It is a good thing that his wife is here too. For all the flak they have copped over the years, I’d say they are one of the great misunderstood love stories of the modern era, two people who were so besotted with each other, and for so long, that the apparent fairy tale of his relationship with Diana was doomed from the start, as a loveless PR exercise which did neither party any good.

As for that “Squidgygate” business with Camilla, anyone who is or has ever been in a relationship would shudder at the prospect of having their private conversations made public, as there would be a lot of other squidgies and pookies and snookies out there who would agree that it’s quite normal behaviour.

Between the endearingly left-field conduct of Charles, the decency of William, and the top-shelf, wholly commendable ratbaggery of Prince Harry, at least we will end up with a head of state who would make interesting company over a few beers. It’s just a pity that we can’t vote for them.

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/my-kind-of-oddball-arise-king-charles-of-australia/

We have to be kind and let the royal off the hook. We need to start a republic in Australia... Then the poor descendants of whoever with the biggest sword from the house of Grequo-Germanicus, won't have to be shuffled to the antipodes and inspect cooked produce in Richmond, Tasmania — one of the least populated place on earth after Antarctica.

Viva la Republica... Long live the republic... Es lebe die Republik... Няхай жыве рэспубліка...

In Australia too the art of punditry is dead, or close to it.

At a recent summit in Canberra, one of the more self-effacing members of the Press Gallery was asked to make a few predictions.

"The way we are travelling," he said "you would be better off following a bunch of blindfolded monkeys throwing darts."

The record of punditry through this year speaks for itself.

The minority government will collapse, and there will be an early election.

Kevin Rudd will reclaim the leadership, if not this month, then next month, or the month after that...

If he doesn't then Julia Gillard and the Government faces annihilation whenever the election is held.

Tony Abbott, on the other hand, is as safe as houses.

And 'that' speech on sexism was a shocker, guaranteed to backfire.

It's not a Canberra Press Gallery thing. Most of those predictions have been embraced at one point or another by regular columnists' right around the country.

It seems that as every opinion poll comes along, political judgments are made and then somehow snap frozen. There is no acceptance that the polls, and the politics, are subject to significant change.

Silver, the latest geek to make a name for himself in New York, would never make the call until the last minute. Only when the election is nigh would he crunch all the numbers.

Consumers of all this punditry have been badly let down this year, no doubt about it. But they shouldn't get too upset.

As we have seen yet again, the pundits, no matter how big their reputations, have practically no influence on election results.

Barrie Cassidy is the presenter of ABC programs Insiders and Offsiders. View his full profile here.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-09/cassidy-the-art-of-punditry/4361630?WT.svl=theDrum

A pundit is someone who offers to mass media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area (most typically political analysis, the social sciences or sport) on which they are usually knowledgeable (or can at least appear to be knowledgeable). The term has been increasingly applied to popular media personalities.[1] In certain cases, it may be used in a derogatory manner as well, as the political equivalent of "ideologue."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pundit_(expert)

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Gus: DEAD?... OMG!... I never noticed!... Actually I read it wrong... Cassidy talks about the "art" of punditry is dead... as if there was artistry in the telling of bullshit. No influence on the result?... Blimey, why are they keeping pestering us then? Why are there so many of them from Jones to Albrechtsen telling us what to think — about subjects they know squat about, when it won't matter a hoot on the result of the whatever? I'd say Barrie Cassidy fell off his high horse and misunderstood the mayo... The influence of crap is underrated here.

The pundits are here to create confusion and to promote support for their preferred dog... The more outrageous the dog, the more outrageous the pundit... The purpose is for the commentators to push a point of view — mostly rubbish — as if it was gospel. It works well. It works beautifully as long as one does not upset the apple cart too much by not having the words "common sense" thrown in. These pundits write the prose and talk the talk with such professional dexterity that, unless we do a double take, we'll buy the crap as truth...

