Just as a followup on the earlier piece. Recall that Howard said:

Now, aside from the breathtaking arrogance of this horrid little man, let's turn to the dictionary, shall we? According to Merriam-Webster, a mob is:

Strangely, M-W misses the other meaning: "mob" can also mean "a crowd of voters who aren't likely to re-elect a slimy little toad".

It's pretty clear that a number of the boosters of a war on Iraq get most of their military knowledge from Tom Clancy novels.

It's still suprising (to me, anyway) to see Lex Loser getting his talking point from them, tho:

Uh huh. Nice, catchy quote. Where'd you get that one from?

Yep. I mean, just look at how Iraq's been proliferating all that bad nasty weapons technology around the world. Oh, no, hang on. That'd be North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia.

Obviously "foreign affairs by non-sequiter" is now the ruling ideaology in the federal leadership...

(Just as an aside, in the linked article, an Iraqi newspaper is described as "the mouthpiece of the ruling Baath Party". I'm all for truth in labelling, and I'm looking forward to seeing Fox News Channel and the Washington Times correctly labelled as "the mouthpiece of the ruling Republican Party". Oh, yeah, I forgot. They're "fair and balanced".)

See, little Johnny's quite happy to play the ugly populist game when the mob is in favour of his policies (like "bash a reffo"). But when hundreds of thousands of people protest against him, well, then, we're just a mob who can't make up their mind, and doesn't know what's right. Luckily we have a visionary leader who can tell us what's right.

Gee, that's funny, 'cos every single opinion poll I've seen suggests that perhaps, maybe, they are the majority.

Kieran Healy notes something similar:

The Age decides that since A Current Affair isn't pushing quack diets any more, obviously it's time that they moved into this niche.

At least they also published a piece pointing out that many medical professions consider the Atkins ("no-carb") diet to be foolish quackery. They also point out that Atkins himself fell over with a heart attack (or, as his publicity machine called it, "a virus") last year. This amuses me a great deal. Is that wrong?

The righty columnists in american politics get their "wit" from ripping off old Simpsons' lines (French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"), then endlessly repeating them in their self-congratulatory echo chamber. This response, from Justin Vaisse, shows how to be informative and witty at the same time. Perhaps the righty types in the US should try to manage one of the two, first. Both might be a bit much.

Ray Cassin:

The Independent takes on Blair's appearance on Paxman, and savages many of his points. They also whack Blair fairly solidly for his "unconvincing and slippery arguments". Remember, kids, Blair's doing better than just about anyone with respect to pushing this war, and even he can't manage it.

Via The Sideshow, they rule. This website (flash) allows you to examine the wonderful world of the interlocking boards of directors of the largest US corporations.

I'm not sure how up-to-date it is (it still lists Compaq, for instance), but it's quite an interesting little toy, nonetheless.

(it also appears to be publically traded companies - so no Carlyle Group )

Rather than believing the US, ahem, spin (or "lies") on barking boy bin laden, the BBC has him in his own words. It's safe to say, of course, that the US is deliberately obfuscating what he said (no!! surely not?)

Even so, even the WashPost (which has been doing sterling duty in the services of the US government lately) reports:

Note the tense of the words. Not "has established" (as they claim), but "may establish" "in case of war".

Uh huh. Whatever. I think it's safe to say that much more of this sort of crap will lead to Powell getting Bush-like levels of public trust.

(Meanwhile, Tom Friedman continues his happy little fantasy, where the US is only interested in "helping" Iraq, and will of course build a nice little democracy with a Starbucks on every corner and happy well-fed democratic civilians. At what point, I wonder, will the reality sink in for him?)

Well, fancy that. Apparently Howard felt like he was uninformed about digital TV, too. Gee, it's lucky that Telstra was there to help him out. Can't have pollies "uninformed".

But hold on - those plasma screen TVs are big bastards that sit on the floor. So why did Howard need to spend over $4,000 on a TV stand? Don't tell me Telstra stiffed him and didn't even provide a stand to put the thing on? Geez, what's happening to bribery in this country today.

When your only friend is John "never saw a cheque he didn't like" Laws, give it away, Dick.

I hear Alston and Howard are also feeling a tad uninformed on the quality of the higher-end wines that we export - anyone from Penfolds feeling up to the task?

The current US ambassador to Australia, Tom Schieffer, really is a dick. Given the current state of politics in Australia, particularly with respect to Australia's relationship to the US, a smart man would just Shut. The. Fuck. Up. If he felt it necessary to comment, it would be done quietly through backchannels. Not through an interview with The Bulletin!

Crean has rightly told Schieffer to pull his fucking head in last week, so this week Schieffer decides it's a smart move to bitch about things in an interview?

Well, yes, but at the same time we've not ever had a US president pushing "preventative war", or telling the rest of the world that they had better follow the US or be ignored.

