Australian journos, writers and bloggers dive into a Friday afternoon Twitter thread on Medieval Bumper Stickers. Some highlights :

rod_benson : That's not a scythe. THIS is a scythe.

Colvinius : King Harold decides who will come to this country and the circumstances in which they come.

wolfcat: Want to live to 30? Ask me how

Colvinius : I subscribe to the Albigensian Heresy and I vote.

clubwah : A dog is for dinner, not just for Christmas

Colvinius : Save carbon emissions - don't burn heretics, drown them

CristenTilley : Not happy, Joan

Colvinius : My dad went to sack Jerusalem and all I got was this lousy bottle of holy water

rod_benson : No king will live in poverty by 1066.

clubwah : Jesus loves you. But if you love him expect to be burned at the stake

rod3000 : I Support Our Veterans of The Crusades

rod_benson : I crusade and I vote.

zombiemao : Kevin 1507

clubwah : I hunt and I'd vote if it weren't for the feudal system

rod3000 : Hot Oil Disarmament Now!

clubwah : Swords don't kill people, people do

rod3000 : I (heart) Magna Carta

Well, I thought they were pretty funny.

Have a great weekend.

Self-Interest, Reputation, More Important Than Free Speech

Oh, diddums!

Andrew Bolt has another whine about some of the hate-filled violence-threatening homophobic racist arseholes that are drawn to his blog like flies to shit :

Should I really be censoring such opinions? Should it really be an indictment of me that I don’t? Won’t it be said that the more I censor comments, the clearer it is that those I let through are the ones I endorse?

So as you can see, against my duty, as I perhaps arrogantly perceive it, to allow as free a discussion as possible, there is my ego and my self-interest in protecting my reputation. I should also admit that taking off the comments function should free up more than 10 hours of every choked week. What’s more, reading and checking those comments that I can get to can eat at my optimisim as well as my time.

You should see the stuff we must delete - or, rather, you shouldn’t.

Much there in the way of threats of violence against those you target that you thought you should pass onto any of our intelligence agencies? Or the police?

This is what I’ve been wrestling with in this wretched week.

Of course, it's all about The Idiot. Not about the people, the scientists, activists, journalists, community workers, he continually holds up for vicious ridicule and slandering by the worst of his droogies.

Get over yourself, mate. Your reputation will never leave you.

The internet does not forget.

If they introduced something like this into MasterChef, I'd start tuning in :



Japanese TV, where producers are never told, "No, this time you've gone too far."

Miranda Devine Backs Illegal Immigrants....Well, Christian Ones

Pro-lyncher Miranda Devine points out that Australia is quickly running out of beds for asylum seekers, fleeing war and rape and persecution in Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan, but asks how about it? for a couple of thousand more :

If Rudd really wanted to show compassion he would back the audacious plan of the Christian Democrat Fred Nile and go into the people smuggling business.

Hosting a meeting yesterday at NSW Parliament House for Christians from Egypt, Iran and Iraq, the upper house MP said he was worried about the plight of Christians in the Middle East, who were desperate to come here and make good migrants. In Iraq, says the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, there are only 400,000 Christians left, down from 1.4 million in 1987.

Devine doesn't point out, of course, that the vast majority of the one million Christian who've fled Iraq in the past two decades did so after the start of the War On Iraq, a war Devine so miserably backed, and promoted.

Australia has a special responsibility for the Iraqi people, and from a self-interested viewpoint, Christians are likely to settle more easily into a Christian country than Muslims.

Yes, it's true, young Muslims, particularly the males, hate all the things that many Australians love, like rugby league and fast food and loud cars.

And Devine is right, Australia must be a Christian nation. After all, we're currently fighting in two wars.

"It's a desperate situation," said Nile. "They're being told 'convert or die'."

They are in Iraq, in particular, thanks to the War. Devine :

Seeing how free and easy the Government has become with boat people, Nile has hatched a plan to bring a boat of 2000 Christian asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia. He wants donations and he dares the Government to stop him.

