Days Volume Two

THIS IS THE END OF VOLUME TWO OF DAYS

2011-04-23T11:31:00.009+07:00

THIS IS THE END OF VOLUME TWO OF DAYS WHICH COVERS THE YEARS FROM 2008 -2011.

THANKS FOR YOUR INTEREST .

VOLUME THREE TAKES AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FORMAT, RECORDING THE EARLY AND SOMETIMES CONTROVERSIAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE BOOK

THE TWILIGHT SOI AT

www.daysvolumethree.blogspot.com

THE FINAL STAGES OF THE BOOK'S DEVELOPMENT CAN BE FOLLOWED AT:

www.thetwilightsoi.blogspot.com

THE TWILIGHT SOI SHOULD BE AVAILABLE FOR SALE IN DIGITAL FORMATS INCLUDING KINDLE AND IPAD SHORTLY, AND HARD COPY SOON AFTER THAT.
THE BOOK IS A CAUTIONARY TALE ON THE DANGERS OF THAT MOST BEAUTIFUL AND MOST INTOXICATING OF CITIES, BANGKOK.

BY SUZANNAH

ENGLISH TRANSLATION:

I'm so, as it is, I will not be another.
I am naive, I happen - is harmful,
But such as it is, I am in the world alone.
I'm so, as it is, I can love.
Who sees me, he can not forget.
I know how to caress, but know how to beat.
I know how to save and able to ruin.
I'm so, as it is, I like the passion.
Building a life, I have time to break.
I'm a little sad and a little laugh.
I am fearless, but I'm afraid.
I'm so, as it is, I like to help.
But sometimes I can not help but cry.
I am free, i am one.
I can be passionate, and then - cool.
I'm so, as it is, I will not be different.
I have a little cry behind you,
Wipe your tears and sweet smile in response.
And so, as I am to you again will turn

RUSSIAN TRANSLATION:

Я такая, как есть, я не буду другой.
Я наивна бываю, бываю - вредна,
Но, такая, как есть, я в мире одна.
Я такая, как есть, я умею любить.
Кто увидит меня, тот не сможет забыть.
Я умею ласкать, но умею и бить.
Я умею спасать и умею губить.
Я такая, как есть, я похожа на страсть.
Строя жизнь, я себя успеваю ломать.
Я немного грущу, и немного смеюсь.
Я бесстрашна бываю, но я и боюсь.
Я такая, как есть, я люблю помогать.
Но бывает, что я не могу не кричать.
Я бываю вольна, я бываю одна.
Пылкой быть я могу, а потом - холодна.
Я такая, как есть, я не стану иной.
Я немного поплачу у вас за спиной,
Вытру слёзы и мило в ответ улыбнусь.
И такой, как я есть, к вам опять повернусь\

Liar Thief, Go-lap, Cam-moy

2011-01-03T09:07:00.000+07:00

These were the divided times,so infinitely beautiful, as they rallied around the gallows you could tell he had no shame; he was just a child, 20 years of age, and as the Deep Dark Woods echoed softly through the house Michael, who he had known for 30 years, since they were young and thoroughly wild 20-somethings dancing on what some might have thought was the cutting edge, up down and around, and these chronic distemperaments, I wouldn't go out tonight John, they had said, crammed into the smallest room in the house; why? do I look a mess? he asked. No, no, but you can't go out every night, you have to have down time, if every dismemberment, every flash of time came back to haunt, it was such bad timing. Just as he opened the gate to let out his old boy and the girlfriend that lad was now totally obsessed by, perched like youthful triumphants on the bike he had paid for, the new boy pulled up in the silver car he had also paid for. The timing could hardly have been worse, oh what a difference five minutes can make, and there was a frozen uncomfortability, and he thought, this is ridiculous, I'm the boss, I'm meant to be running the show, my terms, up to me, and instead he was tip toeing around trying to avoid upsetting someone with the mental age of a 12-year-old, in a duplicitous world of garbage strewn relics parading as human beings, elaborate scams over next to nothing, pitiful things, not now, you take care, he said, and didn't mean a word of it.

It wasn't the money, the 3,000 baht the girl had cheated them out of, that mattered, though in the process of the escapade he had learnt two new words - Go Lop - liar, Cam-moy, thief. He had said no to the idea of the girl coming out to meet Michael at the airport because he didn't want his old friend to feel trapped. Then she was meant to come around in the afternoon; was it only the day after they had gone down to the bar in Paht Pong, Bangkok's oldest and much faded red light district; played pool, picked up a girl. Oh how sweet they were. He always tipped them well, never took them home. The times were so right. It was one of those classic bars where most blokes feel instantly at home; and Michael, affronted or confused by the go-go bars he had marched him in and out of in rapid succession, avoiding the 300 baht drinks during the rapid survey, immediately relaxed. The big Cambodian girl instantly enveloped him. He was always kind to her, played pool for 200 baht a game and gave her the winnings. Oh how the time crawled by in these infinite places, when he hadn't slept, had no desire to sleep, could hear the rhythmic sound of Michael f...ing upstairs, come, come like the geyser you used to be. He complained about getting old; and yet he had never thought of Michael as getting old. He remained forever in his mind the 20-year-old with the good looks, swinging dick and hysterical sense of humour. Not to mention a gift for story telling.

Michael had always been enormously popular with the ladies; and a randy little sod. He thought it was his duty to f... every attractive person on the planet and did his best to fulfil his responsibilities. What did it matter now? Michael was even blinder than he, requiring high powered glasses to see almost anything. So the spare bed rocked. In his own bed an upset, frozen lad lay sleeping, or tossing and turning; after having accused him of chasing boy boy boy. He didn't chase anything, he couldn't be bothered any more; but it seemed impossible to explain his restless insomnia and roaming of the city; so very beautiful in the early hours when he was most awake. It was all too much. He had probably ruined everything. They set up the the table outside as a picnic, with a table cloth, set up the music outside, all very romantic. The girl finally showed up quite some hours later, big enough even for Michael, and certainly on the face of it seemed charming enough. Everything seemed in order. The courier departed with a 100 baht tip. The evening progressed. He decided to go out and leave them to it. Michael made the mistake no Thai man would have made, of leaving 3,000 baht on the dresser just to make clear she was being well re-numerated for her services. Suddenly she was just all to sleepy after a couple of the red Spy drinks the girls all seemed to like, and simply had to go to sleep. Michael, being a naive and old fashioned gentleman, let it pass. An hour later the lady simply had to dash home to take care of her 11-year-old son, although quite what care he would need at 3am was difficult to ascertain, pocketing the 3,000 baht as she exited.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11377

Kevin Rudd was caught up in a snowstorm of denial this week. "This is all just water off a duck's back. I could not care less." Bollocks he couldn’t.

Nothing could’ve delivered him a firmer, more winding blow than confirmation that American diplomats are officially reporting back to Washington that Rudd is (and this list of quotes is not exclusive) an abrasive, impulsive, control freak, prone to mistakes, making significant blunders and blurting out snap announcements without advance consultation.

Oh. And that, since the beginning of this year, his own party has been talking about getting rid of him.

There's a good reason that most former leaders leave politics as soon as they are deposed. It's because, eventually, details are revealed that irretrievably compromise their further work in the public sphere.

The casual remarks Rudd passed about the inability of the French and German military to do anything more than folk-dance and barbecue sausages may have been long-suspected, but now they're out. This will irrevocably cruel his already-damaged pitch as far as the Europeans are concerned.

That little ‘phut’ was the sound of the last remaining bit of goodwill evaporating. The verbal apologies the US has now tendered to the former PM aren’t even worth the paper they’d be written on if anyone bothered to note it down.

And China? Under Rudd our once-close relationship had disintegrated. Nothing released this week has done anything to patch it back together.

The reality is that Rudd can now be treated as little more than a continuing (international) joke, with Australia as the punch-line.

You won't find this written in any diplomatic cables of course, because then it might be leaked and that would be embarrassing. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11376

WikiLeaks challenges journalism-politics partnership

By Antony Loewenstein - posted Tuesday, 14 December 2010 Sign Up for free e-mail updates!

Who can now say that the WikiLeaks cables detail no new information?

It was only last week that ABC TV’s 7.30 Report featured a story with supposed foreign affairs experts, including the Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, who largely dismissed the significance of the document dump. Within a few days these men were all proven wrong.

Now we know Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib sends confidential information to the Americans. He’s not alone.

Crucially, however, our media class aren’t asking the next obvious questions.

The Australian’s Paul Maley argues that communication between politicians, journalists and diplomats is part of the daily job.

“It is no surprise the Americans were talking to Arbib,” he writes, “They talk to everyone.”

And yet the senior Murdoch journalist doesn’t understand that the general public are rarely told about such meetings. What is discussed? What are the agendas? Is there transparency in such dealings? And who is telling what information to whom? Who benefits and what stories are not being told to avoid embarrassing somebody?

The cosiness between these players is exactly what WikiLeaks is aiming to challenge. Why shouldn’t the voting public be privy to whims and wishes of the American government and their relationships with key government ministers, individuals voted in by all of us? If Arbib was warning the Americans he thought Rudd may fall, why wasn’t he telling his constituents, the ones who put him in office?

The fact that the US had followed the rise of Julia Gillard and approved her views on the American alliance, Afghanistan and Israeli aggression is worrying though unsurprising.

Night in Chiang Mai.

Cry Me A River Lisped The Dribbling Hysteric

2010-12-17T12:31:00.005+07:00

He still didn't know where they came from. The malls of ruined statues. The glistening hyper-spun glue that coated every surface. The half formed voices snapping in the unquiet wind. All was at discord and all was at peace. The stabs of pain were a reminder of mortality. The workers watched him as he passed; always at roughly the same time, 4 am. It had been the same in Sydney. Restless in Seattle was the only title that came to mind, trite, as he walked restless, gassap gassai, through this astonishing, 24-hour place, the fleets of neon pink and blue taxis passing beneath the overpass, the soaring high rise condos, the Ascot, The Sathon, Welcome To The Future, Ambience Arriving Soon declare the signs, Starting 3.5 MB, Mingle, Where You Live Says Who You Are, The Riverside, A New Kind Of Luxury, soar above them all they imply, away from the traditional streets, the crowded rooms, the Thais uncomfortable if they're alone, four to a room, a way of life at odds with the soaring skyscrapers and office blocks towering over the slums, or traditional neighbourhoods, however you wanted to describe them, coffee 12 baht, 30 cents, an aching heart, a handsome face, the young spilling out of some dance club, falang, falang, foreigner, foreigner, you want take care? They jostled each other, as if it was their duty in life to provide sexual services to every tourist. The girls demurred. They liked the young men they were with far too much to bother earning tips from some ugly old European. The boys told him they would be working at the X-Size bar the following evening. He laughed and kept on walking. The streets were so welcoming. The fabric of things embraced him. These were things he could never have made up.

It was such a shift from the malignant frame he had occupied for so many years. Now all these tiny things, scenes he treasured so much as they vanished before him in tiny glimpses, were all part of the daily assault. The ailing millionaire. Multi. Short. Hardly pretty. Lived near Mayfair, Highgate was it, with his wife of 35 years. And just happened to buy two Bangkok bars both called Hot Male Station less than a kilometre apart; and a go go bar called Night Boys. He had his pick. He had been in hospital. The funny looking man he assumed to be Jewish, although he told him he had been born in Africa with some sort of Indian heritage somewhere in there, lived in London, had an office in New York. The business man had embraced him merrily, fondly, as if he too was part of his paradise of flesh, though he was in his 50s and long past competing with anything the locals could offer; here in between, here as the doors shut, a brief glimpse, a flutter, the lady boy, Lee, or Mr Lee, we called him, he of the handsome husband. Best silicone tits in Thailand he would fondly declare, giving them an affectionate feel, a Thai sniff. She would laugh with him and stick them out even further, hard as rock, knowing he always tipped, was never trouble, quiet, watched, went home. These were too tight networks and he did not stray. Not here. Not today. Not now. The owner had bought the five story building for something like 35,000 pound, if he heard him correctly over the disco beat, and had occupied the top floor as his own private Idaho, the boys ushering him up into the secluded premises, everything away, everything darkness, all away, all away, the sick little frog man, the amiable giant, the millionaire, married, with a taste for the lads. It's so easy, he had confided to him, one early morn. What, do you take three or four up there at a time, he asked. Oh dear no, one is enough. My heart. Does your wife know? He shrugged. Thirty five years. Three children. She good. I love her.

As if that mattered, as the sky lightened. Already the sois were aflicker with activity, the street peddlers, the morning food, coffee now, and toast and jam, all for a few baht, the western influence, jostling with the spicy "pet" traditional Asian breakfast; in a city which was remaking itself by the day, a new giant born every day, picturesque abandoned houses waiting to be redeveloped, time out of mind, time a strange little nugget dancing silver before him, tired at last. He tipped the handsome doorman who always saw him safely into a taxi. The desperate roamed in that hour in between the day and the night; the older, trickier "boys" who hadn't pulled a customer accosting him in the poorly lit streets or just whiling away the last of the night before going home to sleep for the day. He knew when he was fair game and when he was safe. There had never been any trouble. He would open the morning gate quietly and nestle back into bed with the one he had picked because he knew he would fight off all the others, protect his interests, make sure he was protected. An easy sleeper, like many Thai men, at first the lad never knew he would disappear in the middle of the night, roaming the streets of Bangkok just as he had roamed the streets of Sydney, fundamentally restless, staring fascinated at the 24-hour building sites with the welding flares lighting up against the unfinished structures, the workers in their blue outfits covering the site at night, delineated under the arc lights, more striking than during the day when their tiny figures were overwhelmed by the clutter of the city, muffled by the pollution haze. Now his bed buddy was used to the fact that he wandered around at all hours of the night; knew perfectly well sex was not the motive. Kun gassap gassai, you restless, he would say, with a kind of increasing affection, or at least understanding, as the months past. All foreigners were strange, essentially beyond understanding. Yet the spasmodic pick had worked to a large degree in an imperfect world. Happy with his new station in life the boy would drive off to university in his car proud as punch, the sound system pounding with joy. He would look on from the front porch with a kind of affectionate pleasure, having woken to a clean house and Thai breakfast laid out on the kitchen table, glad that at least someone was enjoying the fruits of his labours. It was a different place, a different world. Each day he learnt a new word. Buhen Phai. Different. Rayn lahp or luek lahp. Secret. No one would ever know what the world really looked like from this side of the multi-flared windows. I wave you goodbye. I welcome you into my heart. In the wide glittering spaces of the airport, under the security cameras, he shrugged. Good to see you old friend.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.google.com.au/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn

LABOR Party national president Anna Bligh has backed a complete review of the government's border protection policies

The call comes as political unity over the Christmas Island asylum boat disaster crumbled.

As the frantic search continued for survivors of Wednesday's horror sinking, the opposition said it would not join a proposed bipartisan group announced by Julia Gillard yesterday.

The rebuff came as The Australian learned that Indonesian authorities were searching for an Iranian in the belief he had planned the doomed people-smuggling operation.

It can also be revealed that the two patrol boats that participated in yesterday's rescue, plucking 41 survivors from the sea, were stationed off Christmas Island only because the seas were too rough to resume regular patrols.

The official death toll last night rose to 30, including four children and four babies, after divers recovered the bodies of man in his 20s and a boy about 10 years old, near the sunken hull.

However, the government, which yesterday announced three investigations into the tragedy, said the toll was likely to rise because up to 100 Iraqis, Iranians and Kurds were believed to have been aboard the boat.

Locals said bodies could be trapped for weeks in underwater caves at the site of the boat wreck, 200m from the island's only safe harbour, Flying Fish Cove.

Ms Bligh, the Queensland Premier, speaking in her federal leadership capacity with the ALP, yesterday agreed the "catastrophic tragedy" would raise questions about whether Christmas Island should continue to host the nation's biggest immigration detention camp.

She said the Prime Minister's decision to return to work from holidays demonstrated that she understood the implications for "policy settings in relation particularly to this island".

Asked whether the Indian Ocean territory had become a magnet for people-smuggling, Ms Bligh told The Australian: "I really do think it is premature to be jumping to specific conclusions. All I am saying is that . . . when a shocking incident like this happens, it's incumbent on all of us to have a really good look at all the settings, and we should have the courage to do so.

"This is an absolutely catastrophic tragedy and when we understand better the circumstances that led to it . . . I would expect that we as a nation would have a long, hard look at what it all means."

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/tagged-and-triumphant-assange-breathes-fresh-air-again-and-heads-for-the-manor-20101217-18zv4.html

Julian Assange has emerged triumphant from custody in London, more than four hours after the British High Court upheld bail with tight conditions, including electronic tagging.

As he stepped through the doors of the British High Court on the dot of 6pm to thunderous cheers, he stopped on the steps, smiled and said it was “great to smell the fresh air of London again”.

Dressed in dark suit and collared white shirt, Assange looked pale but elated and defiant, immediately thanking his supporters worldwide, as well as his legal team, led by Australian QC, Geoffrey Robertson.

He expressed gratitude to “all the people around the world who have supported me and my team while I’ve been away, to my lawyers who put up a brave and ultimately successful fight and those who provided sureties and who provided money in face of great difficulty”.

He also thanked members of the press who “dug deeper in their work” and the British justice system “where if justice is not always an outcome at least it is not dead yet.”

With a deep breath, he said that during his time “in solitary confinement in the bottom of a Victorian prison I had time to reflect on the conditions of those people around the world also in solitary confinement, also on remand in conditions that were more difficult than those faced by me. Those people also need your attention and support,” he said.

Sunset Dreaming by Carlotta Ceawlin.

The Dawn of Everything

2010-12-17T02:03:00.004+07:00

How did that matter? You, me, finished now, he heard the voice shout. He could hear them coming out of all the houses. He could hear every sputter of a bike in the surrounding network of sois, coming for me, coming to see me, he thought, but of course these were all illusions masquerading in a masque, the fabric of things. He had sat in front of the computer finishing off Chaos and now it was time to move on to something else. Fortunes were made and lost. Midlake and the Deep Dark Woods had been getting a bit of a thrashing, inter-cut with Bob Dylan's Desire, Blonde on Blonde and even Stranger Strange, how you listen to the river of my curdled song. These were the days, but were they really? The synapses misfiring. Mistrust all around. Treachery. He knew he was being set up. He walked the other way. He talked for hours to the strange little man. Was there any way around this, or through this? Crashing, crashing. Preoccupations came and went so swiftly. The boys all told him later the owner was in hospital. They had all seen him being embraced by the top dog. The man with business interests on every continent. Wish I had his brain for business, he thought. And outside the night swirled into another enterprise, the bus connection to the sky train station Chong Nongsi cutting a dramatic ark in the middle of the night, the welding sparks cascading onto the street and the traffic below.

He wasn't, he noticed a day or two later, the only one who thought the sight of those Thai workers dangling from the metal structure not just dramatic but beautiful, with a foreigner, falang, having set up his tripod and carefully taking shot after of the ultimate urban landscape. It's astonishing, he commented to Alex, whose books sold by the bucket load to teenage girls across the English speaking world, the amount of building going on in Bangkok. Boyfriends with Girlfriends was the latest title, to be released in the New Year. The title spelt instant sales and he said as much. Alex was one of the few program people he had ever met who showed a genuine interest in other people, asking perceptive, searching questions about their lives and actually listening to the answers. I care about you, he said, over the restaurant table, the gold fish swimming at their feet. Shawn, who had done his PHD on Foucault and could well be one of the thousand or so people in the world it is estimated who genuinely understand the famous French philosopher, gave a curious exposition about Camus and a book he reminded him was called The Plague, about the nature of humanity, the core principles, the things that make us what we are. The fish, their white and gold and red lit by under-lights, swirled past their feet. How did you end up in South Africa, Alex asked Shawn.

The world has become as one, Alex observed. I went to the Seychelles last year, Alex added, looking for somewhere completely isolated, different, uncorrupted by the world. Might as well have been in America. I went to the place Al, the whisky priest, had in Africa. Incredibly remote. Yet the nearest shops were the same. Could have been anywhere. Chiang Mai, he contributed, used to be one of the most picturesque places on earth, flowers everywhere, no one could afford a car, there was no traffic, the most dominant sound was the ringing of the rick shaw bells. Now it's just another place. Same with Lahore in northern Pakistan. Once it was biblical in feel, beautiful, remote, Muslim. Now it's just another bustling place. The world was converging. But it's a fascinating time to be alive, he observed. At no other time in history has it been possible to access so much information, to snoop on such a myriad of stories, to see so much of the world from your own home. What drives you, Alex asked. Pain. No, he said. I am not suicidal. Bored, Shawn piped in. That's an easy one. Only yesterday Shawn had texted him, at Coffee Society, come buy me something and I'll pretend to be interested in your life. No go, he responded in the simple English he had adopted amongst the non-English speakers with which he spent so much time. I want to be one of the few people in your life who don't pay for your company in one way or another, financially, in personal grief, he messaged through the ether. How many hearts did you torment, white whore in Thailand? Oh John, I'm so gorgeous, if I could f... myself I'd never leave the apartment. You're 50 dear, he snapped back, get a grip. I'm not too old to be a whore, I'm sure, he whipped back. Amazing what you can do with trickery and light. Blind lust and eyes that will never see. The dark velvet that is there where only you can be carried. As if it all meant something, these tangled webs. Check bin kab, he said to the passing waiter, noticing the flick of another large carp as it passed beneath their feet.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2010/s3078907.htm

PETER CAVE: In Victoria this morning Premier John Brumby is under pressure to concede defeat. The Victorian Electoral Commission is counting the hundreds of thousands of pre-poll votes which were cast ahead of Saturday's election but it appears that the Liberal-National Coalition may have already reached the crucial 45 seats needed to claim victory.

The Liberals are ahead in the seat of Bentleigh by a margin of about 423 votes.

Alison Caldwell reports.

ALISON CALDWELL: Some would say Labor in Victoria is in a state of complete denial. Others would say the party is just fighting to the end to defend what has been theirs for over a decade.

But late last night the Victorian Electoral Commission declared that on its provisional figures the Liberals have won the seat of Bentleigh in Melbourne's inner south-east. That would give the Coalition the 45 seats it needs to win government.

PETER RYAN: They have had a vote against them of proportions that this state has so seldom seen.

ALISON CALDWELL: For Nationals leader Peter Ryan it is just a matter of time before the Coalition forms government.

PETER RYAN: I believe that we will pick up the extra seat and I believe we will form government.

