You can condemn anything you like except Shostakovich.

LIZ HAYES: Homosexuality? How do you feel about that?

TONY ABBOTT: I’d probably I feel a bit threatened…

LIZ HAYES: I’m not asking if it’s a personal choice of yours.

TONY ABBOTT: ..as so many people.

LIZ HAYES: When you say ‘threatened’?

TONY ABBOTT: Again, Liz, look, it’s a fact of life and I try to treat people as people and not put them in pigeonholes.

Yes, don’t ask, don’t tell. Stay in the closet. It’s a private thing. Don’t ask for those pesky ‘rights’ or be too ‘queer’. And Tone won’t get scared.

I’m not surprised, given the way he lives his (ultra)masculinity, that Abbott literally is homo-phobic. Perhaps he could take up this offer?

Corey Irlam, spokesperson for Australian Coalition for Equality (ACE) will today write to Abbott, inviting him to meet with ordinary gays and lesbian people to help overcome his self-confessed sense of “threat” about homosexuality.

“We hope Mr Abbott will take up our invitation so he can overcome feeling threatened by homosexuality”, Mr Irlam said in a statement.

“Mr Abbott can pick any place he feels safe and we’ll invite ordinary members of the gay and lesbian community to come and talk with him to show him he has nothing to fear from us.”

Via Trevor Cook. I agree, as with the rest of Tony’s fascinating moral journey, it should be televised.

That would be *authentic*.

Update: Tone will probs say, as with some of his previous comments, that he was just answering the questions. Sorrow At Sills Bend has more on his ‘accidental’ oversharing, and some questions that could be posed to Abbott.

In 2007, he wrote a short book, Bad Dreaming, which to put it mildly, met with some legitimate criticism. Nowra, disavowing the work of Indigenous women, took it on himself to solve all the problems of Indigenous Australia himself. Last month, he published what could reasonably be described as a laudatory piece on the life and character of one Tony Abbott in The Monthly.

He’s now followed that up with an amazing rant about Germaine Greer, to be published in the same mag on Friday. Allegedly, it’s to mark the fourtieth anniversary of the publication of Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

You can get a taste of it from this article in The Independent:

In the essay… Nowra not only attacks Greer’s work, but criticises her appearance, her character and even her sanity. “She will do anything to get noticed,” he says, adding that when Greer appeared on the reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, she looked like “a befuddled and exhausted old woman” who reminded him of “my demented grandmother”.

Yet Nowra has the gall to accuse Greer of misogyny. Nowra says that Greer doesn’t understand “what makes women tick” and that her work is too “middle class”. Presumably he is immune to such criticisms because:

Nowra… lives a studiedly bohemian life with his writer wife, Mandy Sayer, in Sydney’s red-light area, Kings Cross…

To allege that because women still wear make-up, Greer’s work had no value at the time it was written is risible.

This is not the first *controversial* editorial decision Monthly editor Ben Naparstek has made. What possessed him to commission such a piece of abusive raving? Were there not any women who might have written a fair and measured reflection on Greer’s influential book? To build sales? I won’t be giving him the satisfaction of buying a copy. I’ve already read more than enough of Nowra’s “intellectual” contribution.

Elsewhere: tigtog at Hoyden and [H/T Gummo] Philippa Martyr at Quadrant.

You can condemn anything you like except French po/mo vampire movies and their soundtracks.

Kevin Rudd is real too. He really is a wonky, nerdy bureaucrat. Perish the thought that we would want to vote for someone who knew something about policy?

But why is it assumed that the persona doesn’t mask something else? Could Tony Abbott be the one spinning a web of symbolism? Wasn’t George W. Bush the candidate we’d rather have a beer with?

[Rhetorical questions in the mode of KRudd.]

Now, I haven’t read Tony’s tome. Be interested to hear from anyone who has. But, Geoffrey Barker has, and he wrote this in the Fin Review today:

… we will have entered the age of bogan politics for a bogan nation: vulgar, simplistic, and focused on aggression, and extremist and alarmist claims. It will be politics to appeal to a dumbed-down electorate, attracted to tattoos and leaders who wear Speedos and fluorescent Lycra cycling outfits.

Yet behind his populist and athletic facade, Abbott is a throne-and-altar conservative with a deeply pessimistic view of human nature and its capacity for improvement. His manifesto, Battlelines, stresses how hard it is for humans to reconcile carnal appetites with their spiritual yearnings, and he acknowledges that dilemma in his life.

