Missing Link – only seven days now

Gandhi’s take on Miranda Devine’s attempt to rescue fellow RWDB pundit Caroline Overington from her own ham-fisted effort at electoral rorting by the time-honoured RWDB gambit of labelling lefties “humourless”.  Nitpickers might observe that Miranda is actually a Fairfax Angel

• 1. News and Politics Stuff
• 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff
• 3. The Yartz
• 4. T.S.S
• 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad

Another bumper weekend edition of Missing Link, compiled by Saint in a Straitjacket, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Ken Parish, with editing by the latter.  Enjoy. 

1. News and Politics Stuff

Horck at Bilegrip provides a useful rundown on the unfolding Coalition reaction to the Auditor-General’s revelation of their Roz Kelly-esque rorting of the  Regional Partnerships program.  Peter Martin helpfully sets out the remarkably speedy ministerial grant approval performance on the afternoon the writs were issued for the 2004 election.  Tim Dunlop also covers Partnershipgate ((someone’s bound to use that cliche so it might as well be me ~ KP)), inexplicably accepting that “funding decisions being taken by Ministers should not be seen as a problem”.  Presumably Tim also doesn’t see any problem with Brendon Nelson interfering in ARC grant decisions??

Andrew Leigh explored the broader issue of blatant Coalition porkbarrelling earlier this week even before the Partnershipgate story broke, and was even quoted as an expert in a SMH article: 

Dr Leigh said: “It seems statistically improbable that Coalition electorates are more needy of technical skills training, more lacking in disability advocates, have greater respite caring needs, and are more award-worthy in the areas of vocational education and aged care”.

Gandhi gleefully follows Tony Abbott’s latest campaign trail brain spasms, as does Roger Migently, who also continues his “sack Mick Keelty” campaign.

“Slim Pickens” seems to think the Labor advertising targeting John Howard is a tad too polite:

Apparently Labor has been running an effective TV ad this week with a working family saying sorry Johnny, its not personal – just time for a fresh team. However, as some of my coarser  musical colleagues would put it, Its nothing personal Johnny – its just that youre a pack of feckin conts.

Peter Martin reveals the numerous dodgy techniques employed in producing the interest rate chart John Howard used at his Monday “campaign launch”.

Andrew Bartlett notes the scant mention of indigenous problems in the campaign launches. He gives to Labor for at least having policy documents on the web,

But its hard not to think that addressing the massive and entrenched inequality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians just isnt a priority for the leader of either major party.

Noting the U-turn in the PM’s rhetoric on surpluses, Jeremy resolves the paradox as follows:

Is it because all your vaunted “economic management” credentials boil down to is that if you flog off everything the country owned and cut basic services it enables you to hoard money to splurge every three years on pre-election bribes? That the surpluses showed nothing more than that you were a canny political operator, and that the line that they were important was nothing more than a facile con designed to fool the economically illiterate?

David Bath welcomes Labor’s promise to discount HECS obligations for maths and science teachers. He suggests some extensions and revisions. On the subject of skills shortages, Ken Lovell discusses the case of the missing apprentices in a prelude to a critique of neo-classical labour market theory.

Arguably the ultimate comment on “me-too-ism” is this hilarious YouTube by that master of the laconic Red Symons:

Meanwhile, John Quiggin contends that an important reason for the Government’s fall from favour is its obsession with waging of a culture war that no one else is interested in. Among other things,

the factoid-based, point-scoring, style of argument that goes with the culture wars eventually leads to complete insulation from factual reality. Any proposition, no matter how ridiculous, can be defended in this way, long after the average person has seen through it. This has been most obvious in relation to climate change and Iraq, but there are a whole string of issues where the culture warriors have imprisoned themselves in an orthodoxy every bit as constricting as the largely imaginary monolithic leftism they are supposed to be confronting.