ALISON CALDWELL: The electoral commission will resume counting today in the seats of Eltham, Ballarat East and Macedon. Labor is pessimistic about Eltham. The other seats in doubt are Albert Park which was provisionally given to Labor on Saturday night, Narre Warren North and Monbulk.

Steve Tully is Victoria's electoral commissioner. He spoke to ABC News Breakfast this morning.

STEVE TULLY: Our major focus is on a recheck of all results that were taken in the voting centres on Saturday and continuing with the large task of moving ballot papers from around the state to where they need to be to be counted.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hCmJGkU23bUki_4NgxNdkYBAUK5Q?docId=CNG.050a9c8c5fd91a430d7e435fcc325b90.f51

WASHINGTON — The WikiLeaks release of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables on Sunday has infuriated Washington, where officials said it could put lives in danger and threaten national security.
At least one US lawmaker called for the prosecution of the founder of the whistle-blower website, which had previously released nearly a half million classified military reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The White House called Sunday's release a "reckless and dangerous action" in a statement released after the first batch of cables was published by The New York Times and European newspapers.
"To be clear -- such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
Democratic Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called the release a "reckless action which jeopardizes lives" and rejected Assange's claims to be acting in the public interest.
"This is not an academic exercise about freedom of information and it is not akin to the release of the Pentagon Papers, which involved an analysis aimed at saving American lives and exposing government deception," he added, referring to a secret history of the Vietnam War leaked in 1971.
US Republican congressman Peter King, the ranking member of the House of Representatives' Homeland Security Committee, urged the attorney general to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for espionage.
The latest release "manifests Mr Assange's purposeful intent to damage not only our national interests in fighting the war on terror, but also undermines the very safety of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan."
He went on to urge the State Department to designate WikiLeaks a "Foreign Terrorist Organization," saying it "posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States," in a statement from his office.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the United States was mulling criminal charges against Assange, saying only that it was assisting the Pentagon in its "ongoing investigation" into the disclosure.
The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee said the release was "an embarrassment to the (Barack) Obama administration and represents a critical failure by the Pentagon and intelligence community."
Representative Pete Hoekstra called on the intelligence community to "move quickly to assess the failures in this case" and said Congress should also take up the matter.
The Pentagon, which also strongly condemned the release, said it had taken new steps to "prevent further compromise of sensitive data."
The steps were taken after Pentagon reviews launched in August that followed the disclosure of tens of thousands of US military intelligence files on the war in Afghanistan.
The measures included disabling all write-capability for flash drives or removable media on classified computers, restricting transfers of information from classified to unclassified systems and better monitoring of suspicious computer activity using similar tactics employed by credit card companies.

Simon Sharratt
Cloud Appreciation Society

Another Round Of The City The Girls The Delinquent Characters He Loved Them All

2010-11-25T15:05:00.004+07:00

There was an infinity of loss, that was for sure, but equally in his startled and erratic psyche there were moments of peace, destiny, a profound surrender to these oh so short lives. You papa, you gaw, old man, many year, the boys would say, and he would laugh it off because what else could you do. Taking care of papa. There were many times when he could of, should have, sought something else. Timae? Why? Why you sad John I worry you, his old partner in crime would ask. And he would simply shrug. I want you happy. You happy me happy. They were both desolate and exhilarating times. He liked it most when the sky started to lighten and the never say die nocturnal animals would gather outside the karaoke bar. He was, as always in these situations, the only foreigner. They were kind to him. As Thais tended to be when they weren't tricking you out of money, or even when they were. As long as they got their share they were happy, and would protect you against yourself and the city's more ruthless denizens. The taxis lined up along the edge of the street outside the giant ramshackle brothels, the final customers spilling into the dawn, some of the men taking someone home with them. Little bit? the boy would say, and he would sigh in despair. He was too old for it all. He should have been home in bed tucked up with a nurse, or watching television, not inflicting his physical presence on this netherworld, night world he loved so much.

He watched the girls taking their final customers for the night. Some of them were drunk and not very attractive, pests really. He mostly ignored them if they tried to attract his attention, except to offer them some of whatever was on the table, whatever he had paid for this time. The cruelty of it was what got him, that these moments couldn't last for ever, these moments he alone was interested in, saw as the peak of the day, the week, his life. No one else did, as they amiably finished singing the final song of the night. And some of them would assure him the boy he was with was good. He like lady, whisky, mak mak, very much, they would tell him, as if he didn't know that already. Whisky and ladies were the test of a very fine fellow. Kow Jai mai kahb, do you understand? Not really. He had been cursed with an unusual temperament. It didn't really hold together in the light. It didn't match his body; now pohm poohey, plump, nor did it match his interior monologue, which was not about being old but wild, on the outer fringe of everything, stabbing into points of ecstasy, infinity, a profound love of urban landscapes, rotting, chaotic, crowded, the cute boys, well they were young men but everyone called them boys, milling outside the bar as the sun began to dapple the sky. They were up for anything. He knew exactly what they were like. They would spend most of the day asleep. They were always for sale. They were nearly always straight but could put on a show for money with few if any of the reservations common in the west. They were lazy and funny and thought everything was a great joke, especially each other, especially foreigners.

They made stupid comments about the departing girls. Most of them didn't have the 500 baht it would have taken to bed them briefly in the small, sweaty, smelly rooms upstairs. He paid the bill, as was his role. He watched his friend arguing with his girlfriend at a table outside. Timae, why? he heard him ask. She had come along to the karaoke bar at four a.m. with them and been sour the entire time they had been there. Perhaps she was shocked by the easy availability of the cheap girls; although why that should be a surprise in a city like Bangkok heaven only knows. And Thai men being the way they were, easy easy. The consternation, the regret that was in their faces as the final shards of night fled into the day! Everything had to end. They must known that. Small groups or couples wandered off into taxis. Some of the boys were having breakfast, or whatever it could be called, before wandering off home to sleep, to laze around in their flats and houses and get in the way of everybody else. Thai women all complained about how feckless, lazy and unfaithful their men were. Although even their harshest critics would often admit a sentence or two later that some of them were lough, handsome, a decorative addition to any home. He was back at meetings and even though in Bangkok they only lasted an hour they seemed to last forever; he couldn't stomach the bullshit. If you want what we have... The only people who do not get this simple program are those incapable of being honest with themselves. The worst piece of self serving logic. Sometimes he would just as rather have been outside those bars, watching the night turn into day and watching the final customers dissemble into the light, all pumped and happy with an adventure on every lip. Sandy had just got back from London and New York. You live the life, he commented. I do, she smiled. He climbed off his new bike. Doesn't the traffic worry you? she asked. It's alarming, he replied, completely alarming, adding, I miss Maria. She kind of adopted me after I called the meetings a cult. Now she was off in Rome, making a whole lot of noise in a whole different place. Yes, I miss her too, Sandy said, a wizened, wise and wealthy old thing. You going upstairs, she asked, gesturing at the Bangkok Christian Guest house. Yes, he said with what could not be called bracing enthusiasm; at the same time asking the passing parking attendant, tinae, where? See you up there, Sandy said, while the parking attendant gestured to a space behind the cars. He was the only one who knew those dawns, those karaoke places, the places where working class Thai men went to relax, drink, flirt, gossip, get their rocks off and "sing a song".

Upstairs in the Bangkok Christian Guest House he could barely sit still long enough, could barely wait for the hour to be over. One day everything he loved so much would last forever, all his peculiar yearnings frozen in an instant. One day time would stand still, for him, for everybody his strange desires were populated with, those people he embraced for friendship, companionship, love, sex, amusement, curiosity, to satisfy his peculiar eye for beauty amongst the dishevelled denizens as they departed into the dawn, into this most fascinating, most alluring of cities.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/pm-caves-on-broadband-details/story-fn59niix-1225960509953

JULIA Gillard has buckled to political pressure from independent senators to save Labor's proposed National Broadband Network.

The PM has abandoned her refusal to release the business case for the massive communications project.

After insisting last week that information in the business case was "commercial in confidence", the Prime Minister yesterday released a summary of the document to secure support from independent senators for a bill that would deliver structural separation of Telstra and pave the way for the NBN.

It was clear last night that senators Nick Xenophon and Steve Fielding would support the legislation, ensuring its passage when it is put to a vote today.

Senator Fielding says the NBN would transform the health and education sectors and could even lead to the establishment of a free online university.

"I strongly believe that technology, including telecommunications infrastructure, is a vital building block for any advanced economy that wants to remain competitive in a global market," he will tell the Senate today.

The breakthrough in winning over the independent senators came as Communications Minister Stephen Conroy last night revealed that the basic internet access package offered under the NBN would provide download speeds of 12mbps, which is already available through ADSL.

However, Senator Conroy refused to reveal the price of the basic package.

Buoyed by her success, Ms Gillard last night used an address to the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry to champion the NBN as a fundamental economic reform that would transform the nation's economy. With parliament due to rise for the year this afternoon, Ms Gillard has been racing to round up crossbench support for the Telstra legislation. She was aware that not securing its passage would be portrayed as a failure in her first major negotiation over legislation since she became Prime Minister in June.

Government sources said last night her about-face was evidence of the Prime Minister's deft negotiation skills.

Senator Xenophon, who extracted the concession, said he had forced the government to a compromise.

Opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull said the business case summary was inadequate, short on detail and little more than "a sop" to win the support of independents.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has struggled for weeks to win approval for the Telstra legislation.

He conceded last night that the bungled attempt to impose seven-year gag orders -- later revised to two weeks -- on MPs who were given access to the NBN business case was the brainchild of "some very eager officials in some of the departments".

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/pentagon-contradicts-obama-on-war-gains/story-e6frg6so-1225960415155

A PENTAGON report has warned that coalition forces are making little headway against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Violence was at an all-time high as insurgents capitalised on NATO plans to hand over security to Afghan troops by 2014.

The Pentagon assessment, which talks of "uneven" progress in the war against the Afghan extremists, appears to contradict assurances by President Barack Obama last week that the insurgency was in decline.

Its release heaps further embarrassment on the White House a day after it was revealed the main Taliban protagonist in recent reconciliation talks with the Afghan government was not, as he claimed to be, the insurgents' No 2 commander, Mullah Akthar Muhammad Mansour, but a Pakistani shopkeeper from Quetta.

Initial reports suggested the man had been paid large sums of money and given safe passage by NATO forces to Kabul for the talks and was even granted a meeting with President Hamid Karzai - which the presidential palace denied yesterday. The Taliban yesterday gloated over the ruse, with spokesman Qari Yusuf Ahmadi telling reporters: "The Americans and their allies are very stupid and anyone could fool them."

The US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, denied the US had been duped. "There was scepticism about one of these all along and it may well be that scepticism was well-founded," he said, adding the revelations, reported in The New York Times, were no surprise to either US or Afghan intelligence agencies.

US and Afghan officials had previously stressed any discussions between Taliban commanders and Afghan officials were simply "talks about talks", designed to sound out trusted Taliban conduits.

Although the impostor's motives remain unclear, Afghan officials yesterday suggested he may have been sent by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency to see what Afghans would offer.

The issue highlights the complexities involved in coalition efforts to exit Afghanistan through a negotiated settlement, just as the Pentagon assessment underscores the difficulties of fighting an enemy now preying on locals' fears of an imminent NATO withdrawal. The report, which assessed progress from April to September 30, found cause for optimism in coalition forces' ability to "localise" the insurgency in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where the US military surge focused its efforts. But it was pessimistic about the prospects of a further Pakistani crackdown on militant sanctuaries within its territory, despite increased co-operation between the US and Pakistani military.

Leaders at last weekend's NATO summit agreed in principle to Mr Karzai's demands that security for the country be handed over to Afghan forces by late 2014 or 2015. But evidence of mass corruption in September's parliamentary elections - a year after Mr Karzai was re-elected in a poll widely condemned as rigged - has done little to boost confidence in the Afghan administration.

http://storage.koinup.com/090430x144905/144905-6.jpg

blog.koinup.com

Well...

2010-11-24T23:34:00.007+07:00

Well the book was finished. Chaos At The Crossroads. He lost track of time. Had barely slept for ten days; or was it more. Two weeks? Twenty days? He couldn't remember now. He had spent twenty hours a day at the computer and it ultimately came in at 176,000 words, twice the length of the average novel. He first began it in 2004 and an early draft had been up on the web ever since. It was a time to finish things. To forget old obsessions. To move on. But this was beyond obsession, beyond hard work, in a different place, really. Rats scuttled through the grass. The boy stared at him bewildered. He would never be the same again. Not ever. You broke my frozen heart; that was more or less what he said. I know you like me. You old man. Papa. Sure. I like you. Always have, always will. This strange obsession with street boys as they climbed, climbed. She have power over you, he observed. After, after, hah bee, sip bee, five, ten years, she will be big, gangster. You, too, careful, careful,, mai koowey, no talk, never say anything to anybody, just progress, climb. You still very handsome, he said. It was true, unfortunately. He had sacrificed everything. Every element of common sense. Nothing changed. He had changed. It was all wrong. It was his fault. He understood that now.

There were days when he could hear the engines of every motor cycle as they passed the house along the narrow soi, or passed up along the even narrower alleyway beside the house. He could never identify which was which. He was waiting, haunted. You old man, I can do, sometimes, business. You good to me. Falang, foreigner, they like me. In the bar, many, many boy, working, no customer. Me, on the street, I have falang. Sure, sure. He took the news of competing interests in good cheer. He could see that there were many ways clear to a foreign future. That he had made serious mistakes. That if not unfaithful in body he was unfaithful in mind. That he treated the boy as if he was an impediment, which he was to a large degree. The house was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. But he was not happy. He couldn't indulge in his most demented fantasies. Pretty, sure, passionate, never. He could hear the contempt drifting down the line as he made up yet another excuse why he wasn't home. Moi, moi, he said dismissively. Whatever. He sat on the second floor of the Bangkok Christian Guest House and could see a million reasons why he shouldn't be there. The only people who don't get this simple program are those incapable of honesty, he heard for the hundred thousandth time, this self serving and ludicrous logic, if you don't agree with us you are dishonest, sure, whatever you say, and he listened to the Americans droning on. How on earth did they do it? He would never know.

The over-arching fly ways, the crumbling windows, the dirty curtains which had never looked out on any more than an indiscriminate industrial scene, the massive concrete station which had never been opened. He thought of trying to ask timmmae, why, what, as they whisked down the street past that strange empty billboarded concrete edifice which must have cost quite a considerable sum to have even got it that far, millions of baht, thousands of hours, the fallanxes of concrete, even the parking station with the sign: "Cars this way." He always passed that empty, unfinished station on the way to some pointless, obsessional, delinquent assignation. The girl friend was never far away; and even she had come to accept him as someone with problems but best of all, a foreigner always prepared to pay whatever price was demanded. He had no personal integrity or self worth left. Yet he had finished the book. Crazy as it was. Mad as it was. In the large font he had been working in, it came in at over 1,000 pages. Beautiful, he said of the finished project, as if any of the working boys he was talking to had the slightest idea of what he was talking about. Make money? That's what they were interested in. Well not entirely. There were various scandals. Him being one of them. But if in all those rivulets, all those strange corridors, all those uncompleted passageways and side pathways leading nowhere there had been at least some breath of humanity, something that could be passed on, he would have been happy. As it was, the chance of anyone relating to this distant state of mind was remote. Yes, I love her, the boy said. Yes, I can see, he said. She has power over you. What was money then, if it was not power? Come take me apart, corrupted heart. The lights of the fashionable restaurant reflected across the hovering staff, and for a moment, just a moment, he stared into those dark, tricky eyes. You understand me, the boy asked. Sure, he replied, sure.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/turnbull-to-make-a-quid-out-of-nbn--swan-20101122-182ww.html

Opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull privately supports the National Broadband Network, federal Treasurer Wayne Swan says.

It has been revealed that Mr Turnbull owns $10 million worth of shares in technology company Melbourne IT, which stands to profit from the NBN.

Mr Swan said he didn't believe what Mr Turnbull was publicly saying about the NBN.

"Publicly Mr Turnbull says he wants to demolish the NBN and privately he wants to make a quid out of it," Mr Swan told Fairfax Radio Network on Monday.

"That just demonstrates the absolute hypocrisy of the Liberal Party when it comes to the NBN.

"Mr Turnbull is simply doing what Mr Abbott told him to do, which is demolish it, when he thinks privately it's a real goer."

Mr Swan also said it would be irresponsible to reveal the business plan for the network now.

"We've got some advice yet to come from the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) at the points of interconnection, that doesn't come until the end of the month," he said.

"When that's with us cabinet can take a decision on the business plan.

"But until we do that ... you simply cannot release it, it wouldn't be responsible."

http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/a-tilt-of-the-head-can-lure-a-mate-20101121-182en.html

Forget diamonds, fine dining and romantic walks in the sunset, all it takes to lure a mate is a tilt of the head, according to new research.

By simply tilting their face forward a woman's face can be judged to be more feminine and more attractive, whereas a man's face is considered more attractive when tilted backwards, this latest research has found.

Dr Darren Burke and Dr Danielle Sulikowski are the husband and wife team behind the research, which has been carried out at the University of Newcastle and Macquarie University.

While a lot is known already on the influence of feminine and masculine features on attractiveness, there is a gap in the evolutionary origin of what is considered masculine and feminine about facial features, according to Dr Burke.

"Our research investigated if looking at the face from different perspectives as a result of the height differential between men and women influenced perceived masculinity or femininity," he said.

"The research found the way we angle our faces affects our attractiveness to the opposite sex."

Typically taller than women, men view women's faces from above so a female face was deemed more attractive when tilted forward, simulating this perspective.

The opposite was then true for men whose faces were judged more masculine and attractive when tilted backwards as though they were viewed from below.

Dr Sulikowski said these findings offer some clues to help unravel "the mysteries of mateship rituals" in this century.

"The next step is to determine if people use this effect in real-world mate-attraction scenarios," she said.

The findings are published in the latest edition of Evolutionary Psychology.

survivalistboards.com

Try Again

2010-11-10T09:22:00.003+07:00

Everything went every which way. Scattered origins, scattered futures, boys idling away the day in back sois. He would never be one of them; that he knew now. Although he still envied, sometimes, Baw's great ability to get lost in the karaoke bars of Bangkok, to get lost in the whisky and laughter and fine scale attempts to divide the heavenly divides. The policeman in the corner. The handsome, should that be pretty, girl in his lap. He had always been the only foreigner. Always. In these places no foreigner ever saw. And even now, when he sat amongst them and watched them touting for customers, it seemed that the French or the Europeans or whoever they were, ugly as sin to a man, never even acknowledged his presence as they were ushered inside. Often enough they would emerge shortly afterwards, underwhelmed or overwhelmed, it was difficult to tell, because they were suddenly the only customer in a bar of semi-naked, increasingly desperate boys. The nights wore on and customers were scarce.

So when he was overcharged for drinks, for their endless cokes and soda one night his reaction was immediate and angry. He wasn't an ordinary customer in any ordinary sense. He wasn't looking at the boys. He wasn't taking any of them home. He had been blind sided yet all these things were a terrible waste. Wasn't there a better life than sitting in a back street watching male prostitutes peddle their wares. He wasn't so sure. Even the strange light that played upon the buildings seemed immensely beautiful. Some where's, some why's. Some of the places in between. A broiling sky, a dark conscience, a soothing sanity. It had all been a terrible mistake. Once the darkness fell there was no way out. Once Christmas dawned he could only hope for compromise. Perhaps he really should be prepared to reach out, to stroke his hand along the fabric of things, to engage in the discourse, to surrender, confess, reveal. Not bloody likely, he thought. Not for you bunch.

In the land of endless compromise, in the land of hungry ghosts, all of it shed for weakness all of it shred for strength, he couldn't help but pine for something more profound. Sure he paid them. Looking for love in all the wrong places. But then he knew that already. He watched the trissy boy he didn't particularly like with his new customer. French. Old. Gaw mak mak as his own companion whispered to him. Very old. He knew the boy didn't like foreigners. They made him sick. He had told him once he was allergic to them, like allergic to a cat. If he stayed with them for more than three or four days he became ill. Yet there he was acting all friendly to the French man, boyfriend. The European seemed clearly besotted, massaging the neck of his victim with what appeared to be affection. He watched them as they disappeared down the soi. That was one thought that was not erotic. There was darkness in the buildings all around; all the office workers had gone home; and the only life was in the ground floor level bars, Nature Boys, Night Boys, the Golden Cock, the disco Hot Male Station slowly stirring into life as midnight approached. I want to go home, he declared loudly to the boy, demanding the keys. He had suddenly had enough of it all.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/national/rudd-ruffles-feathers-to-be-in-clinton-limelight-20101109-17m2c.html

Kevin Rudd gatecrashed the special ABC television broadcast with Hillary Clinton on the weekend, demanding a place in the heavily promoted event to share the limelight with the US Secretary of State, an official said.

Mr Rudd's last-minute decision to attend the town hall-style meeting sent organisers at the ABC, the Foreign Affairs Department and US embassy into a spin - coming only hours before the event was due to be recorded.

Mr Rudd was not scheduled to be among the VIP guests at the recording, which included Australia's ambassador in Washington, Kim Beazley, the businessman Hugh Morgan, Melbourne University's vice-chancellor, Glyn Davis, and the US ambassador to Australia, Jeff Bleich.

Advertisement: Story continues below
But after a dinner with Mrs Clinton on Saturday night, Mr Rudd insisted he attend. An Australian official familiar with the event said Mr Rudd had stridently demanded plans be changed to include him. ''The behaviour was disgusting and he deserves to be called on it,'' the official told The Age.

There was confusion that Mr Rudd was actually asking to be seated on stage alongside Mrs Clinton and the ABC host, Leigh Sales, for the broadcast dubbed, Hillary Rodham Clinton: An Australian Conversation. This threatened to undo the careful planning for the recording, which involved some six camera positions spread among an audience of about 450 in a Melbourne University lecture theatre.

But Mr Rudd has denied he or his staff asked for a seat on stage. ''No, not at all. I didn't ask to go on the stage at all,'' he told The 7.30 Report on Monday.

''I said to Hillary, 'Oh, you're going to the university tomorrow? That's terrific. I know the vice-chancellor. I'd like to come along and have a look. That's terrific.'''

Mrs Clinton has made a habit of engaging in televised special conversations with younger audiences around the region, including in Cambodia and Indonesia.

She has never previously shared the stage with another foreign minister. Mr Rudd described as a ''bit of mischief'' suggestions he sought a place on stage.

