from Crikey .....

Tony Abbott's struggle with the truth

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

We need to talk about Kevin. Not the homicidal sociopath of Lionel Shriver's grisly best-selling novel, but the Kevin who, until a few weeks ago, was the most popular prime minister of all time.

The fall has been spectacular. Flying too close to the sun, the wax in the wings melted and Icarus plummeted to earth. So contemporary wisdom would have it.

Yet there is rather more to it than that. In the past 18 months there has been a relentless media campaign to destroy the Rudd government, the most savage onslaught upon a federal Labor administration since the Whitlam years.

from Crikey .....

Guthrie wins out in unfair dismissal case, judge slams Harto & Blunden

Andrew Crook writes:

Volunteers cleaning a beach in Louisiana

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he's dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

- Stevie Smith

from Crikey .....

Fee gouging: banks may take it up the class (action)

Adam Schwab writes:

from Crikey .....

Ruddquake: That's not a meltdown. This is a meltdown

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

from Crikey .....

Senator Milne: a few stings in the tail of the boring budget

Greens Senator Christine Milne writes:

When Pope John Paul II was still living in Poland as Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, he claimed that the security police would accuse priests of sexual abuse just to hassle and discredit them. (New York Times, 3/28/10). For Wojtyła, the Polish pedophilia problem was nothing more than a Communist plot to smear the church.

By the early 1980s, Wojtyła, now ensconced in Rome as Pope John Paul II, treated all stories about pedophile clergy with dismissive aplomb, as little more than slander directed against the church. That remained his stance for the next twenty years.

More than one unwitting visitor to Jerusalem has fallen prey to the bizarre delusion that they are the Messiah. Usually, they are whisked off to the serene surroundings of Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of the city, where they are gently nursed back to health.

It is an interesting irony that the patients at Kfar Shaul recuperate from such variations on amnesia on the very spot that Israel has sought to erase from its collective memory.

If a Jewish state were run by the secret police, Israelis could disappear without a trace. No contact with lawyers. Court-ordered muzzles on broadcast and print news media.

If a Jewish state were run by the secret police, there were be gag orders forbidding journalists to write even of the existence of the gag orders.

Thank God such a thing couldn't happen here.

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.

The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama's vow that his administration would launch a "relentless response effort" to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf.

One of them was dated Friday - the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling.

from Crikey .....

Here come the towelheads - Abbott hits his stride

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

from Crikey .....

Essential: Rudd is damaged goods, and badly damaging Labor in turn

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

Kevin Rudd has led Labor to the brink of a first-term defeat that was unthinkable just weeks ago, with Essential Media's new poll showing Labor's once-formidable lead giving way to a 50:50 2PP.

In 2008, Mexican authorities rejected a shipment of U.S. beef because the meat exceeded Mexico's regulatory tolerance for copper. The rejected meat was returned to the United States, where it was sold and consumed, because the U.S. has no regulatory threshold for copper in meat.

The whistleblower who exposed lying Penrith MP Karyn Paluzzano says it will be ''almost impossible'' to find a new job after his bruising experience with the NSW Labor Party.

Tim Horan, whose evidence to the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), prompted Ms Paluzzano to quit Parliament for rorting parliamentary expenses, told The Sun-Herald that Premier Kristina Keneally's staff had sought to discredit him every step of the way after he came forward.