Jon Stewart, Rick Santelli, CNBC, and the dearth of political satire in Australia

                                      

(Above: Jon Stewart gives Rick Santelli, assorted loons, and CNBC a really hard time).

If you've had enough of right wing Australian loonatic columnists, time to relax with a nice hatchet job by Jon Stewart. I know there are a million sources for Stewart on the intertubes - why not drop by the Comedy Channel and say hello, and thanks to Crooks and Liars for this clip - and I know when I get an email link, the meme has already hit at least a hundred million people.

But dammit, he and his writers are funny. They're better at analysis than the average finance reporter in this country, and a heck of a lot funnier.

And then I got to brooding. Why is that? Why do Americans get all the best comedians and comedy writers? Why is Australia so bereft of savage political humor, or even a gentle dose of satire, or even just a few funnies about the way the world is at the moment?

Rove? Wash out your mouth with a pillow cushion, you rancid prawn. Assorted morning teams? Well they're funny, but rarely intentionally. John Clarke and Bryan Dawe? You mean for five minutes on a Thursday night as an afterthought to a current affairs show run by a carrot top with ego, but no humor, and given to celebrity star fucker interviews? The Chaser boys - but where have they gone, when will they come back? Wil Anderson? Well he's funny live, but on the ABC he's just a middle class auntie kind of suck. Maybe there's something cult on cable TV I'm missing?

Media Watch is about all that's left, and they give it fifteen minutes a week to cover 24/7 rants by loons Australia wide.

I guess in America they take the free market of ideas, and the market place, seriously. If you can sell it, no matter what it says about captains of industry, or pillars of the media, someone will find a way to sell it and market it. 

Here we have Gerard Henderson. Groan. The man's about as lively as a dead fish, or starting to smell roadkill. Dame Slap aka Janet Albrechtsen? Shut your cake holes, you morons. Compassionate conservatism just happens to involve a Taliban-style ban on laughter. Peter Reuhl? You want me to buy the Australian Financial Review so I can read him? Get a grip. There's not enough yachts or whiskey in the world to make that happen.

Tim Blair? Well he thinks he's funny, and to a small paranoid coterie of weird Tim Blair loving loons, he no doubt is. But there's something sick and desperate about the gadfly's sense of humor - a bit like an Inquisition priest shoving a red hot poker up the bowels of an infidel greenie leftie and laughing at the howls and shrieks (and about as clever). Piers Akerman is always funny ha ha, but only if there's someone around to point out just how funny peculiar the fat owl is.

So there we have it. That's why I spend most of my time watching Stewart and Colbert, in the process giving up completely on free to air television in this country. It's a sorry state of affairs. And it needed be all one way. You mean to say there's nobody can see the funny side of the pious Rudd, the wretched Garrett, the out there Wong, the wayward Swan, and the chief censor Conroy? To name a few. 

This country needs some decent free to air political satire, as we had back in the Whitlam days when the government was as loonatic and shaky as middle eastern oil finance. But so long as the ABC wants to keep making SeaChange for middle class women, and SBS thinks Pizza is hilarious, and they hang about hoping to get some more triennial funding from this cash strapped government, we're all doomed, I tells ya. It's one thing to die the death of a thousand fiscal lashes and cuts at the hands of ponces, gits, and greedy loons, but to die without laughter on the lips ... that's real pain ...

Well at least I can tell you what Stewart was saying in his last bleeped word. Fuck you! Ain't it a grand phrase, so simple and well meaning and well wishing. Sex for everybody, even Bettina Arndt. Get fucked. What a cheerful greeting for eveyone except Christians. We hope you have a happy time of sexual intercourse or perhaps sexual wankery.

We should turn it into a new all purpose greeting phrase. Happy holidays, and fuck you. Merry Christmas, and fuck you. Happy birthday and fuck you. And for our loon columnists, happy writing, and fuck you. And when they're being especially compassionate conservatives, why not a generous wish. Come on, they deserve as much sex as the next person. So give it to them. Say get fucked! with a smile. They'll feel better and so will you.