Hence, despite Abbott’s “trust the people” populism, he stresses the importance of the secular authority of the monarchy or the church to control frail humanity. When he removes the public mask, the commitments to monarch and pope define the real Abbott. They do not sit easily with his bogan politics, but that does not appear to worry him.

But, it’s not terrorism, apparently.

raving black lunatic asks a series of questions, including but not limited to this one:

How can you fly a plane into a building out of spite, and have folks call it “suicide by plane?” That’s like calling it “suicide by portable chest bomb.”

Though for a truly bizarre discussion, you might want to consult Australia’s own Catallaxy Files.

First, a response to the suggestion, which was a mainstay of what we might call the Neocon era of political blogging – that women in Australia are privileged, etc, etc, and that Australian feminists are ignoring their sisters in Iraq, Afghanistan, wherevs, you know the drill. I only have to refer to the archive of furious debates on FGM to signal where this rhetorical move was coming from. Gunders doesn’t necessarily contextualise it in this way, but she makes a very salient reply nevertheless.

She makes a closely argued and well referenced case that there is significant gender inequality in Australia (the denials of which are all too predictable and coloured by ideological blindness), and segues into a consideration of what is properly counted as politics, which moves beyond the usual dichotomies once again:

Given that many people’s experience is that Canberra-based, party politics is something that they have little ability to influence, even at election time, why should they engage with, or contribute to, the massive amount of commentary that accompanies it?

This does not mean that they are not interested in politics. Many are still greatly concerned about the state of the roads, waiting lists in hospitals, standards in schools, suburban planning, and lack of public infrastructure. Some of them, no matter how difficult the stress of balancing all their other commitments, will do something at this level because they can have an effect. Enough signatures on a petition can often get a local traffic hazard fixed or an extra bus in an under-serviced area. Progress Associations can influence, through involvement in the council planning process, the constraints placed on development. Neighbourhood security and sense of community can be enhanced by Neighbourhood Watch and Safety House programs, or services such as Meals on Wheels and involvement in local service clubs. The state and federal governments might fight over adequate funding for schools, but it makes a difference to the literacy development of 30 kids at the local school if a group of parents assist with the reading program each week.

All of this is politics in as far as it is concerned with the distribution of scarce resources, a process which is both influenced by and influences the relative power and life chances of different groups within society.

Again, Gunders makes a persuasive argument well supported by the citation and synthesis of empirical research in addition to rigorous reasoning. Her second main claim follows from the first – the inequalities of time as between men and women in this particular society (and I often wonder where the people who post all day and all night at The Poll Bludger, for instance, find the time):

As I said above though, it would be a mistake to assume that those of us involved in local issues and organisations, unrecognised as “politics” though this is, are not also sometimes engaged in the “rough and tumble” of more conventional politics—it’s just that we frequently have less time to maintain a visible presence there.

Go read.

And just by the by, I think the Crikey idea of a special blog on big P politics by women is just dumb. Don’t want.

Truth is that it’s actually a waste of time and credibility to try to make a news story about minor changes in the Newspoll figures – changes that fall even within the margin of error. Bottom line this week, as it is every week: the Liberals will get hammered, especially under Malcolm Turnbull. Nothing remotely likely will change that.

I counted four stories by Dennis Shanahan about the latest Newspoll in today’s Australian. Way to celebrate the paper’s forty-fifth birthday, I suppose.

More on the Newspoll at Possum and The Poll Bludger.

Only 10 songs on the hottest 100 list were made by a band who had any women in it, ever (if we include Massive Attack, who, technically, only ever had female guest vocalists); the highest of these was placed at no. 20 (The White Stripes, “Seven Nation Army”). The only two songs with female lead vocals are the two by Massive Attack. Finally, no solo female artists at all made the list.

John Gunders has some speculations as to why this happened at The Memes of Production:

the absence of women from recent, mainstream rock music is troubling. I want to argue that there are two, interconnected reasons: the first has to do the masculinist nature of the “rock myth”, and the second is the increasing commercialisation of what we used to call “alternative music”.

There’s a third factor. As Mel Campbell argues at The Enthusiast, these sort of lists form part of a self-reinforcing cycle which diminishes the presence of female and women fronted bands on radio playlists.

Bah to JJJ.

Elsewhere: Rosanna Ryan.

Update: Lauredhel at Hoyden on the Hack segment, who also has lots of links in her post to other commentary and discussion.

You can condemn anything you like except tango [h/t Mark for the YouTube].

The widespread practice of simply ignoring women in male-dominated discussions does not make the fact that we make up 51% of voters go away.

