The radical right, and in particular, Murdoch’s News Corp, are laundering the dirty ideas of the people deploying fascistic politics to make them seem normal “conservative” thought.
Source: News Corp is normalising fascistic politics – Pearls and Irritations
After a steady diet of lies from Fox, followed by countless other erosions of truth on television and on radio, the idea of decency itself began to shrivel and shrink until clearly dishonest and contemptible men could brag about grabbing the genitals of women they barely knew and still be elected to the highest office in the land. The worst men became slavishly devoted to the most corrupt, the most venal, and the most dishonest of their “superiors.” Personal integrity ceased to matter to far too many.
And, when they came for those who still held such quaint values as honor, honesty, and personal integrity, there were just too damn few left to keep the darkness from descending.
Have they come for you yet? If not, they’re surely will be coming as you sit huddled in the enveloping gloom.
The Bannon Project
Outside billionaires have flooded a single school board race in Los Angeles with $10 million. That’s because they know the race is about more than just the swing vote on the LA school board — it’s about the future of public education.
Source: Billionaires Are Shoveling Money Into a Los Angeles School Board Race
The Germans took people’s gold teeth and hair and not just off the dead. What is the difference? If Israelis is doing much the same off the coast of Gaza leaving Palestinians with nothing ?
It is now clear that everyone is going to benefit from the natural gas off the coast of Gaza except those who probably need it the most: the Palestinians in the besieged territory. Egypt wins as a developer; the PA gets the revenues as the nominal owner; Israel takes a cut as a facilitator; and the EU gets the gas a consumer. Meanwhile, the residents of Gaza, who have been suffering from a severe lack of cooking gas, oil and electricity for fifteen years and more, will have to watch in silence as their natural resources are stolen from under their noses.
Boris Johnson has returned to the United Kingdom as he considers an audacious attempt to win a second term as prime minister only weeks after he was forced to step down.
Source: Boris Johnson supporters say he has the numbers for a comeback
A new book examines why congressional leadership pulled their punches when it mattered most.
Source: Deconstructed: How Democrats Botched Trump’s Impeachment
My thought for the day
A conservative outcry: Poverty is the victim’s fault, but wealth comes from virtue, and both are the natural order of things. ( John Lord )
Source: The loneliness of a long-term Opposition Leader – » The Australian Independent Media Network
On current polling, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews looks set for an even bigger win on November 26 than his monster 2018 victory. The most recent Morgan poll has Victorian Labor leading the Coalition by 20 points in two-party-preferred (2PP) terms, though that poll also shows a substantially higher independents vote.
Source: VIC Liberals are a circus, while NSW Labor prepares for power
Christian Porter’s blind trust, Barnaby Joyce’s $32,000 a day expenses as Drought Envoy, Angus Taylor’s Cayman Islands intrigue, Bridget McKenzie’s Sports Rorts, Scott Morrison’s suite of secret ministries, the Leppington Triangle Affair, tens of billions blown to smithereens in Defence spending. What will we get to see from a Federal ICAC, the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC)? Quite possibly none of that. Michael West talks with leading rortologist and former bureaucrat Jommy Tee.
Source: SNACC or NACC? What will be made public by the new anti-corruption commission? – Michael West
On the matter of the recent Lidia Thorpe controversy, I want to state a layperson perspective, one we won’t see much of amidst the swamp of Australian political opinion columns.
Here it is: I don’t give a shit if Lidia Thorpe dated an ex-bikie.
Source: Why we shouldn’t care Lidia Thorpe dated an ex-bikie
Well, it would be because there is no jury. What I’m trying to say is that the decision has been made by the people who matter which – as I am sure you know is the Federal Coalition. Lidia Thorpe has failed to declare a conflict of interest.
Peter Dutton has led the charge, announcing that Senator Thorpe must leave Parliament because ‘you can’t receive those briefings during the day and then hang out, you know, in nice circumstances of a night-time with a bikie.
Effective altruist Peter Singer argues that individuals should do more to alleviate the world’s poverty. But his emphasis on giving to charity disregards the structural causes of inequality, suggesting that nothing fundamental can be changed.
