Mr Abbott has also taken a swipe at the Labor party for not contesting yesterday's by-elections.

The Liberal party yesterday easily retained the northern Sydney seat of Bradfield and the Melbourne electorate of Higgins.

The Labor party did not field a candidate in either seat.

Mr Abbott says it is important for political parties to contest elections.

"I've never felt comfortable with political parties opting out of a fight," he said.

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So, the boxing monk missed out on his by-election quota of biffo, which according to the ancient testament is quite high — especially streaming from a vengenful god banishing people — despite claims to the contrary by Big Joe. Meanwhile, the Labor party might have thought better not to waste money and effort on a majority of rich religious loafers who won't be voting for them anyway...

from Turnbull, with love, to Tony the bullshit-spreader

"First, let's get this straight. You cannot cut emissions without a cost. To replace dirty coal fired power stations with cleaner gas fired ones, or renewables like wind let alone nuclear power or even coal fired power with carbon capture and storage is all going to cost money. To get farmers to change the way they manage their land, or plant trees and vegetation all costs money. Somebody has to pay. So any suggestion that you can dramatically cut emissions without any cost is, to use a favourite term of Mr Abbott's, 'bullshit'. Moreover, he knows it.

"Secondly, as we are being blunt, the fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change. They do not believe in human caused global warming. As Tony observed on one occasion, 'climate change is crap', or if you consider his mentor, Senator Minchin, the world is not warming, it's cooling and the climate change issue is part of a vast left-wing conspiracy to deindustrialise the world."

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Mal, Dont forget what the cockroach said...: ""But those who know me know that I would never attack Tony in front of Malcolm. I would reserve my vitriol for others." Vitriol???

This does not mean Julie would never attack Tony nor would she never attack You, Mal, behind your back... Julie Bishop is her own woman... but a protege of Minchin... who has been using her as a conduit for information and ways to undermine whom he does not like... On the issue of global warming, Senator Minchin is an idiot like all the other deniers —including the little bullshitter himself, Abbott...

They simply don't want to know...

see toon at top...

From Unleashed

Dr Robert Dean is a barrister and former Liberal member of the Victorian Parliament.

...

What is really disappointing is that the Howard conservatives didn't form a party and peddle their wares; they infiltrated my party and took it over from the inside, leaving me without a party that believes in social progress, save for the Labor Party - which means no party at all because, for liberals, the road to social progress is via individualism, combined with equal opportunity and a safety net, whereas for Labor the road is via collective institutions and central manipulation. The two roads never meet.

But what is worse for Menzies liberals, is that liberal MPs in the Liberal Party - 50 of them, as opposed to 35 conservatives - let it happen. The only thing worse than allowing such a vengeful fracas to occur is to then be too gutless to win it when you have the majority.

....

read more of this unleashed at the ABC

Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott will use today's frontbench reshuffle to promote Coalition MPs who spoke out against the emissions trading scheme.

Mr Abbott won the leadership from Malcolm Turnbull a week ago after a damaging public stoush over climate change policy.

Today Mr Abbott is expected to announce his new frontbench and former Howard government minister Kevin Andrews will be promoted, as will Sophie Mirabella, Barnaby Joyce, Bruce Billson and Tony Smith.

Senator Joyce will probably replace Helen Coonan as finance spokesperson and as a consequence will have to learn to toe the party line and support shadow cabinet decisions.

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Joyce can toe the line with a "jesuit" thughead like Abbott... They'll be like peas in a pod. No probs. They all believe the world was created in six days by god and that evolution is a plot by scientists to derail religious fervour... And they all subscribe to the concept that the earth was created to be used for the benefit of god's good people who have to multiply like rabbits and have to conquer every inch of the planet.

The main horrid problem for me is that Abbott is a very clever forceful spruiker — who knows most of the trickery in the book — and who is hell bent on collecting the vavering intellectual detritus of humanity — those who have little understanding of sciences and those who do not question the ommnipotence of their "god". Even some errant scientists fall into this category: clever people with a religious narrowcast distorted view of reality... And the bell curve does not lie, most of humanity in the developed world — and the rest — fits the consuming low-intellectualism detritus diagnostic. We've been fed on the fattening supply lines for yonks. As a majority, we don't ask the hard questions, we consume... me included.

As the Copenhagen blabfeist starts, the concensus amongst those — mostly scientists and nut-cases like me — people who know the real problem of global warming, is that whatever we do there will be like pissing in the wind to extinguish a bush fire.... But to me at least the gabfeist is a start towards the recognition there is a problem. AND A PROBLEM THERE IS: GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL.

So at least we can shift the median thinking pattern on the bell curve, and smart intellectually-advanced politicians (possibly an oxymoron) will be able to make us swallow the bitter pill of harsh solutions, with an iron fist... But first these smart politicians would have to convince (possibly using the army) the banks — the money men who whatever happens, ETS or not, will count the beans and make huge profit — to work heavily in financing low-scale high efficiency solutions, then vanish.