Re. the Media Watch expose on Caroline Overington’s lobbying of Danielle Ecuyer, Tim Lambert is not convinced by the ‘only joking defense.’ Ben Eltham at Polliegraph thinks ‘the real victim is the reputation of The Australian’. Apathetic Gam agrees, and Kim at LP has more links. Speaking of Gam, here are his minutes of the Downer-McLelland debate. Unlike the debate itself, this post should not be missed under any circumstances.

Andrew Bartlett sees the Ul-Haque case as further evidence that our ant-terrorist laws make us more secure rather than less — certainly so if you happen to be Muslim.

The saga of Kevin the Greengrocer: forget fresh, our resident RWDBs recommend discarded vegetables and rats in the kitchen. ((Is there a Coles-Woolworths analogy in there somewhere too?~saint))

Live by the law, die by the law. It’s the law of the bungle.

Tim notes the cognitive dissonance of a gay Mr Been-Here-For-Three-Years whinging about Nation Imperfect.

It was a week in which the blogosphere seemed to turn a corner, moving from uncertainty to bitter hysteria or relief, depending on whether one prefers Howard or Rudd. Slim re-evaluates prior predictions. Harry Clarke gets a little hysterical. Ken Parish is thinking of what next, specifically for the public service, trying to look beyond hit lists. This despite Possum Comitatus passing the news from George Megalogenis that the AC Neilson primary vote graph has the primary votes close enough that a Coalition win is now well within the margin of error.  And “Free Dr Haneef” is having conniptions about the possibility that flood damage-induced disruption to power supplies in Victoria could cause huge blackouts during a heatwave predicted next week and cause voters to turn in anger against Labor!!!

Idiot punters don’t realise the Libs privatised the power system, then they panic, and the fuckwits get back in.

Vest muses on employee rights to use employer supplied resources while off the clock. ((Bah! Facebook. It’s all memes and wank anyway.~gilmae))

Joshua Gans applauds Labor’s announced intention to take on Telstra and achieve a more viable operational separation between its retail and landline infrastructure functions, and

2. Life and Other Serious Stuff

John Ray posts on attempts to equate Islamophobia with anti-Semitism but can’t understand Little Green Football’s definition of racism: it seems too “leftist.” And yet, one of his co-bloggers seems to be lauding pre-apartheid South Africa, to prove his anti-leftist credentials. ((There is Blair’s law. There is Shakespeare. And I’ve been to South Africa. ~saint))

In a couple of longer but very readable posts, tigtog examines the alleged intellectual foundations of the PUA (pickup artist) culture, and finds them hopelessly shaky; and tells the amazing story of the couple who drove their “friends’ ” daughter to suicide with a Myspace hoax. The whole thing has a whiff of the hoax, but if not it’s sure to be picked up by the MSM soon.

Tim Lambert accuses the NYT‘s Andrew Revkin of falling for the fallacy of the middle ground.

Steve is still talking about models.

dr faustus mentions a proposed new methodology to rank Australian universities. ((As to concerns on how to rank Arts degrees, surely measuring the number of graduates who move up from the fries to assistant manager would be appropriate.~gilmae))

Don Arthur finds that post-war reconstruction of West Germany is not so much a refutation of Klein’s The Shock Doctrine that it is an example that the shock doctrine is necessarily bad. ((I suspect Naomi would agree with Don and argue that it is deliberately induced shock  that is the unethical bit.~gilmae))

Sometime Missing Link team member Peter Black highlights a paper he co-authored which analyses legal risks associated with educational and other institutions utilising Web 2.0 social networking platforms like YouTube, MySpace and Second Life. 

Kerryn “Pavlov’s Cat” Goldsworthy’s shot of sunset through her garden boungainvillea. A photographic cliche perhaps (as she observes) but a lovely one.

3. The Yartz

While Lindsay Lohan gets only eighty-four minutes in prison for being a naughty girl, Alison Croggon suffers through hours of torture aka The Madwoman of Chaillot. The lesson for today kids is that it’s better to be naughty (and famous) than to be a theatre critic. According to Croggon:

We all have them. Those mornings when you wake up and recall the events of the previous evening with the desperate hope that it was all a dream. You call your friends to check the facts: was it really that bad? And, very gently, they tell you that, yes, it was.