So basically, war-shattered Christians? Come on in. War-shattered Muslims? Eh.

The Walkley Awards announces the finalists for Artwork & Cartoons. They'll have a hard time going past this magnificent work by John Tiedemann from The Week.



In News Photography, Alex Coppel of the Sunday Herald Sun has scored a nomination for this apocalyptic image from the Black Saturday bushfires :



A gallery of the News Photography nominations can be viewed here.

The rest of the Walkley Awards nominations are here.

Murdoch Vs ABC : Empire Falls

ABC boss Mark Scott is expected to return fire on the so-called "mounting criticism" (by Rupert Murdoch, primarily) of free state news media in a speech tonight :

"In newspapers, the Murdoch media empire has responded to the crisis of advertising by proposing to transform the online world in the same way that cable transformed television - by making consumers pay."

But what happens to quality journalism when its reach and audience are limited in this way; and what will Australians expect of the public broadcaster in the next decade?

Dave Gaukroger at Pure Poison :

This speech will be closely scrutinised by the ABC’s commercial rivals who are developing plans to place sections of their content behind paywalls in the hope of replacing revenue lost due to decreasing advertising rates and diminishing circulation. Both James and Rupert Murdoch have singled out public broadcasters as an impediment to their plans, not surprisingly it’s going to be hard for them to charge for content that organisations like the ABC and BBC are giving away for free.

On Twitter, Scott offers this short intro to his speech :

@abcmarkscott - Looking forward to the AN Smith tonight at Melbourne Uni. Here is where we start: http://bit.ly/2m86Ic

The link takes you to the poem, Fall Of Rome, by WH Auden :

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Hey! Not all bloggers live in caves. Some do, yes, but by choice.

At New Matilda, Jason Wilson takes a look at :

Murdoch's Chorus Of Complaint



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Rudd Vs The Australian....Kind Of

It all seems a bit....staged. It's good for Rudd, and it's good for The Australian :

Kevin Rudd last night attacked The Australian as "right-wing" and less than objective, particularly on the issue of climate change.

"If you cite your source as The Australian newspaper, I simply say this: (It is a) free country; every paper can express their point of view -- the editor of The Australian has said that he edits a right-wing newspaper -- and so he does," Mr Rudd said.

"Let us not pretend that it (The Australian) would seek to present itself as an objective source of information. It opposes the government's actions on climate change, and has done so consistently.

"That's their democratic right; we have a free press. And so they should; that's a matter for them."

The editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, responded last night: "The actual quote referred to The Australian as a centre-right paper but the PM is loose with his verballing these days."

Tepid.

More than anything else, it shows just how unimportant KevinRuddPM and his advisors think The Australian is as a part of the national debate, or as an influential force on the Australian public, at large.

Kevin Rudd reaches more people, directly, on Twitter, than he does when he gets written up in The Australian. Rudd's 'circulation' on Twitter, is many hundreds of thousands higher than the current newsagent, and free-in-the-foyer-many-city-offices, circulation of The Australian.

He doesn't need The Australian to be on his side.

A disregard for 'The Heart Of The Nation' that would been almost incomprehensible a few years ago.

It's Not Comedy If Nobody's Offended

On Twitter, ABC boss Mark Scott points out this piece published at the National Times on how TV comedy is being killed by committees and the easily offended. Excerpts :

....the BBC has decreed that its comedies are not to be ''unduly intimidatory, humiliating, intrusive, aggressive or derogatory''. John Howard Davies, who used to run BBC comedy, pointed out that this is the sort of absurdity that happens when a committee decides guidelines. An individual exercising editorial judgment is far preferable, especially if that individual has been chosen because of his or her connection with the real world, and what makes people laugh in it.

