With violence and hatred occurring overseas, it’s worth reflecting on the positives of living in Australia, writes Adam Abbasi-Sacca.
Source: Amid the world’s upheaval, Australia is still the lucky country
Premier Daniel Andrews’ satisfaction rating has fallen three per cent to 51 per cent, pushing up the Labor leader’s dissatisfaction rating to 44 per cent.
Liberal leader Matthew Guy’s satisfaction rating sits at 32 per cent but his dissatisfaction rating has risen three per cent to 52 per cent.
Source: Victorian election race tightens: Newspoll – Michael West
The coalition kickstarted its campaign with a 1970s-style ambulance dubbed the “Ditch Danmobile”, complete with its own Twitter page.
Daniel Andrews’ week went downhill as he was forced to bat away repeated questions about a 2013 car crash involving his family, after the young man who was seriously injured cast doubt on the premier’s version of events.
The timing of the Herald Sun story raised the eyebrows of Monash University political scientist Zareh Ghazarian.
Source: Bumpy start to Victorian election campaign – Michael West
What’s the scam? It’s the fossil fuel corporations again, the usual suspects, paying no income tax despite billions in income. For yet another year: Exxon nought, Shell nought, Ampol, BP and APLNG nought, and Chevron putting them all to shame with the $30 in income tax paid on its $9bn in revenues.
Source: The Usual Suspects: tax office dump lays bare Australia’s biggest tax dodgers – Michael West
But it’s not the accident itself that’s at issue here. The point I’m making is that for the issue to resurface in the midst of an election campaign is rather interesting timing. Coincidence? Of course, one couldn’t accuse the Murdoch paper of having an agenda. I’m sure that every ten-year-old incident where no new evidence has been produced is always worthy of a front page, so I’m sure we’ll have something about Matt Guy’s lobster lunch and how one of the guests was an Australian citizen thanks to the largesse of Amanda Vanstone and her compassionate granting of citizenship.
Source: Murdoch Media: Propaganda Or Proper Goose? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
QC Peter Redlich, head of IBAC, has said that the mainstream media were, in fact, creating a mountain out of a molehill. Why would that be? The Age could glean nothing from the leaked preliminary reports and be, at best making conspiracies where there were none in Quixotic fashion.
The Age in as much says so to protect themselves legally, and they bury their escape midway through their PR rant against Dan Andrews. We shouldn’t be surprised. Since Peter Costello, took over as CEO, he’s remodelled what was once a balanced news source into a mirror of Murdoch media and has tried to compete with the gutter press. The current headline reminds me of that old rag Melbournians once bought for the racing form guide The Truth.
The Age has amplified what has been common to Australian politics since the days of Bolte. Napthine’s government was criminal the way it left the LNP government when losing to the ALP and with Abbott’s assistance. They cost Victorians over a billion dollars. What we have here is a reflection of the work done by Peter Costello and the Dirtbag brigade of the LNP in deperately assisting the little backstabbing bleeder Matthew Guy who has already left a trail of LNP bodies behind in his effort to make a comeback.
It hasn’t been suggested to The Age that anyone in government or the HSU lined their pockets or materially benefited from the grants. Daintree, from what we know, is not a story about public figures with their snouts in the trough. It is about something more commonplace and arguably, more insidious; a willingness to subvert proper process and potentially, misuse public funds, to achieve a political outcome.
Now that far, far right Israeli politician Binyamin Netanyahu has been elected, what are the major negative consequences Israel and the world might see, according to the Israeli press and other sources? I’m drawing in part on a roound-up by BBC Monitoring.
Every year, nearly the entire globe condemns the US embargo against Cuba as a human rights disaster at the UN General Assembly. And every year, the US government ignores the international community’s pleas.
Source: The Entire World, Yet Again, Is Demanding an End to the US Blockade of Cuba
Nothing normal.
What would be the global ramifications of America going full fascist after the midterms, and entrenching severely anti-democratic outcomes by notionally democratic means?
We might be about to find out.
The results of next week’s midterms could represent the endgame of a frankly fucking terrifying strategy carefully implemented by the likes of Mitch McConnell as he let the world be distracted by the performance of a grifting gimp as President.
