Courtesy of The Australian, the latest Newspoll has the Coalition’s two-party lead down to 52-48 from 53-47 three weeks ago, from primary votes of Coalition 43% (down one), Labor 33% (doen one), Greens 11% (up one) and One Nation 4% (steady). Scott Morrison is steady at 68% approval and up two on disapproval to 29%, while Anthony Albanese is respectively steady at 41% and down two to 38%. Morrison’s lead as prime minister has nonetheless widened very slightly, from 59-26 to 60-25. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Saturday from a sample of 1509.
Capitalism in a time of plague……
https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/download-12-1024×853.jpeg
Give me the beat now and free my soul.
I want you to get lost in this rigmarole
And, drift aways………
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-10/gladys-berejiklian-backs-dominic-perrottet-over-icare-scandal/12541394
Greensborough Growler:
Monday, August 10, 2020 at 7:06 pm
[‘I think Nicky is guilty of horrifying hyperbole and ineffective literacy in his arguments.’]
Really, pal, you accuse others of this & that, but where’s your substantive critique? It’s just more of the same: belittle others who possess original thought, very much unlike you.
SNIP
ABC on screen label says nothing about Libs responsibility for aged care stuff up. Somebody not taking much notice could easily es it as a State labor problem.
Add Trump to MT Rushmore, change the name to MT Flush Sore.
This is huge for Afghanistan. Up until now the Taliban had refused to deal directly. The Loya Jirga is the grand tribal council of the Pashtun tribes. Last one I remember made a decision which pretty much sealed the fate of the US mission. The Americans had out stayed their welcome after a couple of years and became seen as an occupier rather than a liberator. A loya jirga was called and decided to throw their support behind the Taliban. They were not great fans of the Taliban but the Taliban were the only people still resisting what was becoming seen as an army of occupation.
Sadly the brave journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad who documented the ins and out of those early years did not live to see this day. Kidnapped and murdered by , it is believed, Pakistan naval intelligence.
https://tolonews.com/afghanistan/taliban-ready-begin-peace-talks-week-spokesman
The ABC has now moved up to describing the Victorian quarantine issue as “botched”. As for the decline in cases, well that’s heartening but…
Kevin has his say
Kevin Rudd
@MrKRudd
·
2h
Aged care facilities are a clear-cut responsibility of the federal government, not the states. Everyone has known from the get-go that Covid-19 is potentially lethal for the frail aged. What on earth has the Morrison Government been doing to prepare aged care facilities?
I support Trump being added to Mt Rushmore.
As a permanent admonishment to the people of the USA for their stupidity in electing and supporting him.
BSA Bob
‘Botched’ , seems an upgrade from the usual descriptions used.
Cat – he’s done better this week – no major frustration explosions.
Fortunately his car broke down which keeps his attention more focused!
The four Presidents on Mount Rushmore, George Washington (lived 1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) were chosen to represent the nation’s birth, growth, development, and preservation, respectively. When work started, the most recent President featured had been dead for 8 years.
It’s not clear what Trump would represent were he to be added – the future will tell. Hopefully just a passing clown but a highly damaging one. Maybe a signpost on the road of the USA’s terminal decline.
FDR is the only one other than the incumbents who should be up there. Defence of the nation should be added as criteria for addition to Rushmore.
In aged care, one would have expected that infection control had always been a priority, where an outbreak of gastro or normal flu among vulnerable people can be deadly.
sprocket_ @ #560 Monday, August 10th, 2020 – 6:00 pm
On that basis, I’d support chiselling the other four faces off and just leaving Trump up there.
Steve777
Given the wide spread publicity months ago of what happened in Italy and the UK when it came to the elderly and care homes there can be no excuses for not preparing.
All I’ll say about aged-care, don’t grow old in the Morrison era. If that’s not an option, take a bottle of whiskey, spiked with opioids, to bed. Most aren’t however prepared – declination creeps up, and before one makes plans, cognition to do thus is invariably lost.