Michael Costa, Pacific Brands, Branding, Protectionism, Misleading Marketing, False Posturing and Oi Aussie Oi Oi

So it turns out that Michael Costa, one time Labor party heavyweight and Treasurer of NSW has the same mindset as Dame Slap, aka Janet Albrechtsen, compassionate conservative of the extreme right.

It helps explain why Costa was so cloth eared while in office, and why now he's a columnist, he's turned into a ranting, railing, fulminating parrot to the right of Alan Jones, chief parrot and king of talk back radio (no cheap jokes about queens here please).

Costa happily picks up the burden of explaining why Pacific Bonds is a great company, unshackled capitalism is great, and unhindered, greedy pay hikes at the top are positively wonderful. And any thoughts to the contrary evoke the evil, vile dangers of protectionism. The full rant is here, under the header Edging closer to the trap of protectionism, if you can bear the shrill Costa tone for a a couple of thousand words.

Costa starts out even handedly by berating both sides for political opportunism - Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull - and Wayne Swan as a silly dullard for speaking about socks and jocks.

And then we move on to the nub, and I just love this phrasing: While it's regrettable that nearly 2000 workers will lose their jobs, the decision has nothing to do with the efficacy of the fiscal stimulus.

Well that'll be a great relief to the 2,000 workers who've lost their jobs, while Pacific Brands shifts much of its manufacturing offshore to China. It was going to happen all along. Nothing to do with the stimulus. Nothing to do with anything really. So bugger off you hapless worker clowns, sure you've lost your jobs, but we've got important economic principles to debate, and so what if a few pawns bite the dust and head off to become trailer park trash.

Yep, Costa is as compassionate as Janet. 

Whether its brands are nationally recognised is no reason for its management to be judged by a different standard to any other responsible to its shareholders.

But that's the whole point Mr. Costa. Pacific Brands, like many other scoundrels, took refuge in patriotism. Their branding was cluttered with Australiana, they were a national symbol, they wrapped themselves in that colonial flag with its British outpost up in the corner. They were probably what any right thinking lad wore under his daks on the way to the riots in Cronulla.

So what happens when lamingtons get manufactured in China? Or Holden and Ford are found to be outposts of a derelict, wrecked Detroit cabal? Simple minded citizens, of the right and the left wing, who swallowed whole the notion of hard yakka and chesty bonds, get a little mad. (I mean gor blimey guvnor, they used great Australian sporting heroes to spiv and sell their goods! Dinkum!)

It's called trading off, presenting one image while deviously working towards another goal. It's deceptive and disreputable, verging on the dishonest. Perhaps you can't expect anything better of a company, but you can't expect people to say oh bugger it, who cares if we've shifted the manufacture of koalas and kangaroos to China.

Not that it worries me all that much. I don't think I've bought anything belonging to Pacific Brands in decades. Their hokey, and as it turns out specious and false appeal to Australian sentiment and Australian pride and Australian patriotism is nothing but humbug of the worst kind. No I'm a two dollar store person, I don't worry about the labels and the branding, and in any case Pacific Brands were a particularly low rent set of brands. Just give some honest to goodness Chinese crap that will last the lifetime of the warranty, whether 3 months or a year.

So it doesn't worry me that Pacific Brands are trooping off to China, but you'd have to be passably cloth eared not to understand why it's vexatious to some consumers, and why there's been talk of a consumer ban on the assorted brands.

As you'd expect, Costa is profoundly cloth eared, carrying his incapacity as a politician into his incapacity as a columnist of the right wing kind. He's outraged at the moral outrage being feigned by the government. It creates a climate for protectionism.

The public is entitled to ask: if you're so outraged by what appears to be a straightforward commercial decision, why haven't you taken more decisive action to keep these jobs in Australia?

The framing of the attack on Pacific Brands around the symbolic Australian nature of the product feeds into growing protectionist sentiment around the world: the US stimulus package with its, albeit watered-down, "Buy American" provisions and Gordon Brown's misguided plea of for "British jobs for British workers." If more Australian companies move offshore for commercial reasons this issue could come to haunt the Government ...

