This article is a gimme for me. I love Garrison Keillor’s writing and I hate travel books. The two come together here–a Keillor review of travel book about America–and he says everything I feel like saying about every travel book I’ve ever read. Enjoy.
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Why does John Howard hate ordinary Australians?:
Prime Minister John Howard has backed calls by NSW Chief Justice James Spigelman for Australians to improve their manners.
In a speech in Sydney last night, Chief Justice Spigelman deplored the state of manners and respect in today’s society.
Mr Howard said he agreed with the chief justice and believed Australians […]

Rafe points to a piece by Luke Slattery in which he “finds a powerful weapon against the dark arts of postmodernism”. Now, I’m all for the discovery of such weapons (though Slattery’s “discovery” is no such thing, which I’ll get to) and as people know I’m no fan of the postmodern turn, but this […]

Hey, The Bush administration may (or may not) be about to bomb the bejeebus out of (or rather, into) Iran, but that doesn’t mean they can’t sidle up to them on the stuff that really matters:
Human rights organizations and the co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus protested on Thursday a decision by the Bush […]

New blogger, The Unheard Word, tagged me for this and so here are the answers:
Four jobs I’ve had:
Service station attendant (Back when they had them. I did my first gig during the school holidays from when I was about 14. On the last day with my last customer I managed to fill up […]

Interesting turn of phrase over in the rightwing blogosphere aka Tim Blair:
Christopher Bantick gets all nostalgic in The Age:
Children these days are growing up in a very different, less open, society than when I grew up in the 1950s. Curiously, even with high postwar levels of Mediterranean migration, there was less need to ostentatiously show […]

Well, that turned into rather a long Australia Day weekend. The staff here at Surfdom hope you enjoyed it as much as they did.
So where were we?:
JOHN Howard and Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile asked AWB to keep them fully informed of the wheat exporter’s trade with Iraq at the same time […]

If you can’t make it to the Kerry Packer memorial service you, as a tax-payer, are funding on behalf of John Howard’s overweening need to whisper sweet nothings to power, then maybe you might like to make it along to this fabulous event which promises to be just as rewarding and spiritually uplifting.
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Just as a follow-up to the post below about the president’s illegal domestic spying activity, check out this interview with (via Eschaton) General Hayden, the former national director of the National Security Agency who has been wheeled out by the Bushies to spread lies about what they were doing and why. Before reading it, […]

In comments on the Why Labor Will Lose post below, the notion of ruling from the centre comes up. In fact, it is raised by the Criag Emerson article to which I was responding in which Emerson outlines what is pretty much political conventional wisdom, that Labor must rule for “middle Australia” and that […]