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Blog Watch

This new page points to material posted on political websites, initially in Australia.  It can be accessed by clicking the Blog Watch link in the upper right margin under 'site pages'.  It is provided as a service along the lines Crikey provides Richard Farmer's Breakfast Media Wrap, which make perusing the daily online newspapers much easier. 

As many visitors to political blogs are unable to visit daily, the updates will be in weekly batches, so that users can see the whole week at a glance.  Where possible links are provided.  The sites will be grouped under three categories initially: psephology, political, and social/economics

The sites listed to date are:

Psephology
Pollytics
The Poll Bludger
Mumble
Oz Politics
ABC Elections  

Political blogspots
The Political Sword
Lavartus Prodeo
The Piping Shrike
Peter Martin
Andrew Bartlett
Politically Homeless
Blogocrats 

Social and economics blogspots
John Quiggin
On Line Opinion
Club Troppo

Time will tell if I can keep this page sufficiently up to date.

Time to say goodbye

To me, Ad Astra, “Time to say goodbye” are among the saddest words in our language. Yet say them now we must. I chose Ad Astra as my moniker because my secondary school’s motto is ‘sic itur ad astra’, which can be liberally interpreted as: “Here is the way to the stars”. How inspiring these word...

  • 19/12/2022

Have we got a deal for you

There is a conspiracy theory that suggests that birds (in the USA at least) aren’t real. The claim is that all the birds in the USA were hunted down by the government between the late 50’s and early 70s and replaced with bird like drones to spy on you. According to the theory President John F. Kenne...

  • 12/12/2022

Get out of the gutter

You may not have heard of Mike Rinder. A Scientologist for most of his life, at the age of 52 he walked out, and as a result lost his family, friends, employment and pretty well everything else in his life. RInder has written a book on his time in Scientology, runs a website that questions Scientolo...

  • 5/12/2022

Was Amtrak Joe derailed?

Prior to becoming President, Joe Biden was a US Senator for around 36 years. He is known as Amtrak Joe as he routinely took the daily 90 minute each way train trip (on the USA’s national passenger train network — Amtrak) from his home in Delaware to Washington DC to represent his state. If you liste...

  • 28/11/2022

If employers can measure well-being...

Last September, you might have seen Qantas CEO Alan Joyce received a pay increase of $278,000 per annum. It seems that Joyce has met or exceeded the performance goals set by his employers and contractually has earned the reward. It does, however, raise a larger question. Joyce's pay increase for t...

  • 21/11/2022

Coming back to haunt you

In his recent Budget reply speech, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton laboured (pun intended) on the increasingly difficult to achieve promise by Prime Minister Albanese that power bills will be $275 less in 2025. While the government is claiming the modelling done in 2021 supports the accuracy of the p...

  • 14/11/2022

The good economic units

Wellbeing and politics have collided in the past couple of weeks. Federal Treasurer Dr Jim Chalmers has started a conversation about measuring the ‘wellbeing’ of the nation as a result of the measures in the budget. The Opposition, as you would expect, has poured scorn on the idea. On a purely lo...

  • 7/11/2022

Do you want to smile or frown

Recently, in what could be described as an epic fail in recruiting practices, the Essendon Football Club hired and accepted the resignation of the same CEO within a day. The issue was that the CEO was also the Chairman of ‘City on the Hill’, a church that seems to promote some conservative views on ...

  • 2/11/2022

We can do it better

It was probably co-incidental that the Australian Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was held in Sydney around the time the NRL and AFL finals were occurring. CPAC originally advertised the conference would be at Luna Park — until Luna Park claimed they had never had a booking. The Conf...

  • 24/10/2022

The voice

Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong recently addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Accompanying Wong on the trip was Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen and ‘Special Envoy for Reconciliation’ Pat Dodson. Wong told the General Assembly that Australia believed the UN an...

  • 17/10/2022

Kicking climate down the road

You’re probably aware of some who don't see the need to reduce emissions. They have a lot of different reasons or excuses for the position, including the current systems have served us well in the past, we’re only a small population so our changes won’t mean much or just a general reluctance to cons...

  • 10/10/2022

A home amongst the gumtrees

A local real estate agent rings me every couple of months asking if I am willing to sell my house. So far he's tried the 'look how much you could get' strategy, 'the market is moving, you don’t want to miss out’ strategy and telling me he could help me buy another house if I did sell; to which my re...

  • 3/10/2022

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4 COMMENTS

Rx

23/11/2008Hi Ad Astra Here is another you might like to add: OzForums. It's a discussion board, not a blog, but deals extensively with Australian politics. Index Page http://www.ozelection2007.info/forums/index.php Australian Politics Section http://www.ozelection2007.info/forums/viewforum.php?id=2 Cheers

Ad astra reply

24/11/2008Thank you Rx. I've added the index page of [quote]Oz Election Forums[/quote] at the end of the list of [quote]Political blogspots[/quote] on [quote]Blog Watch[/quote]. It's an intersting site.

doghouse

28/11/2008You should consider Jack the Insider, his blog is acerbic and enjoyable as he dishes it out to all and sundry.

Ad astra reply

29/11/2008Thank you doghouse. Jack the Insider is one of the best newspaper blogs. He writes well and always responds, thereby adding value to the blog. I'll see how I can include his blog in Blog Watch. I would need to post reference to his blog early on the day it began, and take it off once concluded.

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How many umbrellas are there if I have two in my hand but the wind then blows them away?

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

Mark Twain

The more one gets to know of men, the more one values dogs.

A. Toussenel

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

A politician is a person whose politics you do not agree with. When you do agree, he is a statesman.

David Lloyd George

All issues are political; politics is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

George Orwell