Now IKEA Weighs In On Federal Election, The Man On The Box

You have to pay this, very well done. A John Howard potrait features on the wall of the Abbutt, and on the wall of the Ruddik is a framed Kevin07 t-shirt.

via @Clementine_Ford

Newspoll Reveals Rudd Led Spectacular Comeback In Just Six Days, Murdoch Media Doesn't Notice

Newspoll, you're so damn finicky.

So according to Newspoll, in just six days prime minister Kevin Rudd has gone from being at "record lows" to Labor support being at its "highest level" since the election campaign began.
 
But nobody at The Australian seemed to notice The Rudd Surge, least of all Newspoll wrangler Dennis Shanahan.

Unlike just six days ago, when Rudd was at "record lows" :

Mr Rudd today shrugged off the devastating Newspoll and said he had been written off many times before during his political career.

“I'm a fighter and there are many things worth fighting for in this election campaign,” he told the Seven Network.

I actually admire Shanahan's work explaining to us how the Murdoch co-owned Newspoll is actually nearly always telling us Labor is doomed. Doomed!

Anyone willing to write thousands of words a week on that fucking berzerk poll, year after year after year, deserves some respect. Probably.

Shanahan on Newspoll is like some bizarre public experiment by Rupert Murdoch, for the confusement and amusement of the masses. Well, of course, there's not so many masses at The Australian anymore, but that's another story. For later.

One you won''t read much about in The Australian.

Like The KRudd Comeback story that was right there, if only they'd wanted to find it..

Maybe next week.

Rap News Delivers Julian Assange As John Farnham

 If the Australian election had not been strange and surreal enough for you yet, Senate contender Julian Assange has handed himself over to Rap News, instead of Sweden. Yeah, that''s Assange in a mullet, in frnt of 0s and 1s, miming his Assange4Senate cheat sheet to John Farnham's You're The Voice. He could have gone for a whole bunch of John Farnham songs. Help! for starters.

The whole video is worth a view or two, but the bit where Julian Assange does his John Farnham thing starts at 6:50.



For comparison, below is the original John Farnham video (from 0:28). Fun Farnham Fact: John Farnham released an astouinding dozen 'video albums' in the 1980s.




Of course you can go too far. Did anyone really need to see Assange 'Aussie Up'? No doubt this will be the image from the video used to mock him most. But you get the feeling Assange knows that. And he doesn't care.

Neither do Rap News.




More soon....

Rupert Murdoch's Australian Media Hits Peak Hitler

Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd spoke to students at a college in Sydney. The walls of the room featured posters of Hitler, Mussolini, Einsenhower and Rommel, appropriate to the historical studies of world history underway at the time.

This Andrew Meares photo as shown on the Sydney Morning Herald election blog shows the classroom with various posters of world leaders, dictators, military chiefs : 



For most of the Australian media, Kevin Rudd being seen near such posters caused little fuss.

But it gave Hitler-obsessives Col Allan and Rupert Murdoch the chance to live out their dream.

After warming up by dressing Kevin Rudd in a Nazi uniform only four days into the federal election campaign, the Australian Murdoch media now had the chance to go Full Hitler on Kevin Rudd.

They hit Peak Full Hitler sometime around 11pm last night.

This is the story appearing all over Rupert Murdoch's Australian online media and rapidly crumbling newspaper empire today:





The Herald Sun liked the 'story' so much,  they ran it 3 TIMES on their online front page.

 That's Hitler Rudd 3 times, in case you didn't get the message:



 
There is some truth in the headline, with a more appropriate photo of someone Kevin Rudd has actually met in person, not just stood near a poster of.

While Kevin Rudd was getting the HitlerHitlerHitler treatment from the Daily Telegraph, here's the key photo they used today for opposition leader Tony "Action Man" Abbott. I shit you not:

Fairfax political reporter Jonathan Swan on the Daily Telegrah:

THEY DIDN'T EVEN SAY THANK YOU

MURDOCH MEDIA PHOTOSHOPS PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD INTO NAZI UNIFORM 

No Nazi Photoshopping By News Corp Required

Murdoch's photoshoppers had the afternoon off, as prime minister Kevin Rudd visited a history class: 





















From a photo by Andrew Meares. You can follow Andrew Meares election campaign photography here.

Abbott Spending Like An Intoxicated Member Of Water-Based Armed Forces Circa 1960s - Federal Election 2013

Oppositiong leader Tony Abbott seemed to forget that the Australian Navy are not his personal political plaything for the media:

Earlier, top Navy brass stepped in to stop Mr Abbott grilling officers about how they felt patrolling for asylum seeker boats.

Mr Abbott toured Australia's busiest Naval port he asked several personnel for detail about Operation Resolute.

"Do you get out on those boats often," he asked four Navy personnel at an outdoor staff canteen.

"So you guys were doing people smuggling patrols?," he asked.

