A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint.
Politics
Australian
Yes I know some people whinge about excessive coverage of the Apathetic Youths, but this image about the Rudd government’s “rollback” of Howard’s campaign donation laws is too good to resist. |
Robert Merkel maintains the rage about the previous government’s flagrant breaches of process in buying the Super Hornets.
David Bath observes that Kevin Rudd’s unenthusiastic response to the Garnaut interim report has been noted abroad.
Jeremy Sear finds himself comforted by Malcolm Turnbull’s assurances that the Howard Government’s tax cuts were about robbing the rich to pay the poor.
Mark Bahnisch focuses on a worrying aspect of Kevin Rudd’s seeming “shoot from the hip” approach to policy ideas for the 2020 Summit, whereby populist moral panic proposals might gain traction. And speaking of moral panics, Guy Beres looks at the Rudd government’s idiotic proposal for Internet content filtering (to protect the kiddies) for social networking sites including blogs.
International
The Americans are abandoning all pretense of nurturing democracy in Iraq, according to Ken Lovell:
A strategy that depends on and encourages tribalism is hardly consistent with democratic processes so its understandable that Bushs mob have gone a bit quiet on the matter.
Ken argues that neither the El-Maliki government nor the goodwill of the Kurds are relevant to the Administration’s objectives any more.
Chris Bertram takes issue with commentators whose responses to Kosovo’s declaration of independence were lukewarm at best (we can’t offend China or Russia, can we?):
If we follow Allen Buchanan, and see secession as a remedial right for groups that have suffered serious injustice and sought and failed to obtain a remedy, then things will look different. The Catalans, Welsh and Basques may have been in this position in the past, but it is hard to see that they are now, given the combination of regional autonomy and language rights that they enjoy. The Kosovo Albanians, on the other hand have both suffered injustice and have no good reason to believe that a just settlement is possible within Serbia.
Economics
Nicholas Gruen explains why, whatever other reasons there might be for selling NSW’s power utilities, it’s bad economic policy to chase AAA ratings.
Law
Does the ‘locking’ of Apple iPhones breach Australian competition law? Reports to this effect are based on a misinterpretation of an academic article, according to Joshua Gans. Not on my (KP) reading of the article by Clapperton and Coroneos it isn’t. They do conclude that there’s a substantial prospect that such an Apple arrangement would breach the third line forcing provisions of the TPA and other competition laws.
Issues analysis
Arts
David Tiley interviews British film director Peter Greenaway (The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover etc).
Alison Croggon succinctly gives up smoking, slags fellow critic Peter Craven and briefly reviews Hamlet at the Malthouse all in the one post.
Amanda links to white blues legend Loudon Wainwright III’s interview with Bloodnut the other night.
Sport
Tony the Teacher disputes claims that the Indian IPL cricket circus player bidding was a “slave auction“.
Snark, strangeness and charm
Snark has been abolished for today in favour of universal niceness.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of the experts…
Is Loudon Wainwright III a blues legend? Does that make Robert Johnson a Vaudeville icon?
Yes to all three of those questions.