A new ReachTEL poll for Sky News records one of the better results for the Coalition of recent times, at least on the headline two-party figure of 51-49 to Labor, which compares with 52-48 in the last such poll three weeks ago. However, the primary vote numbers currently available suggest a Labor lead of at least 53-47 if preferences from the 2016 election are applied. Those numbers are Coalition 33%, Labor 34%, Greens 8%, One Nation 11% and others 6%, with 9% undecided. A follow-up question will have prompted the undecided for a forced response, but we don’t have those numbers at this stage. If the undecided are excluded from the result as published, the primary votes are Coalition 36%, Labor 37%, Greens 9% and One Nation 12%, which plays out as 53.3-46.7 on previous election preferences if those from parties other than the Greens are treated the same way.
The poll also finds Malcolm Turnbull leading 54.5-45.5 on preferred prime minister, compared with 54.1-45.9 last time; Malcolm Turnbull’s performance rated as very good or good by 29% (up two) and poor or very poor by 37% (up half a point); and Bill Shorten rated very good or good by 28% (up two) and poor or very poor by 40% (up one). Power and gas prices were named as the biggest contributor to rising living costs, compared with 16% for groceries, 11% for health services, 6% for public transport and 5% for petrol; 75% favouring government support for renewable energy over coal; and 47% supporting a change to the Constitution to create an indigenous advisory body, with 29% opposed. The poll was conducted last night, from a sample presumably around 2300.
I can really recommend San Pellegrino Pompelmo soda…16% grapefruit juice…very refreshing
Grapefruit and limes are in a class of their own.
Washington Post
1 hr ·
In a move that reflects his interest in working with Russia, President Trump has decided to end a covert CIA program supporting Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad. Read more: http://wapo.st/2uRFMAn
Confessions
Damned good news. Much of the “aid’ for years has ended up in the hands of the head choppers and Al Qaeda outfits.
Itza….they certainly are. Then there are these:
Yurrita Conservas
Cantabrico Anchovies
from the Basque coast….unbelievable…
It might be, if Russia wasn’t actively supporting the other side.
Russo-Iranian hegemony in the Levant is a done deal…and a deal done by Trump.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/22/abbott-issues-rallying-cry-and-claims-turnbulls-remarks-back-warringah-motion
Libs shadow-boxing
A R
Russia only stepped in seriously when Assad became in real danger of falling . By that stage the FSA were irrelevant, the jihadists ruled the roost. Assad falling would have meant Syria being taken over by the head choppers. Not only that there was a serious chance Iraq would have as well. Is that what you would have wanted ?
William; can you please delete my latest post (6:45pm).
zeh @ #597 Friday, July 21, 2017 at 9:58 pm
To clarify
s & u deprecated
strong & em, better than b and i
Zeh or anyone else who understands HTML, just what exactly does ‘deprecated’ mean?
New and better ways of doing it. If your writing new code use the new ways.
frednk @ #962 Saturday, July 22, 2017 at 7:01 pm
I am happy to change to the prevailing style (sic), and it is easy enough to fit in with the prevailing ‘two legs bad, four legs good’, but I see no good reason for it, and the people concerned never say why the new system is better.
I simply can’t see why strong is better than b, and em is better than i. They are just codes to get a particular result, from where I stand.
You say tomahto, and I say tomaeto.
poroti @ #960 Saturday, July 22nd, 2017 – 6:39 pm
Wanted? No. But nothing that I would actually want is/was a realistic prospect in the Middle East.
Would I have been willing to settle for that, as a necessary and unfortunate waypoint along the way towards letting the Middle East sort out its own destiny? Yes. I don’t think the region has any real chance at stability until all of the foreign actors get out and the local population exercises its own right to self-determination.
Probably that does mean that in the short-term, the people with the guns and the extremist ideology that says that using them is fine will assert control. But it’s not like that hasn’t happened in other states, or that it’s impossible to quarantine them to their own territory.
Then either the sane people stuck with them rise up and rebel, or the extremists sabotage the viability of their state by butchering and/or displacing its people, or they realize that chopping off heads isn’t a workable way of running a nation and moderate their views and actions a bit.
That’s an ugly, bloody road. But probably not any uglier and bloodier than ceding the region to Russia and letting them prop up a brutal regime that’s discovered that you can have a viable state that butchers its own people, so long as you’ve got the support of a large and technologically advanced foreign army on your side.
I guess the point is, all the (plausible) options are bad. I wouldn’t want any of them, though I don’t think that makes Russia less bad than any other alternative. They’re just bad in different ways, and for different reasons.
and while we are talking accepted and deprecated:
New and better ways of doing it. If your* writing new code use the new ways.
