Yes, it is strange news, Graham. Trading global human misery like offshore options. All in a days work for the leaders of The Free World.

“Tell ya what Ah’ll do, John Boy. You take these Mayans and ‘Spics off mah radar; Ah’ll take those Slopes and Ragheads off yours, election cummin’ up ‘n’ all. Whaddya say, mite?”

“Sure, George, anything you do is ok by me. We’re in this war against terrorism together, Mister President.”

If j-p-z does happen to hop on The Dog and pop over for the weekend say “hello” from all of us here. Anyone with his irony and wit, his strange taste in music and who comes from Brooklyn can’t be all that bad ….. so hope you do get a chance to meet and chat sometime.

…..

Strange news just in from Australia 18 days after April Fool’s Day: Howard has made a deal with Bush for Australia to detain Cuban and Haitian illegal immigrants in exchange for the US detaining SriLankan and Burmese illegal immigrants currently held by Australian authorities. I kid you not!!!! And no! Borat had nothing to do with it. I’m sure neither Pres. Pelosi nor Pres. Schwarznegger would have touched a loony deal like that.

You’re a representative of the LDP and as well as its Treasurer and here you are insulting me over your monomania on my property so let me say this- I want nothing more to do with the LDP and this year’s subscription fee was my last. I want to be cancelled off your membership roll and all my financial details erased. Your stupid party of hoons can go fuck itself.
Your shooters and assorted speedsters can have the party to yourselves - I don’t intend to vote for it and support it or give it anymore publicity. I will dissuade other people from supporting it too as long as it is filled to the brim with gun nuts such as you.

So, I’m a guy who lives in NYC from now on.

Wait, someone else has that MO.

OK. I’m still my great non-alias.

BearCave:
Yeah - agree about “1984″. In similar vein, try Solzhenitsin’s “One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich” and Lu Xun’s novella “The True Story Of Ah Q”. Hope and optimism …. even to the last.

You are right too about Howard’s mistreatment of true Liberals. No way will the gutless claque from the Ministry Of Propaganda dare write or broadcast anything about that.

when and if you plan to be in this very best of places,just tell a couple of weeks in advance.

Think “Rosalita” when you have a good idea of SD & where you’d stay and it’s still true.

Not because such fantasy translates into modern-day reality, but because I believe Orwell’s story can be interpreted as a timeless study of the average person’s concept of hope and satisfaction, their power relationships and the behaviour of people, both individually and collective. It is one of my favourite stories.

Graham writes:

“So it’s back to “normality’[wtf?] for Australia. Gladiatorial brawls, dead-wrong idiots screaming at each other, government by fake opinion polls and all the rest of the dreary bullsh*t.”.

Add to that John Howard’s poor treatment of his “moderate” MPs, something that doesn’t seem to get mentioned much.

To promote Joe Hockey to being Employment Minister, then to deny Hockey his big chance to “recapture the centre” of the IR debate, I believe, demonstrates that Howard is now a poor judge of the moment.

By not being more supportive of Hockey’s fine balancing act of “competition against” and “cooperation with” Kevin Rudd, Howard has sacrificed Hockey’s self-interest in being re-elected in order to drag Hockey into the uncomfortable collective position of launching “a dog’s breakfast critical attack” against Rudd.

Silly, silly stuff, Mr. Howard.

…From Justin

The Ministry of Truth and Information just couldn’t handle the concept overload of having Kevin Rudd and Joe Hockey discussing and debating amicably, assertively and rationally on nation-wide TV.

It might spread …. and the mugs out there would start thinking for themselves. Can’t have that! Next thing you know the mugs will want real democracy too. Joe and Kevin just had to go and that’s that.

So it’s back to “normality’[wtf?] for Australia. Gladiatorial brawls, dead-wrong idiots screaming at each other, government by fake opinion polls and all the rest of the dreary bullsh*t. Pity. For a while there, Joe and Kevin looked like they might have dragged Australian politics into the modern world.

Especially when you consider that despite criticism over the length of my writing, ABC Radio’s PM tonight made this Sunrise issue “the lead story� and the newspapers will no doubt devote “extra space� to the issue tomorrow morning.

Never said it wasn’t a topical story at the top of the immediate media cycle. Never said you don’t make good points, because you do.

However, in general comments should not be longer than the screen window, or at least that no commentor should have more than one comment per thread that is any longer than that. Other readers will find it dispiriting to have to keep on paging down just to get through a single comment.

If I didn’t repost the Joe Hockey article, my views could be wrongly perceived as Labor Party Spin Doctoring.

You have your own blog. Expand the theme there and if anyone calls you a spin-doctor, point to the counterevidence published there. It doesn’t all need to be here.

Further correspondence regarding this via email, please.

The Moderator no doubt had reason to believe that I had made an “excessively long comment which breaks the flow of discussion.”

One problem with this claim is that my comments actually caused a number of responses about the same issue.

Still, I do agree with this comment from Michael E. Gerber’s small business book ‘The E-Myth’ :

“As Theodore Levitt says in his stunning book, Marketing for Business Growth, “Discretion is the enemy of order, standardisation, and quality.�� [1]

For this reason, I reposted the Joe Hockey content using the Online Opinion “standard” of 350 words to a comment (still too long for LP’s standards?)

Another problem with the Moderator’s complaint is that she/he got tough on me for making mistakes, then made the mistake of claiming my full article was published on my blog.

Not true – For design and layout reasons, not all my LP posts appear on my blog and the link provided by the Moderator is certainly inaccurate. This demonstrates “we’re all able to make mistakes� and I challenge the reader to judge me in this context.

