What will presumably be the last Newspoll of the year records no change on a fortnight ago, with Labor’s two-party lead at 54-46. Labor grabs the lead on the primary vote, moving up two points to 39% with the Coalition up one to 38% and the Greens down one to 12%. For the first time in a while, Tony Abbott’s personal ratings are not appreciably worse than last time, his approval steady at 33% and disapproval up one to 58%. Bill Shorten is respectively down two to 37% and steady at 43%, and the size of his lead as preferred prime minister is unchanged, being 43-36 last time and 44-37 this time.
I’ve always though Waleed is pretty balanced for a leftie. I will miss him in 2015.
Apart from that religious bloke he has on Tuesdays.
Having cleaned the place of the verminous troll, I can relax and play with my son’s puppies again.
🙂
davidwh:
Where is Waleed going in 2015?
confessions@1399
Sorry to break it to the Dolt, but according to all and sundry, the Shahadda (sp?) flag that the nutcase forced people to hold had no specific meaning. Perhaps Dolt missed all that coverage on it ?
Perhaps the demand that this fruitloop made regarding being given an IS flag also went over the Dolts head ?
As far as Waleed Ali goes, perhaps the Dolt is jealous that Ali is so obviously more intelligent and is regarded with more cred, than the Dolt could ever hope for.
A sleeze like Dolt, seems to be a perfect match for a sleeze organisation like newscorpse.
Fess he has finished up on RN but not sure where he is going. I usually listen to Waleed daily on the long drive home.
confessions @1399
Can’t speak for bolthead, but it would not make any more sense if he asked the hostages to put up logos of Starbucks, a footy logo or his own face. He was there purely to gain attention, and I believe once he got it, it went down.
BB @ 1182
Excellent work. Spot on.
davidwh@1401
That’s why Dolt has so0 much problem with him. He is to Balanced for fringe dwellers like Dolt.
I was under the impression Aly was pencilled in as one of the regular hosts of The Project next year.
The ABC basically killed off his ‘Big Ideas’ show, and RN is facing serious cutbacks, so he probably figured it was a good time to move on.
davidwh:
I suppose he’ll still have his column in the SMH.
Raaraa:
Last night Chris Reason was tweeting from the Ch7 studios that the flag was still being held up against the window. But in any case, one thing you could never accuse Aly of being is an apologist for extremism.
I thought Waleed is going to be permanently on The Project and probably end up on other Ten shows.
A real shame he’s leaving the ABC, but I suppose Ten could use a bit more balance that isn’t just there for tokenism. However, I hope Waleed leaves Ten the moment they try to control what he can say.
I was at a conference where Charlie Pickering was one of the guests and did standup comedy. Among the sketches he made fun of news programs on commercial TV. He admitted that he left The Project when they kept telling him what he cannot say.
[ What sort of arsehole posts under the nickname of a Nazi general who used Jewish people as human mine detectors and was responsible for the deaths of Australians during a war. ]
I believe its reasonably well documented that Erwin Rommel made a point of handing Jewish prisoners taken during the fighting around Tobruk over to the Italians so that they were not subjected to persecution. He did have strong connections into the Nazi party but all successful German generals did, at least pre and in the early stages of WWII.
That said, from what i have read of the man i dont believe he would even consider wiping his arse with scum like our DF.
Some interesting commentary regarding #Illridewithyou initiative.
http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/illridewithyou-is-helping-attacks-on-it-are-not-20141216-1281fh.html
Ms Devine please take note.
SGH @1414
Did Chris Kenny really said that? The scum! Suddenly every other issue looks unimportant to him because that news piece is his baby?
[ I love it when Puff gets fired up Lizzy 🙂 ]
Actually so do i. She gets very entertainingly lyrical when the roar comes upon her. 🙂
[1381
jules
BTW – My wife’s grandad was a Rat of Tobruk you effing arsehole. Crawl back into your apple.]
My grandfather was on the frontline of the desert campaigns, and eventually died from complications from war wounds, not many years after it was all over, before seeing his grandchildren born. All we have left is a couple of blurry photos, an honourable service record, and a huge hole in our family.
Compare and contrast to the likes of gutless shit-flinging cesspit dwellers like DF.
SGH:
As with Devine’s reaction, why do these people feel so threatened by #illridewithyou?
Totally bizarre.
Puff the Righteous Dragon
🙂
confessions
It is very telling, isn’t it.
RE# 1414, what exactly did Miranda Divine say ?
[1296
meher baba
Re Miranda Devine: (And check out her father’s view of her as reported in the Latham Diaries).]
I have not read these diaries, so please continue with the story…
Ta 🙂
[1176
confessions
Peter Martin @1petermartin 2m2 minutes ago
Unbelievable. The lengths the former Victorian govt went to conceal the awful truth about East West Link: http://goo.gl/alnfb1 @joshgordo
Surely this is bordering on corruption?]
Federal ICAC, now.
Yeah, yeah, I know you are going to get burnt too, Labor.
Tough. Take your medicine and get on with cleaning up your side of the show.
[It is very telling, isn’t it.]
Very.
[
Andrew Bolt on Waleed Aly:
Waleed Aly, Australia’s most prominent apologist for extremists, in my opinion, says the Islamic flag Monis forces his hostages to hold up against the shop window had no specific meaning
How can this kind of crap get published?
]
Why don’t you tell us Andrew?
ABC 24 – ‘compelling’ viewing.
A guy in a purple dress and a funny hat waving a stick.
also, what was the headline on the DT that has gotten people so fired up ?
So, I see Desert Coward is still trying to hijack a tragic event to make it about him. What a pathetic individual. Maybe if we ignore him, he’ll wipe the chip crumbs off his face, waddle outside and appreciate the world for what it is and become a more pleasant person.
