Robert Reich recently posted this message: “The forces undermining our democracy, polluting our planet, and stoking hatred are counting on you to give up.
“They have money.
“They have megaphones.
“And they have an even more powerful weapon – one that’s harder to spot but incredibly effective: Cynicism.
“Don’t give up.”
The Albanese government has the power to ensure that Australian political speech is as truthful as possible in a world where reliable information is both difficult to determine and utterly crucial.
It seems clear that Morrison doublecrossed the French for AUKUS and the long-term promise of his new appointment on the board of a military think tank funded by the arms industry. A move that couldn’t be seen to happen immediately after his election loss.
The government seems under equipped to deal with this situation, lacking a backbone to challenge the legacy of the last decade of Coalition malaise, and with no ability to articulate how things could be if we thought independently as a nation state. After being roped into this position by a duplicitous Morrison government and barred from the AUKUS negotiations while in opposition, the government has passed on the opportunity to challenge the trajectory and tripled down, scared to take any position that dare challenge this new and dangerous status quo. Through a lack of inspiration, a callous detachment, and political cowardice, they continue to cede our sovereignty because its politically expedient for them to do so.
At the start of the Ukraine war, Biden promised not to launch World War III. He broke that promise, by flooding Ukraine with weapons, CIA operatives and some special forces. To call this reckless is an understatement. Biden’s refusal to use his considerable weight to promote peace negotiations killed thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, will likely kill many more, and also endangers the lives of billions of other people, worldwide – 5.3 billion from nuclear-winter-induced starvation, who would suffer a slow, agonizing death. And I’m not talking about the canard that Russia may use a low-yield nuclear device on the battlefield. I’m talking about Moscow and Washington determining that they really are in a hot war and the long-range, high-yield nuclear missiles that could then begin to fly.
People can no more be a little bit fascist than women can be a little bit pregnant. The parallels of our present dysfunction to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here are haunting. Donald Trump is a real-life Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. MAGA fulfills Lewis’s prophecy, depicted in his novel, of the League of Forgotten Men, while the army Trump commanded to storm the capital is the realization of Lewis’s Minute Men, a paramilitary force intervening in politics. His followers’ intent is to delegitimize any election results they don’t like and to take over every level of government. It IS happening here, and it must be stopped to prevent Civil War II, or the breakup of the United States.
The utterly inhumane, unconscionable treatment of asylum seekers and refugees is the most visible and horrific example of this, again, bipartisan cruelty. But people are so (rightfully) fixated on it that they tend to overlook the others. We should look at the others, though, because the partner visa is an exercise in cruelty all by itself.
Unless you’ve had the audacity to fall in love with a foreigner, you’ve probably not thought about this blatantly racist and classist bit of fuckery. But it is nasty, and this Labor government has no intention whatsoever to un-fuck it.
To add insult to high farce, Scott Morrison also came out at his own press conference where, apart from bleating for almost an hour about tempests and ships at sea and how he’d been up there on the cross for us thanks very much you thankless bastards, he offered a singular apology to his fellow government colleagues. Yes, his mea-not-really-culpa was just to them.
The Reserve Bank of Australia has declared that the Government cannot hide from a net zero future today as state and territory governments around the country make plans without Federal guidance. In response, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has told journalists that he has accepted the RBA’s challenge and looks forward to showing the country he can and will hide from it. “Right now, my cabinet is looking for a dead cat,” he said.
The deadline for all aged-care workers to be vaccinated looms next month, but barely half of the cohort have been able to access a jab. It comes as a new report finds Australia is already facing a shortfall of aged-care workers, requiring at least 17,000 each year “just to meet basic standards of care”. Health Minister Greg Hunt says he is confident all aged-care workers will be vaccinated by the September 17 deadline, but with less than 40 days to go, only 56 per cent of those workers have yet received even a first dose of vaccine.
A Martian or some other extra-terrestrial being who dropped into federal Parliament’s question time on Monday would believe that Australia’s vaccine rollout is world beating and our reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is similarly spectacular. Sparking the government’s bravado was the need to address growing concerns in the nation over the pandemic. Concerns that clearly contributed to the continued collapse in support for the government, as shown in the Newspoll and the severe marking down of the Prime Minister Scott Morrison to levels not seen since his tin-eared handling of the Black Summer bushfires.
Ok, I think I got most of it. I’m writing it from memory so I may not have it one hundred percent accurate but like I said, I am auditioning for Peter Van Onselen’s role writing for “The Australian” so accuracy isn’t really needed… Whoops, is that defamatory? Or do you have to actually diminish someone’s reputation which PvO has already done that himself?
Although the gods do seem to starting to say that it’s about time your luck ran out, Mr Morrison. Big announcement on vaccines, then a few days later the trial is halted. Ok, it’s always likely that there could be a glitch and that there needs to be a pause in a medical trial. That’s why it takes so long to get a new drug or vaccine on the market. I’m just amused that the timing was so soon after the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT. Usually the Liberals make the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT and it’s some months later when we discover that only $27.38 was spent out of the $2 billion announced owing to people not filling in the application form before the due date which was two days before the form was released to the public.
Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck says he is confused by the growing number of people who seem to think he should be in some way accountable for issues relating to aged care.
Just twelve months ago, I was thinking about what a challenge writing was going to be. I mean, I expected that we were going to have a Shorten Labor government and, while I was sure that it would only be a matter of time before I’d be able to apply my satiric style to them, I was sure it was going to be more of a challenge. Let’s be real. With the Coalition the satire practically writes itself.
Take, for example, Scottie telling us that it’s time to get out from under the doona and that we need to get things moving again while it’s still too dangerous to fully re-open Parliament…
In Australia, telling the truth is now a crime. At least four Australians who did so face secretive trials in the coming weeks, three of them in Canberra. Another is imprisoned in the ACT without you knowing what for or at whose orders. You aren’t allowed to know his name, nor the name of Witness K. You are familiar with the other two: Bernard Collaery, K’s lawyer, and Annika Smethurst, a Newscorp journalist whose home was raided by police last July.
The fourth Australian is in pre-extradition detention in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison, also for telling the truth. Evidently, this is now a crime in your allies’ system as well, even though the U.S. has its First Amendment and the UK has a Bill of Rights.
Media Matters has now released clips and transcripts of Tucker Carlson making racist remarks on a shock-jock radio show, a day after exposing Carlson’s misogynistic and pro-pedophilia remarks on the same show. But according to conservatives, everything Carlson said should be ignored by the public — not because the clips and quotes are fake (they aren’t), and not because they’re out of context (they aren’t), but because they were discovered using (gasp!) research.
Here’s Mike LaChance at William Jacobson’s blog, Legal Insurrection:
These audio clips didn’t just fall out of the sky. The people at Media Matters went looking for them. They sat and combed through hours of audio looking for something to use to target Tucker and his Fox News show.
So these clips are fruits from a poison tree! They should be stricken from the record!
But on what planet is the contribution which any of these people has made to society in general, regardless of gender, worth anywhere near the obscene amount they get paid? Why does sitting in front of a camera every morning, talking gibberish and presenting an occasional news article entitle these people to wages that the real contributors to society can only dream of?
olddogthoughts 
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