I have occasionally thought that I used to find programs put out by the BBC funny because I was so much younger when I saw them. However, watching re-runs of old comedy programs, I realise I was wrong: they were, plainly and simply, very funny. The famous Fawlty Towers episode in which Basil insults the Germans fails every one of the new guidelines. It is racist, intimidating, humiliating, mocks Spaniards, Germans, and the mentally ill, and commits other offences too numerous to mention. It is also dementedly funny, even after repeated viewings over 30 years.

After 70 or so years of influencing and shaping the definition of the national sense of humour, the BBC now seems to have forfeited its ability to do that.

I don't know what, indeed, there will be left for us to chortle at.

It makes me realise that my wife is right when she says that once you get past the age of 40, there isn't really anything on the BBC for you. Except Gardeners' World, of course: and we should make the most of that until someone realises how much it discriminates against those who don't have gardens, and who might feel humiliated by the lack of one.

The push for more censorship of Australian comedy and satire does not appear to be coming from the public, but from groups concerned with garnering publicity and profile and tabloid media looking for easy, cheap content to fulfill it's weekly clickbait 'Moral Panic! quota.

Why ABC Boss Mark Scott Should Tell The Daily Telegraph To Get Fucked

The Australian Tries To Stir Up Support For Murdoch's War On Free, State News Media

By Darryl Mason

From The Australian :



Criticism from who exactly?

Let's go to the story and take a look :

ABC managing director Mark Scott will this week attempt to hit back at mounting criticism...

note : "mounting criticism"

....of the public broadcaster's role in the internet space which commercial media companies say is threatening their business models.

So, the mounting criticism is coming from "commercial media companies."

Now there's a surprise.

The debate is heating up...

The debate is heating up in the pages of The Australian, who are now trying to convince an overwhelmingly skeptical public that they should pay to read Murdoch media news stories online.

The debate is heating up after Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation (owner of The Australian), again urged media companies to adopt online payment platforms for news at the World Media Summit in Beijing.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to creating a new model is taxpayer-funded content appearing free on websites such as those of the ABC and BBC.

Taxpayers getting their news for free from news sites that their taxes pay for? Fucking outrageous!

Rupert Murdoch is just plain terrified.

"We find ourselves in the midst of an information revolution that is both exciting and unsettling," Mr Murdoch said.

Anyone else feeling unsettled by this information revolution, by the greatest free exchange of information, art and knowledge in the history of mankind?

No?

Said Rupert Murdoch, who's now losing billions :

"The presses are now silent at some of the world's most famous newspapers -- they were supposed to report on their societies, but somehow failed to notice that those societies were changing fundamentally."

So this Great Media Visionary is telling us that newspapers are going out of business because they failed to notice the dramatic changes erupting across the societies they are reporting on?

What's the problem here? As Rupert Murdoch said back in 1989 :

"If someone goes bust, too bad."

Back to Digital Rupert 2.0 :

"The Philistine phase of the digital age is almost over."

Really? You think so?

"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content," he said.

But will the Murdoch media pay for all for the content they "plagiarise" from other news media they do not own, along with the reams of content they find for free at Facebook and Twitter, and lift without credit from Digg, Reddit, TMZ and dozens of other independent blogs, aggregators and alternative news sites?

Fuck No.

Mr Murdoch said if media companies "do not take advantage of the current movement towards paid-for content, it will be the content creators....who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph".

I've written ("created") more than 2 million words of free-to-read blog content in the past four years (not including the content I've kleptomaniacised) and the only price I've paid is spending many hours doing something I love, making a whole lot of new friends and developing deep interests in subjects I probably would have never cared much about at all if I hadn't felt the drive to write about them here, and at Your New Reality.

Anyway, enough of Digital Rupert's hilariously 20th century opinions.

Let's get back to evidence of the "mounting criticism" as claimed by The Australian :

Chris Wharton, the chief executive of West Australian Newspapers, which is also examining online charging for its news, said the ABC was "the elephant in the room in this debate".

