December, 2010

It’s an amusing time of year in the media, where the competent and/or established writers are away on holiday and the airwaves and papers and blogs are instead filled with the wittering of the B team (don’t worry, Dave will return in the new year). The sort of ridiculous drivel that you’d never see during [...]

Family, food, presents, cricket, barbecues, Dr Who, beer, this coming long weekend has all the hallmarks of a celebration. Here’s an open thread to help you document this merry time of year.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but according to an article in The Weekend Australian by a former Liberal staffer named Chris Kenny (now released from the News Ltd paywall* and without dignity reduced to a slab of quoted text on someone else’s blog), the Canberra press pack are A BUNCH OF STUPID [...]

This is how the ABC reported yesterday’s release of the NBN business case. Two stories, and the headlines reveal the heavy angle: Nearly a decade to wait for superfast broadband NBN will be ‘no nirvana’ for cheap broadband Obviously, both those lines are Turnbull’s attacks on the plan. The ABC journo (whoever it was) had [...]

And the “no, really, we care about the refugees, we really do (but not to the extent of making it easier to process their applications before they get on a boat)” concern trolls over at News Ltd’s blog of shame come up with what they apparently have convinced themselves is A Geniunely Noble Offer: A [...]

Are you getting the Crikey daily email? If not – and especially if you’re relying on the commercial media and ABC for your news – you might have missed hearing about the results of the second independent review of the government’s “Building the Education Revolution” infrastructure and stimulus scheme. As Bernard Keane put it in [...]

Welcome to the week where we shall all be judged by how well we manage to play the part of happy little consumers. Here’s an open thread where you can discuss anything that takes your fancy. Have at it.

The Weekend Australian publishes a whinge from a social conservative former ALP MP, Michael Thompson, complaining that there’s “No place in Labor for people like me“: The middle-class progressives are killing the party to which I once belonged. LABOR is being frog-marched towards political irrelevance by a coming together of the self-styled progressives from the [...]