It must be truly weird and fully sick to wake each morning with blood on your hands, in the manner of Turtle Mitch or Cancun Ted or most of the GOP, and their cheerleaders of the News Corp kind, and all you've got to offer is the blather of thoughts and prayers ...
It was just as odd to see how the reptiles downplayed the news in the lizard Oz ... it was on the front page, but barely ...
As for the digital edition, forget the ongoing random slaughter of innocents, the comedy continued unabated ...
Yes, there was the war on China, but look, even the Leak that leaked on to the top of the page to accompany simple Simon saying "look, Bid, no conflict of interest here" mocked the news ...
As soon as someone says they'll be gentler and more caring and do a reboot, you know you're in the territory of the bulldozer ... and with as much chance of success ...
Meanwhile, everyone had started to offer remedies, prescriptions and miracle cures, including petulant Peta ...
Aware of pond reader sensitivities the pond thought there was no need to go beyond that line about the Liberal party always doing better with a genuinely conservative leader ...
The pond is always up for reptile twaddle, but really, is it useful to say anything ... when only a hollow Sierra Madre laugh is necessary?
Meanwhile, the savvy Savva was also offering a recipe, and yet the graphic tore apart the message in a nanosecond ...
The cartoonists are going to have a lot of fun with that visage, but after its initial survey, the pond found it was running short of material ...
Comrade Milner was a first class futtock before the election, and likely remains a first class futtock now; the pond has no desire to be loose with Loosely, and so on and so forth, and all that was left was the grave Sexton, also offering unguents and prescriptions ...
By golly, that's a ghoulish image to stick at the top of the grave Sexton's piece, but luckily he was done and dusted with another gobbet ...
Completely clueless, and the usual abuse of the usual suspects. Keep on dumping on people, and eventually they'll respond to the dumpings ...
So what do you do? Call on a transformed, humbler, gentler potato head plod to appeal to the routinely abused?
Sorry, the pond should have said potato head gremlin.
As for the apology, the pond doesn't mean to quibble with the infallible Pope, but really he should be saying sorry to the Twilight Zone...
Okay that Gremlin looks pretty silly, but George Miller's gremlin was closer to the mark ...
Yes, there's a passing likeness ... and that re-make also had a version of one of the pond's favourite stories, Jerome Bixby's It's a Good Life ...
And so to a bonus, and here the pond felt stuck. The reptiles had snuck on to their hot rocks and were in a deep sulk, so speaking of a good life, a life full of laughter, fucks, plonk and lies, the pond turned to a reptile report on the doings in the English empire ...
So that's what it's like to be completely shameless. Of course he's a natural born liar, of course he lied to parliament ... what's more pathetic are the lickspittle lackeys, fellow travellers and quislings so adrift that they can't call a lie a lie when they hear it from the horse's arse ...
Even poor Jacquelin can't dissemble her way through this one ... but weren't the snaps something to see, with the Gruadian running the full report here ...
So English, to blur the minions and yet show the chief in all his duplicitous glory ...
What a completely shameless greased piglet, and yet, like potato head, great cartoon material, with more Graudian cartoons here ...
The awfully agamous Sexton, atter having noted that the TPP votes of 52 percent (Labs) and 48 percent (Libs) fairly closely matched the Newspoll predictions (53 and 47 per cent respectively) showed that "the millions spent on advertising by the parties and the constant crisscrossing of the country by politicians proved to be of no significant effect." Really ? But what if the Labs hadn't spent and crisscrossed and their TPP had sunk to 48% as a consequence ? or ditto the Libs and they sunk to 45% ?
ReplyDeleteAnd this guy is with a Party that thinks it can revise the national education curriculum.
Also: "It is true of course, that one of the major parties can make some suicidal statement, such as acknowledging plans to introduce an inheritance tax, in the course of a campaign and alienate voters who up to that time had intended to support it." Wau, but no party did that, all that happened was that the Libs told a lot of lies about the Labs which probably cost Shorten the election. Thus proving beyond doubt the winning effect of crisscrossing and spending.
And after some rambling complaints about how ungrateful "the electorate" is for the government not ruining the economy and quite unmoved by how the government spends the electorate's money, we have: "Does anyone think that the government's cut to the fuel excise in an effort ti reduce the price of petrol immediately before calling an election turned a single vote ?" No, but just think how many votes would have been turned in the other direction if it hadn't.
