from Crikey .....

Meglomaniacal Abbott finally comes out of the cabinet

Andrew Dodd writes:

FEDERAL ELECTION 2010

Generally, Tony Abbott does humility pretty well. But in a couple of questions at the Rooty Hill RSL on Wednesday night his guard slipped and we saw another side of his personality.

from Crikey .....

Rundle: the topic is cancer - the 2010 election and the collapse of political legitimacy

Guy Rundle writes:

Physicist Stephen Hawking, who recently said humans should avoid seeking out aliens because they might colonise our planet if they noticed us, has now warned that mankind must colonise other planets or face extinction.

"I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," Hawking tells BigThink.com. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million.

‘For those who value our present way of life, the Greens are sweet camouflaged poison.’

Like a brat "playing" on a beach, Tony is happy kicking sand in our face... Buckets of uncosted policies, no abacus to be seen, just sand, a leaky toy boat, some cubes to be rearranged to spell "e-c-o-n-o-m-y" after having spelled "I-r-a-q" ... and a plug-the-hole board for infants under three.

Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott will officially launch the Coalition's election campaign in Brisbane today with a focus on tougher laws to stop people smugglers.

Mr Abbott will use his campaign launch speech to focus on the asylum seeker issue and outline plans for harsh penalties for anyone convicted of people smuggling.

Under the Coalition's proposal repeat offenders will serve at least 10 years in jail.

Yesterday Mr Abbott, his Deputy Julie Bishop and the Coalition's immigration spokesman Scott Morrison met with Nauru's president Marcus Stephen to discuss the island's asylum seeker processing centre.

Phoney Tony spent a lot of time this week demanding to know which was the real Julia Gillard. We might ask the same of him. No current political leader can chop and change like he does. Here are four Abbott quotes from yesteryear.

Tony Blair must be prosecuted, not indulged like Peter Mandelson. Both have produced self-serving memoirs for which they have been paid fortunes; Blair's, which have earned him a £4.6m advance, will appear next month.

from Crikey .....

meet a 'queue jumper'

by Y Dr Tanya Ahmed, a psychiatry registrar

Her brown eyes are blank. Her face is expressionless, her body motionless. She has no thoughts, no feelings, no purpose. She huddles in the corner of a stark hospital ward. She does not respond when her children kiss her. She hasn't drunk today, and hasn't eaten for days. If only she had the energy, she would find a way to die.

The respected economist and former Labor adviser Ross Garnaut has delivered a scathing critique of the political and economic records of the major two parties, accusing both of a failure of leadership over the past decade.

Neither party had a plan to deal with climate change and Australia's position on the issue was ''an extraordinary failure of leadership''.

Professor Garnaut said Kevin Rudd abdicated leadership by listening to advisers who rated lobbying by special interest groups and ''inchoate reactions'' from poorly informed members of the community above majority public support for action.