* you’re
A R
The “Russians” in the ME not “less bad” than the head coppers . Puhleese. How is Hilary’s Libya going or Shrub’s Iraq ?
Tom
The newer tags have a semantic meaning which means, I think, that they can be used by other code. For instance a particular style sheet could change the result so (for example) strong is rendered by a particular colour or font size and similarly for me.
An html expert might be able to confirm this. I presume using the semantic meaning in case code would be simpler than writing code to detect b or i text and reformatting it
me=em. GRRRR
ajm @ #967 Saturday, July 22, 2017 at 7:26 pm
Surely I could do exactly the same with setting the b in my style sheet to a particular colour or font size?
And case = css
As I understand, strong and em were introduced to deal with the brave new world where you might not be experiencing the content visually — it may be being read to you by an audio reader. So if something’s in strong tags, that will be emphasised on the page by appearing in bold, whereas the audio reader will shout at you or something. But if you’re not using bold for that reason, and just want it to appear as such on the screen, bold tags are still the way to go.
Tom,
You could, but then if you wanted to change how the document looks, you would have to change every instance. With the newer version you just need to change one statement in the style sheet.
Poroti
Saturday, July 22, 2017 at 7:26 pm
A R
The “Russians” in the ME not “less bad” than the head coppers . Puhleese. How is Hilary’s Libya going or Shrub’s Iraq ?
As Chou En Lai would remind us, it’s too early to tell.
don @ #970 Saturday, July 22nd, 2017 – 7:29 pm
Yes. I believe the difference is that semantically speaking one wouldn’t expect using <b> to do anything (or convey any meaning) beyond changing the typeface. With the other tags that isn’t the case. There’s some reasonable discussion of this here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element/b
Oooo I love it when youse computer people talk dirty 🙂
poroti’s arguments in justification for his position on the Middle East are sooo simplistic and naive. Still, he’s got a right to them. 🙂
poroti @ #967 Saturday, July 22nd, 2017 – 7:26 pm
I guess we’re all about to find out. Give it a decade or so, and we can see how Putin’s Syria compares.
AR
We already know how Hilary’s Libya and Shrub’s Iraq has turned out. It ain’t pretty. Not forgetting Rudd’s leading the charge against Libya.
poroti,
‘Shrub’s Iraq’, as you so quaintly put it, isn’t turning out too bad post Saddam Hussein and the Baathists. Syria should be so lucky. The ‘Head Choppers’, again as you so colourfully put it, have been routed finally, and the country now has the opportunity to go ahead with some semblance of a democracy. Which is a pretty rare thing in the Middle East.
So you would have preferred Saddam, Uday and Qsay to still be in power there!?!
Great to see the “Liberals” fighting amongst themselves, the Right faction at war with the Far Right. Hopefully it can go on for years, with the two sides knocking each other out of the ring like Howard and Peacock during the Hawke era, allowing Labor a free run in 2018/19 and enough in Government to purge the Howard-Abbott* legacy.
* Turnbull basically having none other than to maintain and extend Abbott’s.
Apparently you would also prefer to still have the Ghadaffi family in power in Libya too.
???
From PvO’s column in BKs links, right towards the end…
Also thanks to BK for your links
“Turnbull has never been a shrinking violet. If he holds the philosophical convictions his moderate credentials and past comments on climate change, for example, have suggested, isn’t it time to crash or crash through?”
Most journalists qualify Trumble’s beliefs with an ‘if’, but then go on to assume the he holds progressive ideas as an axiom and plough on.
When will a noted journalist put forward the position there is no evidence he holds these convictions that his past comments suggest and go on from there?
Also who was Kenny suggesting is that devising policy from the head and who from the heart in his column today ? On the assumption that a policy from the ‘head’ is an evidence based response to reality in the face of what has worked and what hasn’t, and policy from the ‘heart’ is an instinctive reaction either for self preservation or yearning?
C@Tmomma
Do you have even the slightest clue about how it is in Libya ? Obviously not. Do you think it Iraq is much better now that Saddam has gone ?
C@Tmomma
Is it true? Belle has nominated for pre-selection?
c@tmomma @ #978 Saturday, July 22, 2017 at 7:53 pm
SRSLY?!?!?!?!
Have you been living in a cave for the last 14 years?
So you would have preferred Saddam, Uday and Qsay to still be in power there!?!
That’s an interesting point. The other question is, was it worth 15 years’ of war and chaos (and that assumes things settle down soon). Bush’s invasion of Iraq always looked like a harebrained attempt to recreate something like the end of communism is Eastern Europe – just topple the bad guy and it’s all sunshine and democracy. All this under cover of a trumped up charge of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. At the very least the exercise was poorly thought through, with no end game and no plan B.
