We need more values campaigning

These infomercials have softened up the public nicely, but it's time for a sucker-punch that will knock some sense into them and remind them who knows their hearts better than anyone. Once this election campaign is called I hope that as well as the attacking of Rudd's weakness we get much more of the 'I'm John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia and I have the guts to say what you are all thinking.' None of us wants a return to the days of the PC 90's under Keating/Clinton. It was awful. You couldn't get laid without reciting Germain Greer first. Mental pollution corrupted all the strong and crushed all hope of a fun future. We all felt so guilty all the time. None of us wants THAT back. Not even the left. All my lefty mates love elitist jokes now. It's great! Back then we were all Pearl Jam fans. Now even lesbians like Gun'n'roses and Motley Crue! And why wouldn't they?

All the values issues are up for grabs in the campaign and Howard speaks for the vast bulk of us: drugs, porn, immigration, indigenous affairs, dole-bludging etc.

There is one issue that leaves huge room for conservative posturing and it's getting more headline space all the time: CRIME. After living in Britain for years I am amazed that crime is not a major election issue in this country. The fact that it is off the radar is proof that under Howard everything is pretty hunky dory. Honestly, Australian working families really have never been better off. But crime is on the rise for a number of reasons. My guess is rampant drug use and the emergence of lawless communities who are scared to talk to the police. Unfortunately the perception of racism on the force can isolate communites that don't feel part of the mainstream. Howard has been helping, or rather compelling for their own good, communities like this to integrate, learn english and feel at home. Rudd does not really have his heart in it. He may appear to be a small target on this issue but the Goverment has to wedge him.

The govt has to talk tough on crime but they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Each time they announce an innitiative no matter how radically conservative, Rudd just echoes the sentiment. It doesn't matter if the ALP backbenchers squeel. Rudd has them by the balls because of the polls. The only way for as wedge to succeed is for the goverment to stay silent so that Rudd gives his gut-reaction or the reaction he perceives will be best received and for the government to do the opposite. This requires some sort of event or the issue to come to a head.

If there are connections between the police union in Victoria, organised crime, gangland killings and drug-trafficing there would be a juicy way to kill serveral vultures with one stone. The Left in Melbourne is up to it's neck in it. There has to be something in this for the coalition.

Even if this is not the issue we need to see more of Howard and Costello the conservative mainstream values specialists. That is part of the core Liberal Party mantra. If Howard can hang on to the public's trust in this regard, and paint Rudd as an agent of the cultural left, here to lock you up for saying anything at all controversial, then maybe, just maybe he can win the public's trust back on IR.

The IR message is the same as the cultural message. We are all duty bound to pitch in for this great country. Dont act like a whinger and expect special treatment. Reagan was a union basher from way back, but the blue collar democrats loved him. He gave them hope for a prosperous free future, not a closeted guilty one. It's Morning in Australia. We all need to see that. We all need to say that. Rudd can do a passible impression of someone who gives a sh1t about this stuff, but he doesn't have it in the guts where it counts. You can't make the unpopular decisions without the conviction to see them through. I have a terrible feeling we will have to endure a Jimmy Carter before we get our Ronald Reagan.

I really hope Howard is saving up alot of his stuff for the last minute when Rudd cant repeat it in time. Johnny did not get to be PM for so long by not knowing why he is liked.

Gotcha by the Shorten curlies

Fairfax once again trumpeting the virtues of the working class who none of their staff or readership have ever met.

Union bully Bill Shorten has done back room deals to usurp labour preselection from the sitting labour candidate in the Melbourne seat of Maribyrnong. And he's lauched his election with the help of the surviving miners from 60 minutes.

Whatever. It's like the Simpsons where fictional Billy get's trapped down a well. 'That Billy's a hero' says Homer. 'But he fell down a well, Dad. How does that make him a hero?', asks Lisa. 'Well that's more than you did!' is the response.

Makes about as much sense as trying to say that Rudd controls the unions when their numbers are strengthening in the ALP's parliamentary ranks all the time. I guess there's no future in being a union boss any more because Howard has changed the workplace culture so they might as will look for a different line of work, and a job as an ALP MP gives them just as many outlets for their talents for sleazy deals, swearing and sexism.

Telstra tellsya how ta vote

Fairfax article about how Telstra thinks a Labour goverment will bring LESS red-tape for business. I think it's more like a socialist dictatorship wont be afraid to endorse monopoly power at the expense of the marketplace.

