Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Don't send in the clowns, they're already here ...




It's been everywhere, and what's remarkable -  seeing its been done for a brand allegedly wise in the ways of the media - is how irredeemably bad the advertisement is as a way of flogging a brand.

There's a grinning, smirking Mike Baird lined up against raving ratbag members of the right wing commentariat, and in the middle, a nobody seemingly intent on giving Apple a plug, without realising that brand of computer is forever tainted by its association with latte sipping, chardonnay swallowing trendie inner city 'leets, while some wretched woman smirks at something on social media, well known for tearing apart the fabric of western civilisation.

It's easy enough to work out what the Daily Terror wants to get out of it. 

Yep, somehow, Mike Baird getting into bed with them is supposed to entice and beguile punters into a bait and switch world, where the sub starts off as gentle as a feather, and then once they get to know you, they can rough you up a little:


Oops, never mind the big print, watch out for the small print.

But what does Mike Baird get out of it, apart from being branded for all eternity as a Murdoch political slut of the first water?

Ah there, on the right, there it is, though you have to look past the photoshop follies of Abbott and Putin, and Abbott trying to change the subject and claw back a bit of respect:


No doubt there will be many more EXCLUSIVES of a soft Bairdian kind - this one is of such kite-flying banality about a racing lifeline that even the Terror can't manage more than seven short pars in its digital edition.

You can always rely on the google bots to make the right connections, dot the "i", cross the "t":



Well there's no reason to explore that in depth.

Mike Baird comes out in favour of the Terror, and the Terror comes out for him and for racing prosperity.

And that's the real result, the diminution of both brands. Is the Terror an independent investigative newspaper, proudly carrying on the traditions of tabloid journalism? Why no, it's a slut of a gutter crawling rag that would hop into bed with any passing politician in the hope of selling a few extra subscriptions ...

Is Mike Baird a classy politician? Why no, he's a slut of a politician, ready to crawl into bed with any passing tabloid in the hope of garnering a few votes ...

Now deep down, the pond doesn't mind - after all, it's all been done before, and as Dr Mumbo pointed out in mUmBRELLA, there have been some splendid examples, such as Jay Weatherill doing his bit for FruChocs and Neil Kinnock turning up with Tracy Ullman - videos and Dr Mumbo here - though at the same time his alternative examples do suggest that politics is a circus and Baird is a clown.

There's something ineffably stupid about the naughty boy grin Baird gives, when he takes a beat towards camera, that's wondrous to behold, a bit like the smirking commentariat on the seats opposite, as beguiling and as attractive as toads in a stew ...

As Dr Mumbo notes, Junkee got into a frenzy, and you can head off here for their take on the ad and the story, which makes the fair point that a grinning, smirking Baird trolling for the Terror hints at a little media bias, of the sort which only a day before had sent the brainwashed Sharri Markson into a frenzy ...

It wasn't just Junkee - the story popped up all over the place, as in The Graudian's NSW premier, now free with your Daily Telegraph subscription, TV ad tells us.

What's startling in that piece is that neither Baird nor the Terror can see how having each other in their back pocket might in any way be problematic, but then corruption has run so deep and so long in the body politic of NSW that any understanding of such matters is now long gone ...

Still, the Graudian has fun with the rich resonances in the ad:

“Subscribe today and get extra, extra every day,” viewers are told as they see three Daily Telegraph star writers – Bolt, Devine and NSW political correspondent Andrew Clennell – smiling at the pure joy of riding in a carriage opposite the lovely Baird, who also happens to be the minister for infrastructure and the minister for western Sydney. 
 “With the journalists you know and trust and a new app for iPad that brings your daily paper to life, subscribing to the Daily Telegraph Plus is now even better value,” the voiceover says as a lone male commuter is joined by the team from the Tele who surprise him by popping up in the empty seats. 
A close-up of the Tele iPad app shows a helpful article: “Tackling the issues affecting the state” under which the smiling team of Baird and Clennell are pictured. Yep, the state government is working hand-in-glove with the newspaper to make NSW a better place to live. 

Now this is a newspaper that routinely carries out destructive jihads and crusades, against bicycles, Clover Moore, greenies, anyone to the left of Attila the Hun, and Baird has clambered into bed with a bunch of ideological zealots and ratbags of the most awful photoshopping kind.

Why?

A spokesman for the premier told Guardian Australia: “The premier would be happy to appear in an ad for the Sydney Morning Herald if asked. He thinks it’s a good thing for people to be buying and reading newspapers.”

Dissembling disingenuous nonsense. The next time you see Baird turn up in an advertisement for City Hub, New Matilda, Green Left Weekly, or Der Stürmer, give the pond a call.

Oh okay, no need to do Der Stürmer, not when you've got the Daily Terror standing by ...