So, we've got Rupert Murdoch and Chris Wharton. And that's it.

The Murdoch media reports on "mounting criticism" coming mostly from Rupert Murdoch. The criticism is "mounting" because The Australian keeps reporting on Murdoch's criticism of free news media.

That's not a news story. It's corporate media PRganda.

Anyway, the ABC isn't the only Australian news media giant that intends to keep allowing readers and viewers to access its news content for free.

Mumbrella reveals that NineMSN has vowed to keep its news content free, as its hundreds of thousands of daily readers have come to expect.

NineMSN CEO Joe Pollard (excerpts from her blog statement) :

The debate over charging for online news content intensified again last week after a number of independent research studies showed this to be an immensely unfavorable strategy amongst those surveyed.

As Australia’s largest online publisher, ninemsn is frequently asked about our own business strategy when it comes to revenue generating streams for our news product. For the record, we do not intend to charge for our online news content.

As premium, innovative and differentiated as our news product is however, introducing a charge for our audience to consume it is just not part of ninemsn’s game plan…but nor is this really what the “paying for online news content” argument should be about anyway.

At ninemsn, we firmly believe an advertiser-funded model is what Australian audiences expect and accept when it comes to the consumption of online news....it’s a model that’s proven and tested…and if it continues to be available as professionally produced, freely and easily as it is now, audiences will continue to vote with their “feet”.

Charging audiences for online news content they can currently access for free is like putting a toll booth in the ocean…and it’s a big ocean.

And unfortunately for Rupert Murdoch, he's no longer the biggest fish. He's more like a lumbering whale being vigorously pursued by a million little fish, constantly nipping away, slowing him down, diluting his influence, subjugating his once formidable power and control.

Now that's a free media in action right there.

And something to be celebrated.

July 2, 2009 : John Hartigan's Idiotic Claim "Bloggers Don't Go To Jail" Becomes International News

August 2, 2009 : The Orstrahyun Hails Murdoch's 'Death To Free Information'
Movement

August 10, 2009 : Who Just Lost Another Few Billion Trying To Convince You That Celebrities Are Important And That People Who Don't Look Like You Can't Be Trusted?

Murdoch Media Asks : Michael Jackson, Not Dead?

September 17, 2009 : Rupert Murdoch Celebrates Death Of Newspapers : "It's Going To Be Great!"

Apparently, the botox doctor who did this to half of The Chaser's Chas Licciardello's face....



.....is now promoting himself in press releases as the`trusted doctor to Chaser’s Chaz Luciado''!

He should use that photo in his publicity.

More...Chas gets a copy of the press release and responds.

Fantasy Boy Steve Fielding Still Appalled, Mortified By Realisation That Jesus Was The Original Hippy Greenie

By Darryl Mason

Is Senator Steve Fielding outsourcing his press releases to Rupert Murdoch's anti-Greens chief propagandist, Andrew Bolt? Sure reads like it :

The Greens would rather send Australia back to the Stone Age than use common sense....

“I don’t know what planet the Greens are on, but by the look of their ‘Safe Climate Bill’ they look like they’re lost in space,” Senator Fielding said.

“If Bob Brown and his hippy friends really believed in their cause they’d ride their bikes to Parliament House instead of using the Commonwealth’s petrol-guzzling V8s.

“If we did what the Greens propose Australia would no longer exist because there’d be no industries left to drive our economy."

“The Greens’ proposed 40 percent reduction in emissions would cripple our economy and boot thousands of jobs offshore.

“The hypocrisy of the Greens beggars belief with the way they carry on about the environment yet show no evidence of doing anything about it in their personal lives."

“The Greens should either practice what they preach or just shut up and go away.”

Further proof needed? Here's the headline Fielding chose for his press release, in all screaming caps :

GREENS PLAN ECONOMICALLY LAUGHABLE, FOOLISH AND LUDICROUS

Fielding better watch himself. Rupert Murdoch has been ranting like a loon (or like someone who's lost a few billion dollars) about the evils of "content kleptomaniacs" recently. If Fielding's going to lift so much content from Andrew Bolt, he may be in big trouble :

"(the) plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content."

