January, 2011

Essential Report’s latest poll offers bad news for Labor, with voters backing delaying or scrapping the NBN, and delaying a return to surplus, over a one-off levy. The online survey was conducted last week before and after the Prime Minister announced a one-off levy to fund the $5.6 billion flood reconstruction effort. When asked about [...]

I have no way of knowing how many New South Wales voters swallowed an ecstasy tablet this weekend but it is bound to have been tens of thousands. I wonder what they think about the somewhat hysterical response of Premier Kristina Keneally to the partner of one of her minister’s being collared by police for [...]

Yesterday, the FBI finally took action in relation to the events around Wikileaks’s release of leaked diplomatic cables. So did the British police, working in concert with them. Only, it wasn’t Julian Assange hauled up for extradition to the US on charges under the Espionage Act, it was a group of teens arrested for participating [...]

Calling it gross disloyalty would be an understatement. The actions of the New South Wales Premier Kristina Keneally in advocating a lower flood tax for Sydney residents than other Australians takes disloyalty to party to a new low level. Labor’s Federal Executive should expel her from the party.

Some growth is better than no growth but for the unemployed in the United States it will be a slow voyage back to what the country thinks of as full employment. The figures out last night from the Bureau of Economic Analysis had real gross domestic product increasing at an annual rate of 3.2 percent [...]

James Cowie writes: Egypt Leaves the Internet – Renesys Blog: James Cowie on January 27, 2011 7:56 PM: Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes [...]

With the fourth quarter GDP figures for the December quarter released earlier this week showing an economy already in decline, further bad news from the UK. Nick Moon, MD of GfK NOP Social Research, described January’s eight point drop as representing an astonishing collapse in consumer confidence. In the 35 years since the Index began, [...]