Except for all the mountains and Mormons What a ridiculous thing to say: After a recent poll put him 13 points behind Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis decided to lick his wounds and head to Utah, a state where he might actually be more popular than the former president.
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Despite all the determined, and well-funded, efforts of Greg Sheridan, his mates at ASPI and in the media to beat the war drums and the legal shenanigans around the role of the Governor General in declaring war, it is by no means inevitable that Australia will go to war against China. There is opposition at Continue reading »
Promising to double its “defence” expenditure over the coming five-year period and placing huge orders for US military equipment to help it to do so, the sometime “peace state” of Japan is moving into high gear on militarisation. The transformation is plainest in the case of its Southwestern islands that stretch over 1,300 kms from Continue reading »
The ALP seems intent on abandoning progressive policies and turning itself into a competent version of the Coalition. This is not good for them, our collective future, or democracy. It’s not hard to feel cynical about politics, especially the democratic variety. After all, expectations are rightly higher about a system that is considered uniquely capable Continue reading »
Lambert chats with two AIs about Covid's airborne transmission.
Last month’s New South Wales election ejected the final mainland Coalition state government from office. As the dust has settled, it isn’t just Chris Minns’ Labor Party which has emerged victorious; public ownership – particularly of Sydney Water – has been resoundingly endorsed by NSW voters. It is now safe to say: privatisation is politically Continue reading »
On any measure since the mid 1980’s successive governments both Federal and State have progressively destroyed public education systems. By adopting a neo-liberal ‘rational’ approach to providing education for all we have come to the place where we have: A two-tier education structure that is resulting in a residualised, under resourced public system Overwhelming evidence Continue reading »
Australia has several very viable options for not buying AUKUS nuclear submarines. All of them are much cheaper in the medium to short term and vastly cheaper and much less political in the long term. I have written before about alternatives to buying and operating nuclear submarines by Australia. The main disadvantages of nuclear submarines Continue reading »
Having worked in all developing countries in East Asia and several in South Asia (World Bank definition), I am very conscious of the value of soft power. Australia is a very small country in all aspects except size and my experience has been that soft power is the best way of expressing our good intentions. Continue reading »
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 23, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
The Democrats’ Appalling Failure to Confront the Rogue, Right-Wing Supreme Court
Simon Lazarus, April 21, 2023 [The New Republic]
They won’t accept anything but a national abortion ban Trump has no room to move on this one. None of them do: A major anti-abortion group blasted former President Donald Trump on the issue Thursday, saying his contention that abortion restrictions should be left up to individual states, not the federal government, is a “morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate.” The Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group was responding to a statement by Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung for a Washington Post story about division among the 2024 GOP presidential field on abortion-related issues. The group has said it would not support any White House candidate who did not at a minimum support a 15-week federal abortion ban. “The Supreme Court made clear in its decision that it was returning the issue to the people to decide through their elected representatives in the states and in Congress,” the group’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, said in a news release.
🏝️ In May, I'll be on the Réunion island for signing sessions, conferences, and workshops!
All info: https://communs.cemea-reunion.org/
He was, as usual, a pig E. Jean Carroll’s rape lawsuit trial starts this week. Trump won’t show up for it apparently so I’m guessing that his deposition will be introduced as evidence. It’s not good. This article is from January: Questioned for a lawsuit, Trump, the former US president, angrily hurled insults and threatened to sue the columnist who accused him of raping her in the New York upscale department store Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s, according to excerpts of his videotaped testimony. The tapes were recorded last October and unsealed by a court on Friday. The New York court on Friday also rejected as “absurd” Trump’s attempt to have dismissed the two lawsuits against him by Carroll, alleging rape and libel. An April trial is planned. “She said that I did something to her that never took place. There was no anything. I know nothing about this nut job,” he said, according to the transcript of the October testimony.
Be ye forewarned I mentioned Frank Schaeffer’s Friday appearance with Joy Reid on Saturday but could not find the video. Here it is. Christian nationalists, Schaeffer strenuously argues, “are authoritarian. They fear democracy. They want to overturn elections. The Christian nationalist movement is a halfway point to a kind of authoritarian fascism.” He was pulling no punches. My inner ear told me my normally even keel was heeling to starboard. Schaeffer sounded more emphatic than I expect to see on TV, and it was unsettling. But he knows whereof he speaks. I found his rant alarming. Ordinary American voters, he says, “had damned well stand up and be counted in the next few elections, or we’re going to see these people turn our country into an evangelical Christian version of Iran.” To repeat: The problem for the left is that too few of us lack the zealot right’s conviction and commitment. Our deer in the headlights approach will end only one way. Take Schaeffer’s warning seriously. Even David French is unnerved. One of the people Schaeffer warned about announced Saturday that he’s running for governor in North Carolina.
Useless and insulting in equal measure Keir Starmer has managed to insult Scots again in his desperation to appeal to little-Englanders, by using images of the Scottish city of Glasgow in his St George’s Day video. Twitter user Michael Sharpe spotted the mismatch: But this may be more than a mere blunder – Starmer appears […]
Cleaners and catering staff are the heartbeat of our hospitals but their work too often goes unrewarded. Many are outsourced within the NHS and this is the case across the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM). Here, cleaners work for subcontracting giant ISS and poor pay and conditions are endemic, with some paid just […]
Letter in Guardian – apparently an incomplete draft sent in error for which Abbott has apologised – was clumsily worded but the reaction to it is yet another demonstration of how other forms of racism don’t count in Labour Keir Starmer’s Labour has suspended left-winger Diane Abbott – the first Black woman MP in UK […]
Armed and spoiling for a fight David French, recalls the unsettling incident when his son received a direct message displaying three Klan hoods. The former Republican, former National Review staff writer says his multiracial family (his adopted daughter is Black) began receiving doxxing and death threats after he rejected Donald Trump and Trumpism: Within moments, my son received another message, a picture of a road several miles from our house. Then another picture arrived. A road sign. This one was closer. Someone seemed to be coming to our home. No one arrived, but such harrassment had happened before. French grew up in Alabama, owned guns, etc., etc. But the gun rights movement has morphed into “widespread gun idolatry. ‘Guns’ have joined ‘God’ and ‘Trump’ in the hierarchy of right-wing values.” Worse, more people are walking around armed and spoiling for a fight. Things seem to have gotten out of hand, maybe: In recent days we’ve seen a rash of terrible shootings by nervous, fearful or angry citizens. A young kid rings the bell on the wrong door and is shot.
New data show 1 in 7 Americans are plugging themselves into the partisan propaganda machine, and rarely exposing themselves to inconvenient facts.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Star Trek: Picard, The Blacklist, The Orville, Justified, The Last of Us, Dead Ringers, Doctor Who & more!
They’re the Big Spenders, they can move the needle. Millennials and Gen Z-ers are now the drivers of this growth.
The Ukrainian defense officials believed they could use Kurdish forces to wage a proxy war against Russia in Syria.
The post Leaked Docs: Ukraine Planned Attacks on Russian Forces in Syria appeared first on scheerpost.com.
The Saudis had also invested in the private equity firm that sold off the tech companies that power Democratic campaigns.
The post Saudi Arabia Owns Stake in Firm That Bought Democratic Party’s Campaign Tech appeared first on The Intercept.