This quote from McKew's article is also quite enlightening:

Ah. Silly me. I forgot that as a "democratic ally" of the US, we're not allowed to have different opinions to them. How foolish of me. I do hope the idiots who think the US is interested in "democracy in Iraq" are paying attention here. Go think about just how much democracy the US is going to let the Iraqis have, when they can't even handle Australia having a democracy that might not always agree with them.

Gerard Henderson, in a piece in The Age on the weekend, passes on reports that US embassy staff were interviewing campaign managers from the left-of-center parties last year. He rightly points out that this is pointless (it's doubtful they'd have learned anything) and stupid (perceived US interference in Australian electoral policies would cause a massive public explosion).

To use a phrase from a stand-up comic I saw last night: It would be a good idea if Schieffer would fuck off, and stay there.

Wasn't there some sort of thing going on in Afghanistan? Something with military, a new government, that sort of thing? Oh, it's completed and we can ignore it? Maybe not. Back to proxy wars, resurgent fundamentalist resistance fighters,and random violence in Kabul.

Meanwhile, Iran moves to go nuclear, Palestinian refugees are in danger of starving, but we must get Saddam. He's evil, don'tcha know. Eeeeevil.

Via Richard, Alston's latest effort - a "loaner" $10K plasma screen TV so that he can become better acquainted with digital TV. Aside from the obvious ethical issue here, it's risible that Alston claims that this is so he can "make decisions from an informed knowledge".

This man has gone out of his way to remain uninformed in almost every aspect of his portfolio - if he was Minister for Oxygen he'd be holding his breath out of spite. I notice in the article that he "uses it to watch sport" - that'd figure.

Via Slacktivist, this WP article with the completely co-incidental deployment of members of the US Special Forces to an area that has an oil-pipeline that needs defending. Worryingly, they're also on the border of Venezuala. The US, of course, has no interest in Venezuala at all.

Without wanting to be the boy who cried "Vietnam", it really does seem like the US involvement in Columbia is going down a similar path. What ever happened to the Powell doctrine of "don't go in without an exit strategy"?

There's a second part to the interview/open chat with Blair, Paxman and an audience. In some respects it's even more interesting than the first. The topic is "public services".

Most people in the audience seem to hold quite strong positions about things like locking up refugees, mandatory sentencing, and the like, and it's quite pleasant to see a national leader actually standing against the easy approach of giving in to the mob mentality. But perhaps it's just pleasant because of the nice change from our own reactionary PM.

Jeremy Paxman, possibly the most brutally thorough interviewer in the world, gave Blair a absolute pounding in this special. Read it, and imagine how long an interview with an American leader would last before the leader either walked out or had Paxman detained as an "enemy combatant"

To be fair to Blair, I also couldn't see Bush (or Howard) ever exposing themselves to what was obviously going to be an absolute shellacking from both the interviewer and the audience. So he gets points for that...

Some sample quotes:

Nasty comment for the session was the audience member who referred to Blair as the "Rt. Hon Member for Texas North"

(Via Atrios)

That's right. The Muslim loonies hate the west for our freedoms. Like the freedom to hand off prisoners to someone else to torture.

This strikes me as one of those things that "seemed like a good idea at the time", but which will come back to haunt the people responsible. If you're going to use Saddam's utterly woeful human rights record as a justification for invasion, how on earth can you allow this sort of "will nobody rid me of these troubling terrorists" behaviour? If western military are captured in Iraq, and, gods forbid, tortured, it makes it that much harder to turn around and say "don't do that!" if you've been participating in this yourself.

The recent case in the US where a medical professor refuses to write letters of recommendations to students who go for creationism over evolution, and is being sued for "religious discrimination", has inspired a bunch of bloggers. Incredibly, many are actually disagreeing with the professor. Look, just because someone has deeply held beliefs, and is completely sincere about them, doesn't alter the fact that creationism is bunk. You can wrap it up in funny disguises, call it "Intelligent Design" or whatever other fancy new name it's got this week, but it's still bunk. Evolution isn't just a "theory", to be equated with "creation theory", it's a solid scientific basis for many of the life sciences we depend on today.

There's over a century of solid work by some very, very smart people on evolution, and over time it's changed as new pieces of evidence have come to light. The basic theory, though, has held firm. In the meantime, what've the creationists produced? Lots of hypotheticals, appeals to this or that ancient scripture, and much deliberate obfuscation and blurring of facts.

As Dini puts it on his website:

It's a source of great confusion that Americans can still be arguing over creationism versus evolution in this day and age. It's somewhat like hearing a couple of doctors arguing over the merits of leeches versus antibiotics. Actually, that's probably unfair - I seem to recall there is some cases where the anti-coagulent that leeches put into the blood stream has medical use. I can't think of any possible cases where a solid knowledge of creation is going to be helpful. If I'm ever so sick that divine intervention is useful, I'll go to a goddam priest directly. I don't take my cat to the mechanic when it's sick, why would I go to the doctor's for religious help?