He arrived early at the event and walked up and down the aisle, shaking hands with the audience. He then took a seat in the front row and later attended a morning tea hosted by Melbourne University Asialink following the recording.

After a hectic two days of meetings, where Mrs Clinton repeatedly praised him for his expert knowledge of foreign affairs, Mr Rudd has now fallen ill.

On medical advice, he has pulled out of attending a regional summit in Japan, with the Trade Minister, Craig Emerson, to represent Australia in his place.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/rudd-waged-war-on-alp-howes/story-fn59niix-1225948549170

PAUL Howes has accused Kevin Rudd of being responsible for the damaging leaks against Labor during the federal election campaign.

He claimed the "vindictive" former prime minister waged a "dirty war" designed to wreck the ALP's bid for re-election.

Mr Howes also revealed how Mr Rudd privately briefed union leaders at Kirribilli House on Labor's planned mining tax several weeks before the government announced the plan in May this year, and prior to the mining industry being told.

In Confessions Of a Faceless Man, his inside account of the election campaign, Mr Howes wrote that he became so angry about Mr Rudd's alleged behaviour, he drafted a set of charges against the former prime minister to justify expelling him from the party. He never filed them.

By the second week of the campaign, Mr Howes wrote, he believed Mr Rudd was responsible for the leaks that were damaging Julia Gillard. "It seems that the same person who leaked last night's story to Laurie Oakes has now given similar quotes to Peter Hartcher at The Sydney Morning Herald. It firms up my suspicion that Rudd is waging a dirty war against the Labor Party."

Mr Howes, the national secretary of the Australian Workers' Union, who played a role in the Prime Minister toppling Mr Rudd in June, wrote how his mood of depression about the leaks "morphed into outright anger".

"I now believe that Rudd is doing everything he can to wreck the campaign," he wrote.

Mr Howes recounted a mid-campaign encounter with former Liberal Party Victorian president Michael Kroger, who told him: "You guys are gone, mate".

"His rationale is that the recent leaks are just a preview of what's to come," Mr Howes wrote.

"He is positive that Rudd is behind them and that, as an outsider without any loyalty to the party, Rudd will do all he can to destroy our chances at the election. I think he's right."

At this time, Mr Howes's depression had become "overwhelming". "I'm now certain that Labor has lost," he wrote.

"(Tony) Abbott will become prime minister not because of some major mood for change among the Australian people, nor some ambitious policy that has captured their imagination, but because of the vindictiveness of a former Labor prime minister who is determined to make sure that, if he can't be PM, then no one else on our side can be either.

"I throw myself into my work for a few hours, but then my mind turns to the election again and I draft a set of charges against Kevin to justify expelling him from the party. I'll never file them, but it makes me feel better."

Mr Howes said that Labor faced "electoral annihilation" under Mr Rudd, with an internal party poll taken four days before the leadership change on June 24 showing the ALP would have lost 23 seats, with another nine going either way.

A spokesman for Mr Rudd declined to comment yesterday on Mr Howes's claims, referring to the Foreign Minister's previous comments that while people were entitled to write books about the election, he would not participate.

http://lh4.ggpht.com

Tahm Peet

2010-11-05T07:46:00.001+07:00

At lest he had learnt a new Thai word, Tahm Peet, mistake. Maybe that was something. Anything. Everything crashed. Fire streaks falling to the ground. The battle scarred regions. The place where we would never be the same again. Shadows were everywhere. He had repudiated the light; for no particular reason except it wasn't him. Perhaps he just wasn't designed for happiness. Stupid things to say. Everything came falling down. Those cheap hotels in decaying parts of Bangkok, my God they were sleazy. Short time. Short time indeed. Well that was the mood he woke up in. Nothing worked, nothing came. In a nice house with a nice boy; and all he could wonder... Johnny Cash droned in the background. Before my time... before my time. If there was any blessed way to escape. Any way to make any bigger mistakes. Any way to encompass change. Things which should have been so easy never were. A time which should of been of peace and joy, haunted by doubt. He could smell his own foreign smell on his shirt even after a few short hours. The Thais didn't seem to smell at all, and if they did he delighted in that sniff that passed as a kiss. Gary lay down on the cool tiled floor, causing great uncomfortability to the boy who had grown up trying to keep his head below every superior person. But there wasn't any way you could get below someone lying on the floor.

To be sure, there were other ways of doing things. He had experienced them in brief interludes for years now; the sunshine streaking through the window, making the laptop hard to see. The quiet peace that was their lot. The days that were both triumphant and decimated. The mistakes that crowded in. The bottle of duty free vodka his friend had left and which they put in the kitchen as if it was some sort of sauce. And which he kept staring at, wondering. Sometimes he would take the lid off and smell it, like petrol. The squirrels jumped from tree to tree. All around the working class suburbs stretched out into a foreign world. He could never make his way. There were other things that would answer through the ether. Brown sugar. The Happy Hippy. Hey mister, you want something. The Aqua Pan Club virtually next door. Massage boys. Promised delight. If only he could be contained in a simple physical body. Already time was mustered. Their random coughs. Their collapsing lungs. The way things were going to end. The recovery process. The partitioned fence. Tahm Peet, mistake, that's all it was. Everything.

He should have gone and lived in the hills. He should have gone and done the typical tourist thing and lived down on the islands. He could see everything come swirling down. He was mad, mad with it. The stupid regret. One day it wouldn't seem so bad, but that wasn't today. Right now he was full of regret and self recrimination. It wasn't very useful. Everyone made mistakes. Particularly here. They're masters, he had been warned, at getting your money out of your pocket; why, why had he paid no attention. It was a silly thing. The regret went on for days. Everything was wrong. At least the previous boy was going to the islands to see his family, and therefore wouldn't be calling him all the time. Suggesting one thing or another. It wasn't the new boy's fault. Boys do what boys do. He'd always liked it himself when some old queen bought him a car; and he flashed around Sydney in one of the smartest little sports cars of the era. It just seemed his destiny. He never thought it odd. It was his role, his place, his due. Of course. Let them pay a high price to touch him. It was only right. And then he'd jump in the sports car and drive a thousand kilometres a week because he could never sit still; up and down the coast, from friend to friend. Manipulative little thing, some suggested. So damn what. Bye bye. There was always another on the pile; fawning, desperate if not desperately sad. Let them pay. If they're that stupid that's their problem.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A35MR20101104

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama seems to be in denial about the full meaning of congressional elections in which Republicans made big gains, Republican leader John Boehner said on Thursday.

Boehner is likely to become speaker of the House of Representatives after Republicans routed Democrats in Tuesday's elections and picked up at least 60 seats, the biggest shift in power in decades.

"There seems to be some denial on the part of the president and other Democratic leaders of the message that was sent by the American people," Boehner told ABC News.

"When you have the most historic election in over 60, 70 years, you would think the other party would understand that the American people have clearly repudiated the policies they've put forward in the last few years," he said.

Obama said on Wednesday that the election results were a reflection of frustration by Americans at the sour economy and an appeal for the two parties to work together.

Boehner appeared to take issue with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who has said Republicans' top goal should be ensuring Obama is a one-term president.

"That's Senator McConnell's statement and his opinion," Boehner said. "I think the American people want us to focus on their message during the election: stop the spending, get rid of the uncertainty. Let's get around to creating jobs again and staying focused on what the American people want us to focus on is my number one priority."

ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer asked Boehner if he would agree to what Obama has jokingly called a "Slurpee summit."

A Slurpee is a flavored ice drink that Obama famously referred to on the campaign trail by saying Republicans were standing by idly sipping them while Democrats struggled to get the economy going.

"I don't know about a Slurpee. How about a glass of merlot?" Boehner replied.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/1104/After-shellacking-can-foreign-policy-be-a-bright-spot-for-Obama

The midterm elections this week were far and away about domestic economic concerns, but President Obama is likely to feel the impact of Tuesday’s Republican tide on a number of foreign-policy issues, ranging from trade to Afghanistan.

On Asia trip, Obama to get an earful about China
Obama calls midterm elections a 'shellacking' for Democrats
But foreign policy may also present a wounded president with a silver lining, some presidential analysts say.

Mr. Obama is going to have to present the American people with a standout success as he makes a case for reelection in 2012, they argue – and his room to maneuver such a feather into his cap is going to be wider on the international than on the domestic front.

“Presidents always have more leeway in foreign policy than they do on the domestic agenda,” says Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to the first President Bush and President Ford and who remains a leading expert on international affairs. “This president may find his opportunities largely in the field of foreign policy because of his difficulties with the new Congress.”

An Obama who could present the American electorate with a breakthrough deal with Iran, or better yet a done Middle East peace deal that guarantees both Israel’s peace and security and a viable Palestinian state, could restore his stature with the US public.

But in the short term, Obama’s foreign-policy agenda may present almost as many pitfalls and opportunities for setbacks as does the domestic front, some foreign-policy analysts contend.

Picture: Peter Newman.

He Woke Up

2010-11-04T06:47:00.001+07:00

He woke up feeling like a shot of vodka and a cigarette, worried by the mere mortality of everything, and thought: you're just so crazy. The vodka was not a good idea on top of liver disease. The cigarette was not a good idea on top of emphysema. Why would he want to destroy what they had worked so hard to create? This perfect house, this perfect life. The handsome boy who took care of everything. The garden in the middle of Bangkok, so that he never wanted to go out. Suddenly, after being stupid enough to let the boy talk him into buying a car he did not need, he was desperately worried about money. His ideas of wafting away at the Happy Hippy when the money ran out seemed all the more immediate. Calcutta. The dead zone. Honestly John, some days I think a lot about taking myself out, Gary said after flying in from some disastrous situation in the Phillipines. Put it off till tomorrow, he advised airily, as in, I feel like a drink, put it off till tomorrow. Put off disaster for another 24 hours. It's just a daily program. Today is all we have. Blah blah blah.

Gary wrote:

"The black dog awaits my every move. It stands as a sentry of the devil in front of me. If I dare go left it goes to its right, to my right it goes to its left. It is uncompromising. It is there to wear me down, to see that my destruction comes to a completion at my own hands. It has fun in its abuse of my mental faculties.
It amuses itself by giving me nano-second glimpses of life being alright before it launches its assault on my self-esteem, my feelings of hoplessness of my future, helplessness to take action, thoughts of my body image, and finally urges to take the action to depart this world.
It further amuses itself by having the victim try to explain himself to some Asian half-wit who thinks I am down because my Thai gf (pro) dropped me, that your silly romance theory has norhing to do with this. It is impossible to explain the concept of the disease in this portion of the world. "Drink mango, you'll have your eyes white, teeth bright, and makes childbirthin' a pleasure. Plus it good for lines on face."
I will call you when my phone charges."

So he sat here watching the native squirrels do their little morning escapade along the electric wires. The birds twittering in the trees. The luxury, seemingly empty houses coming into view. He could never understand why he had gone so far down. Why the light was not more enticing. Why he found himself yet again the only foreigner in a cheap hotel in a decaying part of Bangkok tourists never saw; with cheap porn playing on the television. Short stay hotels. A buffalo woman trying to charge them extra because he was a foreigner. The boy wasn't having a bar of the buffalo, and went straight to the front desk. He alighted from the bike he had paid for and stood there impervious. Nothing was anybody's business. Everything was going crazy. So he came home soiled from unhappy sex in cheap hotels; back into the garden and the fully equipped house and the handsome, considerate boy and thought: why risk everything? Why bother with the dark adventures of the dark lords? Surely you're too old now? His defences were down. He let the boy talk him into buying a car he did not need for twice what he had been prepared to spend; and thought, why, why. Perhaps it was guilt. Only he suffered when his money ran out. Everyone else in this seething city moved on to another warm body. Time was never going to stand this still. But it had. And now he wanted safety. Reform. Another heart.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/Credible-terrorist-threat-against-our-country-Obama/articleshow/6839360.cms

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama has said there is "credible terrorist threat" against America after two suspicious packages, containing explosives material, were found in cargo jets originating in Yemen with two Jewish centers in Chicago-area being their destinations.

There has been a "credible terrorist threat against our country" Obama told reporters at a hurriedly convened White House press conference after he was briefed by his top intelligence officials and national security aid on the latest terrorist threat to the US.

Obama was first informed about it at about 10-35 pm on Thursday and has been updated on the developing plot throughout.

The Administration will not spare any efforts in investigating the origins of the suspicious package, he said.

Obama said agencies have "identified two suspicious packages bound for the United States, specifically, two places of Jewish worship in Chicago."

The packages were identified in Dubai and Britain, he said.

"Initial examination of those packages has determined that they do apparently contain explosive material," he said.

In his statement, Obama vows to take "whatever steps are necessary to protect our citizens of this type of attack," and he announces that there will be "additional screening" of some planes in Newark and Philadelphia.

More "protective measures" will be taken for "as long as it takes," he said.

http://www2.godanriver.com/news/2010/oct/29/3/perriello-obama-must-renew-past-virginia-magic-ar-616891/

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) - On a cold, clear late October evening, an excited, standing-room crowd waited for hours in a downtown outdoor amphitheater waiting for a glimpse of Barack Obama.

That was exactly three years ago, when the Illinois senator was a long shot for the Democratic presidential nomination and a deeply unpopular Republican was in the White House.

On Friday night, President Obama returned to the same venue to campaign for Rep. Tom Perriello, an endangered freshman Democrat running in a moderate-to-conservative rural district with their party now unpopular.

It's the first trip Obama has made in the 2010 midterm elections for a House candidate, and a gamble that the president's visit will motivate more uncertain voters to support Perriello on Tuesday than those who favor Hurt.

In 2008, Perriello edged deeply wounded Republican Rep. Virgil Goode by 727 votes out of more than 300,000 cast in the Democratic sweep of Virginia that Obama led. Now, polls show Republican Robert Hurt slightly ahead. But both campaigns concede that the race has tightened in the past few weeks.

Joan Wicks of Charlottesville was among several thousand people who waited for hours to see Obama at the Charlottesville Pavilion, just as she had to three years ago when another overflow crowd included children costumed for Halloween trick-or-treating.

"Oh, there's no shortage of enthusiasm here. There's as much as there was that night. Really, I think there's more," said Wicks, who canvassed door-to-door for Obama's campaign in 2008 and did the same for Perriello this fall.

What Obama must do for Perriello, Wicks said, is persuade the thousands of young, new voters he energized two years ago that the reforms they wanted will be reversed unless they show up at the polls for Perriello next week.

Greg Varney of Charlottesville was also in the pavilion three years ago when Obama spoke. The Navy veteran said that even with Obama at his side, Perriello has a tough task persuading an impatient and frustrated public that the Democrats policy priorities can still rescue a floundering economy.

"The general public is buying the political rhetoric," Varney said. "People have been led to think that you can turn things around instantly. You can't turn it around in a year, or even a couple of years."

Home

2010-10-30T06:31:00.001+07:00

The red lights on the sky scraper behind them blinked in the early morning dark, a warning sentinel soaring over their house. Strange statue shapes on the corner of its upper tiers gave it a certain Gothic feel, while he could feel every shadow in the streets around, hear every moto-cie as they puttered off to work. There were haunted lovers too, in all those sounds, sheets through the glass, muffled shapes, dignity abandoned. That house could have been mine, if only I hadn't made a mistake. Many mistakes. Pass away, pass away. Unrequited, these things were for another era, or from another era. Harden your heart. What would you tell your best friend to do? Stay away, stay away. And so, little evil on the blessed land, he became someone else in order to survive. He was attracted to chameleons, people who were different every time you looked at them, a princess one minute, a butch little lad the next, masculine, dripping compromise, all bowed under layers of conformity. He had taken to using an old Peter trick when dealing with recalcitrant bureaucracies: just start ranting, I've worked hard all my life and nobody... Etc etc etc. Drives them mad.

Just like winging to the old ex when she came sniffing around for money. A winging drone can drive just about anybody away, and so became an effective weapon in the armoury of survival. The blokes seem to pick up the nicest girls at Electric Blue, he advised, although what would he really know, girls not being his forte right this minute. But he could see, as he descended into the morass of another culture, the descending wave of a western hand. I can feel you are awake through the ether; and the vibration on his mobile phone confirmed his psychic recognition. Heading to the streets. They used to always say: "It's down, down, down as Jack from the Cross used to say". Jack was dead now and every day rolled over anew; the world blessed with a rising sun and a million deaths, a corporate body constantly renewed. His own visit was short; glorious at times, despairing at others. There had been too many mistakes. His health suffered. Instead of rising to the occasion he fell to earth. The mud was like glue.

And then once again survival forced him to perform. He rose to every occasion and twisted in the air like a dervish. Constant waits were nothing compared to fatal obsessions. What would you tell your best friend to do, that's great advice, I've been thinking about it all day, Shaun said. An old sponsor used to tell me that, he replied, at least I think it was him, someone. Let's meet up in Italy, go shopping, have lunch, said a loud American woman. They went everywhere and saw nothing. He marvelled at the way they treated the world as a homogeneous unit, as an occasionally exotic background for lunch. Complaining if everything wasn't exactly the way they liked it. The water cold, condensation dripping down the side. Everything was wide off the mark. He had been missing so badly. Lured into circumstance. Lured into paradise. A nice house. A nice boy. A nice garden. And yet if he still had the physical stamina to be stumbling out of the clubs at dawn with some wretched little thief he would have probably opted for the latter. I just like getting trashed, he whined, what's wrong with that? Well nothing much except it's unsustainable. Greed is good, the woman seemed to be saying, telling us all she was alert, wide awake, conscious, on the edge of her seat. All you blokes, you need to share your thoughts with woman. They can help you. And later Andrew laughed: she's preaching to the wrong set of blokes. They're all survivors of divorce here. And he agreed: we've all survived some of the most toxic hurricanes the female gender can produce. We don't trust them. Full stop. A little misogyny is natural, at least amongst this group, Andrew said.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/world/obama-takes-his-daily-dose-to-defend-his-presidency-20101028-175sl.html?from=smh_sb

WASHINGTON: Barack Obama has defended his first two years in office, targeting young voters during an interview on a popular satirical TV talk show, urging them to keep faith with his legislative program.

Less than a week before Tuesday's midterm congressional elections in which Democrats are expected to be punished for America's tepid economic recovery and high unemployment, Mr Obama ticked off key achievements, namely that his administration had staved off a second Great Depression while posting historic healthcare and financial regulatory reform.

But the President told The Daily Show host, Jon Stewart, that it would take time to fulfil all of the pledges made during his 2008 presidential campaign.

''When we promised during the campaign 'change you can believe in', it wasn't 'change you can believe in, in 18 months','' he said. ''It was change you can believe in but, you know what, we're going to have to work for it.''

When Stewart pressed, asking whether the rhetoric of Mr Obama's election pitch had over-inflated expectations of an audacious legislative program, (''You wouldn't say you'd run this time as a pragmatist? It wouldn't be, 'Yes we can, given certain conditions?'''), the President conceded he would be inclined now to modify his mantra with a qualification: ''Yes, we can: but it's not going to happen overnight''.

It was the first time a sitting president has appeared on the show in which Stewart, a former stand-up comedian whose zany take on current affairs has drawn a cult following, often skewers guests by exposing hypocrisy.

Stewart will lead a ''Rally to restore sanity'' tomorrow in the National Mall in Washington as an antidote to the rallies over the northern summer that drew thousands of Tea Party and other conservative supporters.

The Obama interview ran for almost 30 minutes. But apart from occasional banter, Mr Obama remained serious, determined to push the Democratic cause, while taking issue with Stewart's characterisation of some of his legislation as ''timid''.

Clearly rankled, Mr Obama responded: ''Jon, I love your show, but this is something where I have a profound disagreement with you … this notion that healthcare was timid.''

Mr Obama added that ''the assumption is we didn't get 100 per cent of what we wanted, we only get 90 per cent … so let's focus on the 10 per cent we didn't get''.

On the economy, Mr Obama said: ''If you told me two years ago that we're going to be able to stabilise the system, stabilise the stock market, stabilise the economy and, by the way, at the end of this thing it will cost less than 1 per cent of GDP … I'd say: 'We'll take that'.''

But he dodged Stewart's next question about whether he would accept that same outcome had he known that unemployment would be near 10 per cent.

At another point, Mr Obama acknowledged voters' frustration and impatience. ''Over and over again we have moved forward an agenda that is making a difference in people's lives each and every day,'' he said. ''Now, is it enough? No. I expect, and I think, most Democrats out there expect that people want to see more progress.''

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=11997550

NEW YORK (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's election led many political pundits to predict the popularity of American satirist Jon Stewart would wane. After all, mocking Republicans was his bread and butter.

But two years later with the nation just days away from an election expected to shift the balance of power in Washington, Stewart and his Comedy Central stable mate Stephen Colbert are growing ever more successful.

On Saturday, the pair mount their most audacious stunt -- rallies on Washington's National Mall. Stewart's is a "Rally to Restore Sanity," while Colbert, whose show mocks conservative punditry, holds a rival "March to Keep Fear Alive."

Organizers haven't disclosed what exactly the rallies will be, but they will no doubt build on Stewart's huge following for "The Daily Show," which typically features the comedian commenting on the day's news in a faux anchor format and conducting interviews with top newsmakers.

"We all thought he would have less fun after (President George W.) Bush left office but that's not been the case," said Michael Musto, a culture writer at New York's Village Voice.

"There are still plenty of Republicans to poke fun at, and Obama's ratings are so low that he can now poke fun at Obama and the Democrats too," said Musto. "It's twice as much fun."

Experts say the explosion of Internet news, opinion and blogs and the 24-hour cable television news cycle have created a cacophony of shouting pundits. That, they say, allows Stewart to poke fun at overheated rhetoric on both sides.

Media and Society Professor Richard Wald of New York's Columbia University said Stewart is evocative of Will Rogers, known for such cutting satire as: "I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat."

Picture: Ashley Lock.

A Neutron Bomb

2010-10-29T04:26:00.001+07:00

They say that home is where the heart is. Having no heart, just a sad little collection of collapsing landscapes which passed for a splintered consciousness, the saying had never meant much to him. Oh to be normal. To have a craven heart. But thus it was that he found himself wandering the streets of Sydney after having been away all year, shocked and appalled, well shocked and astounded anyway, at how quiet the streets, how quaint the signage. Ten thirty at night and already the streets were deserted. No wonder I was so lonely here, he thought, and that, briefly, was all he could remember, the long spooky walks at 2am, with the mist dripping from the trees amidst signs of collapse, the well walked dog scurrying ahead, the pain of a restless spirit. Always, always, walking far and wide. There was never anybody there. He sat in alcoves in the cliffs, gentle overhangs, on tops of buildings, in deserted early morning parks, in the way of the truth and the light, holding to some stubborn, perhaps noble principle, aching, disconsolate, always the same.

