Well, the week has been busier than anticipated so I thought I’d take the opportunity to wish every one the best of the season, a Merry Christmas, a happy New Year and an enjoyable rest, if that’s what you are getting. Posting will continue, but will obviously be a bit quiet over the next […]

Got an early Christmas present, a CD by The Handsome Family called singing bones. Excellent stuff. A bit of background if, like me, you don’t know much about them:
THE HANDOME FAMILY is Brett and Rennie Sparks who live in Albuqeruqe, New Mexico. Their latest CD, Singing Bones (Oct. 2003) made the UK Indie […]

Glenn Milne has some survey information that suggests the new IR regulations might be a voter changer. Maybe, but I’m not too excited about his arguments at this stage. Still, there was one interesting aside in the piece that might prove crucial:
At one end the voters he calls “Howard’s battlers” are likely to […]

No Treasurer is an island, so I’m not sure why all the concern about secret Treasury documents casting doubts on claims made by the government about the benefits of their new labour regulations is being dumped at the feet of the Treasurer alone. As the article itself points out, the one that broke […]

President Bush has defended his law-breaking surveillance of his own citizens and is hiding behind the ‘tough-on-terror’ schtick. Of course, it has nothing to do with being tough on terror. It has to do with obeying the law and working within the bounds of the constitution, the very thing his ‘war on terror’ […]

Hey, that’s quite a prime minister we’ve got. The other day he defended racists wrapping themselves in the flag, characterising their behaviour as patriotic:
ELLEN FANNING: Prime Minister, part of what was chilling yesterday was seeing a lot of people in between the violence doing things that you’d see at the cricket, singing “Aussie, Aussie, […]

Well, that was fun. Apart from the usual of end-of-week spam attack, I managed to lose two posts, and the site hasn’t been accepting comments off and on since Friday arvo. I also haven’t been able to post until…..now. That is, I posted three things around the same time as the ‘Government […]

What are the chances that the Bush administration can install democracy anywhere in the world when they clearly have no idea what it means? The latest round in their war on freedom involves the President allegedly circumventing the constitution and ordering the National Security Agency to spy on citizens within the United States. […]

Apologies for lightish posting etc - just realised it’s Christmas time and have been getting my snow-boots and other essentials ready: thought I might chuck ‘em in the ocean next time I go down to the beach.
Actually, we have some family arriving today who will stay with us over Christmas, and then some friends coming […]

You almost get the impression that some conservatives enjoyed the violence that occured in Cronulla and surrounds. Some are seeing it as no more than an opportunity to make specious claims of prescience just so they can have the satisfaction of saying I-told-you-so, apparently:
AGHAST at their television screens as they watched Sydney’s race riots, […]