But can you copyright political propaganda?

UPDATE : Earlier today, Andrew Bolt published the key lines for the revived, and rather boring, political strategy for attacking The Greens (they use cars! and planes!) from Fielding's press release, before it went online.

How very similar it is to Andrew Bolt's own favoured "Look! Hypocrisy Over There!" methodology for attacking The Greens. Surely just a coincidence, and not at all groupthink.

Or something more suspicious.

Did Andrew Bolt get a preview of the press release from Fielding by e-mail, or fax? Or did Fielding read it to him over the phone while he was 'putting it together' ?

Family First Senator Steve Fielding is tired of being hectored by hypocrites:

From 1 July to 31 December 2008 Greens Senators spent $164,240 flying around the country.

“The carbon footprint the Greens leave behind jet setting across the country is just another minor detail they forget to include when they campaign about lowering carbon dioxide emissions....”

(No link yet to press release.)

How very, very interesting.

Is 'journalism' now a second job for Andrew Bolt?

Below, David Marr catches up on the Sunday morning papers, during the 'Morning Papers' segment of Insiders, while Bolt waffles about his latest climate change conspiracy theory, that doesn't include the fact that his boss, Rupert Murdoch, is the world's leading promoter of global warming fearmongery and carbon neutral corporatism.

Murdoch Attacks Bloggers, Again, As His Empire Self-Destructs

This is from an Associated Press story, about the Associated Press boss, Tom Curley, and News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch complaining, once again, about search engines and bloggers "stealing" their content. Interestingly, this story is hosted on Google who paid Associated Press to the use the story, and yet the Associated Press boss, Tom Curley, is angry about search engines like Google using their content without paying for it :

The leaders of two of the world's major news organizations said Friday that it is time for search engines and others who use news content for free to pay up.

The comments from Tom Curley of The Associated Press and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch come as the media industry struggles in the Internet age. Many news companies contend that sites such as Google have reaped a fortune from their articles, photos and video without fairly compensating the news organizations producing the material.

"We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley, the AP's chief executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing.

"Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers," Curley said. "We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content."

He said content aggregators, such as search engines and bloggers, were also directing audiences and revenue away from content creators.

"We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it," Curley said.

Murdoch also told the opening session of the World Media Summit in Beijing's Great Hall of the People that content providers would be demanding to be paid.

"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph," the News Corp. chief executive said.

The AP and its member newspapers contend that unauthorized use of their material is costing them tens of millions of dollars in potential advertising revenue at a time when they can least afford it.

The AP's revenue is expected to be around $700 million this year, down from $748 million in 2008, in part because of reductions in the fees it charges newspapers and broadcasters, whose advertising revenue has been dwindling as more marketers shift to less expensive or better-targeted options online.

Murdoch and Curley were speaking to 300 representatives from more than 170 media outlets from 80 countries at a meeting that will look at the challenges and opportunities the media face from the Internet, changes in technology and the world economic crisis.

It'll be interesting to visit this story again in three or four years and see what's happened.

We Told Them Everything!

In 1977, Voyager 1 & 2 were set loose into the solar system. Voyager 1 is now 10 billion miles from home, and sometime in the next few years will reach interstellar space. Both spacecraft contain copies of The Golden Record, gold-plated discs filled with information about where Earth is located in the Milky Way galaxy, how our genitals work, far too much info about human DNA and various images of humanity at play and at work, and a selection of spectacular locations from across the planet.



One of those images is of Heron Island (image 41 in this collection)



Another shows the Sydney Opera House (image 95)



Maybe it's the booze-alternative talking, but I think that is monumentally cool.