So he abandoned the job which had become such an over-arching nightmare and headed off to Thailand, where juvenile dreams on the Coca Cola trail had left him with the impression that he could be happy there, he didn't know quite how or why, under a palm tree, on a beach, in a cheap house in the mountains with sweeping views down the valley. It wasn't what happened at all. Instead he discovered that Western men with a couple of bob in their pockets didn't have to sleep alone; and so he determined that was exactly the circumstance. And instead settled in a peaceful, read beautiful, house in the heart of Bangkok. Where everything slid and collapsed and he was the feudal lord, accepting of his status. Lights burnt through the long warm nights. In the early hours he could hear every movement of a motor cycle, their gurgling cries, their strange emphases, as if heading your way, a lost obsessional love who could tell you, too, were awake and sleepless, pomh kow choi passah thai nick noi karb, I understand a little Thai thank you, and knew, deeply, lohp luen, that he had been deceived, was being deceived, and some criminals could never change their spots, never not rip off a foreigner, never act with any degree of kindness or integrity.

And so it was that in the aching hearts, in the strange things that had happened to him, he developed a certain survival wisdom. Strange then that he would have made such a simple mistake as to take a Thai national to Australia. They don't travel well, he had already heard, but he had no idea how badly. If a plane flew overhead the boy would look up plaintively and bleat: Thailand. Once he had discovered a Thai restaurant with authentic cuisine and staff who spoke Thai he refused to go anywhere else. He looked at Bondi Beach, one of the world's most famous and most beautiful beaches, and sighed: falang mak mak - lots of foreigners. As if it had never occurred to him that there might be lots of foreigners overseas. If he wasn't on Skype talking to friends back in Thailand or headphones on listening to Thai music he was under a doona pretending to be asleep, shutting out the outside world, so full of foreigners and incomprehensible social behaviours. Nor was the reaction from others very helpful. Dad, you gay, the kids said. Number one daughter declared, all in one sentence: he's obviously a gold digger dad, I need $500 for my formal dress. Number one son, quite the ladies man by his own reports, officially declared he was now disowning both his parents. His mother declared that by wilfully defying God's word and living such a dubiuous lifestyle he was throwing away his greatest asset, his access to the keys to the Kingdom of God by duty of being her son, a loyal servant and one of the Lord's chosen ones. They would all much have preferred he continued to sleep alone. Well, he wasn't going to do that, not for now, that was for sure. And Peter put it succinctly enough: that's why we all build lives far from our families.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/renegade-premiers-workplace-deal-angers-pm-20101014-16lwf.html

JULIA GILLARD has threatened to use federal powers to force NSW to comply with uniform national workplace safety rules after the Premier reneged on a deal as part of a raft of concessions to the union movement.

Business, industry and the federal government were united in anger yesterday after Kristina Keneally said NSW would not honour the deal it signed with other states and the Commonwealth last year to introduce uniform occupational health and safety laws.

The agreement, which required significant concessions by business and unions, was cited by Ms Gillard as one of her greatest achievements as workplace relations minister.

Advertisement: Story continues below ''A deal is a deal and the federal government requires this deal to be honoured,'' Ms Gillard said.

She said nothing was being ruled out as she sought departmental advice ''on what options are available to the federal government to ensure that the NSW government honours this deal''.

Ms Keneally, who is seeking union support before the March 26 election, will not honour the national agreement unless union-friendly provisions that were part of NSW law are included. These allow unions to prosecute for workplace safety breaches and put the onus of proof on the defendant.

Ms Keneally also demanded an exemption from the federal Fair Work Act so her government can cut a separate ''project agreement'' with unions to guarantee the $6 billion Barangaroo redevelopment will be completed on time and on budget. She also declared Easter Sunday a public holiday to ensure workers are paid more on that day.

The Unions NSW secretary, Mark Lennon, said yesterday was ''a sweet day'' for workers, and was backed by the ACTU, which claimed the changes would maximise workplace safety.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/40128.html

What a week this has been. A week of high emotion and smouldering passions, where the glorious triumph of the human spirit was tempered by the depths of human depravity, and we all longed for a return to the days when politics was marked by dignity, respect, and non-bastardry.

The name of the game this week, of course, was Afghanistan, or at least that’s what Julia Gillard would say, as she has demonstrated clearly that she regards the actions of our brave fighting men and woman defending our freedom as a game, to be played for political points.

It was an unedifying way to behave in a week when Abbott, putting his graceless rival to shame, did in fact go to Afghanistan, to reassure the troops that not only did he fully support them, he was quite willing to join them personally.

“Bitch says I don’t like the troops?” he snarled. “I’ll show you how much I like the troops! Give me a gun! Give me a tank! Let’s go get those terroristers! Bang bang bang! Check out my pecs! Look how much I can bench-press! I will fight the prime minister ANY TIME SHE WANTS! BRING IT ON” And so forth.

Having gone to the theatre of war, Abbott was at great pains to emphasise this tendency of the PM to use defence policy as a political weapon, before going on to emphasise it a bit more, and then proceeding to hammer home his emphasis in case we hadn’t got it yet.

Some might have questioned why, after last week’s gaffe in which he claimed he couldn’t visit the troops because he wouldn’t have time to put his face on for dinner with the Tories, Abbott insisted on continuously drawing more and more attention to it by bringing it up at every possible opportunity for days on end like some kind of gibbering excuse-chimp. This however would betray a total misunderstanding of the reality of politics, as Abbott himself explained, telling us all that:

“One of the things that so disappoints me about the election result is that I am the standard bearer for values and ideals which matter and which are important and … as the leader of the Coalition, millions and millions of people invest their hopes in me and it's very important that I don't let them down. When I am unfairly attacked, I've got to respond and I've got to respond in a tough way.”

And the Australian people, once they had got up off the floor, wiped the tears from their eyes and taken a few deep breaths to overcome the crippling stomach pains that are such a common consequence of hearing Tony Abbott describe himself as a standard-bearer for values and ideals, nodded in understanding.

Indeed, we do not want Tony to let us down, and that is why, whenever anyone is cruel or nasty to him, we see the necessity for lengthy, protracted, hyperbolic defensiveness. It’s what we all want in a potential prime minister.

What we don’t want in a prime minister is Machiavellian bastardry, which is, as Abbott helpfully explained, what Gillard was guilty of, and Labor is expert in. The plot hatched by the prime minister was deceptively simple, but fiendish in its ingenuity: laying a trap as skilfully as any French-Canadian furrier, she cunningly invited the Opposition Leader to accompany her to Afghanistan, and sat back to watch the carnage she had wrought.

It was such a callous, vicious piece of passive-aggressive thuggery it took the breath away. To be so calculating as to actually invite an Opposition Leader to a war zone, knowing full well that due to security requirements Abbott would have no choice but to say something unbelievably idiotic, was a ploy worthy of Lucretia Borgia herself.

No wonder it drew such a sharp rebuke from the Shadow Minister for Taking One To Know One, Christopher Pyne, who – lip trembling at the injustice of it all – pointed out that Gillard was guilty of “back-alley bitchiness”, almost certainly accompanying his statement with a clawing hand gesture and soft hiss. Pyne declared that Gillard was unfit to be prime minister, a stinging blow to the PM: if even the Opposition doesn’t want her in office, what must the voters think? Especially after she flagrantly and shamelessly declined to offer any further comment on the matter in a deliberate and transparent attempt to further smear Abbott’s character by making him look like he was talking to himself.

http://www.coreideas.com.au/wp-content/bondi-beach-dust-storm.jpg

A History Never Written

2010-10-06T23:36:00.001+07:00

The ocean was inky black, the black beyond dark matter and petroleum spills, when the only light was the faintest sliver of a moon in a starless sky; and everything was absence. This was the dream that kept recurring and he didn't know why. Black on black, uncanny, beautiful of course, in all its mystery and power, the vast sea, a distant shore, a profound lack. The chaos of the Bangkok streets, the busy stalls, the choking traffic, the crowds of office workers so heavy he had to step out on the road to pass their slow moving masses. That was the world he mostly inhabited. Yet it wasn't the world he really wanted. He wanted a different place, as if the beauty of the present was too much to bear without distorting and simplifying it with science fiction clichés. So instead there were times when he cycled back through former mistakes; and other times when the present situation seemed too perfect to bear. It was just that he wasn't used to things going well. Rather it had become a custom to stumble from crisis to crisis, to regroup just enough to survive and then to move on to the next appalling deconstruction, the next painful embarrassment, the next success which didn't feel like a success because inside he was so deeply hidden from the truth, so carefully tucked away, that nothing real would ever impose itself.

Inebriated forms, withered away from lack of contact with the light, went scurrying away under the stairs when ever a carpet was lifted, when ever an attempt was made to change the debate. And so he couldn't be fair to anyone. He couldn't mask the futile attempts at failure. All he could do was step forth in tatty clothes and swirling cloaks, in medieval garments and the garb of senior servants of His Majesty's court; but in the end it was the villager's humble clothes he wore most securely, which made most sense to him. Do not step out into the light. Do not step out into the day. Take away everything we stood for. Counsel the wicked that they shall be reborn. Put a petting hand on the children's heads; for comfort. If there was such a thing in this bewildering place. Certainly not for him, that time had passed, but perhaps for others; blessed with ignorance and a simple, gullible face, a perfect, natural joy in the day. Oh how he envied them their natural positivity, their easy good looks, their perfect charm. Gawky, every faint was an alarming fraud, based in little but assumption and pretence. Every pose stood as a natural way to die; fleeting, unimpressive. Money cushions every blow. Do you think they would care who I was, if I couldn't pay my way? he asked. The boy, a cast back to a former age, barely understood the flow of English, but nodded eagerly, hoping to sympathise.

So here he was, for no particular reason that he could understand, perfectly at home in the most charlatan of cities, the most treacherous of places. Where if as a foreigner you weren't being ripped off it was a miracle. This city, as one Thai author noted, once known as the Venice of the East and now clogged with stagnant, smelly canals and covered with a scion of highways and whispering places, traffic jams that made venturing anywhere during the day a major assignment, ribbons of roads soaring passed buildings long abandoned or resumed, home to nothing but ghosts and rats and the memory of children who played there long ago, the couples who were once happy together, or bore each other's company with a timeless malignancy. Something human this way came, but was then lost in the hordes that had overtaken the earlier, more romantic years. We were clogging up our past. We were searching for a future. But perhaps it was those empty shells of buildings next to the free ways that most clearly exemplified the Bangkok of his imagination; full of an evocative sense of something that had already passed, of the mystery of lives carried out in crowded places, of a simplicity and magnitude which could never be summoned because it had already passed, lithe forms, the sunny smile of a pretty girl, the companionship of the men sharing the moment, of a history never written. He admired their crumbling forms in the cool of the pink air conditioned taxis of the present, a master of the universe, able to afford a taxi fare in one of the world's most quixotic cities, their masterful decay a perfect rejoinder to the soaring blocks of modern condominiums in the middle distance; and the skyscrapers spiking the horizon.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/world/asia/05gibbs.html

BILLINGS, Mont. — Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs called to say he did not kill Afghan civilians for the thrill of killing. Nor did he toss severed fingers at the feet of his fellow soldiers to scare them into silence.

“All he said was, ‘I don’t know where these guys are getting this stuff,’ ” said Eric Thomas, a childhood friend here, shortly after speaking with Sergeant Gibbs by telephone one recent evening. “He said none of it actually happened. He said for some reason the other guys were scared. He doesn’t know where it comes from.”

“Calvin Gibbs is not a murderer,” Mr. Thomas said. “I don’t want people hearing about finger bones and thinking they know Calvin, because they don’t.”

Members of his unit in Afghanistan paint a devastating picture of Sergeant Gibbs, 26. He is one of five soldiers facing potential courts-martial on charges that they killed Afghan civilians for sport, planting weapons near them to fake combat situations, collecting their body parts and taking photographs posing with their corpses.

Documents in the case obtained by The New York Times, including statements by soldiers and investigators, portray Sergeant Gibbs as the ringleader in three separate incidents involving the murder of civilians near Kandahar, Afghanistan, this year, and as the force behind intimidating other soldiers in his unit to keep quiet. Soldiers said Sergeant Gibbs threatened at least one subordinate with death if he ever disclosed the killings. Other soldiers not accused in the deaths say he mocked them for not meeting his standard for men on patrol.

“He told me the type of soldier he was looking for was the type that could kill anybody without any kind of regret,” Pfc. Ashton Moore told an Army investigator in May.

When Private Moore, who faces other charges, told Sergeant Gibbs that he would not kill someone without cause, he said the sergeant responded: “And that’s why you’ll be stuck in the truck the whole time. The guy I’m looking for is the guy that would shoot the dude just because he could shoot the dude.”

The case has prompted the military to review all combat deaths with which Sergeant Gibbs has been involved, including those during deployments to Iraq as early as 2004.

Specialist Jeremy N. Morlock, also accused in the Afghanistan deaths, said Sergeant Gibbs had openly discussed how he might kill Specialist Adam C. Winfield, another one of the accused, who he worried would report the killings.

“There were two scenarios SSG Gibbs told me about taking his life,” Specialist Morlock told Army investigators as part of the investigation into the five soldiers. “The first scenario was going to take him to the gym and drop a weight on his neck. The second scenario was SSG Gibbs was going to take him to the motor pool and drop a tow bar on him.”

Geoffrey Nathan, a lawyer for Specialist Morlock, criticized the Army for allowing Sergeant Gibbs to lead troops in combat. He said his client “could serve the rest of his life in prison for being in the throes of Gibbs.”

Several soldiers recalled Sergeant Gibbs and Specialist Morlock tossing severed fingers in front of a soldier who had reported the widespread use of hashish within the unit. That soldier, Pfc. Justin A. Stoner, later told investigators that he feared being killed the same way Afghan civilians had been, as if his death had happened in combat.

“It wouldn’t be hard for them to take me out and do the same to me and blame it on the Taliban,” Private Stoner told investigators.

Here in Billings, Sergeant Gibbs’s friends say he was just performing his duty. “How could they put him in jail for doing his job over there?” Mr. Thomas asked. “I’m sure some people were shooting at him, so he shot back at them.”

Not long before he was deployed to war zones overseas, Sergeant Gibbs was a struggling teenager in Billings. “No ambition,” said a neighbor. His father worked in maintenance for the Mormon church and his family was active in the faith. He barely attended high school, earning just 1 of 20 credits necessary to graduate. In his high school yearbook during his sophomore year, he wore a T-shirt bearing the brand of a skateboarding company, “Independent.”

Sergeant Gibbs played defensive end on the football team as a high school freshman. At 6-foot-4 and 220 pounds, he was “the strongest kid I ever played against,” Mr. Thomas said. The friends played video games and rode skateboards, often spending time at the Gibbses’ house because friends said his parents were nice. Friends say all he ever wanted to be was a soldier.

His parents sent him away to an alternative school in Montana that often steered its students into the military. Sergeant Gibbs received a graduate equivalency degree from the program in the fall of 2002, having already enlisted in the military. He had dreamed of being in the Marines but, without a high school diploma, entered the Army instead.

A lawyer for Sergeant Gibbs declined to comment, as did Sergeant Gibbs’s parents. A sister began to cry when she was asked about him and said her brother had requested that she not speak to reporters. Friends said they did not believe the charges.

“People get messed up in the head,” during combat missions, said Paul Thomas, Eric Thomas’s older brother. “But not Calvin. He was always a rock.”

Paul Thomas is a former Marine. He said he had not seen Sergeant Gibbs since 2006. Since then, Sergeant Gibbs has served two tours in Afghanistan after serving one earlier in Iraq. Now, more than one soldier who served with him described him or his actions as “savage.”

Private Stoner said Sergeant Gibbs “associates with skinheads online.” Specialist Morlock said Sergeant Gibbs had “pure hatred” for all Afghans. Fingers he is accused of collecting are now part of the evidence in the case, as is a tooth he is said to have pulled from a dead Afghan and bones other soldiers said he dug up.

Sergeant Gibbs has refused to speak to military investigators. But during fingerprinting and photographing in May, he was required to show his tattoos. On his lower left leg was an image of crossed pistols and six skulls. He told an investigator, according to an investigation transcript, that the skulls were “his way of keeping count of the kills he had. The skulls that were in red were the ones from Iraq and the other three were the kills he had in Afghanistan.”

Soldiers interviewed by investigators say Sergeant Gibbs had alluded to previous crimes he committed in Iraq, including one in which he shot into a car carrying an Iraqi family with children. By early this spring, as Sergeant Gibbs and others were being investigated, military investigators were widening their inquiry, specifically asking about a possible shooting in Iraq in early 2004.

“How many deployments has SSG Gibbs had?” investigators asked. “Need to determine if there was any suspicious incidents or investigations during all deployments.”

At least one soldier has said Sergeant Gibbs had photographs of bodies from his deployment to Iraq. A spokesman for the Army’s central Criminal Investigations Division in Virginia said he could not discuss whether Sergeant Gibbs had faced previous criminal investigations or charges.

Before Sergeant Gibbs invoked his right to a lawyer during an interview with investigators in May, investigators say he told them that “all incidents where he has been involved in are exactly how they are reported, meaning he was attacked and he then responded with his M-4, killing the local national. When questioned on whether any of the incidents were staged, SSG Gibbs stated that was offensive.”

Pfc. Adam W. Kelly, who is accused of assaulting Private Stoner along with several other soldiers, as well as possessing hashish, told investigators that he admired Sergeant Gibbs, as did others in their platoon, from senior officers to subordinates, and that he “displayed solid tactics.”

“I believe that because of his experience that more people came back alive and uninjured than would have without him having been part of the platoon,” Private Kelly said.

Sgt. Gibbs is married to a soldier based in the United States, Pfc. Chelsy M. Gibbs. They were married in a Mormon church in Billings. In 2008 they had a son, Calvin Richard Gibbs Jr. On her MySpace page, Private Gibbs listed her husband as one of her heroes, “for putting up with me, but mostly for the sacrifices he makes for our country.”

Barbara Gray contributed research and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Port Aransas, Tex.

Bangkok, Thailand.

Get Out Of The House

2010-10-05T11:03:00.001+07:00

Well he wasn’t prepared for anything. Look at that face. You could have drunk for 30 years. He woke up in a mood and thought it was best to get out. The visions were all jumbled in on top of each other, the crowded dreams. He couldn’t remember what they were about; except they seemed so urgent, as he woke several times, a mix of Asia and Australia. He was going to be blessed. We were marching forward. Into the abyss. Into a time of stillness and sinking wells. There were so many different ways of looking at it. He could be compromised, answered, all at once. There doesn’t seem to be an answer. Why should I open myself up to attack from that pack of c...s? He demanded to know. Peak experiences anonymous, that’s where he belonged. But how did he recover from half these things. How did he wander through the empty halls and still retain some sort of sanity? Why did they frisk him at the entrance? Nobody trusted anybody here. They liked to boast about their rock bottoms. How they weren’t really low level drunks at all. Mine came while reading a book, Wiliam S Burroughs. Get out of the shit house before it blows up, I read. And it was some of the best advice I’d ever had. So that’s what I did, one rotund creature said. Bully for you, he thought.

He’d had a fight with the gardener, Mr Booh, who he appeared to have acquired along with the new property, and with no consultation. So suddenly he found himself with an aging Thai man on his front lawn, gazing intently at the trees for hours, trying to decide which leaf to trim, making work for himself. They came to words when the lawn mower started up while they were lazing around watching Avatar in Thai for the umpteenth time, this time for the benefit of some of the boy’s infinite number of country relatives. Mai mai mai, Pung knee, Pung knee, no no no later later, he angrily declared, before storming back into the house, dismissing the man’s apology with an angry wave of the hand. Nobody had bothered to ask him if he would like to have the lawn mowed; and that was that, time to be boss. As it happened, he liked it the way it was. He didn’t want to live in a manicured paradise. He was from Australia; and they liked a bit of garden chaos there. Wild, overgrown, with the streets shining everywhere through demented, tilted glass, street lamps burning holes through the early morning fog, a dangerous creature just out of peripheral vision, an edge to things. The crowds spilling out of the early morning bars. An angel face trodden into the mud.

And the gardens winding everywhere, drifts of leaves, secret nooks, nothing trimmed at all. Hedges were nothing but blizzards of green. And even now the subject of green could propel him back to the worst of times, before he became himself, while they tried to beat him into submission. But these things were not the concern of an old man, not now. Sometimes they were in danger of coming alive, of saying what they really thought. Of being “patently unclear”. New York Maria had gone to the coast for the weekend to walk her dog. She had a nerve to complain about her life. Work did not seem to figure highly in her preoccupations. He had got through the worst of dismissing coffee and cigarettes out of his life, those annoying low grade drugs he would sometimes relapse on to, as if trying to energise something in the quicksand of consciousness. It never worked, but he should have known that by now. The internet was still not on, and he couldn’t for the life of him find the wi-fi switch on the computer. He made as if to say no; but that wasn’t what was happening. I need a purpose, a goal in my life, Shawn said, having failed in their agreed bid to give up cigarettes together and having gone and bought a packet. He’d been listening to the racket of the washing machine for months; the quote for every occasion, the catalogue of colourful experiences, and ignored his rationale for failure. If you’re going to have a bust, do it on something decent he advised, stop frigging around on the lower levels. The cigarettes will kill you. Everyone knows that. They might have been a fashion statement when we were kids, the ultimate cool. Now they just spell l-o-s-e-r.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/six-killed-in-iraq-violence-20101005-164lu.html

Six people were killed in violence in Baghdad and central Iraq on Monday, including a journalist for a US-funded television station, medical and security officials said.

Tahrir Kadhim Jawad, a cameraman for the al-Hurra satellite channel, was killed when a magnetic "sticky bomb" attached to his car detonated in the town of Garma, 50 kilometres west of the capital, police in nearby Fallujah said.

International press watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned Jawad's killing, calling for "urgent protection to be provided for the country's journalists and ... (for) authorities to speed up the conclusions of the investigation".

RSF said last month that the Iraq conflict has been the deadliest for the media since World War II, and in October 2009 ranked Iraq a lowly 145th place for media freedom out of 175 countries.

According to the Impunity Index released in April by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, Iraq has the worst record of any country for solving the murders of reporters.