It could also come to haunt the companies who've traded off on being proudly Australian. It's the lowest kind of marketing, the appeal to others about being so very Australian, rather than selling on quality or price or appeal or utility. It's the kind of humbug product differentiation you find in basic clothing or petrol or other products where there's not much else to pitch - after all the quality of the clothing pitched by Bonds might as well have been made in China in the first place.

But of course for Costa it's not about the company, it's about the way this unfortunate attack on Pacific Brands has revolved around its symbolic Australian nature. Well d'oh, it would, wouldn't it, because they've been shamelessly trading off images of heroic Australians these many decades. If they'd been advertising themselves as internationally sophisticated suppliers of jocks to her Majesty the Queen, nobody would have noticed or given a flying fuck.

Then it's on to a cloth-eared explanation of how the decision to boost the pay packets at the time of the shift to China has nothing to do with anything.

Morphet's salary, while large, is hardly at the top end of the scale for Australian CEOs. Although what the size of her salary has to do with the morality of the decision Pacific Brands needs to be explained. If she was earning half or a third of her current salary, would the decision have been OK?

Let's try this in words of one syllable. She sacked 2000 Australian workers from an Australian company boasting how proud it is to be Australian and sell dinky di Australian products to patriotic Australians, while shipping manufacturing off to China - but presumably still expecting to trade on and market its brands as dinki di Australian.

At best it was poorly anticipated and poorly managed, and the notion that you could just ship all the manufacturing gear supplied by government money off to China to help in the re-adjustment is bizarre to say the least. She should have been paid half or a third of her current salary for mishandling the debacle, creating a mess both for her company and for the government, which truth to tell could have done without the whole mini-saga. Everybody knows the Chinese can do this kind of manufacturing cheaper, but you'd have to be a cloth-eared columnist not to realise what fear this generates in the lucky country, with the thought that we might all be reduced to coolie wages and third world living standards.

Just in terms of timing and method it was singularly inept, and always set to be a tabloid storm in a teacup. It reminds me of the way James Hardie comprehensively mis-read the mood in relation to asbestos victims during that extended compensation saga as the company fought tooth and nail to deny its past.

I'll say it again. I don't mind if Pacific Brands shifts all its manufacturing to China. But they should learn one lesson quickly - if you live by a brand, you can just as quickly die in the marketplace by a brand.

Oh but there's one condition I'd impose on them heading overseas - they're compelled to take Michael Costa with them. Since he's such a good theoretical economist - look at the wonderful state in which he left NSW - he'd make an excellent quality control supervisor. I'm thinking Fujian province is just the right place. 

Oh one other condition. He's not allowed access to email so he can't send any columns to The Australian, at least for the first two years of exile. That should be the fate of all politicians who brand themselves as Labor party people, friends and supporters of the workers, and then reveal themselves to be far right loons, happy to be in the company of Dame Slap. Talk about misleading marketing, unreliable branding and false posturing ...

Piers Akerman, the Taliban, the truth and brave liberal secularists

The fat owl of the remove, aka Piers Akerman, is at it again. Brooding on the slaughter of Pakistani cops protecting Sri Lanka cricketers in his column, Just not cricket but terrorists don't care, he comes up with this:

Projecting sporting values on terrorists is as silly as suggesting the allies of the terrorists, the Taliban, were exercising their right to artistic freedom when they used anti-aircraft guns to destroy ancient statues of Buddha dating from the 3rd and 11th centuries at Bamiyan in Afghanistan.

Yet, there were those in the West who felt that this vandalism, this savage obliteration of two massive pieces of art that had stood for some 1600 years, was regrettable but not necessarily an evil act because the Taliban were entitled to erase evidence of earlier civilisations.

Curious, because in the usual fat owl rhetorical way, there's not a name or a shred of evidence to justify these extraordinary assertions. So I went googling. Funnily enough I couldn't find a single shred of evidence to support the fat owl.