On the upside, at least everyone now knows Baird is happy to clamber into Murdoch's back pocket, not that it makes any difference to the pond, since we've never paid a cracker for any Murdoch product and never will ...

What else?

Well today the digital edition of the lizard Oz explains why the pond will never fork over a cent for the reptiles slaving for the rag.

Look at the line up in today's rotating digital fickle finger of doom.

Is this the state propaganda arm or what? The pond could fill in the details of each piece in a burst of automatic writing, which might help explain why the pond was so excellent at painting by numbers:

There's Graham Lloyd niggling, introducing saucy doubts and fears, in a way he's now been doing for years, because deep down the reptiles are a bunch of denialists in the Tony Abbott mode:


Then there's Dame Slap back to strut her stuff:


The joke there is "our values", as if the pond shares the same values as Dame Slap when it comes to Lord Monckton, a UN conspiracy to take over the world, the joys of Chairman Rupert, and all the rest of the rightwing ratbag values that go with being a member of Team Abbott and Team Rupert and Team Chris Mitchell.

Our values?

Oh just go away.

But wait, there's more:


Yes, this sort of reflexive tea party nonsense from the government's unofficial climate denialist spokesperson, and ironically in the same week that everyone was getting their knickers in a knot trying to blame each other for the cuts to the ABS alleged to have resulted in a bunch of entirely useless unemployment statistics ...

Whenever the pond sees some rampantly stupid ideologue raging about big government, the pond is reminded of the quest for the perfect porridge - the question isn't whether it's big or small, but what's right for the job at hand.

So when will you see a story from Newman with a splash saying "We have run out of easy business options. Those who see big business as the solution should think again"?

Well yes, it's as stupid as the current Newman splash.

But wait, there's even more. Who'd have known that Paul Kelly (not the singer, the maiden aunts of Adelaide are safe) is also a curriculum expert?


Could we get any bigger irony?

Of course we could:



The party of freedom? That's the party which, with the connivance of a supine Labor party, is busy introducing the most extensive range of anti-freedom legislative measures in Australia seen outside the second world war?

Dear sweet long absent lord, it's well known that Crikey is struggling, but at least they don't indulge in this kind of lick spittle, forelock tugging fellow travelling codswallop.

Instead you can cop thequestion and Bernard Keane's answer, here in Can the Liberals cope with freedom?, behind the paywall.



Now the pond respects the paywall but here's an excerpt from the first half of the piece:

The Liberal Party’s vaunted commitment to freedom is a fiction: it is as paternalist as the Left and allows national security to justify the curtailment of basic rights. 
The Liberal’s long insistence that it is the party of freedom in Australian politics is being rapidly undermined on multiple issues. Indeed, it’s now hard to see the claim as anything other than a rhetorical fiction. 
 Yesterday the Prime Minister, Education Minister Christopher Pyne, and Environment Minister Greg “I am the walrus” Hunt all joined Treasurer Joe Hockey in attacking the Australian National University’s policy of divestment of fossil fuel investments. ANU’s decision plainly alarmed a resources sector already struggling with falling prices — and a major onslaught has been launched on the university via The Australian Financial Review, which has attacked ANU every day over the last week And those attacks now come with the imprimatur of the most senior levels of the federal government. 
You might think the party of freedom, “the side of politics which has in its DNA to keep governments small and to keep freedom large”, as Attorney-General George Brandis put it recently, would support any investor’s right to invest where they see fit. Indeed, in 2010, then-opposition leader Tony Abbott encouraged investors to divest from Australian resources companies, saying “it is safer to invest in Argentina, in Tanzania, in Zambia, in Ghana and in Botswana than it is to invest in Australia”. 
Then there’s the ongoing campaign being led by Senator Richard Colbeck and other Tasmanian Liberals to extend competition laws designed for commercial conduct to individual activists and environmental and consumer groups that criticise businesses. This would enable the prosecution of groups like GetUp or consumer advocates to shut down criticism of, or campaigns against, industries or individual companies. The theme of both examples is that freedom should only be used in ways deemed appropriate by Liberals — that is, it should never be used to threaten the interests of the Liberals’ business constituency. 
This is the soft underbelly of the modern Liberal Party’s “commitment” to freedom: it’s a commitment that ends the moment freedom is used in ways with which it disagrees. That’s why, during the Howard years, that government repeatedly attacked freedom. It passed an absurd law purporting to outlaw online gambling, which merely had the effect of preventing Australian companies from competing for revenue from Australian gamblers. It passed a law to restrict online freedom of expression aimed at preventing discussion of euthanasia, and even banned Philip Nitschke’s Peaceful Pill Handbook, as well as overriding Northern Territory laws to permit euthanasia.

And so on, and that's before Keane even gets to consider George Brandis and Philip Ruddock and the intent and effects of current legislation - in which the Labor party is also embroiled ...

