These women and kids are all here under duress, and I’m not even sure about the dog.

If you’re a member of an industry group and you’re being interviewed by the local rag (the Maribyrnong Mail) about protests by local residents involving your industry, you’d want to have the best possible shot at winning people over […]

Apropos my post about the lies of the Bush Administration justifying the invasion of Iraq, can I make a humble suggestion? It’s past time, I think, for us to abandon the reflexive use of the expression ‘WMD’ as if it were a valid measure by which to separate members of the Axis of Evil from […]

I’ve just read a wonderful piece of prose:
I know that O’Hanlon is the wanker du jour …
I intend to appropriate this phrase from now on, without attribution, but I pay homage here.
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“If [the remarks] were off the record in 2005, they should also be off the record in 2007,” Mr Abbott said.
“And if something is off the record it in effect doesn’t exist and there’s nothing wrong with denying something that didn’t exist.”
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I’ve just bought George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant. Years late, as usual. I’m not far into it at the moment, but the book has had such a buzz on the internets, the central premise, that is, the idea of framing, is pretty well known.

The Australian edition is interesting, because it begins with an […]

I heard Fran Kelly interview SA premier Mike Rann on Radio National Breakfast a few days ago. Apparently Rann has totally gone over to the nuclear industry and is all enthused about his new interest. I haven’t been able to find a transcript, but a recent interview with him is here.
What with JHo being all […]

According to the Gallaxy poll everyone was talking about yesterday, only 23% of voters thought Mr Howard was more honest than Mr Rudd. A bare majority (52%) of Liberal voters “backed Mr Howard when asked about honesty.”
In his big new speech yesterday, Mr Howard showed why he generates this sort of mistrust. He […]

Yes, I know, I’m my own worst enemy. I spend three days in southern Tasmania walking around cool temperate rainforest, eating and drinking myself stupid and paddling a kayak past mighty mountains and through rocky gorges, and by the end of that time I felt pretty fabulous. And then I had to spoil it all […]

Dog-whistling has morphed into a kind of generic superstitious fear-mongering. The monsters are out from the closets and under the beds and they’ve taken over the world. Or at least the United States of America, which for many people amounts to the same thing. The Project for the New American Century didn’t quite achieve its […]

The prime minister was on The 7.30 Report again tonight, explaining one more time why it would be a disaster if America were to be defeated in Iraq. The thing that struck me as I listened to his tired old argument was the number of times he referred to ‘the West’. The general thrust of […]