No sensible person will be seeking the office. But the Tory Party is riddled with the insensible. Sunak is likely to recontest. The leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, is also a contender. Even Johnson, who did more than most to denigrate the office, is contemplating a return. For the moment, the lettuce won out. At the very least, it deserves a run.
Source: Exit Liz Truss; Enter Lettuce – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Trump Wants nothing revealed because there is nothing there for the public to see if it doesn’t earn him a dollar rouble or rial and coin or creepy crypto will do even sex
The contents of some of the classified documents recovered by the FBI during the search of Donald Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, have been revealed, and it isn’t very comforting. Unless, of course, you don’t love this country. Some of the docs included highly sensitive intelligence regarding Iran and China. If they were/have been shared with others, such information could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the U.S. wants to keep hidden from the world for obvious reasons.
Source: Contents Of Mar-a-Lago Docs Revealed, And It’s Worse Than We Thought | Crooks and Liars
Trump’s Brainiac gets a slap on the wrist
Steve Bannon, a prominent figure on the American right who served as a senior strategist for former President Donald Trump, has been sentenced by a judge to four months in prison for refusing to cooperate with lawmakers investigating last year’s US Capitol attack by a pro-Trump mob.
His lawyers have said they will appeal his conviction.
US District Judge Carl Nichols during a sentencing hearing also ordered the former adviser to pay a fine of $US6,500 ($10,298).
Trump’s former mastermind Steve Bannon has been sentenced to four months jail on two charges of contempt of Congress
Source: Former Trump mastermind Steve Bannon jailed for contempt
Former PM Scott Morrison has joined the global lecture circuit where he is amusingly advertised as a “globalisation mastermind”, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.
Source: ‘Mastermind’ Morrison’s fibs and fantasies go global
The LNP like no other Government before attempted to rid us of the ABC on the behest of Rupert Murdoch a foreign, politically partisan parasite who pays little or no tax and offers no benefit to our Nation’s Democracy whatsoever.
Now is the time to consolidate the ABC’s role permanently by enshrining the national broadcaster, through an all-party Declaration, as an institution that’s integral to our democracy and to which all citizens have a right.
Source: We need an all-party declaration of support for the ABC – Pearls and Irritations
This makes our Justice System seem more a moot game between lawyers so far removed from reality on which a jury is expected to choose a winner. There seems there will be no winners only losers who will walk away apart of course from a justice system whose members will have been overpaid to do what they have defined as work but appears more like theatrics. Unfortunately is there a better alternative?
It is for those making the accusations and bringing the charges to provide evidence and prove every element of the alleged crime, to a standard that is ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ and, if a doubt reasonably based, exists in the mind of any one of them, then the accused must be acquitted : that’s how the system works.
Source: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt ! – » The Australian Independent Media Network
A windfall profits tax levied on the export gas industry could pay for the government’s $20 billion Rewiring the Nation commitment to the energy transition and compensate households for price rises, states the Australia Institute.
Darwin’s Middle Arm project is about subsidising fossil fuels, not “clean energy” and “environmentally sustainable manufacturing.
They have dubbed it “green”, about “clean energy industries” and “environmentally sustainable manufacturing”; yet Darwin’s Middle Arm Sustainable Development Precinct is all about subsidising fossil fuels. Callum Foote reports.
Labor has announced a $1.5 billion Budget hand-out for the Middle Arm ‘Sustainable Development Precinct’ in the port of Darwin.
Public subsidies for fossil fuels already run at a heady clip of $10bn a year, if you include fuel subsidies. And despite all the greenwashing and tricky language over the development of a second port for Darwin, the Albanese government has just slotted the fossil fuel industry another $1.5bn, at least.
Source: Greenwashed: how the new “Middle Arm” fossil fuel hub was rebranded green
Over the last week, record rains have again caused flooding in Australia, this time impacting Victoria. Although the disaster was easy to predict, the authorities took few preventative measures, and now residents are expected to bear the costs.
Source: Floods Have Hit Australia Again. Thanks to Budget Cuts, the Authorities Aren’t Prepared.
This isn’t a new phenomenon in Australia Murdoch’s News Corp owns 66% of the print news in Australia and the majority of the rest is corporately owned. It’s why we need the ABC and more independents because they stand between us and the plundering of our Democracy. By independent I mean news and information not supported by advertising or lobby groups but by subscription only.