"What was it like to apprehend these vessels."

After a pause they offered stilted answers including "it's tiring", "a challenge".

"It's busy," said another.

While another said it was "Tiring work too, frustrating."

At this point Lieutenant Commander Michael Doncaster stepped in and asked for the questions to stop.

"Sir I'd prefer we don't talk on that line and move on," he said.

The Australian Navy previously had to tell Abbott to stop using the phrase "spending like drunken sailors."

Senior Navy officers have implored Mr Abbott to tone it down because it doesn't fit with the image they are trying to portray of the modern-day Navy professional as a sensitive, well-behaved individual.

"We are not like that any more,'' a Navy source said.

"It is not an image that is reflective of the current force or ideals.''

Tony Abbott splashes the cash:

• $67 million to deploy Australian Federal Police officers to Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Malaysia to assist with joint people smuggling operations;
• $20 million to "enlist Indonesian villages to support people smuggling disruption including a capped boat buy back scheme";
• regional transit zones to help move asylum seekers to offshore processing centres without needing to go first to Christmas Island or the Australian mainland;
• $27 million for increased aerial surveillance and $71 million to Indonesia to boost their search and rescue resources;
• supplement the border protection fleet with commercially leased vessels; and
• expand the capacity of processing centres on Manus Island and Nauru by 2000.

The massive $30 billion Liberal Party sinkhole continues to grow: 

There is a gap of almost $30 billion between the size of the tax cuts and new spending the Coalition has promised and the savings it has unveiled so far, leading economist Saul Eslake estimates.

In a 34-page review for clients of how a Coalition government might change economic management, Mr Eslake, chief Australian economist for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, also highlights the potential for "significant and ongoing tensions" in an Abbott government between its "genuine economic liberals", such as shadow treasurer Joe Hockey, and those who are "more sceptical about markets . . . including in many cases Tony Abbott as prime minister".

end

Daily Telegraph Couldn't Fit Any More Rudd Attack Stories On Front Page

A new record for Rupert Murdoch's Daly Telegraph in its fair and balanced coverage of the 2013 Federal Election.

Four anti-Rudd stories in prime top-of-the-page position on the DT front page online.

The strategy is a simple one. Say almost nothing about opposition leader Tony Abbott, just hammer prime minister Kevin Rudd day after day, with everything and anything, regardless of the facts.

It is true, according to some but not all polls, that Kevin Rudd's popularity is falling in Western Sydney, not quite as fast as the Daily Telgraph''s circulation, but getting there.
 

More to come...

Andrew Bolt - I Don't Know How Twitter Works, But Its Freedom Scares Me

 Oh yes, you do.

(quick backgrounder : Andrew Bolt is Australia's most heavily promoted Rupert Mudoch columnist. While never having used Twitter, it was decided that the #AskBolt Twitter hashtag should be used to stir up and "take on the Twitterati", and almost every Murdoch media held Twitter account began pumping out his challenge to Twitter users worldwide. In short, Bolt picked a fight with Twitter, and then hijacked the Usain Bolt #AskBolt hashtag in order to do so).

He can deny it all he wants. But The Bolt Report is an Andrew Bolt Twitter account. And it's official.

It's all a bit sad to see a once innovative political blogger so utterly lost amongst the trees when it comes to Twitter.

Boo Twitter, even though it's where a good slab of his daily blog traffic comes from these days, thanks to regular spammy-link tweeting by numerous NewsCorp automated Twitter accounts. He even has the 'Tweet Me' button on every blog post, along wth the official account for his TV show. He doesn't seem to know about that, either.

#AskBolt was an idiotic idea to begin with, promoting someone who doesn't use Twitter on Twitter, with 'Come And Get Me!' tweets like "Bolt Takes On The Twitterati!"

#AskBolt was a Fukushima-scale social media disaster.

There's no way around it. Even people who had previously used the #AskBolt hashtag to say hello to the incredible sprinter Usain Bolt joined in when they discovered some idiot from Australia  had hijacked their hero's hashtag.

#AskBolt made Andrew Bolt a Twitter pinnata. People who had never even heard of this goose from down under were weeping with laughter at the constant stream of 98% inane, and more the point, non-abusive, tweets that swept #AskBolt into the Top Trending Topics in a host of countries around the world.

Nobody on Twitter had seen anything like it.

For the love of FailWhale, you don't hijack established hashtags. Particularly when you don't use Twitter in the first place.

Mindblowing. What the hell were they thinking?

But Andrew Bolt knows what's going on.

It was all a big Australian Labor Conspiracy.

Really. Hard Leftists, you see, control the Twitternets.

Bolt also seems completely unaware that the Daily Telegraph tried to promote #AskBolt on Facebook as well. Hundreds of people mocked him in commemts and shares. Whether the Daily Telegraph Facebook moderator was laughing too hard to delete any, or whether nobody actually moderates the page, who knows? But the ridicule came thick and fast there, too.