It's possible that long after the Earth has been burned to a cinder by the death of our Sun, those images of Australia, and the greetings of Earthlings from more than 100 nations, will still be floating through the galaxy (fuel sources are expected to expire around 2020), waiting for something to find them, to fire up the disc player, push the right button and to learn all about our species, who we were, what we did and how we once dreamed of something bigger than ourselves and our petty squabbles that seem to consume too much of the lives we live on this little blue-green planet.

UPDATE : Carl Sagan says it all so much better :



I'm on a bit of a Carl Sagan jag at the moment, which never fails to refresh the mind and refill the well of wonder that can get a bit dry sometimes.

Carl Sagan On Cannabis : There Is A Religious Aspect To Some Highs

"Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds.

"When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time."

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Murdoch Journo Declares Allegiance To Taliban

Yesterday I pointed out the shared beliefs of conservative extremist Andrew Bolt and The Taliban.

Today, another Murdoch conservative extremist, Piers Akerman, announces his solidarity with The Taliban :



I thought it was illegal to announce your support for terrorists?

Next thing you know these conservative extremists will be telling us that the Taliban and Hamas are legitimate freedom fighters.

Someone call ASIO. These people are fucking insane.


.

It's a clever way to announce your return. Pick up exactly where you left off, almost mid-sentence, when you were fired :

"The federal parliamentary Liberal Party is consumed by fear and loathing. Barren of anything that might be tricked up as rational policy, its members are stuck together only by a seething stew of grudges and whinges and a gnawing sense of entitlement denied."



.

Laurie Oakes : Hark, Hear The Turnbull Death Rattle

Brendan "Pensioners Eat Cheap Soup! Soup!" Nelson must have to steer clear of most newspapers and TV news these days, lest he risk choking to death on karma laughter.

Laurie Oakes explains why :

Now that Joe Hockey has indicated he would not leave the party in the lurch should Turnbull's leadership become untenable, you can hear the death rattle. No matter what he does, the muttering among Liberal MPs becomes increasingly ominous and the erosion of his authority gathers pace.

The public sees an Opposition racked by internal brawling and a leader lurching from crisis to crisis, so the polls get worse and Turnbull's position deteriorates further. The accepted wisdom is that the Coalition has brought all this on itself through a lack of discipline and Turnbull's ineptitude.

But credit where it is due. Turnbull and the Opposition would not have got into such a disastrous position without a great deal of help from Kevin Rudd.

Rudd has played clever and ruthless politics. Wedge politics. And he learned how to do it from an expert.

John Howard made an art form of using issues such as asylum seekers to divide the Labor Party. Climate change is for Rudd what Tampa and "children overboard" were for Howard. He has used the emissions trading scheme legislation as a wedge to open up a deep ideological fault line in the Coalition.

The only valid reason for Rudd's insistence that the ETS Bill must be passed before the United Nations Copenhagen climate change conference in December is a political one - to wedge his opponents. And the strategy has been spectacularly successful.

Rudd long ago refined the Divide & Inflame techniques used so effectively by John Howard. The prime minister now does pretty much the same thing to Turnbull, month in, month out, that he did to Howard for the entire year leading up to the 2007 elections.

Rudd promised to fuck with the minds of the Liberal Party when he became the Labor opposition leader. Becoming prime minister only meant he got to have more fun breaking their spirit, and sowing confusion and paranoia amongst their ranks. So much so, the Liberal diehards are pulling away, distancing themselves, and have taken to claiming they are "Conservatives" instead of Liberals.


.

Andrew Bolt : The Taliban Are Right

By Darryl Mason

Back home from what one Murdoch colleague has labelled a "typically fascist" European holiday, Herald Sun conservative extremist blogger Andrew Bolt finds himself in almost complete agreement with like-minded conservative extremists The Taliban, over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Bolt :

"Obama did nothing at all to deserve an award once handed out for ending wars"

The Taliban :

"We condemn the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for Obama"

Bolt :

"Where is the peace Obama has brought?"