Whenever the pond sees Tony Abbott rabbit on about freedom these days, it's likely to collapse into a laughing fit ... the freedom he's talking about is the freedom to slut around with the sluttish forelock-tugging Murdoch press and right wing ratbag members of the commentariat...

Thanks Mike Baird for reminding us all how it's done ...

Is there any more high comedy?

Well yes, there's the freedom to sound stupid about the way the current government sees science as the way forward ...

This from a government that doesn't have a science minister, has harassed the CSIRO, and has adopted an anti-climate science stance at the drop of a hat.

Poor old gravel voiced Ian Macfarlane has been given the job of pushing the crap uphill, a job for which he's as ill-suited as Greg "I am the walrus" Hunt is to do something about climate science ... but really Science experiment yet to pass acid test, and irony of Newman ironies, we have big government picking winners, as recorded in PM in Government announces science shakeup with five new growth centres.

Well every era needs its multifunction polis ...

Oh and there's also the freedom to be and to sound stupid, and to get yourself set up for a ragging by the Ruskis, managing to display a sense of humour, as recorded in the Graudian here,  and the Fairfaxians here (forced video at end of link), and it became clear that Abbott hadn't even arranged a meeting at which he could shirtfront Putin, and so he dropped the bullying bluster about shirtfronting, but not before he'd done even more damage to his reputation as a shoot from the mouth blowhard most likely to shirtfront himself...

Well once you set this sort of hare loose, you let loose all sorts of stupidities. So the Graudian has fun with Abbott v Putin in pictures, and the war of words continues ...


... and the Currish Flail lets fly with yet another monstrous piece of photoshopped nonsense for its tree killer front page:


Which reminds the pond of another Currish Snail story in Crikey, with that other bantam, Campbell Newman struggling and soon having to deal with the arrival of Putin, and ...

Queensland bookmakers are not only taking bets on Premier Campbell Newman losing his Brisbane seat at the next election — now they are laying odds on who will replace him as premier. 
The latest polling in Newman’s well-heeled Ashgrove constituency shows that he is still trailing Labor’s Kate Jones, who is making a comeback after losing the seat in 2012. She is on 52.2% and the Premier is on 41.1%, with the gap widening since Newman delivered an apology for his government’s “mistakes” and began a charm offensive through the Murdoch-owned Courier-Mail, the only daily newspaper publisher in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Townsville and Cairns. As an example, the most recent Brisbane Sunday-Mail trumpeted: “Newman’s plan to slash power bills — EXCLUSIVE” (page 1); “Zapped — Power prices sliced” (page 2); and “Power cost cut” (page 3). Driving through the streets of Ashgrove is like entering a special investment zone where money is no object in delivering goodies to local residents. 
 Since it dawned on the former Brisbane lord mayor that his popularity had imploded, Newman’s government has spent an estimated $80 million in Ashgrove to rebuild his approval rating. More than $65 million on an upgrade of a critical intersection, new classrooms ($3 million), a sports hall ($ 5 million), $8322 for a new kitchen for the Boy Scouts and $6160 for a local Italian festival — the list goes on. Local media reports have estimated the spending spree was worth, so far, about $2500 per voter. 
Queenslanders who thought that former premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was King of the Pork Barrel are now having second thoughts. (more here behind the paywall)

And soon enough the bantam will have to deal with a new circus, coming to Queensland to confront the hapless bantam.

And who set the circus in motion?

Why the shirtfronting head clown himself ...

Take it away Mr Pope, and as always there's more Pope here ...


There's just one question. Where did Pope did up that Statesman Abbott? Is this another Fine Cotton racing scam saga?  Maybe Mike Baird knows because it seems NSW is on a race horse led recovery ride  ...

16 comments:

  1. My temporary sojourn in Dandenong has given me a foretaste of the Turnbull-Murdoch legacy in their trashing of the NBN. The copper cables leave it vulnerable to rainstorms and flooding. Broadband has been at slower than the old dial-up speed for two days now, most of that time actually free of rain.

    So it took forever for the feature pictures to unfold for me. Perhaps I was better served in not being able to see them. Baird sucking up to this lot is bad enough (and he from a family who had some passing claims to Deakinite Liberalism). But an ambush with Bolt and Devine was a bit much, offset only slightly by seeing them smile. For Bolt it may be a first, but Devine's is surprisingly natural-looking for one whose writings are entirely bile.

    Clennell is unknown to me as a non-NSW person. His attempt at a smile seemed more like a rabbit caught in the headlights, or Greg Walrus Hunt when he actually gets a genuine question about climate science or the environment.

    A great edition on the clowns. It is nice to learn, on current polling, that Newman's huge effort on pork-barrelling has been to little avail.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dandenong! Well we in Camperdown can match them for dial up!

