So, I went out and bought a smart phone. Not an iphone mind you, a respectable one, a Nokia. I quite like it!

Needless to say this is a test post to see if posting to the blog from the phone actually works. Fingers crossed...




-----------------------------------------
Sent by emoze push mail

One thing Australian coppers specialise in is a sense of humour. In an AAP news feature (not available online) on the soon-to-be-vacant Chief Commissioner's chair, we learn that not everyone thinks the favourite, former AFP walloper Simon Overland, is the best man for the job:

One suburban detective said many police members believed Ms Nixon favoured "out-of-towners'' such as Mr Overland, whom he said had the derogatory nickname "Lantern''.

"That's because he shines bright but someone's got to carry him,'' the detective, who did not want to be named, told AAP.

This bloke can just about put his fine and conviction down to commercial risk:

A MELBOURNE man who sold decoder cards that gave users free access to pay television programming has been fined $7000.

Rodney Paul Doove, 43, of Mount Waverley, yesterday pleaded guilty in the Melbourne Magistrates Court to six counts of selling unauthorised decoders.

Prosecutor Liz Tickey said the scam was discovered when a Foxtel fraud investigator received an anonymous tip.

"In July 2007 (a) Foxtel fraud investigator received information… that unauthorised decoders, known as gamma cards, were available for sale at $400 each," she said.

The court heard that between July and August 2007 the investigator bought 25 gamma cards for a total of $8550.

I'm no mathematician, but that looks like a pretty good arrangement for Pirate Rod.

A yarn in The Age begins:

A RARE blunder by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard undermined Labor's parliamentary attack on the Coalition yesterday over its opposition to Labor's $14.7 billion school building plan.

Oh no. What did she do?

Ms Gillard, regarded as the Government's strongest question time performer, was forced to apologise after she got wrong the name of a school in a Liberal electorate that had written to praise the Government initiative.

What?

Ms Gillard produced the email from the principal of "Milton North Primary School", to taunt South Australian Liberal backbencher Patrick Secker, in whose electorate of Barker she claimed the school was located. But after Mr Secker protested that no such school existed in his seat, Ms Gillard admitted she had mispronounced the name, which was actually Millicent North Primary School.

Good god.

Big day for Pat Secker though. Two press mentions!

Liberal backbenchers are stealing my lines:

"YOU'RE acting like Eva Peron and look what happened to Argentina," Liberal backbencher Pat Secker suddenly exclaimed as question time drew to end yesterday.

You're welcome.

The Australian squad for South Africa is in, and Chris Rogers international career appears over.

Ponting, Clarke, Bollinger, Haddin, Hauritz, Hilfenhaus, Hughes, M. Hussey, Johnson, Katich, McDonald, McGain, North, Siddle.

Only one genuine opener in there, and it's the not-yet-21-year-old Philip Hughes. Thirty first class innings is enough, according to the selectors, and the kid from NSW will replace Matthew Hayden at the top of the Australian order. If Rogers' 11,000 first class runs at 49.94 aren't enough now, they never will be. Thanks for coming Bucky, you did what you could.

This is an extraordinary decision by the selectors, and wilfully ignores, in my view, the lessons of history. We talked about this at AGB Cricket the other week. Test cricket, particularly against a resurgent South Africa, is an incredibly difficult caper. Those who succeed at their first try are few and far between. But that's the responsbility being placed on Hughes' shoulders. Good luck to him, he'll need it.

Meanwhile, Rogers finishes with one Test match to his name. Victorians wail on and on about how hard done by Brad Hodge is, but Rogers, who has been the best Australian opening batsman outside the Test side over the past five years, has been treated far worse.

Of the rest of the squad, the pace bowlers are about as good as can be expected given how the stocks have been decimated by injury. The spinners are interesting. McGain goes, as Tony predicted, but Hauritz is preferred over Krezja. I don't see it myself.

The top five appear set but the battle will be over the number 6 spot. Do the selectors persist with the notion of an allrounder in McDonald (who if picked would presumably bat 7 behind Haddin), or do they pick a specialist bat in Marcus North, who can also roll the arm over with finger spinners that have been quite effective in domestic Twenty20, but are likely too innocuous in Test cricket.

I hope they go for North, for no other reason than he deserves it, I think we'll need the runs and I don't see McDonald taking enough wickets to make up for his lack of technique (and therefore runs) with the bat.

This is going to be a very interesting tour for Australia, to say the least.

UPDATE 1.13pm - Hughes is the youngest player picked to play a Test for Australian in 25 years. Craig McDermott was picked to play the Windies in 1984 as a teenager.

So, the Superbowl. Great game, great last-minute catch to clinch the W for Pittsburgh.

There's something about the way federal politics in Australia is both covered and practised that bugs me, and it's neatly encapsulated on the front page of today's Australian, right there in the opening par, of Jennifer Hewitt's comment/analysis piece:

THE Rudd Government will get a big political boost from its $42 billion spending package but the payoff for the country is much less certain.

So $42 billion, the largest handout in the nation's history and an act that officially obliterates the king's ranson of a budget surplus K-Rudd was gifted by the other mob, may not do squat for the economy, but it will buy him a few points in the opinion polls. How lovely.

For $42 billion, shouldn't we know for sure? And shouldn't the press gallery be screaming from the rooftops at Rudd and Swanny to justify this, particularly given the jury is still well and truly out on the effectiveness of the first stimulus package?

$950 cash handouts for all, at a total cost of $12.7 billion, sounds like an awfully indiscriminate way to spend an awfully big pile of cash. I'm not an economist or an infrastructure expert or even a university graduate, but surely there's ways to better target a sum of this magnitude if the goal is indeed to stimulate real economic activity.

In my own case the cash will be going straight back to the mortgage lender and the credit card company and according to Hewitt's piece (which to be fair actually does a good job of explaining why a latter-day Eva Peron act will do nothing to free up credit markets, nothing to encourage banks to loan to businesses which is the fundamental driver of growth) 60 per cent of the cash will be spent the same way.

Of the rest, no doubt Samsung, Sony, Tabcorp and CUB will be absolutely thrilled to bits.

For Labor's sake, they better hope their man's late-naughties impersonation of an early-70s ALP saint works out. Because at the moment his economic conservatism ($500 million winner picked here! $2 billion bailout there! $700 billion bank guarantee here! Wait, we'll start our own bank!) is looking like one colossal joke.

UPDATE 7.35pm: Good on him.

UPDATE 7.47pm: He is absolutely on the right track, but Malcolm Turnbull's performance with Kerry O'Brien on the 7.30 Report tonight is appalling. He allowed himself to be tied in knots by O'Brien, who kept harping on about Turnbull's rhetorical flourish that Rudd was personally responsible for $200 billion of debt when $115 billion of tax revenues have disappeared due to GFC. The whole thing degenerated into semantics when it should have been a straightforward message from the Leader of the Opposition: At the height of a economic crisis, Kevin Rudd is throwing around billions of dollars he doesn't have with no evidence it is doing any good.