Don Arthur’s recent blogging comeback has stimulated a flowering of creativity, at least on the left of the blogosphere. As Tim Dunlop’s Blogjam roundup seems to be on holiday while Margo promotes her new anti-Howard book (which I haven’t been tempted to buy or read), I thought I’d produce a Troppo version. It might help new readers to locate worthwile material among the blog dross, not to mention existing ones who don’t have the luxury of time to browse the whole ozplogosphere in search of gold.
Fortunately, I’m not under all that much work pressure right at this moment. I’ve finished exam and essay marking, and an occasional burst of blogging, interspersed with preparation of a couple of lectures for next semester on recent developments in US constitutional law, makes a pleasant and sanity-preserving diversion. Here are some outstanding examples of blogging that caught my eye in a leisurely stroll around the blogroll earlier this morning. If you can’t find something satisfying to read amongst this lot, you’re very hard to please:
- Sedgwick has a delightful piece about a family visit to gay-friendly Daylesford in Victoria, and a companion piece send-up of op-ed Tory pundit Gerard Henderson. He also has a more recent post highlighting a couple of especially egregeous utterances by Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. One of them is about an alleged Cabinet split over the site of a nuclear waste dump. Downer is quoted as observing that “Nuclear waste needs to be stored safely and at the moment every state is saying “¦ they don’t want it stored in their state or their territory“. Personally, if I was the Tories, I’d stick it somewhere in central Australia. It’s geologically stable, a bloody long way from populated areas, and in the safe Labor seat of Lingiari held by the left’s Warren Snowdon. There also aren’t any major legal or constitutional problems, because it’s a Commonwealth territory.
- Hard left blogger Rob Schaap makes a fleeting comeback from blogging hiatus to draw our attention to the fact that he doesn’t think much of interim Iraqi PM Allawi who, it seems, was a murderous henchman of Saddam years ago. Rob also reports an ingenious (if dubious) conspiracy theory on why the US decided on a non-elected interim “sovereign” administration.
- Graham Young at Ambit Gambit has an interesting discussion of current ALP strategies and the general state of play in the federal election stakes. I only partially agree with his analysis, as I explain in a post-script to a previous post.
- Don Arthur has a fantastic long-ish post about “political correctness“.
- Finally, the great Gummo Trotsky, reports of whose blog death were seriously exaggerated, posts an amiable, meandering piece about gardening and cooking, on the perfecty reasonable pretext that:
“I’m still warming up after a hiatus of more than 40 days, so bear with me. In any event, there’s only so many jokes you can make about John Howard’s prime ministership before you start repeating yourself and you’d be damn lucky if you end up having to take off at least one sock to count them.”