We need to be carbon neutral by 2015. Oil, gas and coal companies have to prepare for folding shop by then. This won't happen of course unless the warming which, despite what the deniers say, is going up relentlessly — takes a turn for the worse...

May a plague of cockroaches infest the abodes of the deniers, including that of Abbott and Joyce. Amen.

Peace.

http://www.smh.com.au/multimedia/environment/changing-global-temperatures/20091202-k5vv.html

Ah Gerard, that's democracy commenting for you... and dreaming psephologist can and will get it wrong...

Fantasy in reporting or in predicting politics is as solid as ginger bread in a Brothers Grimm tale... We never learn. And the unpleasant double standard of reporting the catholicism of our precious leaders, Rudd and Abbott, is annoying, making us aware — that as the two men are profoundly convicted in their beliefs — Rudd does not let it affect him (much) in his social and governmental duties, while Abbott is there to change the social perceptions according to his own arse.

This is some of what Gerard has to say...:

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There is also an unpleasant double standard here involving Tony Abbott's Catholicism. On Friday Manne wrote that "very many Australians will not vote for a Catholic party leader whose religious convictions fashion their politics". Manne was the chairman of The Monthly when it ran Rudd's essay on the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 2006, and enthusiastically endorsed Rudd's religious convictions at the time. The views of Rudd and Abbott on social issues are not far apart. Yet it seems, according to Manne, Rudd's religious convictions are acceptable while Abbott's are not.

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In a bizarre article in The Australian on Friday, Robert Manne, a politics professor at La Trobe University, canvassed not only a victory for his friend Hamilton but also "the destruction of the Liberal Party" this week. Manne acknowledged some of his views were "fantasy" but it was difficult to work out what part of his article was fantasy and what was academic analysis. Most teachers would fail a paper like this if it were presented as a university essay.

Manne also made his position clear on the Liberals, referring to the party's "troglodyte-denialist wing" and Abbott as the "troglodyte-in-chief". Such language seems acceptable in the La Trobe University politics department.

Judith Brett, Manne's professional colleague, did not throw the switch to fantasy or engage in labelling. Even so, her analysis was very similar to Manne's. Writing in the Herald on Saturday, she said that "the Liberals risk becoming a down-market protest party of angry old men in the outer suburbs". She also said the Liberals were "the natural party of the big end of town and of the big producer groups".

In fact, big business and the big producer groups are willing to co-operate with whichever party is in government. The core of the Coalition's support turns on medium to small business, farmers and middle-income earners.

....

According to O'Dwyer, the Liberals gained votes in such suburbs as Carnegie and Murrumbeena, which are not the high socio-economic parts of Higgins, where she received strong support from young married women. So much for Brett's analysis. Or perhaps fantasy is a better word.

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Gus: Yes Gerard, isn't it obscene? Young women, possibly mothers, supporting Tony Abbott and his clique of deniers!!!... The kids, when they grow up, will be the ones bearing the full brunt of Tony's brilliant carelessness and of the idiocy of their dilettante mothers... But that's the way democracy works. It does not mean they get it right, it just means that they believe Tony represents the illusion they believe in, Labor stinks and the Greens are cave-dwellers... Opinions not based on proper science of course — as humanity is ruled by emotions, nappy manufacturers and religious brain-washing, you know that... On top of that, one has to bring in "costs"... The voodoo of spending "money" on something that can't be displayed on a shelf or does not have the world "realty" — like in real-estate, behind it... Anything that costs money as well as reduces our air-conditioned comforts has to be bad. When one lives in the money belts of loaded suburbia, in secluded mansions where affluence is often greater than intelligence, things like the understanding of global warming and elections are going to be skewed... But perceptions can change... Intelligence can be put to greater use than to create pools of cash on credit, though the habit of voting conservative is hard to break.

So I'd suggest Robert Manne and Judith Brett were pushing a barrow of hope that the majority of voters might wake up from the torpor induced by their "hard-earned" comfort zone... No go. The majority is still in the padded doldrums of individual money making and swilling — as well as in the thralls of selling sumpthin' from the carbon teat... while, god-be-my-witness, those ugly priests of global warming are trying to stop the flow — the bastards... Still, more than 40 per cent of the voters have woken up and went for the cave-dweller mob. Not bad considering the uneasy position they are canvassing: the money now or the planet in one hundred years? Easy choice wouldn't you say?

"down-market protest party of angry old men in the outer suburbs"...??? I wish. The problem is that good thinking people, including young ones, are being swallowed by the exploitative Abbott spin, because it comforts their easy picture of their own cashed-up illusions: the earth is not warming because we say so.

Some people sell their soul... Some don't... it's irrelevant, as meanwhile the planet cooks...

see toon at top....

