Missing Link Daily

Wednesday’s edition over the fold.

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill

Politics

Australian

Tim Dunlop notes the AMA’s bailing out of backing/participating in the NT indigenous Intervention (even the NT News slagged the doctors’ union yesterday as greedy bastards).  Gary Sauer-Thompson also condemns the AMA’s  blatant self-interest in opposing bringing allied health professionals under Medicare.

Lyn Calcutt rounds up analysis of the latest federal opinion poll, while Possum charts the aggregate trends and finds Labor falling a bit from its honeymoon peaks but the Coalition failing to benefit.

Apathetic Sarah joins the blogging cyclist liberation movement.

Peter Martin argues that Canberra’s white elephant Black Mountain Tower should provide a salutary warning for a federal government planning on spending billions on “fibre to the node“.

Apropos Ken Parish’s ongoing LDP 30/30 thread here at Troppo, Mark “Oz Conservative” Richardson highlights news that employers are flouting minimum wage requirements for powerless international students. 

International

Michael Totten lowers US ambitions on Iraq from flowering of liberal democracy to something not quite as bad as Gaza.

At openDemocracy Kirsty Hughes examines the current weird situation in Turkey, where its constitutional court threatens to ban PM Erdogan’s ruling part for “undermining secularism“, while Phillip Legrain argues for an open door immigration policy in Britain, and Mamphela Ramphele dissects the failings of South African democracy in the wake of riots against refugees.

Norman Geras extracts the latest report from Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights, which confirms worst fears and then some.

Law

Jeremy Sear ridicules a Hun moral outrage story about a convicted rapist suing the cops for mistreatment when first arrested.((But isn’t there actually a finality issue about whether convicted criminals should be able to use administrative tribunals to extract compo for claims that “he was forced to sign a statement admitting to rape and false imprisonment under duress, was not read his rights, and was not given the opportunity to appoint his own lawyer”, when presumably all these allegations were agitated at trial and on appeal and rejected?  After all, the rapist in question abducted a young girl, took her to a remote cave and repeatedly raped her (and had a previous not dissimilar conviction) and was actually captured in the act there by the cops. Thus the confessional evidence doesn’t sound like it was all that critical anyway. ~ KP)) In a somewhat related story in the US, Sally Satel at Slate asks whether gangsters should have priority access to scarce surgical treatments like organ transplants.  

Ted Frank details the cynical forum-shopping antics of the bloke who falsely fingered Judge Kozinski for uplaoding porn to the web.  Australian case law on juducial “bias” arguably makes this sort of nonsense rather more difficult.

The Mark Steyn “hate speech” trial continues in Canada and develops ever more Python-esque Spanish Inquisition qualities.

Economics

Harry Clarke and Jason Soon both have a look at Paul Krugman’s column suggesting that Bush’s tax cuts were a poison pill for the Democrats. Soon notices the implicit acceptance of Norquist‘s ‘starve the beast’ doctrine. Clarke seems skeptical that governments have the foresight.

Joshua Gans reports that a potential AussieMac institution is one step closer and been recommended by the Senate committee on housing affordability.

nico, as a single, would like to know when politicians will acknowledge the Singles voting bloc.

Andrew Leigh finds yet another opportunity for a randomised trial.  Yay!

walking

sad eyes

which way up?

still talking

Issues analysis

In other potentially-already-obsolete-technology picked by the Government, Niall Cook^* discusses the hydrogen fuel cell powered car announced by Honda.

Ed links to a piece discussing what Australia could learn from the French system of nuclear power regulation if it was adopted here. Which is 10% of a step closer now that a near-powerless party-waiting-to-die has adopted a policy supporting nuclear research.  Meanwhile the blogosphere’s resident nuclear expert Robert Merkel contibutes a roundup of news on all things nuclear.

Arts

Emo Bunny

Jason Soon discovers a distinct lack of maternal relations in the Houllebecq family.

Bonny Dot Cassidy and Rory Dufficy review the art work of Ai Wei Wei (but don’t bother to mention where the exhibition is, assuming there is one).

Sport

Shaun on the Daily Telegraph’s willingness to exploit footballers in order to sell papers, with sensationalist headlines that are flatly contradicted by the actual copy. Of course, it’s not just footballers, but it was Benji Marshall today.

Robert Merkel looks at the seemingly irreversible trend towards cricket teams being filled with mobile mercenaries rather than players with genuine local allegiance (somehting that happened in most other professional sports long ago).

Snark, strangeness and charm

John Quiggin rejoices at research showing coffee is good for you,((along with wine, although I’m still hoping for research showing that more than 2 glasses is even better. ~ KP)) while Marcellous rejoices in the possible resurgence of his favourite gay pub in Sydney’s Newtown.((which should have the side benefit of giving Tim Freedman an opportunity for another pretentious song. ~ KP))

Colin Campbell marvels at the kind of thinking that would lead to the Hummer brand being introduced to Australia and people actually buying them; $1.60 petrol, guys.

Terje highlights two lesbians undermining marriage after 55 years of knowing their place.

Adrian the Cabbie tells a tale of a crook Monday night shift saved by music awards presentations (possibly boring as batshit if you’re not an old cabbie like me – KP), while Andrew at Worst of Perth is dubious about the career paths of posties and bus drivers. 

Tim Train reviews real life from a blogger’s perspective and isn’t at all sure he likes it.

TroppoSphere, in case Missing Link email subscribers haven’t noticed, is now available as a convenient gateway to a world of news and expert opinion and analysis for those with feed reader phobia. It contains feeds to most of the blogs and other sources whose best/selected content we most regularly feature in Missing Link, as well as general news feeds and those from selected online magazines like openDemocracy, Reason, Slate, Spiked, New Matilda, Australian Opinion Online and Online Opinion.