Where do these tossers get off writing to their shareholders on mass to lecture them on how to vote. Voters have got alot of issues to weigh up with this election goes ahead and guess what Telstra-regulation isn't numero uno on the list or priorities. Telstra wouldn't even have shareholders to patronise if it weren't for the government.

Rather then trying to run the country guys stick to running your company so that your service sucks less. Everyone claims to speak with the authority of the elected representative nowadays. Makes me wanna puke and my guess is that alot of voters will feel this way too.

RNS: Proof of the left's war on winners

SMH article on the Royal North Shore where a woman miscarried in a toilet last week for lack of attention. The NSW Labor government explicitly restricted its funding because the area was said to be affluent and therefore did not need much of a public hospital. This arrangement was done in secret, presumably because it's morally and politically indefensable, and media gags were applied to hospital staff to keep the dodgy deal under-wraps. A doctor who quit in disgust at the damage to health services due to political agendas and the has now spoken up.

I find the scariest thing about this story is the importation of politically-brainwashed foreign staff to implement ideological agendas from .... of all places New Zealand! That's like recuiting the All Blacks to coach the Wallabies. They don't want us to win and they aren't gonna help. New Zealanders are trained to think of Aussies as rednecks from birth. They consider themselves so morally superior that they are prepared to send their own economy to the dogs just to prove how much they love being left-wing. As a result every Kiwi under 30 is over here looking for work? Hey, if they want to help build our economy good on 'em, they make great nightclub bouncers, but it's terrifying to thing that the ALP is deliberately bringing in people who are inexperienced with the Australian health system and isolated from or hostile to Australian domestic opinion in order to force through tasteless changes to the Health System. I'd much prefer to have doctors from India with terrorist connections. They do less damage than public service saboteurs with idealological agendas and the key to the public purse.

The ALP is run by one such ex-mandarin. He's far from harmless. The Ruddites are coming to smash up the machinery. They will use economic tools for social-engineering ends. Hopefully NSW will see that now. Kudos to the Fairfax press for running this amazing scoop, but this article should be much more prominent in The Age so that Victorian lefties can see it too.

ALP grand finals ads to backfire

The ALP is to recruit Footy legends to attack political advertising during the Grand Finals of the AFL and ARL ... with their own political ads on during the grand finals!

Touche. Nobody is gonna notice that hypocrisy. ALP strategists have got that one in the bag. NOT!

But wait, the cunning plan is that the ALP ads with reveal the key difference with the Govt ads. They will push the line that that the Govt ads are taxpayer funded, but theirs are funded by the Labor Party, sorry ACTU. Hang on. Surely that makes ALP ads MORE political than the Govt's, right? The Govt ads are infomercials strictly speaking that don't endorse the goverment. Not like Morris Iemma's taxpayer funded ads during last year's Ashes series. If the ALP thinks that people in the midst of finals fever are going to make this fine distinction they are mad.

The main point they are pushing is the political ads during sport are, if you will, unsporting and that is the main point the public will get if they did not get it already. They will be just as pissed off that ALP propaganda is taking up their valuable ref-abusing time as Govt ads.

The recruitment of footy stars is a bit of a coup for the ALP I guess, but this also serves to make the govt infomercials look more neutral. The ALP seem to believe everyone automatically sympathises with their point and so the message will get through regardless. If that was the case why do they need to advertise at all?

Maybe they realise this could backfire and that's why the ads are only on the antiquated bygone-era medium of radio, and not TV.

Is it hubris or just stupidity? I'd say both

He's at it again. Rudd is presuming to overturn a century of ALP tradition by arrogating to himself the right to solely appoint the ALP front bench. Previously the causus and through it the factions, unions and states had a say. Not any more says Rudd. I thought he was cracking down on Hubris. He's up to his neck in it now. But how?

Rudd, and newly off-the-hook Swan, felt the need to clarify this position after Rudd said in characheristic castrato bravado, “Let me be very clear about this: I’ll be determining the composition of the Labor ministry should we be elected to form the next government of the country,” in response to pressure from the Libs to reduce uncertainty in front-bench appointments.

It is now becoming clear how these drastic Labor policy shifts come about: though a combination of Rudd's hubris and sheer stupidity. In an attempt to look strong he keeps saying forceful things without looking up the facts or thinking about the consequences. After this he collegues have to fall into line behind him to make it look like this is a well thought out new policy position. He's not making it up as he goes along. He's making it up AFTER he goes along. He probably failed to see that he was contradicting Labour Party tradition, just as he failed to see that not endorsing Swan would leave him open to accusations of leaving roles open for union bosses. Both times he has embarrassed himself and his party.

