Club Troppo

Well he was on Seinfeld anyway. Some people may have seen this before but, having heard about it on the radio recently I looked it up on YouTube. Truly shocking. Nice to see the audience filing out as he sank deeper into the mire.

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It was utter madness on the streets of Melbourne this evening, as literally tens of people listening to Huggy on the Gold FM, drive time, Bread back-to-back retrospective were thrust rudely into the new millennium by the shocking but welcome news that Shadow Foreign Minister K...

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I posted on this last year and it's worth mentioning it yearly. A lot of stuff gets exchanged each year that's pretty useless when we could give gifts to each other of donations to causes that could really do with the money. This would have had the assent of most economists be...

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The Bomber among friends yesterday, but how many will he have in Caucus next week ? We'll add links here to developing blogosphere coverage ... Just in case you thought Wednesday's first Missing Link feature was a fluke and doubted that the blogosphere really does consistently...

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Last time I raised this subject Richard Phillipps hopped into me suggesting that I wasn't being helpful. In any event I'm at it again. I've not researched this case in any detail, but it sure looks strange on its face and the report from The Age does not appear to be sensation...

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You can tell this is the good Peter Saunders because he looks like Santa Claus ... Somewhat by accident, (happy accident though it is) Troppo seems to have become a place for really excellent policy discussions about welfare, the labour market, inequality and poverty with cont...

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Sometimes being played for a sucker has positive but unintended consequences. My recent 'free' subscription to Crikey confirmed what I had always suspected. The average quality of their articles isn't crash hot, not when you consider how much they charge for a subscription. Th...

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I was browsing over at Lava Rodeo a few minutes ago, and noticed that Mark Bahnisch was asked about whether he was paid for the articles he writes for Crikey . His answer rather surprised me: The answer would be no and yes. I'm not on a retainer or a contract and can submit ar...

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Iranian President Ahmadinejad If you had imagined that expansionist militaristic "neocon" influence over the Bush administration had been vanquished following the Democrat victory in the US mid-term elections, the sacking of Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, and the appoin...

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The British Empire League was a bunch of Australians in the early 20thC who wanted imperialism to prevail rather than nationalism in Australia. The prominent politician of the time, Alfred Deakin, was the great compromiser and saw no difference between being Australian and a B...

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Here is the last post on primate sentiments - and as I said at the end of the last post, it's really a postscript. It doesn't further develop the points made in the last two posts, but tidies up some loose ends. Smith himself cooked up a theory of the evolution of language at...

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Andrew Leigh wonders why Labor performs so well in state and territory elections but so poorly in national elections. His favourite theory is one Andrew Norton floated a while ago -- voters think of the nation as a family where Labor is mum and the Coalition is dad . State and...

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Kramnik will take on Deep Fritz starting tonight in a six match game. I expect he's got very little chance - especially the way he played against Topalov. He played better than Topalov and Topalov is a great player, but . . . Topalov didn't play that well against him (except i...

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One of the issues that emerged almost inevitably in the commentary on Friedman's death was the contrast with Keynes. James Farrell commented on the way Friedman deprecated the originality of aspects of Keynes' contribution. But I drew attention to Friedman's expressed admirati...

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Do we really want political leaders with vision? Now that it's leadership speculation season again, every speech or media appearance by a Labor politician is seen as an audition for the leadership. Supporters are looking for someone with big ideas, passion, and a vision for ou...

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While Blair's New Labour remains mired in the war in Iraq, Cameron's new-look Conservative Party declares war on poverty and makes peace with Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee . In a recent article, Tory front bencher Greg Clark , says that : Ignoring the reality of relative po...

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A journalist from the AFR rang me today to ask me to comment on a recent report by the World Bank and PWC which is a comparative study on the payment of tax by companies. It's an interesting report but it's conducted with such heroic simplifications that one sometimes wonders...

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To start of what may (or may not) be a semi-regular post (whatever happened to Dr Troppo?) here is my quote of the week - from rookie Troppodillian DW Griffiths. Jagger seems a disciplined bloke, but he plays dissolute superbly - and it seems to be what the world reacts to mos...

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Ahead of this weekend's announcement of the 2006 Australian Idol , today's Age Green Guide acknowledges the popular culture phenomenon. The paper then labels the show, for about the tenth time, as "karaoke". The Age is not alone; a large part of the Australian pop/rock music i...

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