I’ve been wanting for ages to find a pretext for posting this, but I can’t, so I’m giving up and just posting it. Hey, it’s Friday night! Read more »

It must have seemed a bright idea at the time to get Noel Pearson to write an article for The Monthly on Obama. Trouble is - Pearson may or may not know anything about American politics, but almost his entire article is a discussion of Obama seen through the prism of a book written by Shelby Steele. Read more »

On a recent comments thread on LP, it was argued that LP readers are political types rather than Big Brother sorts. Well, I don’t think many people are either/or about such things, and at any rate I’ve been yearning to lower the tone of this blog for a long time. With this in mind, I’ve decided to do a celebrity gossip post today.     Read more »

Image of the Prague skyline courtesy of Pavelm - licenced under Creative Commons. Read more »

I’ve been intrigued to see the debate about the funding and direction of the ABC go underground since last year’s election. Although Kevin Rudd only promised “adequate funding”, the defeat of a government that expended so much energy on critiquing “bias” and whose acolytes in the commentariat never tired of denouncing the ABC in hyperbolic terms has probably served to siphon off much of the intensity of the public broadcasting budget wars. Read more »