Indeed. Women are nigh on invisible, or at least very radically under-represented in most public discussions of electoral politics. But, as Pavlov’s Cat points out, we constitute more than a majority of the electorate… and that’s reflected in the composition of samples taken for polls. So as Possum reveals (with one of his spiffy graphs), the Coalition trails much further behind where they were at the last election with women voters than with male:

The Coalition is pulling a fairly stable average of 37-39 among male voters, which isn’t crash hot, but it’s not exactly terrible either. The thing about election campaigns is that it’s pretty easy to win or lose a few points with any demographic, so if the Coalition went into the next campaign only 3 or 4 points down among males, it’s a doable proposition for them.

With the female vote however, they’re pulling an average 34-37, which is a staggering 7 to 10 point decline on their result from the last election. Turning around a gap that large simply isn’t a doable proposition over the short time frame of an election campaign. For the Coalition to not go backwards at the next election (let alone win), they have to substantially improve their female voter base before the next election campaign starts, simply to give them some realistic base to launch a final assault on Labor from during the campaign itself.

[By the way, Possum also reveals with customary wonkiness and style, that the puzzle of why the PM is popular - so unintelligible to the press gallery and the Libs - might be explained by the fact that the PM is liked. Circular, I know, but there you have it...]

So, why, exactly, are the Libs so on the nose with women voters? Speculate away…

The global market has stimulated first and foremost, on the part of rich countries, a search for areas in which to outsource production at low cost with a view to reducing the prices of many goods, increasing purchasing power and thus accelerating the rate of development in terms of greater availability of consumer goods for the domestic market. Consequently, the market has prompted new forms of competition between States as they seek to attract foreign businesses to set up production centres, by means of a variety of instruments, including favourable fiscal regimes and deregulation of the labour market. These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems as the price to be paid for seeking greater competitive advantage in the global market, with consequent grave danger for the rights of workers, for fundamental human rights and for the solidarity associated with the traditional forms of the social State. Systems of social security can lose the capacity to carry out their task, both in emerging countries and in those that were among the earliest to develop, as well as in poor countries. Here budgetary policies, with cuts in social spending often made under pressure from international financial institutions, can leave citizens powerless in the face of old and new risks; such powerlessness is increased by the lack of effective protection on the part of workers’ associations.

Elsewhere: Analysis at Salon and The National Catholic Reporter (and Rich Heffern on the consonance between the document and the Green vision), full text of the encyclical here.

As Utegate stumbles to a halt, it’s becoming apparent that the more important questions go to the suitability of Malcolm Turnbull for political leadership.

Guy Rundle’s article in Crikey today is an interesting and important contribution to this debate, and I’ve reproduced it (with permission) over the fold.

Guy Rundle writes:

You didn’t have to see much of Parliament yesterday to realise that there’s at least one person who believes it’s all over for Malcolm Turnbull, and that’s Malcolm Turnbull.

One of the cardinal rules of the despatch box is that you never look less than ebullient — jeer back when you’re being attacked, study documents furiously when you need to keep it together, swivel round and talk to the front bench (thus obscuring yourself from the camera) when you believe it’s just possible that you might cry.

Yesterday, Turnbull slumped for minutes on end. As Kevin Rudd did him slowly, the Opposition Leader couldn’t even marshal a naughty grin, a jaw jut, a stiff upper lip. He just lay there like one of those Mr Blowies in a used car yard forecourt suddenly getting the air cut off.

Which is kind of what he was.

Turnbull knows that it’s all over for him — unless Labor is hit with a greater scandal before the next election. He’s been revealed as worse than a liar. He’s been exposed as a fool, a man who not only lacked the prudence to think two steps ahead — and acknowledge the possibility that he or others might be being set up — but apparently couldn’t keep a poker face, taunting Andrew Charlton at the Midwinter Ball, about how we was about to (or so he thought) blow him out of the game.

It was the act of a man more eager to assuage some inner demons than to maximise the political effectiveness of a windfall scandal — a move coming from a sense of inferiority, not of command.

The deflation he displayed at the despatch box was less defeat than it was self-reproach — Turnbull looked like a man who not only realised he’d screwed up, but that he’d screwed up in a way he’d screwed up before. It was a look of recognition of someone caught in a pattern.

Some may say that Turnbull had no choice but to go for broke — given the fact that modern politics is now a one-shot go. Though the Federal Liberal party desperately needs a two-term process of reconstruction now, the public simply judge an opposition leader staying on after a defeat as a retread — principally because neither major party represents a core constituency and set of values in the way they once did.