I was reminded that dynamite was used as artillery fire didn't do the job. Never mind. A technical error by the fat owl.

I was reminded that frantic efforts were made to overturn the decree made by the mad Mullah to carry out the demolition, by Islamic and non-Islamic negotiators. I was reminded that even the Russians imposed additional sanctions against the Taliban for doing the deed, while at the United Nations speaker after speaker condemned the actions. 

Even the Pakistani delegation, which offered a feeble excuse for the Taliban by saying they were driven to extreme measures because of international hostility to the regime, still managed to join the appeal to protect Afghanistan's cultural heritage.

I was reminded that internally this act did a lot to shake the faith of the more moderate elements in the Taliban, confronted by concrete evidence of the fanatical attitudes of hardline mad mullahs. People inside the country as well as outside were angry, though some directed their anger at Taliban treatment of the people ahead of their anger at their treatment of carved rocks.

I was reminded that the hardline ratbag Taliban ideology was in fact foreign to Afghanistan. Spawned in the nineteen eighties, wrote one pundit, to fight the Soviet invasion, the Taliban was a product of CIA weaponry, Saudi funds, Pakistani training and Indian fundamentalist deobandism.

I was reminded of the time when Christians of a fundamentalist persuasion used to tear through the churches of heretic rivals, tearing down and smashing statues, in keeping with the biblical injunction "you shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

I was reminded that not so long ago, Europeans bombed the shit out of each other, destroying countless treasures, buildings, and art works. Not to mention the odd few million people.

But I couldn't find a single reference to anyone standing up and chortling that the Taliban were entitled to erase evidence of earlier civilizations (or even current religions, like, y'know, Buddhism). I'm sure there's a loon out there somewhere, but it'd take a loon to quote a loon like that seriously. As if it was a meaningful statement, a damning indictment of Western liberal thinking.

It's a funny world, isn't it, given the way the fat owl loves to bash liberal secularists, in much the same way as the Taliban hate art, feminists, poofters and other minorities that get up their collectively insane noses. 

Funny, isn't it, the way it's the liberal secularists who usually rabbit on about heritage and culture and protecting the past. Whenever they do it locally, they're denigrated as people wanting to live in the past. Heritage greenies. Ratbags. Black armband historians. Standing in the way of development and concrete and tar and little boxes made out of ticky tacky. Harrumph. 

It's the fundies who don't mind the odd bombing or the looting of museums in Iraq. "Stuff happens", says this kind of loon. Fuck the past. Fuck art. Ban it. Hack the genitals off statues, put on fig leafs, paint over nipples, whinge about someone paying a million bucks for a work of art. Piss Christ they yell, not realizing the freedom to do mad things is the very thing the Taliban deny. They want to be talibans in their own backyard, then get upset about the real Taliban doing Taliban things, then point out how we shouldn't do weird arty things because it makes them sound talibanish. 

Bring on the Danish cartoonists I say (just up their skills a little), come on in Salman Rushdie (but don't be such a bitch about slumdog shows), and hello First Dog On the Moon, the only reason to read Crikey.

You know, at one point, I wondered whether I should use the occasional swear word in this blog. Upset the readership, consternate a visiting Christian, alienate the odd feminist, shock a visiting Islamic. 

Then I thought fuck that, what's freedom if you can't celebrate it with a fuck or two.

The fat owl has got more cheek than an elephant's backside, more front than Anthony Horderns. Anything he says about anything is suspect. He's no more a guide to terrorism than the Taliban is a guide to civilization as we know it.

That's the trouble isn't it? How did Tennyson put it:

Fundies to the right of them,

Fundies to the left of them,

Fundies in front of them

Volley'd & thunder'd;

Storm'd at with porkies and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred

brave liberal secularists

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wonder'd.

Honor the charge they made!

Honor the liberal secularists,

Noble six hundred!