More best books of 2007 fun over at Matilda. This time the list is from Amazon. This morning I ordered Karl Pilkington’s Happy slapped by a jellyfish via Amazon, and I will wait until I get it before making any lists of best books.

It’s too bad more blokes don’t have Devendra Banhart’s style, which could be described as a cross between Peaches, Madonna and some silly old hippy trying to do drag. You can see a picture of Devendra and read about his latest recording at Off the Record. Says Record:

I think I have come to a conclusion that Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon is possibly Devendra Banhart’s best release to date.

Teachers and students should both find the comic strips appearing on Galaxy worth a chuckle. Of course, teachers are too busy moaning at the moment to find anything amusing.

While watching The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle last night, it occurred to me that the idea Nancy Spungen was the reason for the decline/death (how ironic) of Sid Vicious will never die. It seems male punks and male historians of punk can’t accept the fact that Spungen was young and unwell. There’s a relatively recent post on Book Addicts about Malcolm Butt’s Sid Vicious: Rock ‘n’ Roll Star. The book can be purchased from Polyester in Fitzroy, although it’s as deep as a disco song.

In a possibly unique  treble of politics, visual art and poetry all in the one post, Andrew at The Art Life ventures some mediocre examples of electoral haiku.  Can Troppo readers do better?

First the Poms with pink cricket balls, now the Windies!! I blame that cunning devil Geoff Honnor.

4. T.S.S

(troppo sports stadium)

It isn’t just elections. There is an admonition on After Grog Blog that there are other chickens that should also not be counted before they win by an innings and some runs.

 Tony also remains on guard and forever vigilant about Murali’s clearly illegal action, even if Warne is a wuss:

Genius is doing the right thing brilliantly, not doing the wrong thing to gain an unfair advantage. Many a “bowler” would get Test wickets if he was allowed to bend his arm like Murali. Try it yourself. Grab a ball and yo-yo flick it down the hallway; youll turn it at right-angles into the next room.

Imagine, if you will, the great Viv Richards killing two Pommie fielders with a magnificent boundary clubbed to the covers off a loose delivery while wearing this.

5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad

John Surname interviews Mr Rudd and Mr Howard.

And as we enter the single digit countdown of sleeps to Armageddon, a public service announcement from Andrew Landeryou: knock yourselves out.

Peter Black draws attention to an article which (somewhat hyperbolically?) predicts the death of email in favour of instant messaging. ((Mind you, I’m currently evaluating the merits of the competing messaging systems with a view to providing them to CDU’s entire law student body next year.  My current favourite is Microsoft Live Messenger, largely because of its video capability ~ KP))

Peter is also excited about a newly released Internet TV delivery system called Miro.  Apparently it delivers huge quantities of High Definition  content using BitTorrent. ((I’d be more impressed if Peter could explain how anyone in Australia could actually make any more than token use of such systems without blowing out the monthly limits on their “unlimited” broadband accounts ~ KP))

Long time blogger and muscular dystrophy sufferer Chris Fryer is righteously angry about a hospital stuff-up that almost killed him.

Peter Black notes a US judge who has cited Homer Simpson to establish a basic proposition about the formation of a unilateral contract.  D’oh!

Lyn Calcutt explores the notion that we can learn a lot about our political leaders by observing their spouses’ and their similarities to pop culture characters:

Janette has caused some confusion over whether she’s Carol Brady or Saruman, keen supporter of Sauron the Dark Lord.

Caro thinks Therese Rein resonates better with thoroughly modern Australia. She’s a successful business woman who doesn’t need her husband’s name to know who she is. We won’t be getting any prehistoric, white picket fence, Hyacinth Bucket pretensions from Therese. She’s the political wife equivalent of Xena, Warrior Princess.

Meanwhile, comistriphero goes on a motorbike photo-odyssey through the scenic “litmus test” electorate of Eden-Monaro (aargh!!).

Lastly, can someone explain to me what the hell this means?