Club Troppo

[photopress:Weiners_and_gorge.jpg,full,centered] The prospect of Nancy Pelosi capturing the top spot in Congress and the continued rise of Hilary Clinton has unleashed a masculinity crisis according to Texas blogger Amanda Marcotte : The asswipes are relentless. Fear-mongering...

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Perhaps the most embarrassing part is that they will probably out-scrum us, but that should be it. Our scrum should really use this as valuable training since they can be confident that even if they fall apart the backs will carry this one. For the record I expect we won't con...

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Who is Nancy Pelosi ? I wondered. It was 1987 and a long haired guy was photographing a doctored Pelosi campaign poster in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district . The poster originally said, "Nancy Pelosi, a voice that will be heard." Now it read "Nancy Pelosi, a voice that...

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Why is Christopher Pearson promoting a book by a Derrida scholar and an academic who writes about Indigenous issues ? Well... because it includes an entire chapter on him. Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler's new book, The War on Democracy Conservative Opinion in the Australian Pres...

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Ever dreamed about blogging for living? Earlier this week The Road to Surfdom 's Tim Dunlop made the move to news.com.au. Tim is now firmly established at Blogocracy one of News' growing stable of blogs . The opportunity didn't just fall into his lap. Tim's PhD thesis was on d...

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If there really is a vast right wing conspiracy, perhaps it's a conspiracy against the Republican Party Choice quotes from right leaning American magazines: "Republicans must be punished" Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine "GOP Must Go" The American Conservative "Republicans have...

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Should I call this thing Weekend reflections? Any suggested alternatives?

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Senator Alan Eggleston has some interesting comments on the Western Australian boom with its economic and foreign policy implications . The Westralians have enjoyed the pressure that a booming China and India have put on commodity prices. Eggleston opens with an anecdote on th...

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"Let's not be misty-eyed about Friedrich Hayek" says Kevin Rudd , "he taught (and modern Liberals believe) that there is no such thing as social justice and that the only dignity to be delivered to human beings is through their emancipation by free markets untrammelled by the...

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America was in the grips of civic excitement last night; televisions, websites, phones - all running hot. A friend of mine who runs a prominent political website spent his day watching the loads on the webservers increase as the east coast Americans left work, and the west coa...

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This chart is quite revealing. Troppo readers either gloating over their high house prices, or groaning in anticipation of trying to ever buy one, are wondering what's driven house prices up. In the last few years an international deregulationist movement based around the webs...

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also featuring: France v New Zealand, 11 November 2006, Lyon Ireland v South Africa, 11 November 2006, Dublin I should be embarrassed to admit this but I am getting up for the second of these matches! Italy v Australia Who really cares how many points we score against Italy, e...

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Theos -- Britain's new public theology think tank " We don't do God " said the PM's spin doctor. When Vanity Fair's David Margolick tried to steer Tony Blair into a conversation about his religious beliefs, his director of strategy and communications, Alastair Campbell, butted...

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Over at Larva Rodeo a few days ago, "Atticus" forensically dissected a typically silly and dishonest Miranda Devine column . Devine bemoaned a recent NSW Court of Appeal decision in which a DPP prosecutor was heavily criticised. Prosecutors shouldn't have to be so dispassionat...

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From today's Crikey. As an admirer of Christian Kerr, I'm disappointed in his lack of responsiveness to a fabulous debate in September that he helped to kick off in Crikey it was then adjourned to Club Troppo. It was blogging at its best with experts dropping in from the burea...

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In a comment earlier this morning, James Farrell made this peripheral point: It's less than twenty years since a South Australian judge had to resign for saying that some wives needed a bit of rough handling, or whatever it was exactly. The judge James had in mind was Justice...

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What a start! For a while one might have been nearly 10 years ago when Australia v Wales was just a question of how many points Australia would score. And then Wales, fortunately for their world cup hopes, came flying back, and what an anticlimatic finish. First though, I woul...

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There are two possible dominant political entities in liberal democracy, the individual and the state. Progressivism, republicanism, liberalism and libertarianism see the individual as the dominant entity whereas conservatism and nationalism sees the state as the dominant enti...

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This is Imre Nagy speaking, the President of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic. Today at daybreak Soviet troops attacked our capital with the obvious intention of overthrowing the legal Hungarian democratic Government. Our troops are in combat. The Go...

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