The Taliban :

"He has done nothing for peace..."

Conservative extremists in Australia, like their comrades in the United States, and Afghanistan, have nothing left to contribute now to plans for a more peaceful world but their endless hate.

Well, It Was A Kind Of Peaceful First Week And A Bit For The Obama Presidency


.

A Political Party Suicides, In Slow Motion

By Darryl Mason

Devastating. What a headline from the ABC :



Is it still dirty, rotten, ABC Lefty Bias when it's also the stone cold truth?

Chris Ulhman :

Mr Hockey has never actively sought the leadership, having made the quite astute decision some time ago that now is not a good time to be leader of the Opposition.

But since Mr Turnbull declared last week that his party should back him or sack him over his push to propose amendments to the Government's emissions trading plan he has completely lost control of events.

A growing group within his party is now desperate to see the back of him, declaring it's time to put an end to what some mockingly dubbed "the Turnbull experiment". For them ETS has become the "eliminate Turnbull scheme".

Yesterday one senior Liberal crystalised the views of many with whom I spoke.

"There is broad consensus in all parts of the party that it's over," he said. "It is just a matter of time. It's just not working."

And all the Liberals I have spoken to about this - even Mr Turnbull's supporters - lay the blame for the unwinding of his position squarely at his feet.

Turnbull will soon be gone. It can't last more than a few weeks. The daily humiliation is clearly eating away at him. When he steps down, presumably due to "health problems", in November, his attempt to lead the Liberal Party out of the 20th century will have cost him (depending on who you believe) $10-50 million out of his own pocket.

Will Joe Hockey step up before Christmas? Losing one election is not an unshakable curse, but if he doesn't take the leadership, Tony Abbott will and once Abbott has done his best to storm up a national vortex of peak-stupidity, by campaigning on a score of Andrew Bolt-approved conspiracy theories, there may not be much of a viable Liberal Party left for Joe Hockey to lead.

But Turnbull's insistence on all but fully agreeing with the Rudd government on the ETS, even as it turns the full force of the Liberal Party backbench against him, and sinks his poll numbers even further, has to make you wonder who Turnbull's political masters really are, and how many more major missions he has other than to get Australia signed on to an ETS and the seemingly inevitable worldwide carbon tax that would follow.

Then again, what the hell would I know? I announced the resignation of Malcolm Turnbull back in early August, while anticipating the return of Brendan Nelson.

And when Turnbull's resignation does come, Brendan Nelson will probably weep tears of laughter.


November 2007 : Listen Up Turnbull, This Is How It's Going To Be

How The Australian's Caroline Overington Tried To Help Malcolm Turnbull Win Wenworth

January 2009 : Turnbull's Problems With Coalition Climate Change Doubters Break Into The Open When Barnaby Joyce Says He Refuses To "Goose Step" Around Liberal Party Offices

July 2009 : In a Monty Python-esque Moment Of Doubt, Turnbull Almost Admits The Liberals Will Lose An Election Fought Over Climate Change Policies.

They May Be Out There, But They Won't Save The Liberal Party

By Darryl Mason

There is a conservative-minded fantasy that if only a Liberal Party leader would stand up and dismiss the entire idea of an ETS, and confidently, skeptically, laugh off the reality of global-warming induced climate change, that there will be a sudden, election-winning size surge in Liberal Party support. But it's just a fantasy, something for reflexively contrarian opinionists to fluff up to fill their blogs and columns with, and nothing more.

Numerous polls consistently, constantly, show the vast majority of Australians are convinced climate change is a dangerous reality and they believe that the introduction of an ETS will help fight those destructive changes.

There is a tiny minority of Australians who think Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull and Al Gore are all secret partners in a New Green World Order conspiracy to destroy the coal and oil industries and force Australians to live in electricity-free tee pees and ride tofu bicycles to work, but the AGW Skeptic Vote is not big enough to cause any major waves in Australian politics, at least not at a national level, no matter how many times some in the media try to claim otherwise.