Also on Monday, a convoy transporting Fuad al-Mussawi, a deputy minister of science and technology, struck a bomb along a road in the upscale neighbourhood of Jadriyah, in the centre of the capital.

The minister was unharmed, but the early morning blast killed one of his guards and wounded four other people, said an interior ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Also in central Baghdad, an employee of a telephone exchange was killed and another wounded by a bomb that detonated near Al-Alwiyah communications centre in Karrada.

And in Diyala province, north of the capital, a bombing killed three people in the ethnically mixed town of Jalawlah, in a tract of disputed land claimed both by the autonomous Kurdistan region and Iraq's central government.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/turnbull-says-65-a-month-will-keep-most-off-broadband-20101004-164ek.html

The ''extraordinary'' cost of accessing the national broadband network will limit the number of people who choose to use it, the opposition spokesman on communications, Malcolm Turnbull, has warned.

Mr Turnbull, who has yet to finalise the opposition's policy on broadband, signalled the Coalition was unlikely to make any dramatic change to its approach to rural broadband in response to the federal election result. Yesterday he challenged the government's central argument that the broadband network would benefit consumers and competition.

The government-owned NBN Co is likely to charge retailers about $35 a month. He predicted this would result in customers paying an average of $65 to $70 a month.

''That is higher than most people are paying now. So there is no reason to believe that the NBN will deliver cheaper broadband. It certainly will deliver faster broadband than many people are getting at the moment, but at an extraordinary cost,'' he said.

At network test sites in Tasmania, retail prices range from as low as $30 a month for entry level plans to $140 to $160 a month for plans with higher speeds and download limits.

While the government says the network will increase competition between retailers, Mr Turnbull argued that creating the government-owned monopoly could stifle competition from other types of technology.

A spokeswoman for the Minister for Broadband, Stephen Conroy, said the experience in Tasmania showed that competition was already increasing.

''As experience in other markets has shown, the introduction of genuine competition will lead to more choice, more affordable prices and higher quality services,'' she said.

The government-owned NBN Co is due to release details of its business case shortly, but Mr Turnbull accused the government of overestimating both the revenue it would raise and the number of customers who would be willing to sign up.

Bangkok. Near MBK.

Life Is Long

2010-10-04T19:14:00.000+07:00

He didn’t take the calls. He didn’t answer questions. He was becoming used to his new status. He didn’t have to answer to anybody. Stray winders, stray thoughts, that’s all they were. Nothing clear, but it didn’t have to be. The previous evening they had waited for the rain, plohn tok, to stop before wandering around to the restaurant in a neighboring soi. Today a squirrel ran along the electric wires in the morning sun. His new life seemed astonishingly luxurious, even if it was cheaper than the previous incarnation. Life is long, he had told that demented group, mentioning things about his early years he wished he hadn’t, because everything was about status here and it was important not be seen in lower terms. Come the rain, all would be well. So he acted carefully. Worked hard. Could see the clouds coming and going. Wanted to know, what was the answer? Private gay tours of Bangkok? Wait for the guardian angel to provide inspiration. Come and get cooked. Ignore the ice pipes for sale in the street. Take a bus to God knows where. Or enjoy the day, just enjoy the day. Settle petal; as they used to say.

All will be well, one of the many voices said, but he hadn’t believed it for a long time. He thought an early death and a failure of all organs more likely. Now the morning sun shining on the leaves in his very own Bangkok garden, well it was rented but hey nothing is permanent, could only guarantee the passing of another glorious moment. He was desperately prone to heart attacks. To diving off the slender ledge of sanity. Of finding himself in places where he was too old to be. Of embracing massage boys when everything was for sale. He wasn’t going to make the trek to Sukhumvit for the sake of a meeting he didn’t like. Just hang in the new neighbourhood. Be peaceful at heart. Be a classic older gentlemen. Make love in primitive, bestial, rapid ways. Or enjoy, that was entirely the wrong word, the two hour full service massages on offer, with mirrors and naked boys and anything you could devise. It was all too much. A service economy. A place in the heart. Even he had grown to accept it as his due. To take heart from strangers. To be fully aware there was nothing that could change the past; and everything that could change the future.

Well it had been an adventure, in the strangest of ways. And now he was heading back to Australia for three weeks. He didn’t want to be emotionally confronted. It was perhaps why he was unlikely to bother seeing his father while he was there. It was expensive. It would not be appreciated. And doing the right thing could easily become doing the wrong thing, when you were constantly walked over, constantly dismissed. And now he was old himself; and nobody could walk all over him unless he let them. Where have you been? New York Maria asked. None of your business, he replied. I knew you wouldn’t tell me, she said. And they kind of laughed. The sunlight seeped in from everywhere, blinding them. They agreed the place was full of dogs; and nothing could be relieved. You only did what you could. And let the time pass. Sanity restored; they called it. Well he didn’t want their style of sanity; that was for sure. But at least now in the beckoning twilight he could see things more clearly. Perspective, dear, old Jack said. The dry old queen who used to pop into his head drunk. Well dear, there will just have to be another exorcism. Just not today. Just for today, everything is alright.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/04/3029136.htm

A bloody street brawl involving up to 100 people in central Adelaide has brought unwanted focus on South Australia's African community.

Four young men were stabbed in the violence overnight, while four other men, mostly from interstate, have been charged.

Many of those involved in the fight were in the city for a Miss Africa beauty pageant.

South Australian police say the brawl is the result of factional tensions that had been building up over the weekend.

African community leaders are now worried that those problems could destabilise the community in the state.

Revellers in Adelaide's East End were confronted with a violent scene on Sunday night as people brawled off the Rundle Street restaurant strip.

Chief Inspector John Gerlach says some of them were armed with weapons.

"Certainly knives, because most of the injuries were stab wounds, but there was tyre levers, clubs [and] makeshift batons. It was described to me that one even had a post off a bed," he said.

"They were grabbing any sort of weapons they could and clearly they had prepared themselves with some weapons in the event that they did come together, which in fact occurred."

Four men from Adelaide aged between 19 and 21 were stabbed.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/gillards-first-appearance-on-international-stage-as-pm-20101004-1644u.html

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has made her first appearance on the international stage, meeting the head of NATO, Anders Rasmussen in Brussels.

Dressed in a white, short jacket and dark trousers she arrived at the security organisation's headquarters just after 9am European time and was ushered in by Mr Rasmussen, the former Danish Prime Minister and now NATO Secretary General.

Ms Gillard arrived in Brussels early yesterday morning amidst heavy security as Europe and the UK brace under heightened alerts of a terrorist strike.

The leaders of the 27 member, European Union are in the Belgian capital with 18 of their Asian counterparts for a two day summit which aims to foster and build on the centuries-old economic and trade ties between the two continents.

Australia, New Zealand and Russia will take a role at the round-table talks for the first time this week.

The fragile European Union, now set to embark on a grim austerity program to reduce burgeoning sovereign debt, is now looking strategically to its eastern neighbours to boost trade and support many of its more vulnerable economies still in the early stages of a tentative recovery.

Ms Gillard began her day with a breakfast meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, followed almost immediately by face-to-face talks with NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

A press conference was due to be held at 10.15 European time. She was due to meet with the EU President, Jose Manuel Barroso afterward.

Ms Gillard is also due to deliver a keynote dinner address tonight and is scheduled to meet with the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the next 24 hours.

She has not yet said if she will meet with the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.

Ms Gillard said that this was the first time that Australia has had a seat at the ASEM summit, a meeting which provided the opportunity to talk to more than 40 of the world's leaders.

A Bangkok Scene.

Staring Out The Window At Siam Paragon

2010-10-04T19:03:00.000+07:00

That was all they found, a sporadic array of voices, tough shots walking. You no good. You not same same me. Insert Name of Boy. Name of nothing. Girlfriend. Obsessions followed to their ultimate conclusion. His lungs ached after he had briefly relapsed on the cigarettes. Too old, too old now. Configure that, baby. As if all else had failed. As if nothing belonged where it was placed. As if his own good fortune deserved no quarter. As if the myriad landscapes were blessed with demonic brilliance; and his abandoned state was destiny itself. You’ve done nothing but get stoned and hide out in your room; and you expect me to give you money, to rescue you, he thought, as he walked away from the classic Bangkok apartment block, all cheap rooms and cheap floors and people coming home from work. Well that wasn’t going to be his solution. He wasn’t going to make out on the carpet. He wasn’t going to rescue him this time around. He would pay for certain services and that was that. Life was tough in a big city without money. Particularly when you weren’t bothering to get up and go to work. And wasted every last cent you ever got.

He walked away for the hundredth time. Pallid intellectualism, Ian had snorted. And now he was settling into his new gigs. A mansion by any standard, well his standards, anyway; and cheaper than the modern apartment he had just left. Pay to take care. He could hear the argument raging somewhere; and decided to stay well away. Broken lives were not his to mend. The Cambodian boy rang yesterday. I miss you, I want take care of my family, can you send me money. He thought about it for awhile but did nothing. One too many people had asked him for money lately. Maybe he needed some rich friends who could take care of themselves. It was insufferable. He heard the mattresses thumping on to empty floors. He saw the inside of empty buildings. He heard what could have been rats scurrying just out of reach. He made as if to answer, but there had been no question, just disjointed scraps floating in the ether: you no good, take care, take care, you no good. Bury me not, on the lone prairie. Country song, Thai country song, many year old, they said, when he expressed admiration for a folk tune. Hah sip bee, 50 years, came the response, when he asked for details. And outside the city collapsed; indifferent to their fate.

He found himself in these private reaches without even knowing why. Now there was a different place, the sound of a suburb waking. Even the sound of a rooster. Doors closing. A moto-cie in a nearby soi. An aching heart. A promise unfulfilled. Flesh rung out. Desire drained. Every excess ignored, fading into normality. As if he cared anymore. The future was not bright, how could it be? Not when you’re old. Only one destiny awaited all of us. So he heard the house next door awakening and the sound of early morning birds. It had been a while since he had noticed that; not in the grey and steel condo with its dedicated fax lines and high speed internet, air-conditioning in every room and sleek black TV. If you should only ask, I’d be there for you. But every love had decayed into convenience; and so now he embraced convenience as a source of comfort. There weren’t going to be any great heights of passion. Or obsessive little sex secrets. Just convenience, comfort. A nice house. Good company. Everything taken care of. A walking dynasty, having passed through so many lives. Life is long, he assured the crazy girl, who couldn’t stop the path she was on. Same same me sometime, before, he said. But he walked away from the giant decay that was the apartment block and their disordered, descending into chaos lives, and woke up looking at his own garden in a quiet back soi near Bangkok ‘s business district and thought; sometimes in life you get what you deserve. But whether he deserved this comfortable house; and they deserved their gloom laden chaos, he was not sure. Just walk away my friend. Good morning, the current boy declared cheerfully, you hungry? Nick noi, a little, he answered, and they smiled together for what they had built together; jaw clenched dawns infested with shivering pleasures and profound despair were for someone else entirely.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Labor lost a vote on the floor of the House yesterday - and not for the last time in this term.

Tony Abbott has come out swinging this morning, defending his plan to "wreck'' the National Broadband Network and the Wild Rivers legislation that he has proposed.

On the Wild Rivers legislation ("a nonsense, an insult"), which is designed to overturn Queensland Government legislation and has the backing of Indigenous leader Noel Pearson, the Opposition leader said, "we have to give indigenous people more control''.

The "reality check" that is the 43rd parliament is dominating the political correspondent's coverage in the papers today following Julia Gillard losing a vote on the floor of the House: Phillip Coorey's take here, and Matthew Franklin's take here. Phillip Hudson says the parliament is fragile. Annebel Crabb says parliament was polite after "the preceding 24 hours [when] a multilateral pestilence of stiffings and welshings".

On the NBN, Labor is defending its plan after Mexican telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim Helu hit out at the network. Mr Slim said the cost of $7000 for every home was far too high.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and his shadow, Malcolm Turnbull, went head to head over the National Broadband Network on Lateline last night.

And Lucy Battersby writes that Telstra chief executive David Thodey was not ''transfixed'' by the government's $43 billion broadband project and would get on with life if it was cancelled.

Graham Richardson, meanwhile, has stood by his claims that Julia Gillard has been forced to keep two cabinet ministers she wanted to dump.

***Sign up to Capital Circle - all the news that's fit to email***

The wrap of the papers starts with David Uren, who writes “LABOR should expand its resources tax to other minerals and consider increasing the GST as part of a strategy to manage the mining boom."

Tim Colebatch's is here: “AS HOME owners brace for an expected rate rise next week, the International Monetary Fund has challenged the Reserve Bank's forecasts that the economy faces a boom ahead, and implied that it should wait and see before acting.”

Andrew Clennell writes “THE spending habits of poker machine players would be tracked by their fingerprints and memory sticks under a proposal to tackle gambling addiction.’’

Clancy Yeates writes “AUSTRALIA'S population growth has fallen to its slowest rate since 2007, after a sharp decline in migration levels continued into the first quarter of this year.’’

Sid Maher writes "JULIA Gillard has again declined to commit to a timetable for introducing a carbon price.'

Dylan Welch writes “THE analyst who blew the whistle on dodgy pre-Iraq war intelligence and was labelled by the Howard government as ''dishonourable'' and ''unreliable'' may soon be sitting on the nation's most secret parliamentary committee.”

Michael Sainsbury writes “Beijing is angry that Julia Gillard has snubbed China by visiting other Asian nations as Prime Minister first.

Nick Butterly writes “The Federal Opposition says the Government should consider sending attack helicopters, tanks and another 360 troops to Afghanistan after claims Diggers are undermanned and lacking firepower.’’

Lanai Vasek writes “THE first indigenous MP in the lower house used his maiden speech yesterday to thank Kevin Rudd for apologising to the Stolen Generations.’’

Lauren Wislon writes “A JOINT select committee to tackle problem gambling was established yesterday by Labor.’’

THE charging of Australian commandos over the deaths of six Afghan civilians headed off an international investigation into the killings, Dan Oakes writes.

Tom Arup writes “THE Auditor-General has savaged the handling of the government's axed Green Loans scheme but exonerated former environment minister Peter Garrett, who received ''incomplete, inaccurate and untimely briefings '' by his department.’’

Dan Harrison writes “THE Gillard government appears set to overturn laws that banned universities from charging compulsory student union fees.’’

Caroline Overington writes “GREENS MP Adam Bandt says The Australian intends to do all it can to bring down the Gillard government. That's because the newspaper is both immensely powerful, and peeved, he claims.’’

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/welcome-to-the-real-world/story-e6frg71x-1225931993259

NEW Greens MP Adam Bandt says in an interview on the web that his party must now "enact what we believe in".

We reject many of their policies but we certainly agree it is time for Mr Bandt and his colleagues to be judged on their platform. Having long avoided the scrutiny that is routine for other political parties, the Greens are now enjoying the full glare that comes with their pivotal parliamentary role. But based on that interview with The Monthly, Mr Bandt is still adjusting to life in the big school. The member for Melbourne says it is wrong for The Australian to suggest the Greens be voted out at the ballot box. He says we are partisan and that we, in effect, verballed him on September 4 when we wrote that the Greens would introduce a private member's bill for same-sex marriage. Yet Mr Bandt was quoted as saying that "removing the discrimination facing same-sex couples" was among his three campaign priorities. The MP can't have it both ways, campaigning on gay marriage then complaining when this is reported, especially when one of the first things the Greens did this week was introduce the bill. Rather than attacking the media for doing its job, he should get on with his job of explaining his policies to voters. We understand political responsibility comes as a shock to the Greens. But that is the price of power.

Staring out the window at Siam Paragon.

Post The Apocalypse

2010-09-29T10:03:00.002+07:00

They had long wanted to talk about the chaos that had enveloped their lives in a sixty day period; the time between visa runs. And so they did. With the boy's new girlfriend, a result of a strange series of coincidences which he himself had accidentally initiated, while he was bound by a time frame of pretending to be home all night to his current boyfriend. They both had new partners, in other words, and life had moved on dramatically. Sometimes sophisticated in their calls, sometimes barren in their hopes, theirs was a new found glory. Tum pid=plahd went the line, I make a mistake. I don't love her 100 per cent, the boy admitted. Sometimes only 60 or 70 per cent, sometimes 80. Well we all make compromises, he said in a too wordy English, which meant much of what he said was not understood. If you gave 100 per cent you would be giving your life away, surrendering to another. Something like that. Choirboys in quicksand, went the song, In the land of hungry ghosts. Choirboys, choirboys, choirboys in quicksand. Kah kah kah went the girls outside the bars, their calls meant to entice but to a foreigner were as much like crow calls as calls to the divine. Massage boys didn't do much but smile if you went slow, or beckoned. He'd got used to the fact now that foreigners were often regarded with repulsion. They were large, smelly, stupid and drunk and undeservingly had far too much money.

Cute little muscly teenagers dressed in black hung around the back sois. Young boy, dirty boy, went the touts. Young girl, dirty girl, you like young? they pestered. Sometimes he knew he had landed in a very different place. An imperial drone. At other times he was shocked by the malevolence of the fabric of things. I can't sleep with them for more than a few days, they make me sick, I get an allergy, like to a cat. No allergy to the money, however, he noted, as the demented vicious sick little queen filled his boy's head with advice on how to get gold out of a foreigner and how to make sure you didn't walk away with nothing. These things were breaks in time. The ritualised, stylised sex shows, demonstrating how little they liked change, or perhaps even genuine eroticism, for the West seemed to demand some sort of affection lust or love between the combating combining partners to make it all work, whatever it was, the shows and the hard-ons and the music and the movements, even the bashful smile as one of them ejaculated in front of the crowd, were all things you didn't see in Sydney but you certainly saw in Bangkok. Rhythmic, powerful, hypnotic, at the end of the show more than a 100 boys in tight white underpants took to the stage, parading their wares around the perimeter. Number 50 is very handsome, he commented, and noted later that the boy had gone to a customer in the first cull, while others, perhaps more personable, were there to the bitter end.

You baby, you don't understand Thailand, his friend had snapped some months back when he had suggested the tired looking sex worker was complaining she had a baby at home. Let's just send her home, he had said. You baby, mai kow chaie mon Thai, some men will pay more for breast milk, she's just trying to fool you. Don't believe half of what you see or half of what you hear. It was around then that his brain clicked around in the barrel, and he realised how thoroughly alien and quixotic was this place; how treacherous and shifting the sands, how little honesty had to do with anything. They could hardly let themselves go, let themselves be free. They couldn't even see the dancing minstrels. Tired days when the daylight made no sense at all. When he caught cabs into the infinitely complex city on strange assignations only he would undertake. When there was always somebody asking for money. This morning it was the boy from Cambodia. You want me to come visit you there, he asked. It would be very awkward right now, he replied. Besides, there was always somewhere else to go. Home town boy. Country boy. Sophisticated parlance. Yet another club, where they had been before. I hear the Funky Monkey is very entertaining, he said, just for something useless to say. The music pounded out without the usual Thai melodies, and being a Monday night only a scattering of Thais danced between the whisky laden tables. They didn't stay long. They remembered everything, every nuance. The bottle of Black Label the boy had consumed almost entirely on his own. I'm happy you're happy, the man at the next table had declared. But things were never as they seemed. That he had discovered. There was always an angle. There was always a desire for money. Status. Ambition. Confidence. A niche in a poverty stricken world. So he didn't tell them what they wanted to hear. Instead, he smiled an exhausted smile out of his washing machine head and declared: Let's go off to our respective partners, our respective lives. Lets act like civilised men. An hour later he noticed the missed call.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/greens-make-first-move-with-same-sex-marriage-legislation-in-senate/comments-fn59niix-1225931687793

THE Greens have wasted no time flexing their new parliamentary muscles, with senator Sarah Hanson-Young set to introduce same-sex marriage legislation into the upper house later today.

The move comes as the House of Representatives prepares to debate and adopt new standing orders that will establish a new committee to scrutinise legislation before it enters the house and rule on whether it is controversial.

The new bills committee is part of the suite of parliamentary reforms that all sides of politics agreed to earlier this month - at least initially.

But Senator Hanson-Young will not wait to have the same-sex legislation introduced into the house, saying she was fulfilling an election promise by introducing the same-sex marriage bill.

The next step, she said, was to push the major parties to allow a conscience vote on the matter.

Julia Gillard rejected the idea of legalising same-sex marriage earlier today, a move the Greens senator said the Prime Minister would have to explain to her party and the community.

“The ALP is not united on this and neither are the Liberal Party. The Tasmanian Labor Party in their policy platform has that they support marriage between same-sex couples,” she said.

“Julia Gillard will have to be clear about how she explains that to the community, they didn't accept her answers to this question during the campaign. Stonewalling isn't going to be accepted by anyone, not the community or within the ALP.”

Earlier today Ms Gillard confirmed she would not allow a conscience vote on same-sex marriage.

“The Labor Party has a clear position on the Marriage Act, that is a party position, so you should expect to see the Labor party voting as a political party, in unison, if that proposition comes to the parliament,” she told ABC radio.

“I'm saying the word `if' deliberately. Of course, there are members making suggestions about what private members' propositions they are interested in thinking about pursuing.

“The parliament will then collect those up in a proper process, bills will need to be drafted and then obviously choices and selections will need to be made about what goes forward.

“There is only so much parliamentary time. We've got to deal with government business as well as private members' business so there will be some clear selections about which bills get parliamentary time.”

But Senator Hanson-Young said the “new paradigm” meant a less-strict adherence to party lines was needed.

And she called on people to lobby their individual MPs in the coming months to demand a conscience vote.

The Greens will look to have the bill passed through the Senate and then moved to the lower house.