I don’t know the answer, but maybe Bush senior got it right. Get Iraq out of Kuwait and keep it contained.
poroti,
Do you have even the slightest clue about how it is in Libya ?
Actually, yes, I do. Divorce from Authoritarianism is a messy thing. You seem to prefer Authoritarians. Sad.
Do you think it Iraq is much better now that Saddam has gone ?
Yes I do. At least the people are in charge of their country’s destiny now. And it’s finances, via a democratically-elected government. They need to go through a rebuilding phase now that they have purged ISIS. However, if you asked them I think the Iraqis would much prefer to be in the position they are today than worrying about whether Saddam’s goons would come a-knocking at their door. You, apparently, would prefer to be onside with the goons and Saddam. Sad.
Fighting in the ME will stop, and they will stop chopping each other up when they get sick of death. Until that happens, nothing will change.
william bowe @ #970 Saturday, July 22, 2017 at 7:32 pm
Thanks William. That makes a lot of sense.
In terms of the rationale, and the people involved, if not the common sense.
Sounds to me like the touchy-feely, ahead of the curve, pony tail gang got control of the levers.
I will not bother fixing my b and i tags, given your assessment, which I value.
Here’s some of the crimes Gadaffi committed against the Libyan people:
The bastard!!!!!
I’ll bet the Libyan people are so grateful for being liberated from these atrocities.
Revealed – the real reason for special forces troops being present at that Turnbull press conference earlier this week, and why they had to don gas masks: http://www.brokennews.com.au/2017/07/17/special-forces-wear-gas-masks-epic-turnbull-fart/
Dan Gulberry,
SRSLY?!?!?!?!
Have you been living in a cave for the last 14 years?
Okay, wiseacre, explain to me how living under the yoke of oppression of an Authoritarian ruler, like Saddam Hussein or Bashar Al Assad, is better than the necessarily messy rupture that has occurred there in order to free the people from that?
You may want to point out all the death and destruction which has occurred since the Iraq War started, but I don’t think that’s relevant now that the country has been through all that it has in order to create a new democratic Iraq. I honestly don’t think Haider Al Abadi is such a bad guy to be leading Iraq in a new direction now.
I also acknowledge that I marched against the Iraq War, twice. I believe there was a better way to remove Hussein than what was instituted. That being, the phoney pretence of the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. However, I will take the removal of a despot over leaving him in place any day.
This response on a blog says it all:
So CSS can override both b and strong.
And the rationale is from the pony tail brigade.
And b means bold, which is what I mean. Bugger the ‘strong emphasis’, whatever that means, they can have that all on their own. I am trying to put up a web page.
Maybe color (sic) needs upgrading too. Green = cool, restful. Blue = ethereal. Red = angry or emotional. May they rot.
Dan Gulberry,
And wouldn’t the ideal situation be that all those things you mention were provided by a democratically-elected government to it’s people!?!
Maybe we should all read this update from Mosul?
http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2017/mosul/liberation/
I got used to writing reports for executives who don’t read the detail. I always use bold, italics, headings, bullet points, larger fonts to draw the reader’s attention to the things I thought they need per to read. That plus putting the bottom line at the top.
If you want to make sense of what L G H was going on about yesterday, then maybe you should read this article, it’s a lot better put about the same sort of stuff:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/the-strange-origins-of-steve-bannons-nationalist-fantasia
C@t
I don’t claim to be an expert on the Middle East but there are people much more informed than I who say that ISIL was a direct result of the Iraq war.
Add all the death and destruction that organisation has wreaked on the world to the million or so Iraqi people killed during the war itself and it doesn’t look like such a great result to me.
c@tmomma @ #993 Saturday, July 22, 2017 at 8:31 pm
I’ll agree with that, but only if you can name me one democracy that provides all of those things to its citizens.
I can’t get with the proposition that the end (the restoration of dictatorships) justifies the means (the killing and/or maiming of millions and displacement of millions more) in the ME.
Nearly everything that has occurred in the ME since the end of WW1 is attributable to misconceived and mal-executed western policies. The point we have now reached- a point that is very far from peace – is also attributable to these same failures.
The losers from these policies have certainly been the peoples of the central Asia and the ME, who have borne every affliction and depravity. And of course, the losers have also included the west. Our interests, values, goals and settled institutions have been corrupted just as surely as lives, dignity and treasure have all been squandered.
Really, it is only because the west has such vast strength in the first that these losses have barely registered. But there is no doubt at all. We have lost and we have been the instrument of our own failures. The Right-pop flash-backs and uprisings, the political decadence they signify, form a part of this defeat. No mistake at all. We must begin to learn from all this.
This says it all to me (from that investigative report of Mosul I linked to earlier):