As for the siege, questions do need to be asked about how the justice system let a man with a history of violence, accused of murder, free to walk the streets. That’s the real question here. Not the straw man drummed up by attention-seeking cowards (who frankly exacerbate the situation by trying to segregate the community into an “Us v. them” mentality.)
BTW, I am not going to mention the gunman’s name once. I refuse to give him any publicity and make deranged copycats think that they’re going to get free publicity, if they do something equally as terrible. Frankly, he’s already gotten enough.
Just Me
That EW Link thing is scandalous!
Very good article by Laura Tingle in the AFR today. The graphs are also interesting. They seem to show that the budget structural deficit started around 2007, and the trajectory well before that.
BTW, seeing as there has been some discussion of the Shooters and Fishers party, Laura Tingle is the daughter of John Tingle, the former NSW MLC for the Shooters Party. I’m not from NSW so I don’t know how he performed in Parliament. However, I understand that he wasn’t the RWNJ that many might have suspected.
BK
Someone commented that Abbott supported the E-W Link without having read the business case. Sounds right. He then used it to try to bully Daniel Andrews.
I’m so glad Labor held out against it.
B.C.
Mega George wrote about it and was warning about what was going to happen back when Howard was still PM .
YB:
Devine was apparently scathing of the #illridewithyou. The DT front page of its afternoon edition yesterday linked the siege to IS and the ‘death cult’.
I believe the gunman was charged with being an accessory to his ex-wife’s murder, not with murder. His lawyer has also said, for what it’s worth, that the judge considered the case against him to be weak.
I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the facts of that case so I can’t say whether bail was appropriate. In general however, I think judges, who are better informed of the facts than we are, normally get it right (when given the discretion).
BK@1429
Equally scandalous is the Infrastructure PM (who promised the nation prior to the election that his government would not invest in any 100m+ project without a cost-benefit analysis) redirected 3 billion dollars to it.
I’m not sure what this “history of violence” is about – he had been a serial pest, but I don’t believe he’d been known as a violent individual prior to the cafe siege.
He was charged as an accessory to murder – a very different thing to being accused of murder.
And, of course, he was charged with a series of sexual assaults.
Very serious charges, no doubt, but not murder, and not a “history of violence”, and being charged is not the same as being guilty.
Unless you count offensive letter-writing as a “history of violence”.
He was screwed up, no doubt, and I certainly am not trying to defend him. I’m just not keen on seeing a whole laura norder feeding frenzy starting up with the goal of ensuring that no one ever gets bail again. That is not a solution.
BC
I recall John Tingle saying the numbers killed at Port Arthur would have been reduced if there were armed citizens present.
YB @1427
The PM edition of the DT mentioned “Death Cult”, implying that IS was directly responsible for that situation at the Lindt cafe.
Sexual assault is a form of violence, Jackol
CM @1428
We should take a page out of that incident in Ottawa, where instead of demonising the perpetrators, they instead celebrated the heroes who made the situation less worse than it could have been.
CM – yes, he had charges laid against him, but that doesn’t make a “history of violence”.
[We should take a page out of that incident in Ottawa, where instead of demonising the perpetrators, they instead celebrated the heroes who made the situation less worse than it could have been.]
That’s a good idea.
[I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the facts of that case so I can’t say whether bail was appropriate. In general however, I think judges, who are better informed of the facts than we are, normally get it right (when given the discretion).]
It always surprises me that random members of the public, with no awareness of the particular facts in a particular case nor experience of weighing up the various different factors required by legislation would presume, without any information, to know better than a judge. I suppose it’s easier to just go with the general feeling.
[the numbers killed at Port Arthur would have been reduced if there were armed citizens present.]
This assumes that an average citizen is as ready to use a weapon that may kill as a trained policeman.
Gunready citizens? Not in Australia, please.
confessions
[Devine was apparently scathing of the #illridewithyou. The DT front page of its afternoon edition yesterday linked the siege to IS and the ‘death cult’.]
Hard to see how anyone could object to #illridewithyou – but I guess Ms Devine found something. I’m curious what her gripe is – but at the same time, not curious at all.
The appropriation of this tragedy as ammo in the Culture Wars is expected, especially from the lunar right. What I didn’t expect was the bragging rights claimed by various news outlets in their coverage. That’s ghoulish and just plain f**ked up.
confessions@1433
How in the Hell can you be scathing of the #I’ll ride with you hashtag ?
Unless you’re an extremely self-centered and insecure individual ?
Meanwhile, the government is cutting the indigenous and remote eye health program. It costs very little ($5m) and is very effective. What a bunch of horrible people.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/comment-and-analysis/karma-bus-comes-around-for-joe-hockey-20141215-1275l1.html#ixzz3LvnBYVfa
http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/12/16/keane-the-day-the-australian-media-lost-its-credibility/
[There’s one phrase that guarantees anyone who uses it in relation to a tragic event is either a fool or the most vilely cynical manipulator: “the day Australia lost its innocence” — or yesterday’s variant, “the day Sydney lost its innocence”. The people inclined to use that phrase regularly deploy it in association with tragedies. The Bali bombings were, according to politicians and the media, “the day Australia lost its innocence”. But then, so was the Hilton bombing, and it was used about the string of gun massacres in the 1980s and 1990s that John Howard brought to an end with his gun laws. Australia losing its innocence has thus become a constantly repeated process, as if somehow we regain it between tragedies, only to be deprived of it next time.]
Speaking of laura norder feeding frenzies, just received a change.org petition:
Bleh.
The least Devine could do was ignore the hashtag. It’s like she actually want certain segtions of the community to actually live in fear.