PS I don't remember any rational thinking liberal secularist projecting cricketing or colonial values on terrorists. I could imagine fools - who think Greyfriars School or the 5th form at St Dominics are somehow reality based - being deluded about the nature of terrorism. "I say old chappie do you really think that IED is sporting. Not really cricket the way you're hiding it old thing. Come on now, play up and play the game. Fair's fair, pip pip, wot wot old chap."

From where I sit, it's only liberal secularists who have a proper sensible fear of fundies on all sides, be they music banning, women hating Taliban, or scapula wearing women hating pop art banning Opus Dei.

You are such a fraudulent pious hypocrite fat owl, it's why we love you dearly. Now settle down, stop frothing and foaming at the mouth. It's unseemly. And for god's sake, stop asking rhetorical questions like "Was there a Jew among the Sri Lankan cricketers?" What the fuck? Doctor, a hot cup of tea and a bex for this man, it's a medical emergency. He's hot and flushed and sounding very silly ...

Finally, a good news story: Ex-Taliban diplomat hooked on his iPhone. If only the fat owl understood anything. Here's an ex-Taliban who can't do without his iPhone. Now if we can just teach them all the benefits of rock and roll, punk, rap, hip hop and alt country, along with raves, movies, tits on television, mp3's, pirated avis, e, sniffer dogs and other rich secular pleasures, they might stop being so mad. 

Second thoughts, imagine using your iPhone on the internet in Afghanistan to check out the fat owl's online rants back here in Oz. Back we go to the dark ages again ... (and no the photo below is not showing a former Taliban leader mourning the death of Penthouse or slobbering over pornography. He's just using it to access his Facebook and twitter away. Go read the story and help Fairfax Digital Life by giving them a hit, even if it's really an AP story).

Miranda Devine, Adonis on a beach, Netting, Greenie nonsense and kill all the sharks

For a minute there I thought Miranda the Devine was going to join our heroic campaign to kill all the sharks, and convert them to flake, so that once again fish and chips could rule as the take away of choice throughout this fair land.

Instead she's just joined in the standard tabloid shark hysteria with an amount of verbiage and blather excessive even for her. First there's the heading Needless slaughter in the water. What the heck does that mean? Needless? Doesn't that imply a solution? Isn't it kinda opposite to needful? Surely she's talking about killing all the sharks. She's going to join our campaign. Hah! What to make of this?

No one disputes that sharks are a crucial part of the ecosystem and no one is advocating wholesale slaughter.

Eeerk! She's turned into a touchie feelie greenie leftie eco environmentalist warrior and writer of gaia type whole earth nonsense.

But if it comes to a choice between a shark life and a human life there just should be no contest.

That's better Miranda. But how ya gunna do it? I mean that's a pretty abstract proposition isn't it? Between a shark and a human, chose the human. It's very rarely just sharko a mano, one on one - the pesky things sneak up and take you out just when you least expect it.

We have to take a pre-emptive strike, just like we do with land based Taliban and Al Qaeda. These sharks are marine terrorists, and we're in a war with all forms of terror (and don't laugh there's a link, as my forthcoming book, The Selachimorpha Ultimatum, proves, by providing convincing, irrefutable evidence that fundie Islamics have turned sharks into anti-Oz eating machines using wifi technology in devastating, devious new ways).

I think we need to bomb all waters off Sydney beaches in a shock and awe move designed to teach the sharks a lesson, before entering into a long post-war shambles where we mop them up in a piecemeal way until there's none left. Not one. Zip, nada, nil, nihil. It worked in Iraq, and now it's time to bring representative democracy to the oceans of the world.

My poor heart wept to read the Devine's sweet prose:

A tall, blond, 15-year old Adonis with a peeling pink nose and a wetsuit ...

And this poor lad, a boy who would have graced any painting by Leonardo, was beached, while cruel, dangerous, wired sharks patrolled the ocean in search of succulent flesh and misanthropes wrote letters to the paper attacking dirty stinking humans as the scum of the earth  and hoping sharks and cockroaches would survive once we'd devastated the planet.