Andrew Bolt doesn't use Facebook either.

 


Hard Leftists control Facebook, too, presumably.

Here he is having a spit after discovering just how much of a social media disaster, and wider public spectacle, #AskBot was becoming.



This is how he reported on himself in the Herald Sun:



Just fantastic the way the link for tweeting Andrew Bolt's column onto Twitter lines up perfectly with this:

"I took a dip in Twitter this week, and understand even better how Labor got flushed away in a sewer of hate.

"How could Labor - and many journalists - disastrously mistake Twitter for the real world?"

The real world, you see, isn't millions of people in more than 100 hundred countries around the world communicating freely and sharing information, ideas and quality knowledge, without paywalls.

The Raal World, apparently, is Andrew Bolt's BlogWorld, where you have to register to "join in the debate" and where he bans commenters who hit to close the bone.

"(#AskBolt) electrified the Twittersphere. For hours the topic trended as Leftists, many anonymous, competed to ask me - the Great Satan of Conservatism - the worst, silliest or most abusive questions on the #askbolt hashtag.

"Fairfax newspapers thought this was sensational news."

It wasn't sensational, but it was idiotic enough a move to warrant media attention.

After all, Andrew Bolt is constantly demanding the rest of the media and the general Australian public pay attention to him, and exercise their right to free speech.

Clearly Bolt now has his limits, on both

"Gosh, hold the presses. No, wait, they're slowing already at Fairfax and no wonder, if recycling playground taunts by anonymous tweeters now passes for news reporting."

Miaow. Poor Andrew. He doesn't even know Murdoch's newspaper operation has lost more recently than Fairfax.

"In fact, to be attacked on Twitter is no news to a conservative.

"Twitter skews hard to the Left..."

 Twitter refused to take him seriously. 

"Twitter also seems to bring out the worst in users."

 Twitter isn't a bubble.

"Maybe it's the relative youth of tweeters, and the anonymity of many. Maybe it's because hate tends to sell best in the look-at-me Twittersphere."

He has his own TV show. About His Opinions.

"Or maybe it's because Twitter appeals to the impulsive sensation junkies eager to instantly broadcast their most idle thought..."

This a person who has often published more than a dozen blog posts in a single day.

Now onto the Great Australian Labor Twitter Conspiracy.

"But here's the bizarre thing: this is the audience Labor thought could save it.

"This is the crowd Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tried to impress by tweeting a picture of his shaving cut to his 1.4 million followers, thus confusing the magpie attention of tweeters with respect from very real and unimpressed voters.

"But Julia Gillard as prime minister had an even more fatal attraction to Twitter.

"Her infamous misogyny speech last year - falsely branding Abbott a woman-hater - was rightly seen at first by most commentators as a hate-filled rant that would appal many Australians."

What was Bolt saying before about people ranting like arseholes?

"But Gillard's communications director, John McTernan, eventually convinced press gallery journalists it was a success because it had gone viral on social media, including Twitter."

Gillard's speech was viewed by millions across the planet, within days. A political speech. Viewed by millions. That wasn't JFK, Obama or MLK.

That's pretty fucking viral. 

"And so Gillard, convinced by tweets and blog posts, doubled down on her politics of division, pitting women against men, workers against bosses."

Oh Twitter, is there nothing you can't do?

"Stirring hatred may indeed light up the Twittersphere but it makes the world outside your window feel sick."

Eh?

"But it's no surprise if Twitter's culture has spilled out of the internet sewers and now floods media offices.

"No surprise, when Channel 10's Paul Bongiorno retweets Mike Carlton who retweets Rudd's daughter, Jessica, who retweets Channel 10's Charlie Pickering who retweets blogger Mia Freedman who retweets the ABC's Leigh Sales who retweets her boss, Mark Scott, who retweets his presenter, Jonathan Green, who retweets John McTernan who retweets the ABC's Mark Colvin who retweets Marieke Hardy who retweets Mike Carlton who . . .

"And on it flows, a steady stream of hate, flushing the feckless with it. Labor, too."

Andrew Bolt doesn't mention, of course, the numerous automated Twitter accounts operated by NewsCorp retweeting his every blog post intro, around the clock.

You see, mere mortal journalists have to tweet links to their own stories themselves, and try and get people to read their work. Pumping their stories on social media is expected of almost every working journalist today.

But not the Mighty Bolt.

He wouldn't lower himself to using Twitter.

He has others to do it for him.

One of the last of Murdoch's protected species.

 
And just because it's funny, here's Bolt flipping out at others doing what he does almost daily, taking someone's gaffe or misspeak and using it over and over and over again.



He's just so precious.

ENCORE: Andrew Bolt didn't always think Twitter was a sewer. When Rupert Murdoch dived into Twitter, Bolt called it the "coolest new medium."