I think I have been over-estimating Rudd's cunning, and underestimating his stupidity. What's that saying again 'There's only one conspiracy, and that's ignorance'. Rudd certainly has more than his fair share of that, as demonstrated by his collosal tax gaffe last week, right when he and Swan were supposed to by formulating their tax policy. Sheah ... right.

Does Rudd really think that the unions will stand by and allow him to do something that is so contrary to Labor tradition and I presume against the Labor Party constitution? (please tell me there isn't one). If Rudd wanted to get one over on the unions why didn't he keep his trap shut and surprise them after the election? Because he slipped up and now the cat's outta the bag (I gotta stop answering my own questions like u-no-hu). Rudd is a media-hungry moron playing catch up to remarks he said half a week ago. He's a light-weight.

I bet we get a retraction of this latest statement because of back-room pressure from the factions and unions, and then the ALP will front-bench have to think of another excuse for the u-turn. Oh please, PM recall parliament so you can bash the Ruddites over the head with that one.

Swan Song of the Left

Why is it that even when Rudd says things with the utmost conviction he withdraws it the next day with a straight face and not a whiff of humility? He feels able to blame all of his bad-decision days on the 'smear/scare campaign' (read: truth campaign) the government is mounting. A day or so ago in response to a request that he confirm Swan would be treasurer in and ALP govt, he was emphatic that no-one, not even him, was guarenteed a job if he won the election. This statement was clearly nonsense, but delivered with characteristic extra volume and testiculation from Rudd (testiculation = waving hands wildly whilst talking bollocks). He clearly meant for us to believe this logical impossiblity. We all knew Rudd would argue that black was white if he felt it would get him a better poll position, but what motivated him to introduce this potentially damaging uncertainty into the campaign?

On the face of it Rudd insists he is cracking down on arrogance following a plege to come down like a tonne of bricks on any cabinet collegue caught (by anyone outside the ALP) fighting over the spoils of an anticipated election victory. I would not be worried if I were a Labor front bencher. We all saw how hard he came down on union bullies - more like a tonne of feathers. The Goverment knows better than to believe that Rudd is cracking down on arrogance and Costello took the first opportunity to speculate that Rudd was keeping front-bench free for former ACTU prez Combet and other Union militants in safe ALP seats post-election, and (i dont know what's worse) keeping the Treasury warm for Marxist Gillard. Rudd reacts to this inconvenient truth by changing his position and blaming it on a scare campaign. A backflip? More like and about face and a brown-eye to all notions of a decency and a fair fight. As we stare into the left's source of daylight we people who live in the real world can see the foul darkness at the very core of the ALP's being.

With this retraction Rudd demonstrates what the ALP believes: that hubris is ok if you have persecution complex. Rudd's supremely offensive tendency to play the part of victim is the perfect example of moral superiority gone mad. This inverse snobbery is a tool that losers use to gang up on winners. Their secondary status somehow gives them a magical quality whereby everything they do is morally good. On the other hand everything a winner does is morally wrong. The winners in life they say must have used trickery and evil to get where they got. The fact that they won proves it, doesn't it? This cowardly herd-mentality runs deep in the ALP and is the basis for their us-and-them world view. It would seem that the very idea that some people wins and some people lose in life is offensive to the 'moral' sensibilities of the ALP. Indeed, the ALP believes this whole-heartedly, unless the person who wins was previously a loser like the ALP, in which case victory becomes a moral right, anything to achieve that victory is permitted, and the mercilessness they exibit when they win is justice itself. To a leftie might is right, as long as it is preceded by suffering.

Or should I say the perception of suffering. Any leftie with a persecution complex feels perfectly justified in treating anyone who disagrees with them like shit. I bet Rudd felt no guilt at all about confining National Party-linked QLD public servants to the gulag during his time under Goss, but we all know he feels the National Party is guilty of a smear campaign if they say he is too weak to lead people with differing opinions. Rudd's moral double-standard is the proof that he is too weak to stand up to the honest criticism, and the rest, that a PM should expect.

What can we expect if Rudd becomes PM? A return of the Left and their attempts to drill a victim ethos into, and thereby weaken, all of society - a nation of Kevin Rudds, that's what! Oh mighty electorate, please have more mercy than he of whom I speak. Spare us this terrible fate.