The Greens have also promised to introduce a private member's bill on euthanasia and the Prime Minister has promised a free vote on that legislation.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gKQgVdBxfhWneF-UNXpCJfoEDcPgD9IH8C500?docId=D9IH8C500

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — Gen. David Petraeus trudges across a gravel helicopter landing area with his aides, looking purposeful but a bit grim, as he reaches a village outpost in the violent Afghan province of Helmand. He's here to chart progress, or lack thereof, in a war that's running at the pace of a horse cart, in a world that runs at the speed of a text message.
The only time the 57-year-old commander's smile reaches his eyes are a couple of brief moments when he stops and chats with troops. He poses for snapshots that memorialize his first months in command here, fighting a long war that he knows the American public, not to mention the White House, wants done yesterday.
Petraeus does not snap when a reporter asks him a question he has answered 50 times before, and will at least another 50 this year: Do you see progress?
When he replies, the pressure weighing on him shows in his voice — quieter than when he was in charge at U.S. Central Command in Florida, or earlier in Baghdad and Mosul — and it shows as well in the slightly hunched set of his shoulders, leaning on one arm of the chair.
There is none of the showmanship described in magazine profiles that sketched a megawatt four-star commander who outmaneuvers his adversaries with political and media savvy.
Instead, there is a solemn professor, patiently getting through the next order of business in a day scheduled down to the minute. To answer that "progress" question, he asks his aide for a stack of charts, leafs through to the chosen page, and then walks the reporter through his vision of the war, like a tough calculus problem he keeps having to explain over and over.
Yes, there is some progress, but only some, Petraeus says. No, he will not be drawn out on whether it's a trend. Yes, things are going according to plan. But no, he won't give the plan a timeline, because yes, he knows NATO has overpromised before.
His favorite expression is "only now do we have all the right inputs in place," as in only now do the United States and NATO have all the tools, from manpower to surveillance platforms to all the logistics and air support needed to fight the military side of a counterinsurgency conflict. That encompasses "stressing" the enemy through capturing and killing, and moving Army units into contested Afghan neighborhoods, to win them back from the Taliban.
He's got a chart showing those "inputs," too, including one called "People," which lists Gen. Stanley McChrystal — the man dismissed from the post Petraeus now occupies, after quotes embarrassing to the White House appeared in a Rolling Stone article. If you ask an aide why the chart hasn't been updated to say "General Petraeus," instead of "General McChrystal," the aide says: "McChrystal's name is there because the boss wants it there." McChrystal put everything into place, he explains.
True to that, Petraeus brings up McChrystal's name in nearly every conversation, mentioning how everything that's happening now was jointly planned by him and McChrystal last fall.
Petraeus says the burden of convincing the American public that this war is winnable is not his job — he advises the White House on how to prosecute the war, nothing more.
Yet when pressed about the dour headlines of diving public opinion polls back home, he turns to his computer and digs out the latest statistics on violence in Iraq — only six incidents thus far that day, compared to roughly "220 a day back in 2007," which is proof, he says, that his counterinsurgency strategy worked once and will again. You get the sense the tired general keeps an eye on that rearview mirror as a touchstone, to remind himself as much as the journalist sitting before him that no one believed he would turn around that war, either.
And he is keenly aware that few are convinced he can turn this one.
The NATO commanders he is to visit that day do report incremental progress, mapped out in spreading blotches of color overlaid on village maps, showing where once no-go zones have been turned into safe areas. In the U.S. Army counterinsurgency manual Petraeus helped author, these blotches of territory where troops establish security are called "inkspots." The plan, a standard counterinsurgency tactic for nearly 100 years, is that the inkspots grow to meet each other.
The commanders Petraeus visits explain the slow pace is because Afghans will work with NATO troops only if they see "Hesco" barriers go up. Those are the steel cages wrapped in a tough canvas burlap that troops station around their more permanent bases, filled with rocks and earth to stop car bombs and the like.
In the one area on the map the general visited Thursday — in and near the town of Lashkar Gah — these "Hesco inkspots" had indeed grown over the past year. The barriers are a symbol, Petraeus later explains, that the NATO troops and the security they provide are there to stay, presumably to be replaced later by Afghans.
Opponents of Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy have raised doubts about whether Afghan troops will be ready to take the lead from NATO by 2014 — Afghan President Hamid Karzai's stated deadline.
And NATO officers, like Petraeus' predecessor McChrystal, have openly admitted that the local government-in-a-box that was supposed to backfill NATO efforts is not yet providing adequate services. U.S. and Afghan officials privately complain that Afghan officials extorting bribes from the people they were hired to serve also remains commonplace.
Questioned about some of those obstacles, Petraeus said it was too soon to guess how much progress would be made on security, or governance, over the next year.

From: www.squidoo.com
From the movie Reign of Fire.

Celebrating Ordinariness

2010-09-28T08:05:00.000+07:00

They were crucifying themselves, swirling in, regulation upon regulation, ache upon heartache, sea breeze in an infinite dawn, all that was breaking, heart open, crystal shore, these places were the beginning of new things and old, and he emerged like some primordial life form coming out of the swamp, almost laughing as the water streamed from him. I'm just a garden gnome alcoholic, the next three speakers said, the only time he ever said what was truly going on in his head. So instead he became friends with Maria from New York and they made jokes about the library card set - as in, I knew I had to do something about myself when I lost my library card. Fell off a bar stool. Got done for Driving Under the Influence. He could hardly be marshalled into believing. That just wasn't the way to corral him into anything. Neatness freaks and Jesus freaks. Dusty streets. I might go back to morning meditation. Or splatter myself against the sky, he said to Jaan on the Skype system. There were so many methods of communication these days. Shadows hovered like limpid belief systems. They weren't going to shrug this one off.

I'm American, from New York, Maria declared in her inevitably large, loud voice. What a mean ass junky she would have made. Never guess, would you, he said to the antique dealer. From Denmark. Everyone was truly from everywhere, here. He wasn't going back, that he knew. There were other things to be grateful for. Salvation. Oblivion. A hankering after a costly place. A costly state. Just that, frustration. A hankering after a divine place most mortals never knew, could never pine for, could never afford. These were darkened days; as if the shadows were waiting just around the corner. But at the same time he couldn't believe his good luck, good fortune, and should have embraced everything with a great deal of fervour. Just one happy year in Bangkok, that's all I want, he said. But already he worried about two or three years hence, as if it mattered; and the divine march? Well that was the way of it. Kah Koon Kahb. Thank you. How are you, I am fine, the boy parrotted. Sabadee mai kahb. How are you? Said to a friend, you care about the response, the guide book said. They walked across the Railway of Death on the River Kwai, another bunch of gangly tourists. And later the driver went into a great exposition about how the shop keeper had given them a discount just because he spoke a few words of Thai. They still spoke as if he didn't understand, but were more wary now.

The future was a troubled place, that he knew. So he just surrendered to the present and grew in depth. There were many opportunities awaiting abroad. And he maintained the joke, although it wasn't really a joke. Be careful with money, he would tell the boy, if I run out of money we have to go and live in India. Aek no India, tih nih degwahr, here is better, he would protest. And they would kind of laugh, as if it was really a joke. Someone would die, but would that really make things any better. Sometimes he was classified a ruin. Come and view. Come and see me, now! Let the girlfriend clean her gun. Let the security guards shuffle uncomfortably, or laugh outright. Let the gossip circle and the carrion birds fly. Let the crows hop from branch to branch above his head. Let the sinister trails reach out through what they knew to be their own. Make house. Make sure. Make a noble role of a noble house, noble life. Let's stand tall and say: at least I had a go. At least I lived. At least I watched the foreign climes collapse in sheets of profound colour; marking desire and longing and emptiness all at once; there in the tropical heat. He couldn't stop gazing out the window at the view, even when he was nowhere near the place. Well, that was it, they were moving to a new place. The boy was very busy.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/pm-uses-carbon-carrot-to-woo-green-vote/1953563.aspx

Prime Minister Julia Gillard hopes to take Greens supporters with her all the way to the next election by putting a price on carbon via a policy strongly influenced by the minor party.
To determine that policy Ms Gillard, at the request of the Greens, has formed an exclusive committee whose members must accept that a carbon price is the only way to tackle climate change. That rules out Coalition participation, with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, who prefers direct action measures, already knocking back an invitation for two of his members to join.

Ms Gillard detailed yesterday the line-up and terms of reference of the new committee charged with investigating ways of putting a price on carbon. It will canvas various methods, including through a carbon tax, an emissions trading scheme, or a hybrid of several measures.

Ms Gillard will chair the body herself, while Climate Change Minister Greg Combet and Greens senator Christine Milne be co-deputy chairs.

Treasurer Wayne Swan, Greens Leader Bob Brown and Independent MP Tony Windsor will also sit on the committee, which will be supported by a panel of four expert advisers led by climate change economist Ross Garnaut.

The committee will function as a Cabinet committee, with all its deliberations and advice papers to be kept secret until the Government decides otherwise.

For more on this story, including details of a public forum to be conducted during the life of the committee, see the print edition of today's Canberra Times.

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/keep-open-mind-on-climate-windsor-20100928-15um9.html

Key independent MP Tony Windsor is encouraging members of a new multi-party climate change committee to bring an open mind to their deliberations.

But he has expressed concern about the impact a carbon price might have on agricultural land use and food production.

The parliamentary body will be chaired by Prime Minister Julia Gillard and includes Mr Windsor and representatives from Labor and the Australian Greens.

The Coalition has declined to join the committee despite an offer from Ms Gillard.

"I'm going in with a completely open mind," Mr Windsor told reporters in Canberra today.

"I suggest it's probably time most of us did that rather than have a closed mind at the start of the process."

However, the rural-based MP wants to ensure an "inevitable" move to a market-based carbon abatement scheme does not impact adversely on food production.

"We need to understand what we're potentially doing if we start to introduce a favoured economy over the food economy."

Independent senator Nick Xenophon said he'd like to be part of the new committee.

"I need to negotiate my way through on that," he told reporters, suggesting emissions trading as the "most efficient" way to tackle climate change.

"I guess I have to talk to the powers that be, [including Climate Change Minister] Greg Combet and others."

One of the first tasks of the committee will be to assess the worth of a citizens' assembly, proposed by Labor during the election campaign.

Mr Combet said that the committee would discuss the assembly in the context of how best to go about promoting discussion and debate in the community.

"We don't want to get hung up about the mechanisms too much," he told ABC Television.

Mr Combet said the desired outcome was improving the level of community debate and a better understanding of the options to address climate change.

His opposition counterpart, Greg Hunt, said the committee would be one of the most secretive bodies ever created in the Parliament's history.

Politicians could not sit on the committee unless they signed on for a preordained outcome and a belief test, he said.

"It's contrary to parliamentary practice, it's contrary to good democratic practice and it closes down rather than opens up debate.

"We think there's a better way - direct action, start immediately, clean up the power stations."

Liberal backbencher Dennis Jensen said the committee was discriminatory.

"I don't believe in a carbon price, it's as simple as that," he told reporters.

"There are things that you can do responsibly without needing to go to a carbon price."

The opposition's junior environment spokesman Simon Birmingham said Ms Gillard had "totally backflipped" on a carbon price.

He also defended the Coalition's decision not to take part in the committee.

"We are not going to sign up to something where we fundamentally disagree with the outcome," he told reporters.

"This is not a committee that's open to deliberations [or] the public ... this one starts with predetermined conclusions."

Greens climate change spokeswoman Christine Milne defended the make-up of the committee.

"The fact is climate change is real; acting on it is urgent; we've had that debate," she told reporters.

"There's no point in going back to square one," adding that there would be space for people on the committee to change their minds.

"And come up with a position that's different from all the original positions, people may have taken into the discussion."

From the web.

Cascades Dismembered

2010-09-27T11:23:00.001+07:00

In Bangkok, you're always right at the borderland of the mundane and the supernatural. I mean, here's a city with fax machines and smog and expressways and buildings shaped like giant robots and the world's highest concentration of shopping malls and all that, but the twentieth century's just skin deep, scratch it and you're in the primeval past. I love it. Keeps my mind working. I was musing on all these things as I gazed at the sleek, sleeping young body of....

S.P. Somtow

The crisis was real enough. The ancient battlefield was dying off now, the fizzing lights cascading into the mud disappearing into another neuronal network. But every waterfall cascading down cliffs was full of faces trying to get out; shrieking, sometimes, swirling in the froth, just trying to escape. We were cemented in our positions. Fragile in intent. Sitting in backstreet sois. Easy companionship. Every corner store, every tiny restaurant, offered easy conviviality. The rain bucketed down and the lightning flashed around the skyscrapers, here where it felt like home now, although nothing was responding as it should. He sat through another meeting, this time at Soi 43 off Sukhumvit, the PIE, Psychological Initiative Enterprise, or whatever it stood for; and people from all over the world told little drabs of their stories or promulgated the gospel according to them; and as always he said nothing, letting them all wash over him. And even now, if they had pointed to him, he would have said: I have nothing to say, now more than ever. The silence is deafening was a cliché of foreign form, yet all that came to their attention, the misery, the laughter in a daughter's eye, truly meant nothing, not now, not ever.

They were coming around. They were telling each other there was a solution. The darkness was encroaching and yet that, too, meant nothing. Sometimes he thought of risking the girlfriend and her gun. Sometimes he was happy with the happy face of the current boy. Hello darlingk, he said, thinking it was a great joke, a parody of Sexy Sar, the woman who broke his friend's heart, as they sat in the back of the taxi on the way to the River Kwai. My darlingk. My darling I want some money went together like wedded gloves. All the time, every time, he was seeing things more and more from their point of view. He was a miserable old man. They could dance in the street without end. They were moving to a beautiful new house. All was shifting, in the fatal sands. Messages received which were never received. Times and conventions and convenience, a television glaring in the distance, voices of those he had loved murmuring down long corridors; aching desire relegated to another dimension; a fist in time, a jerking convenience, and then all went quiet.

There was a disturbance in the force. His kidneys ached. Then he went back to meetings and said nothing. Then he debated whether to have his hair dyed. Some said yes, some said no. The boy said, then you no falang, you Thai. He saw their achingly beautiful forms lined up along the cat walk. He left Ian in a go go bars with girls pole dancing, with everything neat and tidy and ready for the armada. Some things were better left unsaid. The trouble was he left everything unsaid. His kidneys ached and he collapsed on the bed and an hour disappeared. There wasn't any money coming in when it should. You can see the notes. You can do your taxes. You can feel the population stirring, from silence to silence, from evasion to evasion. Him baby. Mai kowh chaih mon Thai. He don't understand Thailand. The falang came and went and the population lapped at the base of the stone stairs, twisted, molding, the Gulf waters full of rubbish; a land of magic and skyscrapers and whispered intents; of times pure and simple. Yet achingly so. Sure of intent. Sure of purpose. Climbing out of a hole. Al Pacino collapsing to the ground. Cicero's Way. We were in a different era again now. He got out of the joint and asked: what happened to the clubs, what happened to all that marijuana? Now it's all glistening platforms and cocaine. Well, now it's something else again. Demented and exultant, crazy and intent. Ice took over where cocaine left off; and shook another generation. If only he could live forever; and suffer no consequence.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/national/gillard-moves-into-the-lodge-20100926-15s2x.html?from=smh_sb

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her partner, the first bloke Tim Mathieson, have finally moved into their new digs at The Lodge in Canberra.

Ms Gillard deposed her predecessor Kevin Rudd in June but refused to set up camp in the prime minister's official residence until the people formally elected her to the top job.

With Labor having just scraped into power and parliament about to resume, she was chauffeured up the pebble driveway today as The Lodge's first ever female prime ministerial occupant.
There is no news about what will happen to Ms Gillard's Altona property in Melbourne's west or the apartment in Canberra's inner south, but one would imagine her days of civilian living are gone, at least for now.

Despite the sumptuous setting, the prime minister collected her own bag from the boot of the car, before being greeted at The Lodge's front door and welcomed inside by one of the household staff.

Ms Gillard and Mr Mathieson then re-emerged to take a stroll around the lush gardens, popping with spring pansies and camellias.

Hand-in-hand they headed towards the private pond, where Ms Gillard spoke of wanting to find a "big fish" in its waters.

But knowing there were even bigger ones to fry inside, she didn't stop to smell the roses but made a beeline for her home office.

"I'm actually heading towards the study to do some paperwork but it's a great privilege to be here," she told waiting reporters.

However, Mr Mathieson's top priority was finding out whether there was a decent coffee machine on the premises.

"I don't know whether there is one here, so I've got to check it out soon," he said.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/kevin-rudd-tells-united-nations-to-improve/story-e6frf7lf-1225929566613

THE United Nations stands on the brink of irrelevance, Australia's foreign minister Kevin Rudd has warned.

Mr Rudd delivered a scathing assessment of the world body's track record during his formal address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York yesterday, listing a string of recent failures on poverty, climate change and nuclear non-proliferation.

"We do not need another grand plan for UN reform," Rudd told an assembly chamber that was two-thirds empty.

"We need to summon the political will simply to make the UN work."

Only three days ago, Mr Rudd talked up the merit of Australia's multimillion dollar campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council in 2013.

Yesterday, he urged the UN's 192 member states to work harder at fixing the world's biggest problems.

"If we fail to make the UN work, to make its institutions relevant to the great challenges we all now face, the uncomfortable fact is that the UN will become a hollow shell," he said.

About 200 world leaders and their staffers witnessed firsthand Rudd's 20-minute address, which he delivered before boarding a commercial flight back to Australia yesterday afternoon.

Delegates from the US, the UK, China and India were in the room while Rudd spoke but few Pacific and South American nations heard his call to action on climate change and deforestation.

"The unconstrained carbon emissions of one state impact on the long-term survival of all states," he said.

"Climate change is no respecter of national or geographic boundaries.”

The biggest threat to Australia was not organised crime and people smuggling but natural disaster, he told the assembly.

"The most immediate and pressing threat to the physical security of Australia’s wider region lies in the scourge of natural disasters," he said.

Promotional photograph: The River Kwai.

The Beast In Me

2010-09-25T10:16:00.000+07:00

The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day
And by night rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in me

The beast in me
Has had to learn to live with pain
And how to shelter from the rain
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might have to be restrained
God help the beast in me

Sometimes it tries to kid me
That it's just a teddy bear
And even somehow manage to vanish in the air
And that is when I must beware
Of the beast in me that everybody knows
They've seen him out dressed in my clothes
Patently unclear
It's New York or New Year
God help the beast in me

The beast in me

Johnny Cash

These were the battlefields, lit up, trails of light blazing in flaming tracks, shocking in their intent, dismal in their finality, the ruined fields, the overwhelming sense of disappointment. And yet it was these very same battlefields which marked an entirely ruined consciousness. The lights were all cascading downwards, barely lighting the ground before dying like fireflies. The disruption was intense. The sense of longing intense. We were being called for a greater purpose, but nothing was so profoundly devastating as to look across these places, see what was meant to be, realise that everything had aged, call forth great squadrons, light up every corner of a silicon network, feel the flesh corroding as he walked; it wasn't fair. But nothing was meant to be fair. Fireflies. That's all they were. But fireflies who could imagine greater things; battlefields, corroded places, things which were of infinite longing, which held no place, which said, yes you were, my darling, darlingk, darlingk, I want money. Pappa, I want money. They all laughed. ATM, the girls laughed at my friend, painting the letters across his forehead. They all thought it a great laugh his girlfriend had ripped him off and he was devastated.

What on earth did you expect? Ian has finally left; leaving the lobby very impressed, well laughing anyway, at the number of girls he managed to squeeze in during such a short stay. My God, the boy said. Lady, lady, lady. Well the old one wasn't performing very well and Ian wasn't going to let any chance go by, not when he was returning to the "sexual desert", as he calls Sydney. They parade their enormous forms. I want to go, Sahr said, after she came to pick up her picture and other things the day after Ian had departed and sat, wondering whether she was going to get any more money. He was slow enough to reach into his pocket that she didn't stay. Enormous times. You were fast forwarded through what happened to me over a number of months, he said, but Ian was having none of it in the eternal wrestle for dominance. Intellectual poverty, he snorted, to make such a comparison, but it wasn't anything of the kind. Nothing came close to the wild devastation he had gone through. Nothing was going to be incidental to these crimes. He was getting old now. Could he be tiring of the boys? That's what they all said. You grew tired of the whores, the easy availability, beauty at a price.

They all wrestled with what was on display. They were all seeking a quiet time in a quiet place. They were all going to be displaced at one time or another. He wasn't prepared to answer their questions; as if he knew any answers. Be courteous to the traveller, kind to the stranger. That was about it. Have some common decency. Pass through the eye of the needle. Despair and be born again. Collapse realities. Take the easy way out. Try and let the battlefield go; although the extremity of those falling lights, the beauty of the desolation, the intensity of chaos, they were all things he didn't want to let go. A naked form, a fumbling intent. A body into which to seek oblivion. But we always woke up. There was always another day. There wasn't any way to keep up this excess. So profound, so deeply profound. That was why he loved it so much; that battlefield full of cascading lights, the muddy surface, the night sky flashing neurotically, the silvered, slivered intent. And so it was that he came full circle. And said goodbye. Not just to Ian. To things he should never have been attached to in the first place. Said goodbye and went to live in a nice quiet house. And sought a full blessing. Begin again; a new life. Take care, they said. Words from the English which had entered the Thai language. Take kae, they cooed. Take good kae. Taking care of Pappa. Duty over desire. Money over lust. These things were small and passing. He was about to enter a new domain.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/gillard-picks-up-where-rudd-left-off/story-e6frg9if-1225929099425

KEVIN Rudd set a new benchmark in the annals of Australian politics. He became the first prime minister to be worse than Gough Whitlam.

His colleagues seemed to agree with this judgment, denying him even the opportunity which Whitlam -- and indeed all previous prime ministers -- had to defend his/their first election victory. True, their judgment was more that Rudd would be worse than Whitlam for them personally. The damage he could continue to wreak on the nation was an entirely secondary consideration. White cars and other perks always trump the national interest.

Now, before she has even entered the Lodge, his successor Julia Gillard has embarked on challenging that new "Rudd benchmark" by picking up precisely from where he, so to speak, left off.

Two things among many cemented Rudd's grasp of the prime ministerial dunce's cap. The Emissions Trading Scheme and the $43 billion National Broadband Network. The first constituted a direct and utterly pointless attack on the foundation of not just this nation's prosperity but its very existence. Our vast resources of coal in general and its use for power generation in particular.

The second constituted -- constitutes -- perhaps the greatest waste of resources in our history. It at least equals the great railway building binge of the closing decades of the 19th century, which it most closely and disturbingly matches. Indeed, with politicians across the eastern states now also "feeling a fast train coming on", the NBN might well be a return to that sort of 19th century hard-wired waste in the 21st century.

One alone would have won the "accolade" for Rudd; the two together rendered certain his position in the pantheon of prime ministerial disasters. Now they were both bad enough when committed to by a nascent Rudd government. First a prime minister setting out to directly attack his own country through the ETS. None dared call it treason, for it was, to misquote either Ovid or John Harington, more simply stupidity.

And second, the biggest infrastructure project in the nation's history, which was completely uncosted initially -- the billions probably didn't even get the courtesy of an envelope's back, just a prime ministerial enthusiasm. Neither then nor now has there been any rigorous analysis to identify the claimed benefits against the very real costs.