This has rapidly become the standard business model for American newspapering. Today, more than half of all daily papers in America are in the grip of just 10 of these money syndicates. That’s why our “local” papers are dying. It’s not a failure of journalism. It’s a plunder of journalism by absentee corporate owners.
A new congressional report commissioned by Bernie Sanders finds that the 1 percent now own one-third of all wealth, while the bottom half of Americans hold only 2 percent. It’s another sign of the slide into oligarchy that Sanders has warned about for years.
Source: Bernie Is Right: Extreme Wealth Concentration Has Turned America Into an Oligarchy
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.
Source: Ken Burns’ Holocaust Documentary should set our Hair on Fire about the Creep of Trumpian Fascism
British Prime Minister Liz Truss has quit after just 44 days in the job — sparking a new leadership contest for the fifth Conservative prime minister in just over six years.
OPEC+ slashed oil production following a Saudi pressure campaign that experts say aims to hurt Democrats in the midterms.
Source: Saudis Sought Oil Production Cut So Deep It Surprised Even Russia
A well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy. Yet, on China, Australians are being misled by our mainstream media.
Source: The Australian electorate is being misled by its media – Pearls and Irritations
Since when did the ABC become an extension of the Murdoch press? Should we be surprised, Probyn worked at the Herald Sun for 9 years where he was blooded or was that at Scotch College where he found his anti-Labor stripes?
After addressing the National Press Club last Wednesday on his proposed National Anti-Corruption Commission, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus faced questions from some of Australia’s elite political jour…
Policymakers who have belatedly recognized the peril of climate change now promote incremental, market-based solutions to the crisis. But there’s no way we can prevent ecological disaster without tackling the vested interests at the heart of global capitalism.
Source: “Green Capitalism” Is a Lie
Lachlan still doesn’t have his big boy pants. However, he’s allowed to sue and advocate for and against free speech one at the same time.
“Rupert Murdoch has come out of hibernation,” Enders said. “COVID was a period of hibernation, and his then wife [Jerry Hall] exercised a degree of control over his movements, which became the cause of the divorce. He is 10 times more directly engaged with the business than he was during the COVID years. Talking to Robert Thomson, there’s no question that this is all Rupert Murdoch, and that he’s very actively engaged in this process. The transaction is definitely going to be happening.”
Source: ‘Rupert Murdoch has come out of hibernation’: Top analyst backs Fox-News Corp merger
The premiership of Liz Truss has effectively been over for days, perhaps even weeks, but cruelly she’s yet to be put out of her misery. It is coming, there’s no doubt. And for everyone’s sake, it should really hurry up.
Source: A day like no other as Liz Truss’ reign goes from absurd to outright ridiculous
The U.S. leadership class likely has little regret. The U.S. intention, after all, is to cause distress in Cuba leading to regime change. Moreover, U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, occupation of territory in Guantanamo, destabilizing interventions inside Cuba, and the CAA, taken together, add up to attack on Cuba’s independence and national sovereignty. The silence of the media and of political activists on these matters takes on an ominous quality, that of complicity with crimes.
The community of nations enabled the United Nations to deal with international crimes. Under the United Nations Charter, the Security Council may confront “any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” of one nation against another. The General Assembly in 1965 unanimously approved Resolution 2131 which states that, “No State has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any State.”
What situations would these authorizations be applied to, if not to the instances recited here of U.S. aggression against Cuba?
Source: Cuban Adjustment Act of US Still Privileges Cuban Migrants, Hurts Cuba – scheerpost.com
Soldiers were seen picking the trees after receiving permission from a settler group. When Palestinians went to harvest the next day, police prevented them.
Source: Why are Israeli soldiers harvesting Palestinians’ olive groves?
However, a report by Human Rights Watch found that most of the cases they documented “where Ukrainians from the Mariupol and Kharkiv areas were transported to Russia amount to forcible transfers”.
The report described the practice as a “serious violation of the laws of war amounting to a war crime and a potential crime against humanity”.
The Institute for the Study of War has stated that Russia “continues to conduct massive, forced deportations of Ukrainians that likely amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign”.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have had to escape the war via Russia. Neighbouring Estonia has become a sanctuary for those unwilling to stay on enemy soil.