And even if it were possible to leave an Opposition leader in place after a defeat, Turnbull is not the man. As this correspondent noted at the time of the 2007 election, the plain fact is that Turnbull is not a politician in the way that John Howard, or Tony Abbott, or Paul Keating or Bob Brown or Kevin Rudd are politicians — people for whom their movement is a vocation, demanding as Max Weber noted, “a slow drilling through hard timber”.

Turnbull proved this during the failed Republican referendum of 1998. Someone willing to do a bit of slow drilling would have noted that a majority voted for the Republic, and that only sleight-of-hand by the Rodent managed to delay it. That pyrrhic defeat would have been the staging point to really build the ARM as a social movement — develop branches, widen its remit and visibility, take Republicanism to the point where it appears inevitable.

Instead, denied the chance to be the first Australian President, and faced with the grey and monotonous task of building a movement, he couldn’t face it. Just as he hasn’t really been able to face the task of redefining the Liberal party after voters comprehensively rejected its mix of social conservatism and neoliberalism.

Had he had the patience for that, he would have let Brendan Nelson — a man who makes your average Mr Blowie look like Lord Salisbury — take the fall for the first defeat (or whoever else replaced him).

The dire straits for the Liberal Party are that of its two most recent leaders, one was a former member of the ALP, and the other wasn’t really a politician at all, simply someone who wants to do everything for about two years before moving onto the next thing.

Given that conspectus, it should be obvious that Turnbull, a man who has measured his life in court cases and deals, would always go for the quick score — and be particularly oblivious to the fact that it all seemed too good to be true.

Cheap psychoanalysis is a plague on political writing, and I wouldn’t descend to it. ( pause ). If I were to, however, I’d point out that Turnbull’s character cannot be separated from the strange fact of his childhood — that he was left, as a nine-year-old, not by his father, but by his mother.

The departure of a father is dead common and can be got over — Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama are goodish examples of that — but let’s face it, few children left by their mum develop the sort of core solidity that politics and supreme leadership demand*. Turnbull, I would say if I were indulging in this sort of schlock, has spent his life tap-dancing in ever greater feats of short-term public success in the deep hope that an extraordinary enough achievement will get her to come back.

Each success shows that it doesn’t so he moves onto the next thing. Each failure just shows that something else has to be tried. As the Jimmy Cagney character says in the film noir classic White Heat , before being annihilated by the cops machine guns “look at me ma — top of the world ma!”**

But who else does the Liberal Party have? Tony Abbott is the only prominent figure with a defined philosophy, an idea of what the Liberal Party could be as the representative of a distinct worldview — unfortunately it’s a worldview only shared by about 35% of the Oz population, and Abbott — who it has been medically established via MRI, has no soul — is seen as a dark and sinister individual, a Berowra Borgia, by a large section of the population.

Joe Hockey? Joe’s like the bloke who gets picked up by a buck’s party pub crawl and ends up at the lap dance club giving a speech about what a great bloke the groom is. Looking at the photos ten years later, everyone tries to remember who the hell he was.

Nick Minchin? Too old guard, too shadowy. Minchin looks like a black and white photo of himself. ***

Sophie Mirabella? She could probably lug herself up to stick the finger in the dyke of the party’s leaking opportunities. Indi? Go girl!

Bill Heffernan. If this occurs, I will vote and campaign for the Liberal Party full-time from now to the election.

Peter Costello: ha ha ha ha ha. Would the laughter ever cease? You can bet that even now, Peter Coleman is on the phone to him, expressing what he called, in the Oz Spectator , his “disappointment and irritation” in more forthright terms: “you useless lump of chicken meat! You’ll do whatever I frikkin’ tell you, just like you’ve done for the last twenty five years! I own your arse! Ohhhhhh me gout! Merlot boy, a jeroboam chop chop, or there’ll be one more Indian immigrant getting their ears boxed! Where was I! Ah yes Costello, listen you slime yourself back into Higgins and get that leadership, or else! I ran Quadrant for twenty years you think I can’t rustle up a CIA death squad!”

Y’see the problem. There’s no-one, no-one to lead the party. Yet Turnbull is the worst sort of person to leave in place across a likely election loss. And I have no real answer to this conundrum. It’s just something I enjoy thinking about at great length.