Finally: "they [Libs 'n' mob] will win a federal election in the immediate future [oh, really ?]. But their task is much more difficult than it was even 20 years ago." And do you maybe reckon, Sexty old mate, that much of that "difficult" comes from what the Libs have done in the last decade ? Total inability to pick a half-way decent leader, for starters, and they're still doing that. G'day to Dutton.
Some recent research in the UK showed that two-thirds of voters take no interest in politics day-to-day (perhaps that number is slightly lower in Aus where we have compulsory voting), and so election campaigns are crucial because it may be the only time that uninterested voters are listening. Given the obvious decline in the proportion of rusted-on voters (evidence the increasingly massive swings in elections that underline how little rust is left), again campaigns are crucial.
DeleteAs for unappreciative electors, witness the Victorian state election of 2018 where four years of investment in infrastructure, services and social reform delivered a landslide for Labor. I live in a new teal seat in Melbourne, and not only can I remember the achievements brochure of Labor in 2018 (and also the physical evidence of same) in my electorate, but I compare it with the Liberal achievements brochure of 2022 citing the resealing of a nearby sub-arterial road - that's local government stuff using GST distributions. In short there was nothing for the electorate to be thankful for, after three years of Morrison. In addition short term hand-outs promised by Liberals in this election campaign is not really what Federal Governments are for.
I am confident that luminaries like Sexton will help to keep the Coalition in opposition for some time to come.
Not sure that even during election campaigns that all that many electors take any real interest, Anony. I remember when a particular statistic was quoted - always with frowns of disapproval - which was the so-called "donkey vote" - those who deliberately only put a '1' in the top square or just numbered from '1' upwards down the line of squares.
DeleteBut I haven't seen a mention of that anywhere for quite some time and I wonder why - and I can't quite believe it's because hardly anyone does 'donkey' nowadays.
And for anyone who is curious about what Americans might know about Australia, I'd reckon that not many know this:
ReplyDeleteAustralia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted.
"In the wake of the killing in Uvalde, here’s what America can learn from Australia’s response to tragedy."
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback
Soon to be Senator Jacinta Yangapi Nampijinpa Price is much in demand for interviews by the mighty intellects on Sky News. She talks about considering the issues and problems for indigenous Australians from a conservative point of view, but gives no real indication what she thinks a ‘conservative’ perspective on those issues would be, or what it would lead to.
ReplyDeleteSuppose we take the Macquarie Dictionary definitions - ‘conservative’ is ‘disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc.’ and is ‘traditional in style and manner.’ Senator Price does refer to ‘solutions’ that resemble Howard’s ‘Intervention’ - for which there is a fair account and review at
https://www.monash.edu/law/research/centres/castancentre/our-areas-of-work/indigenous/the-northern-territory-intervention/the-northern-territory-intervention-an-evaluation/what-is-the-northern-territory-intervention#:~:text=The%20Intervention%20was%20directed%20at,and%20poor%20health%20and%20justice
albeit with a remarkably unwieldy address.
In one sense, this might be taken as ‘preserving existing conditions, institutions, etc.’ - or, at least, those of the last 130 or so years. But it would be nothing like the conservative perspective applied to whitefella existence.
Although, as we have seen even in the last 9 years, there is a strong sense amongst those who claim to be ‘conservatives’ in this country, that they are entitled to tell particular groups how to behave, and why those groups should not receive the same freedoms as what has been claimed to be a majority - silent, but a majority.
As ever, there is no hint of irony in the invitations from any of the presenters on Sky for Senator Price to speak, even though those presenters - Dog Bovverer, Bolt, Chuckleheads - would all claim to be, well - ‘conservative’
The 'actual' address is:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.monash.edu/law/research/centres/castancentre/our-areas-of-work/indigenous/the-northern-territory-intervention/the-northern-territory-intervention-an-evaluation/what-is-the-northern-territory-intervention#
The "long" form you posted is usually from a google search, but the 'real' address usually ends at the # sign. Still a very long address though.
However: "When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
And our question is: can a word mean as many things as assorted "conservatives" seem to think it does.
GB - the quote from Mr Dumpty is wholly appropriate in this case - it really is one of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's most useful bits of dialogue.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the meantime and in-between time, how about this:
Delete"Traditional centre-right and centre-left parties were established to represent large, coherent social and economic groups, most importantly unionised labour, business, and various religions. But the economic and social model on which these parties were founded began to change in the 1950s and has now largely disappeared, thanks to neoliberalism, deindustrialisation, the feminisation and casualisation of the workforce, the decline of organised religion, the decline of unionism, and the collapse of communism."
https://clubtroppo.com.au/2022/05/26/australia-enters-the-post-party-phase-of-western-democracy/