Especially when you consider that despite criticism over the length of my writing, ABC Radio’s PM tonight made this Sunrise issue “the lead story� and the newspapers will no doubt devote “extra space� to the issue tomorrow morning.

Tigtog writes:

“Perhaps just the meatiest chunks in future rather than the gravy as well?�

If I didn’t repost the Joe Hockey article, my views could be wrongly perceived as Labor Party Spin Doctoring.

I define myself as “non-left labourite as I strive to be “a third party� in my own special branded way

…From Justin

[1] Gerber, Michael E. The E-Myth. 1995 Harper-Collins. Pages 125-128.

Repeated long long long posts from one commenter does tend to stifle the discussion, I’m afraid. Perhaps just the meatiest chunks in future rather than the gravy as well?

Also in The Australian, Glenn Milne reveals that Joe Hockey’s role on the Sunrise program is being challenged by his own party:

“The internal bitterness over Hockey’s Sunrise performance emphasises other colleagues’ doubts about him: whether he has what it takes to convince the electorate at the end of this year”.

However, what Mr. Hockey’s colleagues would be much more shy to emphasise is Joe Hockey’s potential to enjoy the benefit of “The Arnold Schwarzenegger Factor”.

No, I’m not suggesting that Hockey and Schwarzenegger look or present alike - especially when you consider Schwarzenegger’s image as “The Terminator” in contrast to Hockey’s intended image as “The Care Bear” of low unemployment

Rather, I’m suggesting on Sunrise, Joe Hockey was in a unique position to learn from last year’s mid-term US election.

As actually written by Ed from The Australian on 14 November 2006:

“As the US election result shows, the race is on for the centre. California’s republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, provides the stand-out example of political survival through reinvention. He ditched unpopular policies and captured the centre, and with it almost 80 per cent of the vote.â€?

This is mind, Joe Hockey is wise to dismiss a (slight) misreading of the situation written by The Australian’s Glen Milne:

“On Sunrise on Friday it was time for Joe to go grizzly. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister and the Government generally, he went cuddly.”

Actually, a more appropriate use of metaphor is that for Hockey, “Grizzly” represents the need to position argument, but “Cuddly” represents the balance to ensure capturing the centre, just like Schwarzenegger did.

So, now Joe Hockey knows who to think about the next time these words are leaked to the press:

“Every Friday it’s just a free kick for Rudd. Joe’s always wanted to be Big Happy Joe. Well, that’s not enough.”

However, it might be more than enough for Joe Hockey himself.

“Mr Stokes will certainly choose to compromise the Sunrise brand by succumbing to the desperate peer pressure
being displayed by certain mainstream media cohorts”.

Given the joint decision by Rudd and Hockey to resign, this statement does assume too much that such a decision would be made at the decision-making level of Kerry Stokes, when it’s now clear there are at least other factors that have contributed to the outcome that nonetheless has compromised the ability of Sunrise to challenge, rather than adhere to set programming formula.

The Australian reports:

“They have decided it is no longer possible to continue as regular weekly guests on Sunrise, they point to their long standing friendship and their senior positions they now hold in opposing parties,” (Mel) Doyle said.

Co-host David Koch thanked both men for their time on the show.

“They both thanked Sunrise viewers for the opportunity allowing them to speak candidly every week, we at Sunrise understand their position. “Politics can sometimes can be a pretty nasty game and it was never the intention of the segment to get bogged down in that.”

Public Relations can also be a nasty game.

Which is why I reassert everything else I’ve said in my previous post:

A “media elite” of News Limited newspaper editors have certainly lobbied to “reduce contexts of political debate” and impose a one-size-fits-all “Canberra-centric, serious approach context” that puts them more in control of democratic debate, despite the risk they place themselves “out of touch with the wider Australian public”.

Their sectional-interest motives are very much to the detriment of “ordinary folk” and their engagement in political debate.

Fortunately, there are still alternative media sources that deliver snapshots of what ordinary Australians are thinking that News Limited editors have little or no influence over, limiting the “media elite ideology” that can be imposed.

…From Justin

(Moderator: edited to fix broken lines from cut and pasting this text from another source. If you must do that (must you, really?), please have the courtesy the edit the linebreaks so that the text flows for ease of reading)

I think you will find the reason Howard has been in power for 11 years is that the ALP became the Australian Luvvies Party. Its new base tend not to be the most percpetive social and political analysts. They are wont to come out with doozies such as this:

I don’t much like it either, Phil, but ‘all those mindless gossip columnists and radio presenters’ and the people who read and listen to them have been helping to keep Howard in office for eleven years

For people horrified at the idea that people who don’t exclusively watch Deutsche Welle on SBS in the mornings actually vote — suck it up.

Rudd & Gillard for Eurovision!!

Which is inevitable but unfortunate. It was more of a liability for Hockey because he was constrained in being the attack dog in that context. Whereas Rudd could just sit back and be Alternative PM like, Hockey was being pressured to stick the boot in. Which was a bad look. Of course the jealousy of other media outlets/pundits and News vs Seven rivalry was making it a liability for Rudd too.

Sunrise was the best thing that happened to Rudd and party of the reason he has the poll numbers he has and, more importantly, alot of the reason those numbers are holding up even after everything that has been thrown at him. The media elite who dismissed the show couldn’t see it — but Rudd had already created a public image for himself. He was as well or maybe better known to Sunrise watchers than Lateline watchers (not that the two are always mutually exclusive). The pundit class had no idea it was even happening — which accounts for alot of the hostility and belittling. Politically, he got his message out cleanly and to the widest audience. Masterstroke.

For people horrified at the idea that people who don’t exclusively watch Deutsche Welle on SBS in the mornings actually vote — suck it up.