Consternation and a Cafe Latte

Nice opinion piece in The Age called 'Answer's please Mr Rudd?' shows how the left-leaning middle class are sizing up the realities of a potential Rudd premiership.

Their big unanswered question is 'So far we don't know to what extent Kevin Rudd will line our pockets with tax cuts'. Ummm ... let me answer that for you. You'll get precisely f*&k all. He's a Labor guy. Once he's in he'll spend everything he can get his hands on. He might hesistate to take more money because of the consequences electorally, although he won't shy away from exploiting stealth taxes and bracket creep Keating-stylee. He'll increase the GST to pay for health if he can manipulate the polulation into feeling guilty about not paying. The exact same thing happenned under 'New Labour' in Britain with the National Insurance contribution. Whether old or new, the very word Labo(u)r gives people away as tax-and-spend income redistributionists.

I can't find the name of the author. Presumably they wish to stay anonymous to avoid a barrage of Ruddite propaganda at the next dinner party they attend. Whomever he or she is you can tell the author is left-leaning, dispite the fact they want tax cuts, because they imply they want troops out of Iraq by calling to our attention the fact that Rudd has duped people into thinking he'll pull out now when he advocates one more full troop rotation taking the deployment to mid-next year.

I am greatly comforted by the desertion of lefties from the ALP, to the Greens or anywhere else. If Age readers are so worried about money from tax cuts, presumably for private school fees and piano lessons for kids Jonathan and Marjorie, they will be just as likely to desert Labor for the Liberals. The have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too crowd still have to make a real choice in the end. If they eat John Howard at the polls they can't stick their fingers down their thoat, bring him back up and have another go.

Mmmm ... bulemia.

HEY! TEACHER'S UNION! LEAVE THOSE KIDS ALONE!

Great piece. by Janet Albrechsten in the Australian this moring. I left a comment on it that I will repeat here.

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/janetalbrechtsen/index.php/theaustralian/comments/no_place_for_ideological_agendas_in_our_classrooms/

Hi Janet, The kids might not be learning much but I learned alot about the indoctrination in schools from your piece. I feel very strongly about this kind of herd tyranny that prevails in schools because it crushes the spirits of every inquisitive child that desires even the tiniest bit of respect for their brain-power. It's institutionalised bullying. Maoist political indoctination of kids destroys their innocence. It intrudes into their home lives and splits loyalties like one parent in a divorce trying to turn the traumatised child against the other parent.

Might I make one point however in slight dissagreement with you and that is that while telling children who to vote for and encouraging them to behave like a rabble is inexcusable, there IS a place for ideology in schools, and the curriculum and teaching methods will inevitably be influenced by some ideology or other. The challenge is to find a BETTER IDEOLOGY than the so-called progressives. One that encourages excellence, discourages envy, promotes both team-work and individual resourcefulness and makes no apologies for rewarding on results. If we start with AWA's in schools and performance based pay for teachers this might trickle down to the students and lo-and-behold the values taught in the classroom might start to correspond to those you need to succeed in real life.

BTW I'm one of the kids who went through the schooling under these teachers so please forgive my spelling errors.

Aussie NHS = Expensive Mess

Don't forget to Rudd's plan for an Aussie NHS. It has slipped off the radar what with all the showmanship from the coalition. Rudd's plan to nationalise health is the true mark of an ex-mandarin turning his hand to policy. All Ministers, Prime or otherwise, should have a fundamental phobia of Sir Humphry of the Civil Service. Rudd is Sir Humphry. Be afraid.

The consolidation of all the state public health services into one body run from Canberra by Ruddite pencil-pushers compiling league tables and imposing easily evaded targets will greatly increase (I predict double) the bureaucracy of the public health system and inevitably the GST that pays for it. It will also reduce our world-class public health service to the 3rd world standard of Britain's where the staff, from medical down to clerical, lose half the blood samples that they take, screw up the tests, then blame you, and make you feel like burden on the system for getting sick in the first place. Been there. Done that. Don't want it here.

Anyone who has not been to Britain should try it for a while if they want to see what 'New Labour' is like. There really is no need to inflict it on the rest of us Down Under.

BOING!!!

Here it comes. Not the first bounce for Howard and it wont be the last. Tomorrow's newspoll is tipped to halve the gap with the ALP. Should steady the nerves a bit partly because it's a welcome chance and partly because it just shows how volatile and unreliable the polling is. I wonder whether this bounce is due to Rudd's premature campaign launch over the weekend where he announced nothing but the creation of another review panel and used virtually the same slogan as Keating's last doomed election campaign. 'New Leadership' = Old Labour.