’Botched’ is the standard appellation for the Home Insulation Program.
Do we actually know that the outbreak escaped from quarantine or is this subject to confirmation by the enquiry? What about the public housing towers? Workplaces?
In that case, we should build a big statue of Tony Abbott for Australians to look at and remind them of how “stupid” they are. At least Trump didn’t win the popular vote and barely scraped in. Australia overwhelmingly supported Abbott.
Yabba:
Monday, August 10, 2020 at 8:10 pm
[SNIP]
I don’t want to up the ante. I’ve said my piece, leaving it at that.
Also, nobody is getting added to Mt. Rushmore. It’s not a monument that gets updated – it’s a dumb, early 20th Century idol to American exceptionalism and spat in the face of the indigenous people of the area. It’s not going anywhere because, well, it’s a carved mountain and it’s also South Dakota’s main source of tourist money. But no extra President is being added to it.
Trump knows this. He’s just saying shit like getting added to the monument to get a rise out of liberals because he wants the other side to look like oversensitive “snowflakes” because that has echoes of his path to victory in 2016.
I feel left out of the Mavis/GG thingy.
RL @8:21. ” …Trump knows this. He’s just saying shit like getting added to the monument to get a rise out of liberals”
The ”dead cat on the table strategy” – he says stuff like this to distract from what he doesn’t want to talk about.
Rational Leftist:
Monday, August 10, 2020 at 8:12 pm
[‘Australia overwhelmingly supported Abbott.’]
That was a bit of a worry.
Chip Franklin
@chipfranklin
·
13h
When 2 died of Ebola they said Obama should resign.
When 4 died in Benghazi they said Hillary should go to jail.
When 162,000 died from the Trump Virus, they said put him on Mount Rushmore.
Bushfire Bill:
Monday, August 10, 2020 at 8:24 pm
[‘I feel left out of the Mavis/GG thingy.’]
Don’t worry, BB? Mavis is on your case, too; but only where the circumstances dictate.
poroti & Steve777
Oh yes, the appellation “botched” is a definite indication that the quarantine issue has Made It into the official list of Mythical Labor Disasters. Not a lot of comment in the mainstream news about Morrison & aged care or his presser? I gave up in disgust before the programs I watched finished, but they’d gone past their usual political news slots.
Mavis
A bit busy, and so way behind on the blog, but very glad to hear you have your lab / staffy cross Boogie.
It sounds as though the staffy bit of Boogie has come to the fore with the new home (anxiety probably).
Having had a few rescue staffy crosses myself, I have a few tips:
As one of my books on dog breeds says “Staffordshire Terriers: Wonderful with humans, including children. Never to be trusted with a strange dog.”
– we found this out the hard way. At first our staffy crosses were great with other dogs, but one bad incident where they felt threatened (or attacked) – they never recovered, and would attack other dogs without warning .
– A lead is your friend. Maybe a long one, but always have your staffy on a lead.
– When they get to know other dogs, they are great friends to them, but it can take a while.
– they are amazing with humans, and wonderful company., and very well worth the effort.
I don’t think it’s so much as a strategy from Trump as more something he just instinctively built his career on doing. Projecting a hyper-masculine boldness by being as brash as possible – and any critics of him look weak or humourless in contrast. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t know how to turn it off so he also can come across as delirious and, at times, sulky.
Thanks Mavis. I appreciate your attention.
BSA Bob,
This is based off very anecdotal evidence but I think that the Coalition and media have made a pretty bad error in their campaign against Andrews. It’s triggered political engagement in people I know who have been previously pretty hard to read or leaning on the right to defend Andrews (increadibly, the views of a Labor partisan like me on this are moderate compared to what I’m hearing).
I think that’s partly to do with the attempts to attach blame to Andrews for what people believe to be the actions of individuals misbehaving. It’s also the misjudgement of going after the politician who already had the largest social media following in the country (for a politician) on issues they didn’t think were as important as more immediate issues. The Liberals going unhinged and media getting annoyed at people for daring to criticise them isn’t helping the anti-Dan crusade either.