Tim Blair, of the Daily Telegraph, recently tried to hype the (illusory) power of the unrepresented Skeptics Vote on Insiders, as a way for the Liberal Party to not only differentiate itself from Labor, but to also save itself from compete immolation. A last desperate gasp, presumably. Blair's curious little theories were quickly slapped down by The Australian's George Megalogenis and Radio National's Fran Kelly.

Blair : The one thing that's interesting about this...the more both parties bang on about the ETS, the more the public is disengaged. We had another poll today, saying, I think, only 14% of Australians think that climate change was an important issue. So, (this is) one of the great sweeping mysteries of our time. The biggest argument we're having right now time is what the temperature will be 100 years from now. And one of the big flaws about the Liberal Party's ETS is that it has an ETS. I know, privately, a lot of people in the Liberal Party are a lot more skeptical than Mr Hockey would let on.

(Insiders host) Barry Cassidy : But you haven't actually seen a poll that convinced you that the Coalition can vote against this and benefit politically.

Blair : Well, they might actually get some traction out of it. They might actually be seen to take a stance. At the moment it's arguments over tiny fractions. Anything with the word 'Copenhagen' in it will turn the public off.

Kelly : Yes, Tim, but as soon as you do that, then you're arguing, well, what next for climate change? So you're either arguing, we don't have to do anything right now...

Blair : Yeah, I'll vote for that.

Kelly : Yeah, I know, but I don't think a lot of the public would. I think the people are convinced that something is happening and something needs to be done.

Megalogenis : NewsPoll has tried to ask this question every which way, and the answer still comes out the same. Two thirds or more of the electorate want action.

Blair : But as soon as you put that in monetary terms, as soon as you say, "How much are you going to sacrifice" or anything, then the number drops off.

Megalogenis : It doesn't drop as much as you think, because even half were prepared to pay more for petrol. But the more interesting thing that has happened in the polls this year, there is no distinction between the views of Coalition voters and the Labor Party. So basically, it's at the same 'Yes' rate.

Another recent poll backs George Megalogenis' claims :

Three-quarters of Australians believe that the price of fossil fuels should be increased to deal with climate change and 92 per cent believe a legally binding global climate deal is urgent and should be made at the conference to be held in Copenhagen in December.

A surprisingly consistent majority (about two-thirds to three-quarters) in most countries believed that fossil fuel prices should be increased....

An overwhelming majority of respondents globally (Australia 94 per cent, Indonesia 92 per cent, US 90 per cent, China 89 per cent and Russia 86 per cent) believed their government should give high priority to joining any deal made in Copenhagen.

The Liberal Party will have a new leader within a month, but whoever that is, you won't see them fully opposing the introduction of an ETS, nor will they be embracing Andrew Bolt-style skeptic/denialist pronouncements ("Belief in man-made global warming will soon be laughed out of existence").

There is no potent political gain for the Liberal Party in embracing these positions, unless they want to make it all that much easier for The Greens to get that much closer to finally replacing the Libs as the second most powerful political party in Australia.

The United States' top general in Iraq, Ray Odierno, said today :

"I'm not sure we will ever see anyone declare victory in Iraq...."

That can't be right. Andrew Bolt declared Victory In Iraq in late 2007.



Army General Odierno, therefore, has now de-declared victory.

It sounds like the US is trying to cover up their late 2007 Iraq War win.

Must be some new kind of strategy to throw the enemy off.

Unless Andrew Bolt was wrong.

But how could that be? Look how accurately Bolt predicted the reality of the swine flu pandemic :

Australians are more likely to be eaten by mice than to die of swine flu

More than 140 Australians have died suffering from swine flu, including many children, since the first death from the virus in July.

But reports of Australians being eaten by mice are curiously rare in the Australian media. Must be another cover up to make Andrew Bolt look like a complete dickhead.