Oh tear my flesh from my bones, the humanity of it all, I can't bear the tragedy. But say on Devine, your column surely isn't one of those cheap tabloid tales exploiting the populist excitement of having exactly three shark attacks in the past few months, none of them fatal.

Well sure commercial fishermen get a mention, claiming government protection has led to a local explosion in shark numbers. (You know they caught so many white pointers in the past to feed mouths hungry for the tang of lemon and salt on shark flesh).

Oh and apparently there's a move to get rid of the nets, which have been tremendously effective, and prevented many shark attacks, but somehow failed to stop the current ones that have led to all the hysteria ... hmmm ... must think ...

Oh that's right nets aren't foolproof, and were never designed to provide a barrier between sharks and humans (they're just designed to deter and catch resident sharks feeding near popular beaches. Phew, for a minute there I was worried about all that evidence that back in the old days there were 15 fatalities between 1922 and 1936 when commercial fishing was in full swing. Must have been hopeless fishermen or an abundance of sharks).

Good oh, carry on then Miranda. You came late to the shark tales - Piers beat you by days and days, but better late than never I suppose, except for your unfortunate shark loving sentiments. A crucial part of the ecosystem! Pshaw. The great white shark listed as an endangered species. Proof please! It's humans who are endangered. All this mumbo jumbo about global warming increasing the nutrients and the feed for sharks. And it's supposed to get worse next season!

Leftie gibberish. What a shark suck you are Miranda. It's a choice between humans and sharks. There can be no middle ground. 

What are you going to do Miranda? Give in to greenie nonsense, all this talk of saving the sea horse? It's time to take a stand.

Until you join us in our campaign to kill all the sharks, right here, right now, we just have to list you as another feckless, morbid columnist spruiking a passing summer sensation,  albeit partially redeemed by an unhealthy interest in teenage Adonis's.

Sob, will we ever be allowed to go back into the surf again? Pass me another lamington, before I forget what it is to be Australian.

Adam Walters, hapless bus drivers, malignant unions and Featherless Chooks in freefall flight

It seems one time Morris Iemma spin doctor Adam Walters - we presume it's the same happy chappie - is now reduced to catching the bus, if his whingeing bit of union and bus driver bashing in the Daily Terror, Not all's well on the buses, is anything to go by.

Oh it's all the union's fault for the state of Sydney buses, a bit like the way the dipstick columns in the Daily Terror are all the fault of the dipstick journalists. Why, the drivers are so grumpy they don't even doff their lid in an ever so humble way, and say a hearty, cheerful thanks to the noble Walters when he blesses in a papal way these hearty yeoman for their good work manoeuvring their way through beastly Sydney traffic. 

"Oh I say ever so well done", says the kind hearted Walters, only to be greeted with "fuck off loon" from the recalcitrant driver. I can't remember this sort of thing going down when Noddy and Big Ears set off an adventure.

Yep, it's all the fault of the union we still don't have a ticketing system that can be used on bus, train and ferry. Nothing to do with the state government. Nothing to do with Maurice and his policy of hiring consultant loons.

My thought? Wouldn't it be fun, after working in a circus full of clowns, if the ever so humble Walters got out into the world, took a bus driver's course, and found out what it was actually like to drive in the madness of Sydney traffic with a rather large vehicle - seeing as how he's such a strategic thinker and a serial abuser of ungrateful bus drivers.

Last I heard Walters was supposed to be co-authoring a book with Michael Costa. What a fine pair of featherless chooks. Now it seems he's washed up like beach-side driftwood back at the Daily Terror, where he started his metropolitan rounds way back when.

The sooner the Labor party is kicked out of government in NSW, and the sooner we can start banning bikinis and offensive Andy Warhol art, the better. But will the buses run on time? Well they never did under Costa.

And while we're at it, can we ban gratuitously offensive, humbugging columnists happy to do a bit of two by four, baseball bat bashing of the unions in classic right wing loon Labor party style? Get thee gone Adam Walters. And if there's someone else out there called Adam Walters writing abusive columns for the Daily Terror, well bless my socks, and may the lord have pity on you.