Prior to this news we had a great day in parliament which included Howard's best line of the year to date.

Julia Gillard accused howard of not calling the election so he could extend the taxpayer funded add blistz on TV. HOward responded by saying no-one in the ALP was in NSW over XMAS obviously because you could not switch on the TV without hearing a message about Morris Iemma's plans for the state. Paraphrased, Howard delivered the pearler "At one stage Cricket Australia was thinking of introducing 4 ball overs so that there would be time for all the adds. Talk about hypocrisy. Give us a break." Howzat.?!! The Bradman of politics strikes again. THe Libs have a monopoly on humour in politics now that Beatie has beat it, but that's not what the ABC want's you to think.

If you were watching ABC news and the 7:30 report you will have missed it. They showed the labour question and the last bit of the response about hypocrisy, which sounded lame and puffed up on it's own.

You got the scoop here folks on Australia Rising, the ABC's Micheal Brissenden has the worst Jouralistic ethics on TV. He misrepresents what people say in his 'editing'. What's worse. He had a great soundbite and buried it. Where's the showbiz factor? YOu wont see this brought up on Media Watch, just like they ignored his dubious handling of the Costello leadership chat dinner.

Keep holding off on the election JOhn. Rudd is powerless to do anything about it but clock up more boring condescending smuggness in front of the cameras while you guys crack the jokes. His impotence is reminding him and everyone else that he's not the Prime Minister until elected constitutionally, and of the arrogance of his usurpation of Howard's constitutional role at APEC on the basis of unreliable and transient polls.

Do ex-mandarins bounce, or go 'splat' when they fall from a great height?

TEAM AUSTRALIA

So Howard blinked in the discussions over the leadership. Big Deal. It's testimony to his nerve that he didn't claw his own eyes out in response to the polls. He's made a promise to move on which most of us pretty much expected him to do next term anyway. In a way it gives bit of ammo to the opposition but the recent contary-to-promises departure of Labour State Premiers has insulated him from most of this flak. It's not uncommon or unrealistic to affirm that you will at some point leave office. Tony Blair did the same thing before the last British election. We all know that US presidents only serve two terms. The promise of renewal that the pundits say the voters want is now there. They can have it now if with Rudd, or they can wait a little bit more and be cautious with the nation's future.

From the number of times he's said it in the last 24 hours it's clear that Peter Costello thinks that 'team' is spelled with an 'I'. Well it is when you spell it TEAM AUSTRALIA!!! You have to admit that Howard looks and makes decisions like mentor Spotswood from the movie of similar name. Kevin Rudd with his glasses, language skills and ambition to be a Socialist Dictator could be mistaken for Kim Jong Ill. "My pran is working perfectry. Worrd domination is inebitabrrr". Can someone please draw this up as a cartoon?

The team angle is good for 2 reasons. Firstly, Rudd's team is a joke. Wayne Swan? Julia Gillard? Sheah, Raaiiigght. Sadly it's joke we've all heard too many times over this year. It's not funny anymore, at least not ha ha funny. The second reason why a team approach is good is that any way to tap into Costello's famous wit and furious ambition for the benefit of the party/team/nation is fine by me. We need an energetic campaign and we need to mercilessly tear apart Rudd's and his team's credibility. Sorry, what I meant to say was we need to talk about our plans for the future. For $#@* sake. We all know what the Liberal's plan for the future is, DONT GO BACK THE THE PAST!

Costello can attack Rudd on economics, but this election is about values as much as hip-pockets. Howard represents mainstream Australian values better than anyone. It's his job to convince Australia that the cringe is over and workplace reform is all part of the plan for boosting our confidence and getting a grip on the reality of global competition. Gimme summa dat Aspirational Nationalism. Rudd has got some nerve claiming that Howard is the man of the past when all his ideas are backward-looking 60's-inspired lefty economic and moral prejudices.

GIVE 'EM HELL, TEAM AUSTRALIA! All free-thinking Australians put our trust in you.

Election 2007 - The Big Work Choice

We are about to enter into a Federal election campaign here Down Under. To say this is going to be the election campaign to end all election campaigns would be a huge understatement. On one side we have our glorious leader Prime Minister John Howard and the Coalition Government of the Liberal and National Parties. On the other side we have arch-villian and former mandarin Kevin Rudd leading a pack of mangy Labour mongrels with all the money and muscle of every unionist thug in the country behind them.