*Some might object that Obama was separated from his mother too. But that occurred in adolescence — Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents, a decision he appears to have made himself, while his mother continued anthropological fieldwork, after a particularly close childhood. Churchill is the rule-proving exception (neither of his parents had much time for him) — he was a lifelong alcoholic depressive, obsessed by violence and motivated in his active military service by an obvious death-wish, and in his command by a relish for killing brown people. By the 1930s his life looked like a chaotic failure. World War Two was the salvation of him, because it was the only moment in history when the outer world was more violent, deranged and insane than his inner one.

**A film incidentally written by Ivan Goff, possibly the most distinguished Australian to work in Hollywood, given that he wrote not only half a dozen classic films noirs, but also created Matlock and Charlie’s Angels. But did he get the Miles Franklin, even once?

***Minchin’s father, Denver, is the author of one of the great Australian verite thrillers The Money Movers, which deserves a re-issue — and a remake of the great film by Bruce Beresford. Which is really the only reason I mentioned Nick.

****Continuing the mummy theme, isn’t it interesting how Barnaby Joyce was leading the charge about someone bringing their toddler in for one senate division for two minutes? Remember when he was first elected? After one week he was making noises about the Senate voting electronically from their constituencies so they wouldn’t be separated from their families? In reality the littlest Senator was homesick and fwightened in the big city. So Senator Hansen-Young can’t have her child in the chamber ‘cos Barney can’t have his mummy with him.

Politics has to be, perhaps along with long-distance road transport, one of the least family-friendly occupations in the country.

Even your average backbench Federal MP works long hours. They’re away in Canberra 19-20 weeks of the year, and with a long schedule of electorate events and duties when they’re back home. Ministers, shadow ministers and swing vote senators, who have to get their heads around every piece of legislation and work out whether to back it or amend it, work even harder.

This time of year, the last sittings before the winter recess, are particularly intense.

Sarah Hanson-Young is to be commended for having her child with her in the chamber yesterday. It was for a division, not a debate, and her daughter was about to leave to return to Adelaide.

Instead there has been some remarkable vitriol, particularly on radio, and from at least one of her colleagues, Barnaby Joyce, who accused her of pulling a stunt. That was one of the lowest jibes I’ve seen in this place for a while. The distraught look on Hanson-Young’s face as a staffer took her daughter outside didn’t look much like a stunt.

You can accuse politicians of being greedy and self-serving all you like  — after all it’s one of our national sports — but here are some views from the coal-face.

Greg Hunt is one of the youngest members of the Coalition’s leadership group. He has a young daughter and his wife is expecting a baby shortly. He thought the treatment of Hanson-Young was crazy. “The nature of the job is that it is very long hours, seven days a week,” he told Crikey.

“It is hard on MPs and their staff. But the flipside is that you do have some flexibility as your own boss. I take my young daughter around to electorate events where they’re suitable and she wants to go, and she behaves perfectly even when she’s a bit grumpy, so I get to spend time with her.”

Hunt also says Turnbull and Opposition Whip Alex Somlyay emphasise to MPs that family comes first. “On Sunday night, I was at the airport [to fly to Canberra], it was going to be a big week on renewables issues, and my wife called me to say she was at the hospital and maybe experiencing some early contractions. We let Alex and Malcolm know and they were happy for me to remain home until Wednesday (the new addition to the Hunt family decided the time wasn’t right yet). When I returned, the Speaker was very understanding as well.”

“They should have been delighted to have a child in the Senate, and let her play with the President’s gavel.”

What Hunt didn’t say was that, while he was absent, Kevin Rudd had a go at him for not being there to ask about renewables issue. Rudd probably didn’t know Hunt’s circumstances, but it shows how the rough-and-tumble of partisan debate can go.

Natasha Stott-Despoja, who was in the Senate for nearly 13 years, four of them as a mum, knows first-hand the family-unfriendliness of the Senate and was instrumental in having the Senate standing order on “strangers”  — non-senators  — in the chamber so that it didn’t apply to breastfeeding mothers. She said she’d been stunned by the vitriol directed at Hanson-Young on radio. “There was no question it was an overreaction by the President, as there is flexibility for this sort of thing to be accommodated. But it is symbolic of the family-unfriendly nature of Parliament when it comes to balancing work and family.”

“Politicians work extraordinarily long hours. Often I’d go into the building at seven and not leave till midnight. Every workplace is different but in that time, some interaction with your family is not unreasonable  — in fact it’s humanising. I had full-time child-care, because it’s the nature of the job, but when you’re four minutes away from a crucial division it’s not unreasonable. To see this just breaks my heart.”

