If you haven’t been reading the political blogs much — say, Greg Sargent — you may not have a sense of just how dire the political environment is. But here’s the situation. You have a Republican base that truly believes that guaranteed health insurance is the work of the devil. Meanwhile, there’s a Republican majority in the House that owes its position not to broad popular support — Democrats actually got more votes in 2012 — but to a district map that concentrates Democrats in a minority of districts, which in turn means that most Rs are more afraid of Tea Party challengers than outraged independents.How depressing...
And the debt ceiling looms, with many ideologues assuring the base that Obama can be bullied into gutting his main achievement, which he won’t.
Everyone seems to assume that this will be worked out somehow, but nobody has even a halfway plausible story about how this will be done. Default looks like a real risk.
ASHLEY HALL: Playing with building blocks offered him the chance to share a campaign slogan.Oh please...
KEVIN RUDD: We're just going to keep building up, because we've got to build things up, haven't we? Making sure we are building and building for the future.
For three years he conducted a relentless, deliberate and effective negative campaign against the Gillard government, a campaign at times so aggressive that many on his own side were deeply concerned it was causing irreparable damage to voter perceptions of Abbott himself.And, as I have noted before, the tactics being used against Rudd this time are those he used against Howard:
But with negative views of Labor’s record apparently entrenched – aided, it must be said, by Labor’s own self-destructive leadership saga – Abbott is flipping to positive just in time.
Slowly but surely his personal approval ratings are improving. He has toned down the attacks. His colleagues and his daughters talk about his “authenticity” as a community member and a family man. They label Rudd a “fake”.
And all the while Abbott refuses to deviate from his strategy of claiming to have a “real plan” without setting out what it is and how it will be paid for in anything like the detail provided by previous oppositions.
The last time we saw “the flip” exercised with such confidence and dexterity was in Rudd’s campaign launch speech in 2007, when he managed to flip the economic management debate to one where John Howard, who had just presided over 11 years of consecutive growth and record low unemployment, was on the defensive over the economy.2. Lenore also had a good column a few days ago about the Coalition's deliberate delays to disclose funding for policies:
Rudd had made $45bn in spending promises during the formal campaign, just $5bn less than Howard's $50bn in campaign promises, but when Rudd told the party faithful “this reckless spending must stop” he looked like the competent and frugal economic manager.
.... while oppositions of both persuasions have tried to game the formal costings processes, individual policies have almost always been released with their full price tags detailed over four years.3. Abbott's mysteriously unanalysed by Rupert's papers "let's go to Indonesia and buy boats!' scheme has apparently not gone over well in that country:
The Coalition's health policy, released on Thursday, had one line under costings which read: "The Coalition's policy to support Australia's health system will cost $340m over the forward estimates." Some of that – we were told on "background" – would come from cuts inside the health portfolio, and some from "elsewhere". In other words: they'll get back to us.
The "PBO has still got our homework" schtick has also worn thin since the Coalition has been telling us for months they already have everything fully costed and figured out.
The "Labor is running a scare campaign" excuse worked for a little while – aided by the ALP's silly insistence on using the $70bn figure for the Coalition's costings black hole, which by a quick reckoning is clearly overstated.
The buyback plan has met with heavy resistance in Jakarta, with a senior member of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's ruling coalition saying it showed Mr Abbott lacked understanding of Indonesia, and the broader asylum-seeker problem.
Mahfudz Siddiq, the head of Indonesia's parliamentary commission for foreign affairs, said on Monday that it was Mr Abbott's right to suggest the policy but warned that it had broader implications for the relationship between Jakarta and Australia.
"It's an unfriendly idea coming from a candidate who wants to be Australian leader," Mr Siddiq said.
"That idea shows how he sees things as [an] Australian politician on Indonesia regarding people smuggling. Don't look at us, Indonesia, like we want this people smuggling.
"This is really a crazy idea, unfriendly, derogatory and it shows lack of understanding in this matter."
When they're not utterly stupid, they are oddly banal. Another Inspire recommendation is to shoot up lunch spots that are popular with government workers. So in a decade, al-Qaeda has gone from targeting the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - the two symbolic organs of American power - to threatening Starbucks outlets one at a time.That was, of course, before the Boston bombings killed 3 people and maimed and injured 264 others.
Then there is ''Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom'', which suggests repurposing a home pressure cooker to become an explosive device. Such a device is weak, apparently, so the magazine recommends it is placed ''close to the intended targets''.
It is surprisingly hard to detonate explosives successfully.
For the past six years there has been a lot of hoo-hah said and written about industrial relations. As soon as the ALP moved to change IR legislation, warnings came from the Liberal party and conservative commentators of a wages boom. They also warned that the Fair Work Act would destroy productivity.
It didn’t.
In his campaign launch speech on Sunday, Tony Abbott talked of returning IR to the “sensible centre”. It’s a claim based on the view that unions now have too much power. If that is true, there is scant evidence they have used it to gain excess wage rises which have decoupled earnings from productivity.
When the Liberal party does finally announce its changes to IR after the election, it would be nice if they could keep themselves to fixing problems that actually exist, and not ones that occur only in their imagination.
It’s as if he can’t be bothered. Or it’s as if he has missed the past four decades entirely. Though, presumably he wasn’t alone in this. Presumably he is in sync with an entire demographic that has not seen the need to pull back the curtain and only reluctantly ever answers the door.I would add - he appears to show an interest in changing mainly when the need presents itself directly to him in his family - thus more (allegedly) understanding of gay issue because his sister went into a lesbian relationship. He realises the importance of parental leave to women because his daughters are now of child bearing age. He's on board with fertility treatment (against Catholic teaching, incidentally) because he knows Christopher Pyne and his chief of staff have had it. Yet again, this indicates to me a significant degree of shallowness and/or opportunism that I find unacceptable in anyone aspiring to be PM.
He really does think, when confronted with the issue of the recognition of the rights of gays, that it’s a matter of fashion.
There’s a certain laziness here. It represents the approach that says that some things aren’t worth noticing, learning, respecting. They’re just not important. He is comfortable where he is and really can’t be bothered to take on new information, or understand new dynamics.
The growing idea that marriage was all about feeling alarmed many. The Bishop of Sheffield thought that the institution would buckle under the load of emotional and sexual expectation. The Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce of the early 1950s feared “an undue emphasis on the overriding importance of a satisfactory sex relationship”. They were not wrong. By 1959 the Archbishop of Canterbury was thundering against the “tide of adultery” sweeping the land. Ms Langhamer convincingly argues that the sexual permissiveness of the 1960s and the subsequent decline in marriage were less a reaction to the so-called stability of the 1950s than a product of the decade’s instability.
She sees the 1920s and 1930s as a time of pragmatism, of slow courtships and modest expectations. The question was less whether a couple were in love than whether she could housekeep and he could earn. Ms Langhamer concedes that the trends she traces are winding and unsteady—that caution was urged in the 1960s, just as emotional intimacy was sought in the 1920s. Still, she finds that after the devastation of the first world war, steadiness was valued above all. The woman who, in 1930, wished simply to meet someone “clean, and if not good-looking, at least pleasant”, with £5 a week, was not untypical.