CSICOP has a good piece on what's involved in this, while D-squared Digest delivers the most cutting suggestion I've seen for a letter of recommendation. (As well as the line "sitting around teaching morons in a town where the definition of an intellectual is someone who can keep his mouth shut when he points at aeroplanes.")

(again, from today's Age. Today, it's a gift that keeps on giving.)

He's bet his what??? Which reputation for economic competence would that be? The one that took an end-of-bubble slump and turned it, apparently, into some sort of hideous deflationary collapse? The one that slashed taxes all over Texas, resulting in that state now facing disastrous budget deficits, with the butchering of services that follow.

As Paul Krugman might say, if he was a cranky Australian blogger rather than an NYT columnist and noted economist, "Pigs Arse".

I mean, ok, sure, Lachlan blew a couple of hundred mil on One.Tel, but isn't this going a bit far to try and stop him driving News Corp into the ground after Rupert passes on?

So I'm about to go to bed, check the ABC news for the latest, half out of habit. What do I see, but that Lex Loser has, well, fucked up. And it could be quite a major fuckup, even by Lex "Things That Batter" Downer's standards. (short explanation: Lex was previously leader of the liberals back in the early 90s. A notable highlight followed one policy launch called "Things That Matter". He thought it would be a laugh to refer to a policy on domestic violence as "Things That Batter". He's also referred to South American nations as "BACs" - "Busted Arse Countries".) (aside the second: what the hell is it with our Foreign Ministers. The previous one, Gareth "Puppy Joke" Evans, was also one for the idiotic comment, although in Evans case, at least, it appears that it required booze to get him going seriously.)

Presumably "out of context" means "out from a quiet little chat, and where the public can see it".

The following image was found on Parents. The Anti-Drug. website, which appears to be another of those "Parents! Here's how you can be down wit' da kids speak and 'splain to dem bout how dangerous drugs are. Yo!" websites.

Now, I might just have a mind that's twisted in a particular direction, but to me, this looks like an advertisement. I tried to find a similar one for Prozac, but to no avail (although it did lead me to http://www.anti-depressants-paxil-prozac-zoloft-celexa-medications.com/, which has to be the worst URL ever).

Or am I just seeing things. I really wanted to take the "Test your Anti-Drug IQ" test, but it appears to require Flash 6, which would require Windows. [Update: tried it on the Windows box. Apparently my "Anti-Drug IQ" is only 50%. Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.] My favourite "Parent to Parent" story title from that page, by the way, would have to be "See Your Child As A Person". Damn. There goes my plan to "See My Child As A Small Walking Container Full Of Fresh (And Convenient For Transplanting) Organs".

Where do they find the well-meaning but utterly clueless types that spend hours and hours of their life on this stuff? Jesus. Look, if you're worried about your kids messing with drugs, try this radical idea: Maintain a open and honest relationship with your kids. Treat them with respect, and don't feed them bullshit. If your response to "Mum, I tried some pot" is "oh my god you're going to become a drug-addicted junkie!!" while you slam down your prozac with your third gin and tonic of the evening, well, don't expect your kids to come back with further questions.

Or just dope the little fuckers to the eyeballs with Ritalin and plug them into the TV. Seems to be the popular choice. On the other hand, if this parenting style does appeal to you, consider getting a fucking fish tank. Just like children, only you don't get arrested if you neglect them to death.

Hitchens' hatred of Clinton continues, and continues to turn someone who was an interesting writer into a tired hack, peddling his Clinton conspiracy theories to eager right wingers. "See?" they say, "Lefties think he was bad, too!" Hitchens' latest? Apparently he thinks that Clinton was a CIA spy in the anti-Vietnam community. Hold on, though. Wasn't one of Clinton's big bad things that made him unsuitable to be President his "draft dodging" (unlike the current inmate, who served honourably in a national guard post his daddy's friends arranged, for a bit, until he decided he couldn't be bothered turning up) and Clinton's participation in the anti-Vietnam community? If he was a CIA spy, surely that makes him a cunning hero to the wingnuts? Oops, that would require suppressing the knee-jerk anti-Clinton hard-wired responses.

I'm sorry, but the supposed crimes and misdemeanors of Clinton utterly utterly pale beside what's been done since then by the new mob. That Hitchens can sit there and continue to bang on about Clinton, while the current nutjobs turn the world into a scary place run for corporations, by corporations, with a cowed and silent populace unable to have a say in their lives, speaks volumes about how far he's fallen.

(For what it's worth, I think that Clinton wasn't a particularly good president. But given the choices that are likely in the US, he's about as good as the US voters are going to get. And compared to the current guy, well, as Eric Alterman puts it, "Thanks again, Ralph".)

via Maru at WTF Is It Now, a Salon interview with HST. (Aside: how great is the new 'see a crappy ad, get 24 hours of Salon Premium' policy? There's no way in hell I'd ever subscribe to something that gives money to Sullivan or to that disgusting arsehole Horowitz, but this I can deal with).

I've only just got my copy of Kingdom of Fear, so can't comment on the book. But certainly the interview is consistent with the first quarter of the book: