PM Kev … One year on

I cannot resist the trivial for once… let everybody else be serious.

For a year, I haven’t seen film or photographs of an Australian PM jogging.

This is a blessing, but is Our Kev looking after himself?  I hope so.  Does he look like he is getting enough exercise to you?

Rudd and “The People’s Daily”

Perhaps the Chinese don’t love our Kev as much as he would like.

I was looking through the English edition of the Chinese Government Mouthpiece Chinese People’s Daily, and navigated to World …Asia/Oceania.

Lots of stories with headlines about New Zealand, one with Australia in the headline… and guess what it was?

"New Zealand PM meets Australian counterpart in Peru"

Snigger, … giggle, … chortle.

Georgiou should stand for Senate next time

Petro Georgiou, who recently announced he will not stand for Kooyong at the next election, but will at least serve his current term, deserves much praise for his stances on human rights issues.

For lefties such as myself, it has been a wonder that perhaps the best example of a principled politician in the House, prepared to go off-side with the party-room and many party supporters on human rights issues, happens to be a member of the Liberal Party.

Personally, I hope his personal political advisors do a bit of number-crunching on whether he’d stand a chance running for the Senate as an independent: I reckon he’d do quite well.

As a below-the-line voter (and I wish more people would do that!), this is one lefty who’d include a lifelong Liberal Party member in the top couple of preferences.

Are there any other Victorian lefties out there who’d consider putting him high on their list of Senate preferences in 2010?

Something for non-Christian fans of Bach’s sacred music

A couple of questions for readers that might push some types of posts and some of my hobby work:

• How many of you are Bach fans?
• How many of you Bach fans are not Christians, but love his sacred music?
• How many of those people would like “sacriligeous” versions with the vocals replaced by instruments?

If any of you fit into any of these categories, try the MP3 files over the fold that I’ve generated (mainly with Rosegarden Linux Midi Editor), add comments with criticism or praise (especially voting for which of my renderings you like the most), and I’ll take it into account when preparing more tracks at home and uploading them for you.

Economics MSM lags blogosphere by 2 years or more?

("Prescient" bloggers are invited to add links as comments to prove or disprove the assertion of this piece.  I’d like to know which blogs I should be reading.)

John Kehoe’s Oz Fin Review (2008-11-22) "Economic heroes beware: Revisionism is nigh" is welcome, but far too late: a bit like sending wedding congratulations after a divorce.  Behind (not even between) the lines is a massive indictment of the Australian press coverage of economic matters for the last decade.

Some of the international press (particularly The Economist) had done much better, as I detailed in my (very positive) deconstruction of an Economist article in "The Economist damns Howard with faint praise".

I wish Kehoe had taken to task most of the economics commentators in the Oz mainstream press for leading the public up the garden path of "good economic management by Howard/Costello" – a bit more intelligence or honesty might have saved us much pain we will now be forced to endure.