A while ago there was a thread on Club Troppo about some of the annoying tropes that people come up with while arguing on the internet. RTS blogger Ken Lovell mentioned the common assumption that if you criticise the Liberal party, either State or Federal, you are a Labor supporter and have a portrait of [...]

All that crap about ‘working families’ really started to grate after a while … well about last August, to be honest. Kevin’s advisers must have finally convinced him that he was not only being unnecessarily exclusive but also starting to alienate large slabs of the population.
So he’s making an effort to clutch more of us [...]

News just in:
THE number of billboards asking Sydney commuters if they want longer lasting sex is to be increased, ignoring heavy hints from the advertising industry watchdog to take them down.
…
After following ad industry advice to test billboards in Queensland with the letters XOX replacing SEX, the doctors at the Advanced Medical Institute said they [...]

I reckon this must be the last one. Or close to it, anyway.
The US military in Iraq says a militant killed on Tuesday has been positively identified as the leader of al-Qaeda in the city of Mosul.
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Alas no. When I saw Amos Lee’s new album was titled Last Days at the Lodge I thought it might be a valedictory tribute to our late and much-loved* PM but apparently not.
The songs are nice though, if this is a typical example.

* By a certain class of Americans.
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The Coalition has had trouble trying to discredit Kevin Rudd since the day he got the leadership. They spent most of 2007 trotting out a series of childish personal attacks: Rudd went to a night club, Rudd exaggerated his childhood deprivations, and most memorably that testament to Peter Costello’s political genius Mr Speaker, Rudd had [...]

After spending the last few months berating “27/7 Kevin” for working public servants too hard, we are now meant to be appalled that one of them is taking a holiday:
THE man at the helm of Australia’s troubled economy will leave his post for nearly five weeks to look after a colony of endangered wombats. [...]

Here’s some pieces that look at the issue of emissions trading schemes. My interest is in trying to work out how all this is likely to work, especially in an environment where the public debate is, it seems to me, not really spelling out what the issues are. What struck me about these [...]

In news from Iraq:
Roadside bomb attacks and fatalities in Iraq are down by almost 90% over the last year, according to Pentagon records and interviews with military leaders.
In May, 11 U.S. troops were killed by blasts from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) compared with 92 in May 2007, records show. That’s an 88% decrease.
But … but [...]

When did Labor/Labour become the executive committee of the owners of the means of production? Was there one moment in time when the political representatives of working people decided this was the only way to survive, or was it a more sordid accommodation with capital that allowed them to feather their own nests?
Whatever the [...]