How much worse is it now to persist with the NBN and to go back to an attack on our greatest national asset, this time via a carbon tax, when we know so much more about the context for each?

Rudd's insistence that the ETS be adopted before Copenhagen was bad enough. Now we know Copenhagen turned into Hoppenfloppen. Any move towards a unilateral carbon tax is that much the more irresponsible and stupid.

Similarly and even more so with the NBN. Back when the enthusiasm for the fixed NBN took hold, the iPad was barely a gleam in the eye of Steve Jobs. It was certainly not the, ahem, apple of his eye, as it didn't exist. Why the iPad? Because it captures the rapid, unpredicted and unpredictable shift to broadband mobility. Yet the government, and now Gillard as PM, is mandating the immobility of a fixed broadband network.

The 19th century railway splurge is a telling and -- should be -- uncomfortable precursor. For in the space of two generations most of those fixed lines were rendered obsolete by the car and its pervasive adoption, as a matter of deliberate choice because of its flexibility, by every family in Australia.

Now the railway builders did not and could not anticipate the car. Apart from the more basic reason for many of the lines -- pure political pork -- rail networks made sense in their context. But imagine if they had known the car was not just coming but was already here? How much worse would a decision to nevertheless pour billions into fixed rail networks have been.

That is exactly the position with PM Gillard. She now knows the iPad exists. Rudd didn't. Because two years ago, it didn't. Further, in Ziggy Switkowski's warp-speed world, we won't be waiting two generations.

To persist with the fixed NBN with that knowledge of the iPad and what it portends, is beyond folly. Indeed further, the way its birth and subsequent explosive growth should tell us there is a myriad of known unknowns, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, jostling to the surface behind it.

Of course we remain on pretty safe ground to argue that we need a fixed fibre core. But probably of much more limited extent than we might have thought when FTTN (fibre-to-the-node) was "the solution". That might mean wiring up the nation to regional centres. Funny about that: much like we still have with railways.

But then the continuing communication capillaries to the homes should be some mix of wireless and the good old telephone cable. And the Foxtel and Optus cable in the capital cities. The telephone cable because it's there and works perfectly well for what most consumer need and want. To stress, what they want now. Wireless because it's cheap and either upgradeable or disposable, and what consumers want.

There were actually two reasons for the enthusiasm for the Rolls-Royce upgrade to the $43bn FTTH (fibre-to-the-home). It was the second which brought competition tsar Graeme Samuel inappropriately into the government's tent. An attempt to break Telstra. More specifically, it's monopoly hold on the nation's infrastructure. So we saw Samuel move on from his job of regulating competition and applying the rules, to trying to mandate the very structure in which competition would occur.

Now the real point is not whether this is desirable or appropriate; simply that it's become irrelevant and unnecessary. Telstra's monopoly hold on our telecoms core is eroding as rapidly and as surely as its share price. And it's doing so mostly because of that switch from fixed to wireless. We don't need to build a pervasive fixed NBN to get greater competition. So, we have a Gillard government proposing to plough-on, bullheadedly building the most expensive white elephant in our history; and also embarking on a direct attack on our nation's prosperity, knowing that the first is silly and the second crazy. Do we have to wait three years to pass the accolade from her predecessor?

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iFCUoD_iGBrFwchNJDxcmY6phsRg

NEW YORK — Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said Friday that early elections could take place early in 2011 if the opposition Red Shirts prove they can remain peaceful.
"We believe that six more months of continued stability... should be able to set the scene for a possible early election next year," he told a think tank in New York, where he was attending the UN General Assembly.
"But that very much depends, still, on how the opposition and the Redshirts respond," Abhisit added in the talk at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"If they would prove that they are interested in democratic movement, peaceful assembly and rejection of any illegal activity -- and of course violent activity -- then I think we should be on course to achieve a solution."
Early elections are a key demand of the opposition Red Shirts movement.
Abhisit, the British-born, Oxford-educated head of the establishment Democrat Party, does not have to go to the polls until the end of next year.
He had proposed holding polls this November but shelved the plan when opposition protests in April and May ended in a bloody government crackdown and riots in Bangkok.
Ninety people died and nearly 1,900 were injured in the army assault to clear away the protestors on May 19.
The protesters were campaigning for elections they hoped would oust the government, which they view as undemocratic because it came to power with the backing of the army after a court ruling threw out the previous administration.
Most of the Red Shirt leaders are now in jail or wanted on terrorism charges for their roles in the two-month-long mass rally.
Abhisit insisted that elections could take place, but only once stability had returned. "I don't believe in elections where there can be intimidation, threats or use of force," he said.
He acknowledged that "we cannot claim to have returned the situation to complete normalcy," but said that "ordinary people are not affected" by the continuing emergency rule.
He also defended himself against accusations of damaging media freedoms, saying that only outlets which "incite violence" had been closed.
"I'm not sure whether you'd allow any special station for Al-Qaeda here," he told his mostly American audience.
Sporadic violence continues to afflict the country. A small bomb hidden in a rubbish bin exploded in a residential area of Bangkok on Friday, wounding three people, police said.
Despite the instability, Thailand's economy is performing strongly, the premier said. GDP is projected to grow eight percent this year and exports are growing at 30 percent a year, he said

Please Do Not Urinate Here

2010-09-23T20:13:00.003+07:00

This was what we imagined. A blighted past where nothing made sense. We caught you. We transfigured you. We were riding high above the infinite, a view across all the channels, all the grating ice, all the dips and fur-roughs, the channels which stretched forever, the alien sky, the places where we weren't now but loved so much. We wanted you, so much. We loved you, so much. We were caught amidst these strange inter-laces, lattices, places that meant nothing and everything, profound, oh my God I love you so much. Please rescue me. I could see the troughs. They were just stretching, like some European surrealist painting, into a distance we could never imagine, into a place we could never despair, or paint our own despair, pinpoint what was a stupid agony, that frivolous panting which was meant to be everything. No, I not give you so much money. No, I not so stupid. No I love you mak mak, and yes, it was the most stupid of things. Yes, I want to go sing karaoke in some stupid bar, no you not steal my soul. Oh how I loved you. Oh how I wanted you. Oh how the inconvenience of your stupid plans laid havoc to my stupid life. And yet, yet, we were there, his friend ordered drinks, we said yes to parties without margin; let's face it, we're the foreigners, we pay everlasting.

There it was, everything. Conflicting signals. He wanted to be her. He wanted to be him. He wanted to embrace everything. He wanted to avoid everything. Every ancient voice. They weren't just the sentinels of the ancient carved channels, they were spiritual voices that tapped into something far deeper, far more psychotic, for more emblematic. I kept myself pure for you, what a fool was I. He listened to the barbarism of the German's voice. The greed dripping in every last sentence. Hyped up on some sex drug or other. It was from then, he thought, that he began to notice just how ugly some of the foreigners were, the cute Thai boys with them. Was that a pained expression on the boy's face? Bit fat tubby pale queen, with rounded face and rounded belly, strutting, that was really a strut. He'd manage to buy something he could never get any other way. Well that was the commerce. But it was the German who disturbed him the most. Apart from being bald it was the whopping big nose ring that was perhaps his most notable feature. And the fact that he was drunk and edgy, and had just ordered a bottle of red which he clearly intended to drink on his own. And then parallel universes kept breathing through the fabric, touching him, sending shivers up his arms.

Evil in intent, these hungry ghosts. It wasn't long, as he sat outside the Balcony, before the German had told him not just his life story but things he really could have lived without, so that images of that hyped up ugly ugly ugly form having his way with some poor Thai boy kept recurring, off putting. There couldn't have been anything more hideous, exploitative. He walked past the Thai boys touting for business outside the massage parlours and couldn't look at them the same. Imagine having to put up with that German? Sweating, humping, demanding. Shudder through the depths. Even the sea creatures at the bottom of the ocean could feel their horror. It came as no surprise to discover the German had just sold his piercing shop in Berlin and was living on the proceeds. He had been married, he told him, to his boyfriend of 20 years, but these days they only got off together once or twice a month. There was an endless procession of other forms, faces, bodies, supplicants, bare asses. He was into S & M and the Thai boys just weren't into all that, so it wasn't very satisfactory, he declared. Then he stood up, handed the bottle of red back to the bar and declared he was going off to the massage parlour. Ten minutes later the German was back. He looked surprised. I came in seconds, he declared. It's the sex drug. I'll go back in half an hour and do it again. I haven't got my money's worth yet. Some things he didn't need to know. Some things he really didn't need to know. I hope you tip the boy well, he said. I've already paid, the German declared. Tip him, he insisted. It means nothing to you.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/24/3021064.htm?section=justin

The Federal Government has found a Coalition MP who is prepared to be deputy speaker and pair with Speaker Harry Jenkins, the ABC understands.

ABC News 24 political editor Chris Uhlmann has been told the deal is close to being sealed.

Any such move by a Coalition MP would preserve the Government's two-seat majority and would no doubt enrage the Opposition and its leader Tony Abbott.

This lunchtime Queensland Liberal MP Alex Somlyay, who was dumped as the Opposition's whip in the recent reshuffle, told ABC Radio Current Affairs that he had been approached for the deputy speaker's job and was considering his position.

Earlier he told ABC NewsRadio that he would speak publicly on the reported job offer later today.

The major parties are locked in a brawl over who should fill the role after the Coalition backed out of a deal to have to have the speaker paired with an opposite member during divisions.

Walking away from the deal yesterday, Mr Abbott argued that it was unconstitutional.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and independents Bob Katter and Tony Windsor have attacked Mr Abbott for going back on his word.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11367296

Thousands of anti-government "red-shirt" protesters have defied a state of emergency by staging a demonstration in the Thai capital, Bangkok.

The protesters were marking the fourth anniversary of the coup that ousted ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

It was also exactly four months since the suppression of their long-running protests in the capital.

The BBC's Rachel Harvey in Bangkok says security was tight but there was no sign of violence.

Another gathering was also held in the northern city of Chiang Mai.

Protesters in Bangkok gathered at the crossroads which earlier this year they had turned into a fortified encampment.

Thousands of red balloons were released and many demonstrators carried banners calling for the release of comrades held in prisons across the country.

Some red-shirt leaders face charges of terrorism and others are accused of breaching emergency laws which remain in place in Bangkok and several other provinces.

More than 90 people died and about 2,000 were injured during two months of protests earlier this year, which blocked off the commercial heart of Bangkok.

Many within the red-shirt movement are loyal supporters of Mr Thaksin who is currently living in exile to avoid a jail sentence for corruption.

The coup which ousted him caused deep divisions within Thailand.

Our correspondent says Sunday's peaceful demonstration is a vivid reminder that those rifts remain.

Taking Care of Pappa

2010-09-21T10:23:00.001+07:00

Infinite. But that didn't stop the pain. The pleasure principle had already died. His friend got drunk on "Margies", as he called Margaritas, his favourite drink; and then headed off with the girl to the Electric Blue go go bar, where his friend took his latest girl in a queue of girls, downed tequila shots and pole danced with the go go girls until they were too drunk to stand. They'd written the chorus:
We were choir boys in quicksand
In the land of hungry ghosts
Amongst all the back slapping and bleary late night toasts
On the streets of Bangkok, Irish pubs and Sunday roasts
We were choir boys in quicksand
In the land of hungry ghosts.
They were crucified before they had even started. Nothing worked. Every excess had been surrendered. They were too old for it now. Taking care of pappa, that's how they thought of it. Hardly erotic. Tip tip. Good natured as they were. Flesh on flesh. Yabba pscyhotic girlfriends cleaning guns. Does it work? he asked. Yes, she replied. Hmmm, might take the hint, he thought, and stay away from her boyfriend. Their history was history. He could offer everything she couldn't. She'd cheerfully kill him.

The story went round in ever expanding loops. He couldn't be crucified if he had already died; if the streets of Calcutta called; if the chaotic scenes of the Howrah Bridge still held promise; a place where there was still a future, or had been last time they were there. Only in their thirties. The children still young. Everything young. Even the decaying Frenchmen in their cheap Indian rooms were a source of fascination and delight; how could a European throw themselves so thoroughly away. Easy, he thought. Oblivion took many forms. Gassap Gassai. Restless. They would be crucified in an oblivion drenched age. You sad, someone accused. You sound unusually sad, insisted Jaan on Skype. He denied every last accusation. Over tired. Can't sleep. The pleasure dome was a sinister place. The boy had cheerfully despatched the girl so he could take care of pappa. But she kept coming back. She crazy, boy say, she say money don't matter. The girlfriend kept cleaning the gun. It was safer to leave. Even he had finally worked that out. There wasn't any way to be more fulfilled, except to adopt a more sensible lifestyle. Spiritual solutions, they chanted. As if he could hear all the denial, all the stories; all the chaotic cult like garbage that spewed from their mouths. I was prepared to believe anything I was told, they declared. Well I'm not, he thought. And that was it. Laugh out loud if you want to. If you want to make God laugh tell him your plans.

We were choir boys in quicksand
In a land of hungry ghosts.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90777/90851/7146695.html

The capital of Thailand heated up again on Sunday four months after a blood-shedding dispersal to a chronic anti-government rally, as well as four years after a bloodless military coup that ousted the then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Although the activities in Bangkok by the Red-shirts called it a day by 6 p.m. local time on Sunday free of violence or unrest, analysts believe the return of about 10,000 Red-shirts to the downtown Ratchaprasong area, where was the central stage for the April-to-May rally, has alarmed authorities that the anti- government movement could be regaining power.

Holding activities on Sept. 19 has been a routine for Red- shirts since the coup on that day four years ago toppled Thaksin, their leader de facto, but this year new importance was attached to the date: Four months ago on May 19, the troops dispersed the Red-shirts protesters by force. The Red-shirts leaders said the gathering meant to commemorate the 91 people, mostly Red-shirts protesters and security forces, who died in clashes between authorities and the anti-government group during the protests.

In the morning of Sunday a group of Red-shirts travelled to Pathum Wanaram temple near the Rachatprasong Intersection and laid red roses outside the pavilion, where six people, including both protesters and medical workers, were killed in the dispersal operation.

In the afternoon more and more people with red shirts joined them. They gathered at the Ratchaprasong area, chanting Red-shirts songs, tying red-ribbons and lighting candles to memorize those who died during their rally in April and May.

On Friday, Red-shirts across the country laid red roses in front of prisons nationwide in a bid to express best wishes to, and call for the release of, 252 Red-shirts including their leaders, who had been detained after the chronic rally ended.

A cavalcade of Red-shirts on Saturday also drove all the way to the northern province of Chiang Mai, a stronghold of them and Thaksin, to stage another rally on Sunday, with key Red-shirts members, including Jatuporn Promphan, delivering speeches.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/coalition-crab-walking-away-from-parliamentary-reform-says-labor/story-fn59niix-1225927174275

INDEPENDENT MP Tony Windsor has described the Coalition's objection to fellow independent Rob Oakeshott's bid to be Speaker as "payback".

The comments came after Mr Oakeshott withdrew his bid to be Speaker and expressed a preference for the Coalition to provide the next Speaker.

The independent passed up the chance to become Speaker after meeting Tony Abbott and the manager of opposition business Christopher Pyne in Sydney late yesterday.

Mr Oakeshott said yesterday Mr Abbott had “agreed to come back within 24 hours on the issue of a Liberal MP in the Speaker's chair”.

He said that was “something I would strongly consider endorsing as a step towards the Westminster model of a truly independent speaker”.

With parliament due to resume next Tuesday it remains unclear who will fill the Speaker's chair.

Mr Windsor said today the Coalition might be punishing Mr Oakeshott for siding with Julia Gillard after the election, handing Labor minority government.

“There is a little bit of sour grapes there in terms of not getting the backing of Rob Oakeshott to form government, so this may be a little bit of payback in a sense,” he told ABC.

Labor leader of the house Anthony Albanese accused the Coalition of “crab-walking” away from the parliamentary reform agreement both major parties had signed up to.

“Tony Abbott and Christopher Pyne have to make their position clear, they haven't up to now, they have been crab-walking away from that agreement,” he said.

“What we have seen since the government was formed is Tony Abbott go back to his old habits of talking about conflict politics, and what we need to know is what the rules of the game are.

“Will they stick by that agreement and then we can make a decision based upon the rules of the game.”

Mr Oakeshott said the constitutional problems about him becoming Speaker and raised by the Coalition in recent days had not been discussed during parliamentary reform negotiations.

“The assumption was that everyone was doing their own diligence, no-one was relying on each other, everyone was very aware of what we were trying to achieve,” he told the ABC's AM program.

“The fact that now we are finding out after the event that people have signed up to something that they have admitted they haven't done their homework on is of concern.”

Not Sure

2010-09-16T08:36:00.000+07:00

The images were fleeing like rats into a grey ether; and he wore the distended, ragged tiger t-shirt with pride. It cost him 200 baht and already it was falling apart. But he liked the distended red Asian tiger and the word "Answers" crawling across his chest. As if there were any answers. As if the flight of the tiger through the smoky sky held anything but a sense of infinite strangeness, of Asian nights and infinity and a clarion call to right the wrongs. He wasn't shattered or bereft, confused or blinded. Wounded by life, perhaps, by worries that marked the fall of innocence, by a thousand creeping sensitivities that blurred into one enormous vague out. Oh pretty boy, come hither. As if it meant anything. As if they hadn't already been where everyone should go. To the end of the line. Not to Absolut, but absolute, there in the peak of indulgences and the singing of modern songs of discredit. He couldn't be sure what was happening. Fool if he succumbed to demands, idiot if he didn't. These were not the times of which he had dreamt.

One happy year in Bangkok, that's all I ask, is exactly what he had told himself. But now it was more about strategy and hypothesis and completing things which were overhanging from the past. Taking what was his and making it whole. Confounding. There were a thousand ways to think about this. He was going straight to hell in a hand basket. All attempts at reversal were bound to fail. He had crossed the line at high speed and failed to put on the breaks until five seconds before collision. When it was simply too late to avoid disaster. Castrophise; that's what we do, someone said. He couldn't care less. Believe? What was there to believe in? Of the many conflicting philosophies, he remained in doubt. Pick one, is that what you do? I was so desperate I would have believed anything, I was prepared to do exactly what I was told, they say. And he looked at them; defiance in the face of God. The worst beating he had ever had as a child was when he announced he didn't believe in God, or at least wasn't sure; and then subsequently refused to apologise. Why should he apologise for telling the truth?

The belts snaked out into an infinity of loss. We were sure there were answers, we just weren't sure what they were. It wasn't to be found in baffled excess; he'd given that a good enough shaking. From the clubs at dawn to the bewildered mornings; to the intoxicating foreign landscapes that morphed in and out of whatever constituted the present. They had become just like any other bank, rude, incompetent, dismissive. They had subsequently tried and cried and flayed themselves with wonder; and still nothing worked. I no like, he said, it puts me in a very awkward position, fool if I do, bastard if I don't, he said of yet another Thai request for money; from their always sprawling, always needy, always supposedly in crisis families. Falangs as mobile ATMS. Infinite money; he was more about infinite loss. If there was any way to stay sane he would crawl onto the raft. Act with dignity, act with dignity, these fleeting moments of flight, as he greeted his friends at the brothel door, where they had been waiting for him. How were the boys, the mamasan asked. The boys are very nice, he said, I'm not working very well. A head case. Surely not. The city was as ravishingly beautiful was it was every other day; an infinitely fascinating place; with new corners to be discovered at every turn. New treachery. New delight. It couldn't be clearer. He took no action.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/oakeshotts-speaker-bid-could-tip-balance/1943302.aspx

The Federal Government is seeking urgent legal advice on a bid by Independent Rob Oakeshott to become Speaker, a move that would dramatically shift the power balance in the new Parliament.
If he is successful, the Coalition may refuse to supply a Deputy Speaker, forcing Labor to nominate a backbencher and thereby lose its wafer-thin majority.

The situation would arise because the votes of the Speaker and Deputy Speaker are cancelled by ''pairing''.

This arrangement was put in place by the historic agreement forged by Prime Minister Julia Gillard with the country Independents to make the Speaker more independent of party politics.

Labor and Opposition frontbenchers could not say last night if the agreement would remain valid if Mr Oakeshott was successful in becoming Speaker. They also questioned how Mr Oakeshott could fill the role of Speaker but still push issues for his electorate. A fall-back position to Labor's problem would be installing renegade Independent Bob Katter as the Deputy Speaker, because he has sided with the Coalition.

The Canberra Times reported yesterday that the current Speaker, Labor's Harry Jenkins, was in danger of losing his prestigious position.

Mr Jenkins, who would not comment last night, became collateral damage in horse trading when Mr Oakeshott turned his attention to the Speaker's position after rejecting Ms Gillard's invitation to be a minister.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/16/3013085.htm?section=justin

Former foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer says he is willing to support his old political foe Kevin Rudd in his new job.

Mr Rudd was sworn in as Foreign Affairs Minister earlier this week and is now on his first overseas trip to Pakistan and the United States.

During the election campaign Mr Downer said the former prime minister was unfit for the post because he had damaged Australia's relationship with some important countries.

But last night Mr Downer told Lateline that was in the past.

"He's become the foreign minister, Labor has formed the Government and I think the really important thing now is that he be given a chance as the Foreign Minister to do the job that he's been appointed to do, and to do it effectively.

"The one thing I'm not going to do is dwell on things he said about me and things that I've allegedly said about him.

"Whatever any of us may have thought beforehand it's certainly my view that we need now to give him a bit of support and hope that he does very well. It's not about Kevin Rudd, it's about Australia, and it's in Australia's national interest that he does well."

Picture: Novices in Chiang Mai.

Harbingers

2010-09-15T05:00:00.002+07:00

I couldn't be seen like that. Not gasping, not panting. Not just desperately wanting everything to end. Not able to achieve a heightened place. Money saved at every turn. Bangkok brothels mounted in corridors, each to be explored. He couldn't care less what the consequence. I love you. I miss you. These things were dancing on a very fine pin. I love you; when the whole of the city beckoned; redolent with glory, puhm poohey, plump, chubby, an observation of status or derision. I love you, that is what I have come to know. We were going to make the swiftest break, the most immediate of corridors, sweeping, beautiful. Dizzy, you bet you. Spewing out of those Colognes, out of the swirling spear, out of the elegiac ear piece, out of Christmas and New Year, out of wind tunnels and constellations not just of exquisite despair but mind numbing beauty, as if consequence was the only answer, as if we said too much just by being here. As if he lied and lied and lied. Just to to be there in the instance, paralysed, transfixed, whole ancient scenes and absolutely modern cities glazing in a transfixed hallucination straight before him. Nothing would be the same, nothing would be the same.