The art of punditry is in the art of spin, in the advertising, in the sermons from the pulpits... I knew a priest once who did not have the gift of the gab and his sermons were crap and lengthy beyond longish... He lost nearly all his flock to another parish were the gobbledegook was wrapped up in glorious eloquent words by another priest — as a full-blown smart pundit for christ. 

The pundits are not dead, The art of punditry is still as crap as before, whether the pundits get their predictions wrong or right...

Pundits will bother us for years to come, with less and less references to "reality" (they never touch the stuff) and they will spread more bold crap that sometimes might hit the mark — thus the pundits will tell us they told us so, triumphally...

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Fox News host Megyn Kelly introduced Karl Rove in a just-concluded segment by saying that Rove had had a day to think about the presidential election and was ready with some reflections. One topic that Rove apparently wasn’t ready to discuss was his Ohio-related meltdown on the Fox News set on Tuesday night.

Yet Rove was available to speak to how dark and miserable and insignificant was President Obama’s victory at the polls. The highly successful political operative reprised some of the points from his Wall Street Journal opinion piece of today, noting that Obama’s vote totals had dropped by 9 million from 2008, that his margin of victory dropped from roughly 7 percent to 2 percent, and other negative indicia as well.

All this was evidence, Rove explained, that the president “succeeded by suppressing the vote.” Neither Kelly nor Rove examined how the alleged suppression squared with the highly documented Team Obama get-out-the-vote operation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/post/karl-rove-obama-succeeded-by-suppressing-the-vote/2012/11/08/bbf05b48-29d9-11e2-bab2-eda299503684_blog.html?hpid=z7

Now, let's be brave here... and allocate the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) directly on the laps of Rove... It was under his management that George the Littlus was elected twice. The first time with electoral fiddles in Florida... This moronic minus president gave the rich geezers tax cuts that the US could not afford and still cannot afford without creating a crater-like growing deficit. It was Bushit that went and spent moneys on toys, such as useless wars, with money he did not have. It was under  Bush da Crappus that regulations of the money market became so lax that even rating agencies were taking crap. It was under Dubya's watch that proper emission control (reductions) of CO2 did not happen... It was basically under Rove's Bush that the US took a dive into the ditch, socially and morally.

Rove should be proud. His job to make the next president's job much harder was done... So as Obama toughed it out, George W Mediocritus's star was being polished...

Bravo Karl Rove...

How should women be looked at? It's a question that is constantly debated but never really gets anywhere. No wonder. It's a weird question. Yet there's no denying it's also fundamental. For some, the answer is that women simply should not be looked at.

The solution is the burqa, or the veil. Muslim feminists can be persuasive when they insist it's a liberation for women, the hiding of their faces and bodies. They will point to the mass of highly sexualised images in the western media, and ask if that's really such a wonderful thing.

Lucy Kirkwood, in her Royal Court play NSFW, explores that territory, too. The first half of the play is set in an office where the work consists of creating images that are Not Suitable for Work. Doghouse is a fictional version of Nuts or Zoo, a magazine whose raison d'etre is publishing photographs of their readers' topless girlfriends. No one who works there bothers to hide their contempt for the readers or the girlfriends. But it's a free country, and if men want to ogle and women want to be ogled, why should they not facilitate the activity? It pays the rent, while these ambitious yet rudderless young people wait for better jobs in better publications to come along.

Sure, there's a bit of a crisis, when their readers' girlfriend of the year turns out to be 14. The staff all agree this is indefensible (and also that they too are the victims, because they were lied to). But the point is made. If the production and consumption of sexual images really is such harmless fun, why is there such strong consensus around the idea that some people are too young, too vulnerable, to take part in it? The visceral conviction in our culture that minors need protecting from this sort of exploitation is prima facie evidence that it is indeed exploitation, and that taking part in it is an important decision, not a trivial or casual one.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/09/looking-at-women-deborah-orr

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Most women's magazines have always annoyed me... Most of them have been financed by men and designed by women to place women as not much more than beauty product consumers... That is due to the advertising and to the premise that is due to "what woman want"... How many women do you know who do not want to look good (perfect)?... But these women's mags concentrate far too much on this subject alone and leave little room for intellectual matters, most of these concepts created in a vacuous way when tackled...  

