Reading the ranting about the Amnesty Report on the way the Bush administration tortures and mistreats prisoners makes me wonder why someone doesn’t start a “Good News From Guantanamo Bay” blog and set the record, you know, straight. Surely there is some aspiring Dr Feelgood out there who wants to do the culling?
Best post […]

The trajectory blogging has taken in Australia is quite different to its development in the United States. Not better or worse, just different. And this makes one-on-one comparisons fraught. Still, given the growing interest in blogs in Australia (see the links below to recent mainstream articles), and given that there is often […]

Regrets, he has a few, apparently. Unfortunately, he doesn’t say what they are:
On mandatory detention, Mr Howard said it was a regrettable policy but had already been softened.
“We will always take opportunities to further liberalise the policy, and make it more flexible but consistent with maintaining mandatory detention as a necessary although regrettable element […]

Just got back from a weekend away at various Civil War sites around Washington DC, including Harpers Ferry and Gettysburg. They are remarkable places to visit–especially Gettysburg–and I’d highly recommend people spend a few days travelling around them if you ever get the chance. As I pointed out below, visits to such memorials […]

The Australian has a breathless article today about Steve Bracks “breaking ranks” with other Labor premiers and doing a deal with the Federal Government. There’s plenty to say about this, from the substance of Brack’s proposals to the media mindset that underpins the story, but for now just one word: Air Warfare Destroyer.
How they […]

When I’m in bookshops here in America, I often keep an eye out for Australian titles. You see quite a few, and I’m sure you can guess which authors tend to show up most often. However, there is one Australian author whose work I see far more often than any other and if […]

The front page of The Washingston Post this morning has a moving photograph of a Marine presenting a folded flag to a boy whose father died in Iraq. Please don’t anyone tell Arthur Chrenkoff or we’ll be treated to another treatise on the evils of a biased media and another modest suggestion that they […]

So have you heard the new live album yet? I stick by what I said originally, though on rereading it it comes across as a bit more negative than I felt. To adjust the balance, let me point to this review which is pretty comprehensive and certainly enthusiastic and wrong in some ways, […]

E.J. Dionne, writing in the Washington Post today, makes a point that this blog has been making for a while now:
Conservative academics have long attacked “postmodernist” philosophies for questioning whether “truth” exists at all and claiming that what we take as “truths” are merely “narratives” woven around some ideological predisposition. Today’s conservative activists have become […]

I notice the excellent US law blog, Talk Left, has been following the Schapelle Corby case, the case of the Australian woman sentenced yesterday by an Indonesian court to twenty years in prison for marijuana possession.
The case has been a big deal in Australia and it raises many issues to do with the way in […]