Source: The Ukrainians forced to flee their homeland through the country of their invaders – ABC News
As Iran’s fighters, advisers and weapons proliferate to new areas and empower U.S. adversaries, Iran further promotes its national interests at the expense of U.S. national interests.
Source: Iranian drones used by Russia in Ukraine show that there’s already one Victor in that War: Iran
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said the martial law crackdown was an attempt “to suppress the resistance of the residents” who oppose the Russian occupation. “Putin’s decree is null and void. It has no legal consequences for Ukraine and its citizens, as well as for the international community,” said a statement released by Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Source: Vladimir Putin declares martial law in annexed Ukraine
My thought for the day
In the recipe of good leadership, there are many ingredients. Popularity is but one. It, however, ranks far below getting things done for the common good. ( John Lord )
Source: Power for no other reason – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Yes, Rob B is ex- Lib Premier Ted’s son. He was campaign manager for Monique Ryan’s downing of Josh at Kooyong in the last Federal Election. He is now working in the same capacity to ensure Matthew Guy loses in Victoria By Rob Baillieu
Under Matthew Guy, the Victorian Liberal Party is a souffle in the sun, collapsing in on itself. When it comes to scandal it doesn’t get much worse than your top lawyer quitting over concerns that you’re breaking the law. Except maybe your Chief of Staff resigning over a major donation scandal. The near-constant scandals have ruined Matthew Guy’s attempt to campaign on integrity. Not that it ever had a chance. When the most common refrain that follows your name is ‘lobster with a mobster’ then you probably shouldn’t campaign on integrity anyway.
Source: Matthew Guy is a veritable souffle in the sun | The Shot
The coalition of over 300 doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and other medical professionals have repeatedly called for Assange’s release from Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in London and protested “health injustices” that have occurred as a result of the extradition case against him.
Worsening matters, as Doctors for Assange notes, is the fact that Assange tested positive for COVID-19 on October 8.
“Given his chronic lung ailment, Mr. Assange may be at increased risk of serious illness resulting from COVID infection,” the doctors write [PDF]. “In addition, Mr. Assange’s mental health is placed at further risk by the solitary confinement he has been forced to endure since his positive COVID test.”
Doctors For Assange wrote to US and UK officials warning of health concerns if Julian Assange stays in prison. He tested positive for COVID.
Source: The Urgent Reasons 300 Doctors Are Calling for Julian Assange’s Release – scheerpost.com
Editors at Nine Entertainment and the ABC have been diagnosed with Acute Journo’s Ear Syndrome and possible Craniorectal Inversion following reports of an $8 billion Medicare fraud. Callum Foote reports.
As a consequence, the Australian Government now doesn’t want to tax them.
Australia’s gas giants are “profiteering” from the war in Ukraine, according to the independent Australia Institute.
Source: Gas windfall ‘war profits’ surge to $40b – Michael West
The Australian foreign minister, Penny Wong, announced on Monday that the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would reverse the country’s recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. She said in a statement that Australia’s embassy would remain in Tel Aviv.
1975 saw the shameful death and cover-up of 5 Australian reporters shot and killed in Balibo.
Australia’s role during the Indonesian occupation itself is largely considered as one of passive acceptance, a “blind eye” to events to which it fails to respond.
In fact, as these documents and files clearly show, Australia played a very active role, encouraging the Indonesian intervention before it took place and acting as the Suharto regime’s key propagandist in the international arena while the worst of the atrocities were occurring.
Australian lobbing not only delayed a resolution of the East Timor independence issue, but also curtailed measures to highlight and alleviate the suffering, actions that undoubtedly cost many, many lives.
The active role that Australia took in supporting the attempted genocide of the Timorese people is still obscure to much of the Australian public. No true reconciliation nor compensation to the East Timorese nation is likely without a true appraisal of the unredacted facts.
Newly declassified files from the National Archives of Australia show how the Department of Foreign Affairs provided PR cover for Indonesia’s genocidal scorched-earth campaign in East Timor, Peter Job reports. By Peter Job Declassified Australia The photographs show a smiling Australian, in
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.