With a tiger's pounce that blindsided everyone, George Brandis has moved ruthlessly to carve out his own arts fiefdom. But in doing so, he has taken on an industry with a loud voice, writes Ben Eltham.

Politicians love a sporting analogy. Only war (the one waged on drugs, for example) gives sport a run for its money in the political metaphor stakes.

Peppering your speech with sporting references is seen as a way of avoiding that most unforgivable of political sins: appearing out of touch with the "average punter". Just think of Tony Abbott's "captain's calls" or Julie Bishop praising the PM for his talents in the "change rooms".

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"It's not unlike, you know, the way that a prop forward takes the ball up," said the Cronulla Sharks diehard.

Treasury officials will not be interrogated about the Abbott government's much-anticipated second budget this year by Australia's chief economists.

When Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg invented the movable type in 1439, he and his fellow printers discovered that the great advantage of simplifying the printing process was to make serious money by selling printed books for nearly the same price as hand-written manuscripts. By 1500, the price of books had dropped by 4/5ths.

We've publicly called for Mr Newman to resign as business advisor to the Australian Government over his misleading comments.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk will again move tonight to try to resolve the impasse over the Parliamentary Crime and Corruption Committee (PCCC).

A bizarre conspiracy theory about a military takeover of the US state of Texas has surfaced after the US military announced it would be taking part in a training exercise there.

Okay... Loades sells car insurance, house and apartment insurance... Loades' NRMA would be keen to have more cars on the roads. Though liberating Parramatta Road from traffic could be good, having new apartment blocks all along the way, the traffic will soon become more jammed than ever... Hum, Who knows. Unless the new road is a 3 lanes deep tunnel each way, all BELOW ground, Parramatta Road will remain a snake pit — especially if it is done as a half sunk monster as per the 1980s Greiner plan, with more people living along it.

As more US presidential hopefuls are coming to the fore, and pandering shamelessly to the religious Latinos, one has to wonder about all the various Christian sects, churches and denominations in that country, as well as the various schisms in the Muslim religion of the Middle East and in smaller numbers across the globe. 

We need to inspect the multiple origins of modern beliefs since 4000 years ago in the human brain, including that of the people and their excellently recorded delusions as being exclusively chosen by god.

As the Joe Hockey Budget is looming on the horizon one can only expect some mediocre tempering on the previous budget which is still mostly languishing in the doldrums of the Senate, for good reason. But as usual, Old Gus could be wrong and we may be surprised... I thought I'd jumped the gun in making some dire satirical predictions... 

Last night media watch gave us a lesson in ... Well I don't know what it was about...