News
There is growing Parliamentary support for an independent enquiry into Australian media practices, fuelled by the News of the World scandal in Britain, and the perhaps accompanying realisation that while Murdoch paper saturation was 40% over there, in Australia it is 70%. Say it after me: diversity!
Australia: land of the outback, friendly locals and overzealous security. As Czech president Vaclav Klaus discovered
when a security guard at the ABC TV building tried to force him to go through a security scanner. At which point Klaus, as a visiting head of state perhaps unused to being automatically suspected of terrorism, turned on his heel and left. How embarrassment.
Obama delivered an address to the nation yesterday in a further attempt to force the comically emboldened Republican leadership into giving ground on the stalled and potentially catastrophic debt negotiations
(and they were so close to a deal as well). This was immediately followed by the almost unprecedented move of a Republican House Leader going on national television and delivering a speech in reply in which he tried to suggest once more that the fault here lay entirely with those high-spending Democrats, who just wanted to waste all your tax money on frivolous projects. Which seems like as good a time as any to revisit this graph of spending on new projects under both Bush and Obama.
And as international finance flees the US dollar like rats off a ship sinking in its own ineptitude, the Australian dollar is losing its goddamn mind, with
an unheard of 110 US cent valuation seemingly imminent. Book your holidays now people. I'm gonna go to Hawaii!
The shameless Sarah Palin documentary/hagiography The Undefeated has bombed at the box office. What a goddamn, albeit sweet surprise.
The NATO forces currently bombing the living God out of Libya are starting to concede what once seemed unthinkable:
that Gaddafi may, after all, get his wish, after ceding power, to stay on in Libya. The country which, whatever else you might say about they guy, he has certainly made his own. This is likely to piss off the rebels currently doing most of the killing on the ground, but with a limited supply of troops, resources and international patience backing their cause, it could become much of a fait accompli. The fighting continues apace, with western rebels continuing to hold crucial towns on the way to Tripoli, but man it is going to turn into one gritty, gritty urban shitfight if Gaddafi makes them try and actually take Tripoli itself.
Syria has voted to allow opposition parties for the first time in 48 years!... So long as they are fully vetted by the government, pledge allegiance to the government and are not organised on any 'religious, tribal, regional, denominational, or profession-related basis, or on the basis of discrimination due to ethnicity, gender or race''. This has about as much chance of stemming the violence as I do of farting so loudly I break a window.
Somalia: still just so goddamn awful. Time to get our donation on.
Here's a chilling sequence of photographs of the true horror of last weekend:
New York's first gay weddings.
And now here's an actual chilling sequence of photographs of the true horror of last weekend:
Anders Breivik's warpath and its horrific aftermath. To be accompanied by the potentially awkward tendency he had to praise, by name,
the tactics of Australia's conservative authorities, such as John Howard, Peter Costello, George Pell, et al.
Finally, Glenn Beck is, once again, News You Can Use's Asshole of the Week. His crime this time:
making an allusion that the children attending the camp on Utoya where Anders Breivik killed 70-odd people sounded themselves a little bit "Hitler Youth". Thank you Glenn for your heartfelt, compassionate and well reasoned contribution. I sincerely hope you have your tongue torn out by angry marmosets.
Features
Annabel Crabb on Tony Abbott's war on facts, science, economics and even himself. A war hich we all appear to be eating up with the rabid enthusiasm usually reserved for Froot Loops and high grade heroin.
The New York Times writing definitively on the misbegotten political discourse that enables men like Anders Breivik.
Oddities/Curiosities
A strange and haunting account of the life of a woman in Brevard who managed to disappear without leaving her house.
And now a sequence of rare and astounding colour pictures of London during The Blitz. I think that guy is going to be waiting a while for the next bus.
Video
Some reasonably heartwarming footage of the first legal gay wedding in New York State, held on the precipice of Niagara Falls, in a ceremony that seems to prove conclusively that just because you're gay doesn't mean you automatically have good music taste.