Stott-Despoja was unsurprised that Barnaby Joyce had attacked Hanson-Young. “I’m not surprised that politicians who are the biggest advocates of family value are the first to criticise. A lot of male MPs are happy to use their families for promotional purposes  — in fact we’ve all done that  — but not so interested in the pointy end of family life: breast-feeding, changing nappies, dealing with temperamental kids. But do we want mums and dads as MPs, or automatons who ignore or are ordered to ignore their families? We’re multi-faceted and human. And I know politics is not an environment you want to expose children to on a regular basis. I’ve seen plenty of bad behaviour and Senate antics. But when I needed to take my baby into the chamber it was always met with understanding from other senators.”

To his credit, President John Hogg put out a statement last night indicating that “he could have handled the situation in relation to Senator Hanson-Young this afternoon better” and welcoming a proposal for the Senate Procedure Committee to examine the standing order in relation to the issue, which he suggested is confusing.

The bottom line here, as Stott-Despoja notes, is what sort of politics we want, whether we want younger people, who are more likely to be in the their early parenting years, to play a full role in our political system or whether it should be confined to the childless and those who have older children, or men who aren’t interested in playing a full role in their children’s upbringing. The accelerating demands of the media cycle mean politics is becoming an ever-more demanding occupation, constantly consuming whatever politicians can offer and then demanding more. But our Parliamentary standards are still stuck in a Victorian era of old white male legislators. This is the place, remember that after a debate lasting an entire political generation, only decided to have a child-care centre on the premises last year.

There aren’t many young parents in politics and, judging by the reaction to Hanson-Young, we’re unlikely to see too many more. Our democracy and our politics will be all the poorer for it.

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett.

Apparently, the end of the world is at hand. Kevin Rudd borrowed a ute off a bloke. Or something. It’s a scandal! Apparently. Although, why the *fair slice of the Pineapple* PM isn’t receiving high praise for driving such a *dinkum* Aussie vehicle from those who were loudly denouncing him only last week, over their lattes, for his Quinceland vernacular, I don’t know.

But… at Libertarian Central, Christian Kerr’s second favourite blog (after Club Troppo), they’re all in high dudgeon:

These are extraordinarily serious allegations and, on the news I have seen, it doesn’t look good at all.

Orly?

It gets worse. Poor KRudd. Will he withstand these incomprehensible *though terribly serious* allegations? OMG!

Kevin Rudd will not survive if it is firmly established that he—or even his office—made special pleadings for car-dealer mate John Grant. It is undoubtedly his greatest crisis in politics.

New York Scores Club much?

The kiss of death though – “The Punch [has] more.”

Srsly?

Right, that’s it. Refuse supply! The GG should sack him! Hang on she’s some sort of vaguely liberal vaguely feminist upper class Queensland Barrister… Quick, appeal to Her Maj!

Don’t blame me for this nonsense. I’m just the piano player.

You can condemn anything you like except The Michael Garrick Sextet. I do condemn myself for not blogging for ages!

Certainly, the party swap of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is a fillip for the Democrats.

Although, those with a long memory for the ‘Clarence Thomas hearings’ might question the elderly gentleman’s progressivism when it comes to issues of concern to women. Anita Hill, wherever she is now, probably isn’t over the moon:

Though another way of looking at that is that he’s the very model of the Senex – the governing classes of what passes for the Republic these days.

In truth, I’d suggest, Specter’s defection reflects a real ‘partisan realignment’ – the shift of established power bases to the Democrats, uniting around Barack Obama now that he’s proved that his version of “change we can believe in” is softly, softly muted. This, of course, does leave the Republicans as the party of the noise machine, and an increasingly marginalised voter base, but where does it leave progressive politics in the U S of A? If you’re in a kind mood, you might assume that Obama’s natural instincts will be further pulled rightwards… You read the omens!

But what’s the real issue, here, politically?

Norman Abjorensen puts his finger on it:

The real losers, however, are the environment and the people. A less obvious, but equally important, loser in all of this is our increasingly enfeebled democracy – once again trashed by the corporate juggernaut. This just one more example of what the American political scientist, Carl Boggs, has called the corporate colonisation of society. A deal has been struck between self-interested business elites and a supposedly representative government that has effectively capitulated: the public – and the public interest – have simply been excluded from the equation.

…

We must start to ask the question: whose society is it? Theirs or ours? It was Aristotle who first promoted the idea that that people were designed by nature to live and be active in the polis. The polis, as society, existed only for the sake of “the good life.”

Where is it now?