      Delete
  2. All nations and their citizens, at one time or another have to deal with unfortunate catastrophes..some nations have trouble with earthquakes, others, as we have seen recently have frequent outbreaks of plagues or disease...some have tsunamis and volcanoes and so it goes....but by far, it has to be agreed upon, the natural disaster, however tragic, however grave and destructive, is a thing universal to nearly all citizens and can therefore be shared among all the citizens and felt squarely by all the citizens...many nations of the world have such natural tragedies.....

    WE.......here in Australia have an UN-natural catastrophe....we have Tony Abbott and the LNP. "govt' ".........fate can be cruel !

    Now, after only ONE year of this pestilence, we have a divided country..divided between the rich in diversity and multicultural appreciation, and the poor in logic, reason, capacity to accept diversity and to appreciate innovative science and youthful ingenuity....The latter are in "governance" so we, as a nation are also the poorer for it!

    Now, after only one year of this fool-in-residence, our country is viewed by our international fellows as incompetent, willful, racist, uncaring and self-indulging spoilt-brats!....so we, as a nation have lost our once high-ground, high-status principles to stand up for and speak for the oppressed and deprived peoples of the world...WE are no longer the pleaders for the dispossessed, we are now pariahs that prey on those same peoples.....where once had pride, now have shame....and the worst of it, the disgrace of it, the tragedy of it is...

    THEY, THE "GOVT'" CLAIM TO DO IT IN OUR NAME !!

    no....no.....no...not in MY name...not Tony Abbott, not the entire LNP. administration, not their associated lobby groups....not, nor never...in my name!

    jaycee.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Too true.And well said!

      Delete
    2. Wow, first Anon. I second and third and fourth what second Anon said (above).
      Mish

      Delete
  3. Hi Dorothy,

    CCCP, the Hammer and Sickle and Bolsheviks. Don't the photoshoppers at Limited news know that the USSR disintegrated more than 20 years ago?

    Lazy memes from aged hacks still locked into a Cold War mentality, hardly much of an encouragement for the Yoof to subscribe.

    DiddyWrote

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It really is curious DW. Photoshop and a 1950s cold war mindset surely equals fucked in the head ... do the younger ones - presumably it's the younger ones that do it - take their marching orders from the senile old goats roaming the corridors?

      Delete
  4. Damn, my nitpick comment doesn't appear to have gone through so I'll paraphrase it: Should be "whore", not "slut". The former sells sex for money in a restricted sellers' market while the latter partakes in sex to give and receive orgasms.

    Love your writing. My day is not complete without reading it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ms Pond
    The votes of Ashgrove are on to a winner here and we should learn the lesson. All voters in a high-profile member's seat should work together to swing the polls to show a landslide towards the opposition. Then you get $80m spent on new schools, sports ovals, roads. No need to actually vote according to your threat.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Baird must have very bad body odour.
    The 3 wingnuts are jammed together on one seat like sardines whilst Smelly Baird has other seat to himself.
    I bet it is only time these geese have ridden the rails.
    After the recent ICAC bombshells i would have thought Premier Smelly would be aware of what sleazy deals look like.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Wimps! A good war is what this complacent nation needs! Abbott has fired the first shot in the next Austria-Russia War. Our great friends the Americans can be relied on to get in early, as is their usual practice. To complete the historical trifecta, it looks like the Serbs are tossing up between EU and cheap fuel in the Grand Slav Alliance. Let any stray Dukes beware.
    Where's my brown suit?

    ReplyDelete
  8. The Dire Leader's bathroom mirror will be seeing all sorts of horrible grimaces as TA practises looking terrifying for the Poootin visit. Maybe he will borrow the rictus grin from Pope and Rowe? Maybe he will ape Julie's death stare? Of course he has one of his own, the one when his eyes darken with menace and he trembles and twitches as if trying to control the Oxford-Blue-lefthook clenching and unclenching against the trouser. Oh dear. Oh dear. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the nastiest one of all?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. By Geez, we've seen a lot of his wretched s**t-eating grin today. "A ... robust ... a very .. robust, ... a .. very, very ..... robust discussion."

      Delete
    2. Ah Dirk, practice makes perfect.

      Delete
  9. Shit. Morrison the fascist wins again.

    Baby Ferouz, born to asylum seekers in Brisbane, denied protection visa

    11-month-old declared an ‘unlawful maritime arrival’ by federal court, and will be sent back to Nauru along with 100 other infants.

    More like as Ellis said, an 'illegal birth canal arrival.' Let's just round them all up and stick 'em in special 'camps' where they can learn that "Arbeit macht frei".

    http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/oct/15/baby-born-to-asylum-seekers-in-brisbane-denied-protection-visa

    ReplyDelete
  10. The Roast was pretty good tonight. I don't expect the fascist mouthpieces will be too happy. Expect vituperation tomorrow.



    ReplyDelete

Comments older than two days are moderated and there will be a delay in publishing them.