The Labor state government here is doing fine (politically).
For those that don’t know the origins of Mt Rushmore as a seedy tourist trap (unfinished), Adam Ruins Mt Rushmore is pretty amusing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8QQBRIqZmw
Bugler…. I think the Liberals will come to rue the day they sought to politicise a public health emergency. The pandemic is very far from being over. The partisan discord will only make everything much worse than it needs to be. The nakedly cynical attempt at political exploitation will arouse the resentment of a fearful public.
The LNP are being dishonest in the way that they are politicizing the coronavirus – they are falsely claiming that the Victorian Government is primarily at fault for the spike in infections, and should also be blamed for the economic impacts (even though the state governments can’t do much about the economic impacts).
The ALP, at both the federal and state levels, are failing to make legitimate political attacks on the LNP that really have to be made. The LNP has bungled its response to the pandemic – first, by frequently urging businesses and schools to be open as a point of dogma, instead of following prudent public health strategies, and second, by failing to provide enough of a boost to the federal government’s net spending to offset the reduction in non-government sector spending. The LNP’s failure on economic policy has directly worsened the pandemic by making some people so financially desperate that they continued to show up to work even when they should have been in quarantine.
Mavis Davis (replying to GG):
Yeah GG – show us ya Manifesto – if ya got one!
Douglas and Milko:
Monday, August 10, 2020 at 8:39 pm
[‘A bit busy, and so way behind on the blog, but very glad to hear you have your lab / staffy cross Boogie.
It sounds as though the staffy bit of Boogie has come to the fore with the new home (anxiety probably).’]
Thanks, D & M. Boogie has become very aggressive, so much so that she’s a danger to other dogs
in the trailer park, so much so that I can’t control her. She started out a couple of years ago as unaggressive, now very aggressive, culminating last night with what could’ve been an almighty fight. She’s very strong, standing on her hinds. What we’re doing at the moment is to restrict her movement to the back yard, which is heavily fortified. If that doesn’t work, she’ll need to go back
from whence she came – the legal ramifications of an aggressive dog untold.
Bugler
Pleased to read that. The anti Dan forces are certainly going gangbusters & you just have to hope people look beyond that. ABC tonight had comment from a nurse involved in the process saying the hotel occupants , far from being the enthusiastically co operative souls we were first led to believe, communicated & gamed the staff with threats of self harm. But still we all know whose fault this is…
Today was not he ABC’s finest hour, that is for sure.
BSA Bob,
I think it equally means that going hard against Morrison might be dangerous ground for Labor as well, so not all positive.
Nicholas,
Daniel Andrews has made comments that contracting and insecure work is something we’re going to have to look at after the pandemic might indicate a shift. But as a state Government their influence is limited so really up to federal Labor to follow that thought.
Reading PB you have to wonder why we are actually bothering to have an inquiry.
If Andrews announced tomorrow that he is closing it down i wonder what the Victorian public would think.
Bushfire Bill:
Monday, August 10, 2020 at 8:44 pm
[‘Thanks Mavis. I appreciate your attention.’]
You’re only saying that because it’s true, though others would no doubt be in sync.
BSA Bob according to that nurse it was DHHS staff and security staff who failed to carry out their functions properly.
Mt Rushmore is an expression of meglomania.
Australia does not do BIG politicians, it does BIG prawns, bananas etc 🙂
Mavis
I am sorry that Boogie has worked out the way she has. Staffy crosses may turn out to be very aggressive. Not a dog for an older person.
I knew a pedigree staffy breeder and although they are marvelous family pets they can also be fighters whose teeth can clamp on another dog and are almost impossible to separate. For your own peace of mind I’d recommend you return to sender.
Taylormade
What gibberish is that. Absolutely nonsensical comment to make
DENNIS SHANAHAN, WHAT A GOOSE!!
I see Media Watch has started.
Rakali
I thought you said Australia doesn’t do politicians ?