Around the blogs

* Andrew Norton over at Catallaxy does a sterling job looking at the David Throsby booklet "Does Australia Need a Cultural Policy?" launched last night by Cate Blanchett. Of course, if Cate was involved, you could always guess that the document was going to be an anti Howard diatribe. It is, and a boringly predictable one at that.

I really think that the public mood for substantial government funding of cultural matters has swung more or less permanently against it.

* Mark Bahnisch helps disprove his own argument that lefty's do a have a sense of humour - honest- by agreeing with wacky humourist Mark Latham's complaint that the ABC was not taking the last election seriously enough. (I am paraphrasing here: that complaint was directed againt Micheal Brissendon having too much fun in his commentary pieces).

* Tim Dunlop has a calmer moment reflecting that issues that involve a "conflict of goods" can make it particularly difficult for consensus views to be reached in liberal democracies. He even mentions that this is why the wiretapping issue in America is not biting politically as much as some think it should. Makes sense. But he has written a string of posts (go find them yourself, it's late) in which he has carried on as if the wiretapping issue is obviously a horrible travesty, legal opinion on this is all going one way, and has a go at a commenter by saying : "But I certainly accept your implicit point that you have nothing useful to contribute except bluster, lies and partisanship."

Where did the nice Tim Dunlop go?