Source: American democracy is on the line next week | The Shot
We know how easily a government can be toppled and how close we came on January 6, 2021: if just five Republicans had not refused to go along with Trump we’d be in this fascist dystopia today.
We can’t pretend we don’t know what’s happening and where it will lead if it’s not stopped.
This election may well seal or determine the fate and future of democracy in the United States and, by extension, most of the rest of the world.
Vote as if it’s your last chance to have your voice heard. Because it may well be
Source: It’s Critical to See what a Fascist America Looks Like, Before it’s Too Late | The Smirking Chimp
He’s taken the words out of Murdochs mouth and applied them to Ch9 and what was once the Fairfax press
Nobody knows what military threats to Australia from China or anyone else, will exist in 2050. In these circumstances, it is folly to commit to spending over $200 billion on acquiring eight US designed nuclear attack submarines to deploy in support of the US on the China coast.
Source: Australian submarine madness and the phoney China threat – Pearls and Irritations
In what world is this a believable statement. If Alice went down the rabbit hole today she’d find this group around the Mad Hatter’s table. Is it because BP is Australia’s largest investor in solar energy? It has one foot on the subsidy accelerator, pays little in tax and has the other foot on the renewables brake. They don’t mind a reduction in output as long as prices continue to rise and renewables are kept under firm control
Ms King vowed to back new gas and coal fields to combat the energy crisis. She also expressed support for the ongoing role of gas to power mining and refining, which will support a net-zero emissions economy.
Source: Coal and gas ‘natural ally’ of renewables – Michael West
Extreme weather events have ravaged every continent on Earth since world leaders last gathered to address climate change.
It’s sobering reading as leaders prepare to meet again from Sunday, this time in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh.
“Europe sweltered through its hottest summer on record. Parts of East Africa endured unrelenting drought while other parts of the continent suffered deadly floods,” says Climate Council senior researcher Simon Bradshaw, who wrote the report.
“Many parts of Asia suffered record heat waves, and Pakistan has suffered one of the world’s worst ever flooding disasters.
“Here in Australia, we are still in the midst of our costliest ever flood disaster, as affected communities anxiously look ahead to predictions of a wet summer.”
Source: Call for action as extreme weather smashes global records
Cutting the umbilical cord doesn’t mean we want to be American or French. We want a Head of State not obliged to a King but obliged to the Australian people.
With the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Australia is once again considering the republican question. For a country that saw its last reforming prime minister thrown out of office by the queen’s representative, breaking with the royal family is a necessary task.
We are so fortunate in Australia to have compulsory voting as a duty required of every Australian citizen. America doesn’t require its citizens to vote. If that is the case why not allow all American “residents” to vote citizens or not? Republicans want neither as they command the votes of the wealthiest minority in the nation and while their numbers are shrinking their proportion of voters remains high despite the fact they have been captured by MAGA Trumpists.
My friends, we owe it to generations before us who fought and died for democracy and the rule of law, and to generations after us who will live with the legacy we leave them — to get out the vote next Tuesday, to vote out the traitors and liars, to renounce the party that has forsaken the precious ideal of self-government, and to vote in people who are dedicated to making our democracy stronger and better.
Source: The Biggest Question of the 2022 Midterm Election | The Smirking Chimp
“Billionaires represent 0.000002% of the American population, but they’re responsible for 7.4% of all political donations so far this cycle,” according to Americans for Tax Fairness.
Source: ‘Drowning Our Democracy’: US Billionaires Have Pumped Nearly $900,000,000 Into Midterms
Conspiracy the true meaning of the word and it’s relationship to reality
“They had a damn insider on SCOTUS who they thought would help them overthrow our democracy. He’s married to a deranged MAGA cult member. He won’t even recuse himself,” wrote former federal prosecutor Richard Signorelli.
Something you don’t find in Australia’s Mainstream Media
“Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia,” the report reads. “However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70% feel positively towards China, and 66% positively towards Russia.”
Source: New study finds the rest of the world supports China and Russia – Pearls and Irritations
Another blue bottle is about to fall
The starting gun has sounded in Victoria’s official election campaign but the race to the poll is off to a slow start as the state grapples with prolonged flooding. Governor Linda Dessau signed the writs on Tuesday, ending the 59th parliament and formally triggering the election process. Labor leader Daniel Andrews kept a low profile on […]
Victorians will be able to apply for postal votes from Wednesday and cast ballots at early voting centres from November 14.