When I was young the temper of the contests between Catholics versus any other form of Christianity, was at its peak - or it seemed that way to me.

These were the years up to and including WW II.  During these years the Catholicism of Hitler and Mussolini became an issue in the allied nations. Both were blessed by the Pope, even when Mussolini was reported as having Ethiopian leaders bound hand and foot and dropped from aircraft and the Irish were fueling German submarines whose objective was to starve England by sinking millions of tons of allied shipping along with their crews.

Catholicism was as much a bigoted and cruel “bonding” reason as it was in the days of the Spanish Empire.  An Italian friend of my family was constrained to put a Greek flag on his fruit shop window.  But, strange as it seems, the religion had become an issue even more so as the supposedly poor Irish (like Joe Kennedy in the US) were becoming more and more wealthy and magnificent Catholic schools and churches were popping up everywhere.

I well remember a young lady to whom I was attracted and upon discovering that I was Protestant suddenly considered that I had an awful smell about me.  Funny how stupid little things like that can hurt so much.  I remember my brother, who had qualified at Fort Street High School (big time in those days) with honors and who was denied employment in the Newspaper the Daily Mirror because he wasn’t Catholic same as Mark Foys and others. 

I remember even when I joined the Navy in 1957 that your religion was absolutely necessary to be declared and even then, the supposed superiority of the Catholics was still a pain in the bum.

I have not found Kevin Rudd in anyway abusive of his position as P.M. due to his Catholicism – quite the contrary – he seems to put his religion aside when dealing with matters of concern to all religions but, without having to betray his own beliefs.

Conversely, the all too open and damaging servitude of Tony Abbott to Cardinal Pell, who in my opinion is an “Inquisition” type believer in the most ancient and unpleasant dictates of his church - is certainly enough to turn me off him.

However, I believe that, contrary to the absence of any such problem with Kevin Rudd, the religious split in the political parties and the public in general may yet again raise its ugly head.  Remember Cardinal Mannix and the Democratic Labor Party?  What a mess that attempted take over caused in the politics of Australia.

And now they have elected a Hitler Youth member as Pope.  Is that a case of forgive and forget or one of sadder things to come?

God Bless Australia.  NE OUBLIE.

G'day Gus,

My information is that Tony Abbott was introduced to boxing by the Catholic Church and he is reported as wearing headgear and large gloves (by memory 16 ounces) when he stepped in the ring.

When I was a Physical Training Instructor in the Navy we were not allowed to wear protective headgear nor when we volunteered to teach boxing to the Catholic "wild boys" in (if I remember) the Morning Star Catholic reformatory at Mornington Peninsula Victoria.

I well remember one case where a young man was allowed “shore leave” by the Monks for good behavior – but on the condition that he returned at a certain time on a Sunday night.

We happened to be there on that Sunday night when the boy honored his commitment by arriving as agreed however, the Police followed him.  To keep his promise he had stolen a car so that he would be on time.

I think there is a moral there.

God Bless Australia.  NE OUBLIE.

The Opposition Leader was scheduled to make the announcement Thursday afternoon.

Senator Joyce will be Coalition spokesman on water issues.

Mr Robb has not held a shadow portfolio responsibility since last year when he withdrew from the Coalition front bench due to illness.

Senator Joyce had embarrassed the Opposition with comments on state debts, and by slips of the tongue confusing millions with billions.

Mr Abbott said earlier today the Nationals Senate leader was “an unorthodox politician’’ who did "a very good job in that (finance) portfolio’’.

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Gus: I heard Abbott on the box blame Labor for Barnaby's demotion... What a rat in smugglers!.

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By online political correspondent Emma Rodgers

Posted 3 hours 52 minutes ago

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has appeared on a Melbourne gay and lesbian radio station in an attempt to explain his recent comments about being "threatened" by homosexuality.

On a recent 60 Minutes appearance Mr Abbott said he felt "a bit threatened" when asked about homosexuality.

When asked to clarify his comments a few days later he said homosexuality "challenged the orthodox notions of the right order of things".

Mr Abbott took to the airwaves of community radio station Joy FM this morning and was quizzed in a wide-ranging and lengthy interview on gay adoption, gay marriage, discrimination laws and homophobia.

He conceded his comments to 60 Minutes were a "poor choice of words".

"I think blokes of my generation and upbringing do sometimes find these things a bit confronting," he said.

"But the truth is, as we get older, we mellow.

"People close to me are gay and I'd like to think it hasn't made me love them any the less or treat them differently."

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Any Tony's backflip porkies will do to try to catch votes... On this site, we're way older than he is and gay issues are no issues. Sure we might make fun of generals denigrating gays in the army but it's lampooning the idea the general is canvassing...

And "Robb of the back dog mornings" in charge of shadow finances?... "Jeffrey? come back!"

See toon at top...