There was an Australian magazine called Portfolio created and financed by women back then in the early 1980s (launched possible September 1984). It was quite successful (50,000 circulation) and looked into serious matters for (executive) women of Australia... It did contain some articles on fashion as well but the aim was to present women equal to men in pinstripes — while developing a new smart female image. It did the trick for many women who could draw inspiration and discover sisterhood connections, not against the men, but as part of the bigger picture, of business, government and relationships.

Magazines like Cleo and others, such as Cosmo, never reached the level of sophistication that Portfolio did. I am not sure but I think the magazine was sold to a greater publishing company, probably with a lesser understanding of the inspirational purpose of the magazine, to turn it into an advertising platform that eventually flopped commercially.

The media in this country is still "anti-women" despite its over-production of women's magazines and articles. This is why the media in this country failed to (DID NOT WANT TO) recognise the importance of Julia Gillard's response when Tony Abbott accused Julia of being sexist and misogynist. That speech was going against the massaged message that the media has been cosily portraying for years:

"look good and shut up... If you must say something powerful, educated and relevant, make sure that you are the female exception not the rule. And we will send our female journalist dogs after you to tear you apart."

So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch's ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America's democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.

In the American instance, Murdoch's goal seems to have been nothing less than using his media empire – notably Fox News – to stealthily recruit, bankroll and support the presidential candidacy of General David Petraeus in the 2012 election.

Thus in the spring of 2011 – less than 10 weeks before Murdoch's centrality to the hacking and politician-buying scandal enveloping his British newspapers was definitively revealed – Fox News' inventor and president, Roger Ailes, dispatched an emissary to Afghanistan to urge Petraeus to turn down President Obama's expected offer to become CIA director and, instead, run for the Republican nomination for president, with promises of being bankrolled by Murdoch. Ailes himself would resign as president of Fox News and run the campaign, according to the conversation between Petraeus and the emissary, K T McFarland, a Fox News on-air defense "analyst" and former spear carrier for national security principals in three Republican administrations.

All this was revealed in a tape recording of Petraeus's meeting with McFarland obtained by Bob Woodward, whose account of their discussion, accompanied online by audio of the tape, was published in the Washington Post – distressingly, in its style section, and not on page one, where it belonged – and, under the style logo, online on December 3.

Indeed, almost as dismaying as Ailes' and Murdoch's disdain for an independent and truly free and honest press, and as remarkable as the obsequious eagerness of their messenger to convey their extraordinary presidential draft and promise of on-air Fox support to Petraeus, has been the ho-hum response to the story by the American press and the country's political establishment, whether out of fear of Murdoch, Ailes and Fox – or, perhaps, lack of surprise at Murdoch's, Ailes' and Fox's contempt for decent journalistic values or a transparent electoral process.

The tone of the media's reaction was set from the beginning by the Post's own tin-eared treatment of this huge story: relegating it, like any other juicy tidbit of inside-the-beltway media gossip, to the section of the newspaper and its website that focuses on entertainment, gossip, cultural and personality-driven news, instead of the front page.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/20/bernstein-murdoch-ailes-petreaus-presidency

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This failed David Petraeus bid happened before the NY Post under Uncle Rupe's guidance decided to overtly support Mitt Romney... See image at top... Nothing wrong with the Post doing so, except it's depressingly obvious and to a great extend the idea of Mitt is based on false premises and promises, cleverly hidden from the public... Romney might have solved the "fiscal cliff" problemo by now, but it would have been done to the detriment of most for the benefit of a few... Social services would have been cut in order to afford the tax cut extensions to the rich... Sure some people will argue that "soclal" services are hand outs to lazy buggers, but in most intances it's the only way for most to make ends meet, despite working long hours — even in America... Especially in America...

Yes Uncle Rupe hates anything that is given away for nothing... But nothing is never nothing... When people can live better, they don't have to steal or create a revolution... It has happened before...