Electoral Commissioner Warwick Gately confirmed the Victorian Liberals have been cleared of illegally distributing postal vote applications.
“What was distributed was a pre-filled general postal voter application,” he told ABC Radio.
“It was not a postal voting application. There is no rule preventing a party promoting an application to be a general postal voter.”
Source: Starting gun fired for Vic state election – Michael West
Angus Taylor comes out swinging like a see-saw at the press club. His “abstract” economy is “resilient” and doing well. However, the majority of people and small businesses that make it up aren’t. Good Onya Angus! Isn’t Labor saying that and acting on it when the LNP weren’t? It’s why you’re in opposition now and no longer a do-nothing government.
The economy is about people – and people are struggling to keep up with the cost of living.
That’s the key message shadow treasurer Angus Taylor wanted to get across in his first major speech since the Albanese government’s first budget.
Mr Taylor said the overarching economy was in a relatively good position but businesses were struggling to find workers, waterlogged roads were deteriorating and power bills were hurting hip pockets.
“The Australian economy is fundamentally resilient,” he told the National Press Club on Wednesday.
Source: Remember struggling Australians: Taylor – Michael West
Australians are working more than they were before the pandemic, but have less money to show for it, according to new research.
Source: Australians working longer for less money – Michael West
Distraction and Deflection away from Dutton’s Public Question Time gaffe. Mainstream media followed
The recent Labor “bullying” claims are just another publicity stunt to add to the great Liberal gaslit bonfire of bullshit, writes managing editor Michelle Pini.
We are after all Constitutionally a Secular Democracy
Trioli’s conclusion,
And then I realised I had been wondering a similar thing all week – something that had been bothering me really ever since the marriage equality debate: why do churches like Thorburn’s City on the Hill care so much about what’s going on in the bedrooms and GP consulting rooms of people they have absolutely nothing to do with?
Why do some people – overzealous ex-students and overanxious parishioners – have such a powerful need to control others?
Why can’t they live and let live?
Source: Do you want to smile or frown? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Murdoch led us to conspiracies which led us to even the more extreme QAnon mindset along with both militant, religious, and Far-Right groups in the USA and here. Australia’s own homegrown Christian-right dream of a theocratic-led state like ISIS and are calling for one openly.
Andrew Bolt declared, after the bombings in Barcelona, that the Australian Christian youths should have the same commitment as those bombers had in Spain. To the death, he wrote with the blessing of Murdoch’s media. Mind you he doesn’t have the same commitment himself but insists and drives others to have it. He went into immediate hiding for 4 days after the Christchurch massacre and then outpoured own denial to any violence. What did he mean when he said Australian Christian youth were gutless and needed to fight back? He certainly said it, wrote it, and they read it. The Australian militant mass murderer in Christchurch hero-worshipped and listened to a series of far-right guests giving voice to aggression on Andrew Bolt’s show. The Murdochs didn’t even profit from it yet they promoted it. The fact that Bolt admired the commitment to the death, of the Barcelona bombers says it all. He was a media crusader and recruiter for the radical right and as Judge Mordecai Bromberg declared a lazy and no-talented hack who had no regard for facts.
The same forces are in play in Australia: desperate people, stoked with existential dread at the crimes of the Elites, exacerbate each other’s sense of victimhood. They falsely claim the pandemic was manmade, and vaccines intended to control them or kill them slowly. They celebrate their pure blood and sperm. They wondered if they felt sick after gathering unvaccinated because the government had sprayed them with toxins. (Because conspiracies are unfalsifiable, every consequence of stupidity becomes fodder for paranoia.)
Source: Conspiracy: the disease that threatens our survival – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Thirty-two per cent of Australian public companies paid no tax in 2020-21, according to ATO data, although the tax office said most have legitimate reasons for not doing so.
America’s nuclear not so secret shadow puppets
It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Australia is not just complicit in, but committed to, America’s nuclear war planning.
Source: B-52s at RAAF Tindal commits Australia to America’s nuclear war plans – Pearls and Irritations
When asked if Ukraine will win the war, Garagatyi looks incredulous.
“We’ve already won,” he says. “What are you talking about? We already have won! We have already defeated them.
“They don’t have any idea … they don’t understand why they have come here. They have no idea what they are doing here.
“They’re cowards. How are those cowards capable of defeating people like us?”
In the wake of Russia’s retreat from eastern Ukraine, survivors are sharing their stories and the horrors of life under occupation are being revealed.
Despite the well-documented history of violence swirling around the figures who returned Netanyahu to the prime minister’s office, one member of Congress, Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., spoke out forcefully against Otzma Yehudit in the run-up to the election. “As #Israel heads towards another election in November, I urge Israeli political leaders from all sides of the political spectrum to ostracize extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir whose outrageous views run contrary to Israel’s core principles of a democratic and Jewish state.” Sherman tweeted. “These extremists undermine #Israel’s interests and the U.S.-Israel relationship, which I and my colleagues have worked to strengthen.”
Source: Israel’s Far Right Draws on U.S. Funding Despite Terror Classifications
The flag that insults Judaism
What if today’s politicians routinely spoke about the need to strip citizenship from and expel the Navajo from New Mexico and Arizona into Mexico and to annex the Navajo Reservation, the 27,000-square-mile area that stretches across four states in the Southwest? What if all 7 million American Indians were branded terrorists by some politicians in Washington?
Despite Israeli propaganda about being a democracy that shares values with the liberal West, the country has for some time gone down a much darker path. Exit polling done by the major Israeli television channels in Tuesday’s election suggests that Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party, in a joint slate with Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), will win between 13 and 15 seats in the 120-member Israeli parliament or Knesset.
1. Everything you will read in this commentary is disinformation.
2. To say that this commentary contains disinformation is disinformation.
3. To say statements calling this commentary disinformation are disinformation is disinformation.
This is what our public discourse has come to. This is what we have done to it. We Americans have made a nonsense of ourselves. You want to talk about America’s late-imperial decline? This is the warp and weft of it as we shred our social fabric. This is what our troubled republic sounds like, an indecipherable cacophony amid which anything we say can be turned to mean other than what we mean.
Source: Patrick Lawrence: Disinformation, Absolutely – scheerpost.com
Albo isn’t all that he seems to be!
Anthony Albanese and Labor have already done a dirty deal with Liberal Leader Peter Dutton to support a National Anti-Corruption Commission where all hearings will be in private except in exceptional circumstances. One of the ways they are trying to fool the public into believing that is the norm is by arguing that is what the NSW ICAC do, and therefore acceptable, but they are cooking the books with fake statics.
With Mark Dreyfus’s ancestry, you’d think he’d go out of his way to do something.
The rise of the Albanese government spared hopes of a new deal for people blowing the lid on government malfeasance. It isn’t working out that way for one prominent whistleblower, writes Callum Foote.
Source: Bad intentions: Labor failing to protect whistleblower David McBride
In the first half of this year, widespread resort to wind, solar, batteries and hydro saved the world $40 billion in fuel costs and avoided 450 megatons of carbon dioxide emissions. Without these green sources of electricity generation, fossil fuel use would have risen by 4%, with all the environmental and climate damage that increase would have implied.
Albanese is not talking. However, he’s certainly signalling that we aren’t a Pacific Nation any longer nor are we an independent one. First Nation Peoples have been invaded and colonised once and this seems a second coming of the white man.
While others are saying “don’t worry” this isn’t a message for China to take as a threat as we are so far away. B52s are slow and could be tracked and dealt with easily in mid-air. If this was the case why deploy them here at all? Alaska, Hawaii, Philippines are much closer? B52s, Nuclear Subs that America no longer wants to be sold to Australia? Tracking Stations we certainly are looking like an American base. Shhh! Where are those warheads to be stored?
In what critics are calling a “dangerous escalation,” the United States is reportedly preparing to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, where they would be close enough to strike China.
Source: ‘Military Madness:’ US Deploys Nuclear-Capable B-52s to Australia
Nuclear subs,B52s, but no warheads not even stored here? Just dinky toys to play and warn with? We seem to have an American mindset, not a Pacific Regional one and are hair-trigger-armed.