Stephen Conroy and the never ending battle against vile pornography, communism and homosexuality

                                   

Urgent. Attention Stephen Conroy. Please watch this video at once. Perverts are stalking the intertubes for profit, and independent Nick Xenophon threatens to scuttle your wonderful, compulsory country wide intertubes filtering censorship system. 

Okay, it's an oldie, but a goldie, and I was amazed my partner had never seen it. Perversion for Profit was financed in 1965 by Charles Keating, who later helped bring the world the Savings and Loan scandal. It seems there's a direct link between anti-porn crusaders and corrupt capitalism, but never no mind, banning porn is a noble undertaking, especially as porn is conclusively linked to weakening resistance to communism and homosexuality. You can pick up part two on YouTube or the Internet Archive if you like this kind of jolly stuff.

Meantime, it stands as a potent warning to Conroy that much remains to be done. Prophylactics are needed, and we're not talking condoms. Or maybe we are. Think of Stephen's intertubes filter as a giant condom covering this entire wonderful country, so we can lie beneath it detumescent and calm and safe.

Peter Costello, Going Green, Nuclear Energy, the rapture and god power

Is Peter Costello's rant in the Fairfax rags today a covert way of bringing the rapture forward? You know, his latest scribble, wherein the tired old loon comes out of his den, pretends he isn't sulking and flaunts his god-given insights into the world. 

Going green must involve going nuclear is the sermon for the day, and it's full of the specious logic and pious platitudes we've come to expect from the flabby Pete (thank you John Howard oh thank you for what you did to him. Can you come out of retirement and do it again?)

What the heck does old Petey boy want to go green for? There must be a hidden agenda. There has to be something fishy at work behind the arras. Remember god's hand moves in mysterious ways.

Here's what I think Petey boy and his fundie friends are thinking. First install the nuclear reactors, then boom, meltdown, all the way to China, and by the grace of god, we'll all be in her hands with an eternity of singing along with the good folks from Catch the Fire ministries. 

Well Petey boy will, but you port-oids, feminists, poofters, Satanists and ne'er do wells can look forward to a lifetime of hell (and life in hell runs a pretty long time. Hmmn wonder if the devil has embraced nuclear energy as a forward thinking way of guarding against dwindling coal resources? Or has she set up shop inside nuclear powered stars, franchised around the galaxy as 'Hell Holes for Hell Souls'?)

Peter, Peter, new thinking in the Liberal party. Global warming is a myth, even if we could do anything to stop it, we can't afford to, and anything we do do will have nil impact (you know, that do do like voodoo, the thing that you do do). 

Let's just keep shipping that coal to China and burning the rest here. We're so looking forward to the new beach at Marrickville metro.

By the way, the loon has the cheek to link 1990 base level emission cuts to communist privatisation and the wonders of Margaret Thatcher closing all down the coalmines. Well we know that won't happen here Peter. Margaret had way more balls than you - sometimes given your somnolescent approach to John Howard and politics and the glittering prize I wonder if you've got any balls at all.

Wedging greenies on nuclear power? So naff. Obama embraces nuclear energy? What's he going to do? Sack Homer Simpson and shut down all the 100 plus nuke plants generating 20% of total electric energy consumption overnight?

Try again sometime. Dazzle us with your dazzling, flashy insights into politics. Second thoughts, don't bother, not when you can rock out to Hillsong and sing about the impending second coming of the lord. Nuclear? Meh. We're lighting our house with god power.

PS you know I just so love Petey boy's Australia Day message, I couldn't refrain from giving it another run around - I believe the original YouTube link died a mysterious death. And if you want to read Ross Fitzgerald's demolition of Costello in The Australian, take a look at Costello's hopes should have burned out after sermon.

Scary stuff, Fitzgerald says. Actually, reading Costello on policy issues is now the scary stuff. The sanctimonius gherkin seems to believe what he's saying. To which all I can think to say is Hallelujah brother, go bother god with your insights.