from Jeremy Buckingham

As I have said before, if Kevin was so keen on the ETS he would have carried on with it. He sort of blame others in his party for his decision to abandon it... Strangely Kev does not point the finger at Tony the Little Shit who sunk his baby.

We all know that Tony has no morals — well I mean proper human ethics and understandings of the mechanics of the earth, the only morals that count in my book...  The rest is just the management of the illusion of sin.

Ted Baillieu, Barry O'Farrell and Colin Barnett's state election victories may augur well federally for the Coalition and badly for Labor. There's clearly a huge swag of voters for whom Labor is on the nose, and while no one can be absolutely sure of the degree to which Labor's floundering federally has played a part, nobody sensible says it played no part.

Even the most jaundiced Coalition campaigner is enthused, and fear strikes in the hearts of Labor marginal seat holders.

I, along with the members of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, support the position that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four detainees charged with 9/11 crimes should be tried in federal courts and not in military tribunals.

So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.

But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.

According to information released by WikiLeaks, through The Sydney Morning Herald, Mark Arbib was a 'protected source' of the American Embassy in Canberra.

Writing in The Good Weekend on 12 March, Nikki Barrowclough says in an article, "The Power of One", American diplomatic cables refer to Arbib as 'a tough political operator and evidence-based strategic thinker' who had met with embassy representatives 'repeatedly throughout his political rise'. In other words he met with US representatives over a period of time on a frequent basis over a number of years.

Let's judge the moderates and extremists.

Once in power in 2007 who supported in practice the US led invasion of Iraq, an invasion which has killed more than 1 million civilians? Labor.

Who supported the invasion of Afghanistan and has kept Australian killers there? Labor.

Who supported and now directs the racist Northern Territory intervention and has expanded parts of the welfare quarantining program into other areas of Australia? Labor.

What is the life expectancy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians under Labor? 17 years.

Special flights to Dakar have ferried 167 foreigners, including French and Lebanese nationals, out of the Ivory Coast's violence-hit city of Abidjan, the French military says.

"Seventy-seven, mostly French, left overnight and 90 in the afternoon. These were not evacuations but options given to leave," French military spokesman Frederic Daguillon said on Sunday.

"Commercial flights have not restarted, these are special flights," he said.

Earlier, UN chief Ban Ki-moon demanded Mr Ouattara take action over a massacre of several hundred people blamed on his followers, a UN spokesman said.

On Monday President Obama received an award for transparency, which ironically was given to him during a closed, unannounced meeting. Bestowed upon the President from a group of transparency advocates, the ceremony took place in secret, even though - as of two weeks ago - it was supposed to be open to the press.

If I was an American lawyer who had fought for many years to secure habeas corpus rights for the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba - in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge to rule on my captors' reasons for slinging me in a legal black hole and leaving me to rot there forever - the latest news from the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. (also known as the D.C. Circuit Court) would make me sick in a bucket rather than believing any longer that the law - the revered law on which the United States was founded - can bring any meaningful remedy for the prisoners at Guantánamo.

More than any other individual - from a long list of contributors to Labor's appropriately punishing fall from grace in NSW - Edward Moses Obeid is challenged only by John Robertson, perversely the ALP's new leader, for the title of having wreaked greatest damage on the party that governed this state for 52 of the past 70 years.

from Crikey

Problems with pushing new coercive employment policies

Eva Cox writes:

Yesterday Prime Minister Julia Gillard opened the inaugural Gough Whitlam Oration with a few words "adopted from John Curtin, but ever identified with Gough Whitlam". Set against an increasingly hostile political environment, this speech opened with a welcome gesture - Gillard sensibly pointed to the "politics of inclusion".

Gillard pledged, that as "prime minister and federal Labor leader, it is my role to define what it means for Labor to be its best self". She promised Labor has "always understood that we must be the interpreters of the future to the present and must shape the future so it is one of fairness".