Kevin Rudd has been ahead in the political polling since the start of the year by a pretty big margin. It's been crushingly boring. Everyone in the media and the Labour party has been going on and on and on about it for months. They all think Rudd will be the next PM. They've been spreading the Big Lie now for so long that that everyone in the whole country believes it now, everyone that is except the actual current PM, and die-hard Liberal supporters like myself. The odd thing is that for almost a century no Australian government has been kicked out of office without there being an economic downturn or a major crisis in competance. Neither of those preoconditions exist now. On the contrary we are enjoying a golden age of economic prosperity and the government's competance on issues as diverse as the economy, immigration, terror, indigenous policy and yes now even the environment is undeniable. So why is the government in so much trouble?

The trouble stems from one issue that is fundamentally tied to the Australian way of thinking. The big issue of this election is the new Industrial Relations framework introduced by the Howard government called Work Choices. In it employers are given more freedom to hire, fire and pay employees as they see fit. Previously Australia used to have a more centrally regulated and unionised system. Employees still have rights under the new system, good and fair rights, it's just that they are defended by government bodies not unions. Essentially under the new laws, worker's rights are no different to any other citizen's rights in that the Govt. and Police uphold them, not vigilante groups who strut around thinking they own the place and trample on people's rights by their sheer clumsiness.

The labour-market flexibility under the new laws is fundamental for the continued economic growth of the country. Work Choices has freed small business up to hire more people which has lead to the lowest unemployment rate in over 30 years. The new IR laws are also vital for the stability of the economy. If inflation and interest rates are to be kept under control in a near full-employment economy wage increases need to be due to increased productivity, not union leverage. Otherwise real wages will fall as inflation rises, and recession looms with the resulting job losses.

Work Choices is working, but it threatens the unions. They have therefore been running the biggest scare campaign ever seen in this country - all about evil bosses and their plans to destroy ordinary working families. The question is whether or not Australia is now grown-up enough to realise that the boss is not the bad guy. Because of our heritage Australians have a deep-seated distrust of authority. I think distrust of authority is often wise, but disgust at all people in authority is just childish. Someone has to be the boss. Deal with it. The boss needs us as much as we need them and we all need to work together in order to compete in the global economy. The Unionist us-and-them mindset is a thing of the past. If we don't all grow up, get along, and get on with the job there won't be any jobs to go to.

I fully agree with Kevin Rudd when he says Austalia is now at a turning point (thanks for the soundbite, Dad). The Australian population will decide at the next election between going forward with John Howard to a new age of prosperity and confidence for Australia and going backward into the ugly recesses of cringing Australian psyche with Kevin Rudd. My gut feeling is that Australians have ambition. Look at the spectacular success of our sports teams. We love to win - and that's a very very good thing.

Welcome to this 'ere blog, cobber

G'Day.
I'm Will T Power, an centre right poltical blogger for the under 35's. I live in Melbourne, Australia and I support the Liberal Party of Australia with every bone in my body. For anyone reading this from o/s you must realise that in Australia the Liberal Party is the centre-right party dispite it's name. It's the equivalent of the Republican Party in the USA and the Conservative Party in Britain. I like the name because it implies that we defend liberties from the socialists, which is of course true. In Australia we call lefties 'small-L liberals'. OK, now that we've got the lingo sorted out grab a tinnie and a snag and sit down to digest veritable BBQ or delicious politcal insights.

I apologise to my Aussie readers-to-be because i've posted on a US site and the freaking times allocated to the posts are US time. I'll have to fix that soon.

Blog on, Dudes.

John Howard is THE UBERBATTLER

The murdoch media campaign against Howard is over, and the media is the loser. All the conspirators have handed John Howard the first big victory of the campaign. Howard is now the UBERBATTLER!! When John Howard was totally friendless he did not buckle. The whole world was against him, the glass ceiling was in place and all the chattering-classes were hounding him to recognise their judgement that he was inferior, and to quit in shame the he ever tried to lead. You gotta hand it to the guy. He believes in himself. He's got balls. He's the Shane Warne of politics and this is the 2005 Ashes Series. He's screaming at his team to focus on the real enemy. If they pull up their socks they can still win it. Australia only lost that series because of bad light and a Kiwi umpire at Edgebaston. Well the umpire in this contest, the media, has done his worst to no avail. John Howard only has to produce a couple of his trademark deliveries and kapow! Rudd's stumps will go flying out of the ground. If the Liberals go down they will go down fighting and with their reputations unsullied.

The vultures are going to have to go hungry for another few weeks at least.