In an arc of militarisation across northern Australia, successive Australian governments, in close concert with the United States, have responded to the rise of a newly assertive China in terms that constitute an almost historically irrevocable opposition to any accommodation with China as a regional great power.
Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, would be able to battle the charges as prime minister, improving his chances of avoiding conviction or jail time.
Source: Israeli Election: Exit Polls Point To Benjamin Netanyahu Win | HuffPost Latest News
IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN.
There are lots of problems with cults, but one is that they’re not terribly self-aware. The Make American Great Again (MAGA) “movement”, to frame it generously, lacks even the most rudimentary self-awareness. Many of its staunchest adherents – zealots, perhaps; those who disseminate their religion with furious keyboard strokes and oddly-placed capital letters (you’ll know them from the Kool-Aid running down their chins) – are not even cognisant of the ideology they’re embracing.
We all know there are Nazis at Trump rallies. There were Nazis at Charlottesville. There were Nazis storming the barricades during the attempted coup on 6 January. We all know the KKK endorses Trump. But the people who don’t know it, the people who deny it with every misspelled slur, every comedic self-own, are Trump supporters.
It’s weird. They don’t even know what they stand for.
Source: Cult of denial: Lies, injustice and the new American way
Republican aides on Capitol Hill and GOP strategists are expecting the U.S. Dept. of Justice to indict Donald Trump within weeks or months of the November election, which is just eight days away. Some are warning if that is the plan it should be sooner rather than later. Former top Trump advisor Steve Bannon claims if the former President is indicted DOJ will be defunded “immediately” and Garland could face impeachment.
Source: Trump Indictment Expected ‘Weeks’ After Midterms — And Bannon Makes a Threat | The Smirking Chimp
The mainstream media was quick to chastise PM Albanese for illustrating Peter Dutton’s ignorance in Parliament. Dr Victoria Fielding reports.
Longtime Labor supporter says Plibersek told him she disagreed with the decision to keep tax cuts legislated by former Coalition government
What in the intellects of seemingly reasoned people would render them incapable of rational thought? It is a question I have constantly asked myself over the past decade as we slowly descended into the consequences of an overheating planet. Inevitably, I do so more often as I approach my final years.
As one day seeps into the next, the world as we know it weeps in protest, fighting the pains of its rape by nations uninterested in saving it.
Source: We have gone beyond the point of no return – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Four Corners last night showed how Australia is becoming ‘a proxy’ or is it ‘a patsy’ for the US in a possible conflict with China. Our actions invite a Chinese response. Sometimes I wonder why the Chinese bother about a reset in relations when we behave so foolishly at the behest of the US. China is not a threat to Australia but our ‘dangerous ally’ keeps goading China to provoke a war.
Last night Four Corners reported:
- The US is preparing to deploy up to six nuclear capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, a provocative move experts say is aimed squarely at China.
- The bombers are part of a much larger upgrade of defence assets across northern Australia, including a major expansion of the Pine Gap intelligence base which will play a vital role in any conflict with Beijing.
Source: Four Corners: Australia becomes US nuclear spear carrier in Asia – Pearls and Irritations
Needless to say, Kiriakou hasn’t spent time in a Russian prison. I’m sure he hasn’t. More Americans are incarcerated than anywhere on the planet, but not Trump. So Griner is his opportunity to rail against the American Industrial Prison System. Using Griner as his lead-in doesn’t shine a bright light on the differences between State and Privately controlled prisons. Capitalism vs State Controlled in a Democracy vs an Authoritarian regime produces significantly different results.
Greiner is in a Russian prison primarily for political reasons and not criminal. Her misfortune today is she’s American and not Russian. If Russian she would have been handed down a lesser sentence and walked away with a fine. We can only assume the prison admin isn’t about to look on her with any sympathy given they support Putin’s politics.
Maybe Kiriakou would have been better comparing Finland’s prison system with the American in order to drive home his point of difference.
These breathless admonitions are nothing more than a bad joke. Have none of these journalists and writers ever been inside an American prison? They wouldn’t have far to look to see that the U.S. prison system gains nothing by casting aspersions on the Russian system or pretty much any other.
Source: JOHN KIRIAKOU: American Gulag
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