Obama's letter to God - a little bit of 'sugar'

From the U.K. Telegraph a photograph of the note Barack Obama left in Jerusalem's Wailing Wall:
"Lord – Protect my family and me. Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will."

Call me cynical, but I refuse to believe that such an astute campaigner as Obama didn't expect that this 'note' would be retrieved and published.

Some Beijing Olympic titbits

From Bob Dumpling over at New Matilda* on Friday:

I love the Olympics. No one is more excited than me (except maybe Ian Thorpe and his new best friend Henry Kissinger) about two weeks of physical endurance and deep hatred based on nationality and racial stereotyping.However, there is time between 2:00 and 6:00am when there are no live events on, to reflect on what sport does to us. As we commence this fortnight of hysteria, we can afford to ask: what are we allowing ourselves to get away with in the name of sport?
* Featured pic found there also.

Nicole Kidman in The West on Saturday:

"I want to wish every one of our wonderful Australian Olympic team the very best of luck over the next two weeks," the Hollywood star told the Seven Network."They've all put in so much hard work ... so I just want to say we as Australians know you are going to give it your best shot - go for it, try to enjoy every moment as well."

Simon Barnes blogging from Beijing for The Times online:

The worst decision sport ever made was to start testing for drugs. Once they began to catch the cheats, all hell broke out and we began to lose the faith. In particular, we began to lose faith in the core Olympic sports of athletics and swimming. Now the world is full of people declaring that they don't care who wins what at the Olympic Games, because “they're all on something”.

Kevin Rudd quoted in The Age yesterday:

"As someone who's looked at the history of human rights in China, it's always been two steps forward, one step back," Mr Rudd said when asked if China had fulfilled its promise, made in 2001 when it was awarded the 2008 Games, to improve human rights.

The Epoch Times looking back at the week:

"The smog actually helps us, the more the better for an old guy like me, I can see those little orange discs a lot better in the sky." - Australian shooter Russell Mark takes a lighter look at the pollution problem plaguing Beijing ahead of the Olympic Games.

Headline in the Telegraph.co.uk on Saturday:

Beijing Olympics: The ultimate business networking opportunity

From Black and White Cat in a post called God the Father, God the Son and God the Olympic Spirit:

.... in Beijing, hundreds of people on drugs will run around in circles and throw things. I’ve heard various people here, enthused with the passion of the sacred flame, saying that this is the most important thing that has ever happened in China - displaying either a disturbing lack of knowledge of Chinese history or a very strange interpretation of it.

Call to buy out water hoarders to save the Murray. Hold on, haven't we heard this before?

According to News.com.au yest'dee

"A SYDNEY Harbour-sized wall of water could be pumped into the ailing River Murray from six water-hoarding cotton farms under a radical new plan unveiled by conservationists yesterday.
Describing the move as a "huge win for NSW", the green groups have demanded the Federal Government buy the properties - located in western NSW and Queensland - which are ready to be sold, and pump the 300-400 gigalitres of water a year into the drought-ravaged River Murray basin. The Government - which yesterday admitted it was open to the idea - has been urged to buy the water allocation under its National Water Plan." ----

Properties being suggested include Toorale and Darling Farms in NSW and the famous Cubbie Station and Balandool in Queensland."

Sounds familar doesn't it? Too right it does.

Peter Beatie (while Queensland Premier) almost begged the Howard Government to partner his state in a buyout of Cubbie, Ballandool and Clyde Stations to return water to the river system.

Jackboot Johnnie said no to Cubbie in 2002 and rejected the other two in 2006.

Now the entire country is paying for his sheer bl**dy mindedness.

The little dictator didn't deserve a gong after the country sacked him - he deserved a rope necktie!

How do you spell pathetic? Answer: N.R.M.A.

Heard the saying that whatever the NSW Government can do, the NRMA can do better?

Well, the NRMA has proved that saying correct, yet again.

Sydney Morning Herald journo Matthew Moore, who has been on a very admirable mission to expose the NSW Government's shortcomings, nay hypocrisies, in relation to freedom of information (FOI) has revealed, courtesy of one very p*ssed off NRMA member, that the NRMA has been playing games with its so-called information.

In an article titled "Secrets under the hood" Moore does a very nice job for NRMA members to reveal just what a pack of incompetents (although some might say mischiefs, while others might go further and say something a whole lot worse) the current regime at the NRMA happens to be.

Moore writes:

"If you think it is only government departments that have secrecy and spin as the core principles in their mission statements, take a look at the country's biggest motoring organisation, the NRMA.

To understand how it operates, go back to January when its president, Alan Evans, called on the State Government to ditch plans for a cycleway on Epping Road.

Evans issued a press statement headlined, "NRMA plan for Epping Road: Don't bump motorists for bikes". It said the NSW Government was wasting $7.6 million on the Epping Road bike path even though only 25 cyclists used it daily.

Instead of wasting $300,000 a cyclist, the Government should widen the road to make more room for cars and trucks, it said. In the news vacuum that is often part of a Sydney summer, Evans's punchy comments got page one treatment in the papers, which mentioned the full NRMA case was set out in a submission to the Roads and Traffic Authority. One NRMA member and cyclist, Nigel Withers, thought he would like to read that submission and tried to get hold of it.

When he couldn't find it on the NRMA website, he wrote to Evans asking for a copy. Evans replied on January 16 but would not hand over the submission. He offered this laughable excuse: "NRMA's submission to the RTA is now an internal departmental document." Withers wrote back, but this time was ignored. Undeterred, he tried the NRMA's Open Road magazine, explaining he had twice asked Evans for the submission without success. "Perhaps Open Road could print the submission in question," he wrote optimistically. Not likely.

The editor-in-chief of Open Road, David Naylor, replied on February 8, telling him his letter had been passed to the head of "government relations and public policy". Nothing came back, so Withers changed tack.

In May he submitted a freedom-of-information request to the Roads and Traffic Authority seeking a copy of "the NRMA submissions regarding bikeways on Epping Road". At least the RTA replied, even if it was not what he expected: "There are no documents relating to your request," they said.

How could there be no submission when the NRMA president had released a summary of it and confirmed in writing there was one?

This week I rang the the NRMA's PR team to find out and got the Withers treatment. For days they promised to send me a copy but it never arrived. Still, the excuses were diverting: "We genuinely did not know what submission you were talking about … The guys who wrote the submission were in the country … Our guys were not back in 'til yesterday … "

Finally, the NRMA admitted the RTA was right. There is no submission. The closest thing is a three-page document sent to the RTA in August 2006, 17 months before that press release about useless cycleways.

We still haven't seen that three-page document. Nor have we seen the survey of bike-lane usage the NRMA now says was done many months after the 2006 submission.

If the NRMA expects to be taken seriously, it should adopt the levels of transparency demanded of government. If it is going to quote from "surveys", it should post survey reports online to be scrutinised. The same goes for so-called submissions. An organisation this size should not be relying on misleading press statements alone to influence public debates.