At least I don't stare out the window for two hours every time there's a suggestion we do something, Ian said, all fresh and brash from Australia, all working fine, all happy, ancient times, ancient red light districts, their patina of gloss so old that they had taken on a more enduring light, of insane, instant beauty, of a deadening hand, of finite joy; of short moments, he thought, when the woman behind the bar, when he had already told the girl he had a boy waiting at home and they would be going back for dinner shortly he was just showing his straight friend the sights while trying to be sensible himself, dumped the keys to an upstairs room in front of him. Infinite loss. All the bar laughed, when it was explained that his friend was the straight one; and so she took back the key with good spirits and he tipped the girl 100 baht for her company. It was all too brutally frank. Ian gave his Sexy Sar too much money, and so she didn't come. Why would she bother? He already paid her. It was always going to be a brutal waste. He pay to take her to Australia; then no boom boom. Everyone warn him. Be careful your heart. It's easy to fall in love with them. We're old, we were lonely; at least in that department. Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.

So to cure some real or imagined illness, angst, dankness of spirit, old fashioned horniness, sometimes he would take himself off to the brothel; where there wasn't any doubt, they take good care. It was always going to be such a terrible waste. They were so beautiful. He couldn't reach whatever state it was he wanted to reach; so he took himself in laughing, finite manner through the craziest reaches; and they danced to remember, they danced to forget. There was a prickling disorientation between them. Take care. You take care. Many mistakes. If he hadn't been so vulnerable he wouldn't have been so crazed. So they had a quiet night at home. He reached back through the days to the boring part; where they were happy in their quiet routine; where a big night out was Saturday at the kareoke bar, when there was no school the following day. It was always going to be thus. It was going to be an insane waste. He was going to be fractiously concerned. He was going to fuss. He calm me down, he explained to the interpreter, he make my house a home. Before, I never sleep more than two hours a night. He think that now I am gassap gassai, restless, but it is nothing to what went before. When the "ting tong" craziness was in every reach; every frame; when he walked the best walked dog in the world through the mistiest, loneliest streets. Then he came here. And never slept alone again. And that was that. Some people were very easy to make happy.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-election/gillard-lashes-out-at-media-coverage-20100912-1570l.html

JULIA Gillard has lambasted the media for not exposing the up to $10.6 billion black hole that Treasury found in Tony Abbott's election costings.

She has also taken an oblique swipe at some of News Ltd's coverage.

The Prime Minister said the campaign contained a lesson for media organisations.

The central issue had been the economy - the government's stimulus versus Mr Abbott's slogans about debt and waste. But ''it took three independents to find the $11 billion black hole. That should have been a job done by journalists during the campaign. People should have known that before they voted'', she told the ABC. ''The biggest story of the campaign was effectively missed''.

The independents got the information after the election because they insisted Treasury should cost both sides' promises as part of their negotiations with them. Mr Abbott, who had earlier refused to submit his policies for official costing, eventually agreed to do so.

Pressed about criticism of News Ltd's political coverage, and particularly Greens leader Bob Brown's attack on The Australian, Ms Gillard was cautious but said: ''I don't believe in editorialising on the front page. I do believe people have got an obligation to report the facts.

''I think that there are times when media personalities actually think that they are involved in the political process rather than commentating on the political process … I've been known to joke that Sky TV is endlessly journalists interviewing journalists - the politicians are no longer required.''

Senator Brown has accused The Australian of stepping ''out of the role of the fourth estate to think it's the determinant of who has seats in the Parliament'' and said that ''it needs to be taken on''.

The Australian's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, told Crikey last week that Ms Gillard had rung him twice during the last week of the election campaign and had ''both times thanked me for our fair and balanced coverage''.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/13/3009789.htm?section=justin

A Sydney man who embarked on a bicycle quest around Europe to find his son is hoping to be reunited with the boy today, nearly three years after his mother fled with him to the Netherlands.

But Ken Thompson has been told it could be months before he will be able to bring the boy back home to Australia.

In 2008 Mr Thompson's estranged wife left Australia with their son Andrew before a court had determined custody arrangements.

Dutch authorities have told the ABC that extradition proceedings are underway to have Melinda Stratton returned to face contempt of court charges.

Andrew was three years old when his mother took him from Australia, and is now six.

Mr Thompson's desire to find him was so strong he quit his job as a deputy fire chief, mounted a bicycle, and rode 6,500 kilometres through Europe to find him.

He says he is excited ahead of today's reunion.

"I've been searching the world for him for two-and-a-half years," he said.

"So the process now is to give him time to come to accept that his father is here and that his father wants to see him."

It is understood Andrew came to the notice of authorities when he was enrolled for school.

Picture: Glen Campbell www.glencampbellpictures.com

draft

2010-09-12T14:05:00.000+07:00

The herd mentality was back, if it had ever left; gassap gassai, restless, the boy said, and everything moved away in rivers, across time, through the channels that pummelled through walls, the flash of a thigh, a sunny smile, a gesture, a path not taken. It was never going to be the same. There were a hundred ways of viewing these things. There were crises that never made the point, misshapen faces, and he knew that a destiny awaited him he did not want to face. There were flowers in the garden, faces misaligned, communist bodies marching in concord, trimmed hedges, beds of orchids, hanging trees, crows perched up high, watching every move, harbingers, and even while he sat a turtle crawled across the grass and tried to nuzzle into him. You're not well, you're dizzy, someone said, and he knew it to be true. They couldn't much match what was happening to him. All across time, things were fleeing, bright spots, pain etched out of wilderness, thighs flitting through the grass, voices calling, an overwhelming sadness so out of line with the rock and roll lifestyle. He went to see Mark in the locked ward, but he had already left, despite having been strapped down only a few days before, and was drinking again, by all reports. Brandy Alexanders, rock and roll drinking, he had proudly declared.

I'm having the time of my life, Mark had declared, but Tom, who had so looked up to him, so relied on him, was barely amused. No one else around him is having a good time, he mused. He's already been expelled from one apartment block. The city sprawled heavenward; voices of discontent, and their shattered Sabbaths, their feeble attempts at spirituality, reached back through time and denied their current forms. If only there had been an answer. If only things hadn't taken such a ruinous course. He could feel the bells ringing. The walls of white patched with concrete, hiding the dreaming, slumbering forms of the Chinese, the only ones who felt secure, after a lifetime of denial. The soldiers were back at every entrance to the Sky Train. At the entrance to Limpini Park. He could feel what should have been; but didn't know how to answer. I didn't care, even when he was ripping me off. I was simply a soldier, on a path to ruin, he declared. And all was expelled, all made new, and yet his own answers were like far off Christmases, seen through a television mist, exposed for myth. He couldn't really explain what was happening.

That there was nothing concrete, that the simplest of calls through him into ruin, made for an answer that was often brutal, yet at the same time lacking in substance. The streets were quiet, it being a Sunday. Ian had arrived at the apartment from Australia at 3am. All was jostling for position. Larger than life. Bigger than a tree. Big, was all he could say, failing to cross the language barrier. Big. Everything. Big of body, big of personality. Here in these quiet times, where his ruinous instincts only served to make things worse. Where he would happily have dived into oblivion, if it had provided any thing at all, any answer. But the high apartments floating on the ceilings of ice, the sheets of cloud, high in the sky, were only remnants of old sail boats, places they had been before. There wasn't an answer in any kaleidoscope, no matter how easily conjured. It was hard to imagine that anything could be worse. Or better. That he could be happier, or sadder. More together or more unkempt. More fulfilled or more empty. The pain and disillusion kept up its constant rhythm. He could hear them making love through the wall, Ian and Sexy Sar. And he decided he didn't want to hear, turning up old Rolling Stones as loud as the thin walls would permit. As loud as the frequent calls would permit. For as long as he could submit to any form of denial. It was all wrong. And strangely, just as he had written about crows heralding the deaths of old warriors, of birds flying backwards through the sky, they gathered in Limpini, and nobody but he seemed to see.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2010/09/10/weekend-talk-thread-september-10-12/#comments

Ray Hunt
Posted September 10, 2010 at 8:27 pm | Permalink
While it’s unfortunate that Julia Gillard has inherited such a
poisonous media environment, to simply blame a relentlessly-malignant
Murdoch media agenda and a lazy, blinkered, herd-mentality amongst the
Canberra political reporters would be to miss the underlying strategic
problem – and ignore the single best opportunity the Gillard
Government has of succeeding politically during the next three years.

If the ALP was a corporation, the organisational response to their
dreadful performance during the 2010 election campaign would have been
brutal, wide ranging and swift. Many heads would have rolled.

But politics is a specialised business, the art of the possible, so
the axing of Rudd, Swan, Arbib and the incompetent NSW right mafia
can’t/won’t happen. File it under realpolitik. Minority status means
the government can’t afford any of these incompetent hacks outside the
tent.

The unprofessional and reactionary communications approach of the ALP
since November 2007, however, is an area where much can and should be
done.

In a speech to the ALP party room on Thursday that clearly marked her
intention to adopt a different presentational style to Rudd, Julia
Gillard said her government would not be worried by the daily news
cycle. ”Our challenge is to get out clear (linear messages about) what
we stand for – not be worried about each day’s 6 o’clock news,”
according to a report by Michelle Grattan and Katharine Murphy in
Friday’s Age.

The ALP had a good economic story to tell during the 2010 election
campaign. They had protected Australian jobs during the worst global
economic turbulence since 1929. Interest rates were low. Inflation was
low. Government debt was low. Economic growth was the high. The ALP’s
economic policies had clearly delivered for their natural constituency
on the issue that mattered most to most people, but even with an army
of spin doctors and plenty of paid advertising they could not get this
positive message out.

Julia Gillard has publicly acknowledged on a number of occasions the
government communications effort was poor. Why is it so? The problems
were born during the ALP’s brilliantly-executed 2007 election
campaign.

In 2007 the highly-effective advertising campaign was run by a
well-known, left-leaning communications group; and the ground-breaking
online guerrilla campaign that was lifted by Team Obama the following
year was delivered by a small group of creatives. Both teams worked
pro-bono for 9 months. Success usually has many fathers but not this
time. Rudd’s cocky Gen Y spin doctors and an advertising identity who
did the Kevin 07 branding work and TVCs claimed all the credit for a
focused campaign they had played marginal roles in.

The creative brains behind the campaign were shafted. Not paid, not
credited and kicked into the long grass. This story is common
knowledge in ALP circles and has been written about by The Age’s Shaun
Carney, The Daily Telegraph’s Malcolm Farr, The Australian’s David
Burchell and Mike Steketee and others.

So, on November 24 2007, there was an abrupt end to the strategic
media focus, the positive linear messaging, the effective issues
management, the wit and charm of the campaign, and so ended the ALP’s
ability to get their key messages out to “their people” via the media.

In place of strategic media management, came smart-arse, sexist,
reactionary techniques. Plenty of clever short-term tactical plays but
no strategy and no joined-up approach to whole of government
communications.

Led by Rudd, a sub-prime communicator with a fragile ego and
vindictive personality, political journalists were used, abused and
discarded by his spin team just like the hapless campaign creatives
had been.

Lachlan Harris, who was placed in Rudd’s office by Wayne Swan, was the
main offender but he was not alone. Rudd’s media team lacked an
understanding of the complex game of media chess they were supposed to
be playing – they were demonstrably unable to proactively or
reactively manage issues – because they lacked professional experience
and life skills.

Equally important, Cabinet Ministers and Rudd’s senior media people
lacked the foresight and courage to pull Rudd back into line, even
thought the many communication and personality problems that
ultimately led to Rudd’s down-fall were already apparent by February
2009.

Journalists were enraged by the way Rudd and his spin doctors
mistreated and insulted them. News Ltd’s senior people were equally
enraged by a deluded Rudd screeching idle threats at them.

The unprofessional Rudd media team broke the basic rules of political
media engagement – there is always tomorrow, you can’t win
confrontationally, the media pack for all their annoying quirks needs
to be charmed, persuaded and carried along by linear narratives; not
bullied, personally insulted and ignored.

Ultimately, the graceless Rudd posse reaped what they sowed, the only
surprise is that the inevitable consequences of their many
professional failures took two years to materialise.

Unprofessional communications practices, ill-will and lack of strategy
are the primary reasons why the ALP could not get the good news out
during the 2010 campaign. The journos were so dirty they would not
listen and the unpaid brains behind the 2007 campaign for some strange
reason declined to get ripped-off again.

It’s also why Julia Gillard has had to deal with such a toxic media
terrain from day two of her Prime Ministership.

So what should the ALP do about this poisonous media relations hangover?

The answer is surprisingly simply.

Have a clean sweep of the Ministerial media offices. Step one, sack
all of Rudd’s former media advisors. Bring in the people who actually
delivered the goods in 2007 to do a top-to-bottom communications
audit. As part of the process, ask the gallery journalists to identify
who the most “shop soiled” of the spin doctors are. Discover which
names keep popping up and terminate them.

Make the rest of the government spin doctors reapply for their jobs.
All of them. Intensively test them over a full week – in practice and
theory – using evidence-based metrics to identify those who have the
integrity and the necessary strategic, creative, issues-management and
media-relations skills to professionally fill these positions.

Replace the many that don’t make the cut with experienced
professionals from a variety of non-ALP backgrounds.

And run a very-humble, relationship-repair program with the political
journalists who, like it or not, do more to shape the general public’s
perceptions of politics than anyone else.

For Julia Gillard, the one shining star of the 2010 campaign disaster,
acting now to rebuild the government’s communications apparatus is her
great big opportunity to make a clean break with the toxic Rudd
hangover and finally start getting some of the government’s positive
messages into the public domain.

It may be her only chance.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/rudd-the-wrong-choice-bishop/story-e6frf7jx-1225918474301

PRIME Minister Julia Gillard's appointment of Kevin Rudd as foreign minister risks Australia's international relations because of the fractured relationship between the pair, Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop says.

Ms Bishop told reporters in Perth this afternoon that Ms Gillard had missed an opportunity to "clear away the wreckage of the Rudd-Gillard government".

"The leader that was sacked by his own party because he led the government off course ... is now expected to navigate Australia through our foreign policies," Ms Bishop said.

"The leader who was sacked by his own party because he could not get along with people is now Australia's number-one diplomat."

Ms Bishop said Mr Rudd had caused damage to some of Australia's most important international relationships and was now being sent back to repair that damage.

"The relationship between the prime minister and the foreign minister should be one of absolute trust and confidence," she said.

"Yet Julia Gillard has appointed as foreign minister the man who she tore down so brutally from the position of prime minister and we know that Kevin Rudd then spent most of the election campaign in retribution.

"The Australian people know it was the Kevin Rudd camp that released information and so breached cabinet confidence against Julia Gillard and revealed her opposition to pension increases and a paid parental leave scheme."

She also said it was "the Rudd camp" that had leaked the news that Julia Gillard did not attend all national security meetings and had sent her staff instead.

Ms Bishop said Mr Rudd's appointment presented a risk for Australia "because of the fractured relationship between Ms Gillard and Mr Rudd".

Ms Bishop said Stephen Smith, who now moved from foreign affairs to defence, had been "a steady hand on the wheel" and there was no reason why he should have not remained in foreign affairs.

"It seems that Stephen Smith will now be taking on the role of peacemaker," she said.

Ms Bishop said Mr smith would bear a heavy burden not only as defence minister but also ensuring a truce was kept between the Gillard and Rudd camps in government.

She said that under Mr Rudd's prime ministership some of Australia's most important overseas relationships had deteriorated, including those with China, India, Japan and Indonesia.

He would have his work cut out for him to repair that damage, Ms Bishop said.

"He will obviously have to apologise to East Timor for the bungle Julia Gillard made over announcing that East Timor would have a processing centre for asylum seekers when East Timor doesn't want such a centre."

A Bangkok building site.

Unimpressive Last Time

2010-09-09T09:49:00.004+07:00

Now was a time to be free. Now was a time to find a home and stay there. Sweet Jesus, evoked all the grandiloquent lines. Nothing wrong with a bit of delinquent grandiosity he declared. Johnny Cash: "...playing Jesus to the lepers in my head". Bukowski: We were born to strew flowers down the avenues of the dead. Burroughs: Fish boys ejaculating on silver streams. The windy smell of rotting oranges. All these strange, well actually they didn't seem strange at all, thoughts came and went as he grizzled at idiots and worried about money and found odd tunes to play, here, there, everywhere he went, oscillating in darkness and in health, shorn, bereft, off stage, passing through the days and the eye of the needle, consequence in a land and a time without consequence, shorn of meaning and delivered anew. It made sense but no sense; so instead he felt sleepy and went to bed early. Chaos was at the door but not allowed in. They could almost have been happy. Well I received no warning of this, and therefore refuse to pay. You can suffocate for all I care. Let's go marching through the rivers of the dead. Let's find new boys in the back streets, in the slums. Very handsome, he said. It was the universal pick up line in this part of the world. As in, come home, I will tip you generously. And you won't have to do too much.

Pom chow, or Putchow, they declared, I am man, which meant, of course, you can do anything you like to me except eff me. And that was where he was left, wandering, uncertain of his heart, uncertain he had done the right thing in selecting one from the crowd, happy in intent and discontent at heart, wandering shamelessly through other breezes; shorn of meaning, bereft of purpose, slaving over typewriters, passing through the eye of a needle. All was well but not well. We were certain of purpose but yes shorn of meaning, and existing with people who had done nothing with their lives except not drink; have you managed to cobble together some days? old Wayne asked. Oh yes, he declared, tired of them all. Tired of their jaded philosophy and meaningless prattle about God. Old Scott snuggled up to him like a cat, used to affection, to never being knocked back, even when it wasn't sexual. The pain in his shoulder simply got worse. He could be blessed or he could be cursed; the road was open to either alternative. He was meandering through their paths. He was shocked and shorn of virtually everything they had ever asked for. He smiled and they smiled back. For once he didn't want to be anywhere else.

These times were branded anew. He made as if to move forward and was spiked on some strange spear. The echoes of other lives kept spiralling outwards; and he slept like he hadn't slept in years. These days were marked as a fall of purpose; as a destiny he could not deny, as a way to keep himself awake and as a snivelling piece of gutter thought; an erotic flash to achieve whatever; thoughts and friends and purpose and meaning, swirling in a single cyclonic depression. He would go down the corner shop and buy "nung burrie", one cigarette, and sit on the stool in the ramshackle corner store and castigate himself for not being able to go from one to none on a daily basis. First line of defence, Peter had always taught him, but defence against what? Why couldn't he just be happy. Why did he have to have one cigarette to stoke the feared emphysema, every day? Why were there so many shadows at the edge of sight? That's all I want, he had thought, one happy year in Bangkok; in a life which hadn't been all that happy. Just one happy year. But the truth was he didn't just want one happy year, he wanted to stay here forever, he didn't want to go anywhere. He certainly didn't want to go back to Australia. And if Calcutta was the place he had chosen to die, well he wasn't there yet. And so he worried about how he could afford it, not this year, but next. And wondered what would happen. And cursed and blessed them, all the spirits of the dead. And wrote, wrote, of birds flying backwards and a prickling sense of fear and heightened reality, preceding disaster. And knew, deep down, he didn't deserve to be happy. Not for a year. Not in Bangkok. But he was going to do it anyway; and nothing was going to stop him.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/features/federal-election/return-of-the-rudd-as-labor-licks-wounds/story-e6frfllr-1225916242809

KEVIN Rudd is expected to return to the Cabinet as Labor holds its first autopsy of the federal election campaign.
Julia Gillard is expected to promote Mr Rudd as part of the pre-election promise she made that he would serve on the frontbench if she was returned to power. It is speculated that he will be her foreign minister.
The reshuffle opens the door for other promotions in key ministries, but a question mark remains over whether Ms Gillard will reward powerbrokers Bill Shorten and Mark Arbib. Both were instrumental in removing Mr Rudd in June.
There is also an offer of a job to Rob Oakeshott, the NSW regional MP whose support helped Labor stay in power. Today's caucus meeting is also a chance for Labor MPs - those who are left - to voice their criticism of Labor's campaign which reduced a first term majority to a second term minority government.
Meanwhile Liberal MPs will hold their first party room meeting. Tony Abbott will be re-elected as Opposition Leader and Julie Bishop is set to remain as his deputy after a mooted challenge from Andrew Robb stalled overnight.
The abortive challenge is seen as having been aimed more at shadow treasurer Joe Hockey than against Ms Bishop.
Labor reshuffle
An announcement on the reshuffle might not be made immediately, with ministers expected to be sworn in next week. But here are some of the moves that have been speculated:
- Mr Rudd to become Foreign Minister, booting Stephen Smith out of a portfolio he is considered to have done well in;
- Mr Smith to take on Defence, which has been left empty by Senator John Faulkner's decision to retire from the frontbench;
- Former union boss Greg Combet could also be Defence minister, having served in a junior portfolio in Labor's first term. Or he could be given Workplace Relations or Education, which were Ms Gillard's portfolios before she took the top job, if Simon Crean is moved on;
- There could be demotions for Peter Garrett in the wake of the failed home insulation scheme and for Penny Wong, after Labor's inability to negotiate its climate change plan through the Senate in its first term;
- Senator Wong's job could go to Mr Combet, Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese or Agriculture Minister Tony Burke;
- Chris Bowen is expected to take over as Finance Minister after the retirement of Lindsay Tanner, a former rival of Ms Gillard whose seat has been won by the Greens;
- There could also be a demotion for Immigration Minister Chris Evans, after the asylum seeker issue was used by the Coalition and Greens during the campaign to bleed support from Labor;
- Mr Oakeshott has been offered a "regional ministry" - probably regional development - but he is still talking it over with his family;
- A promotion for Mr Shorten and Senator Arbib could be seen as rewarding the pair who orchestrated Ms Gillard's rise. That could be divisive inside Labor, which needs to remain united with only a one-vote buffer in the lower house. It could also be easily exploited by the Opposition as jobs for the "faceless factional men".
Reading the entrails
A promotion for the campaign strategist Senator Arbib could also be a hard sell after what has been described as a disastrous campaign which almost saw Labor turfed out after just one term in office - something which is incredibly rare in Australian politics.
There is expected to be heavy scrutiny on the performance of national secretary Karl Bitar. Some of the blame will also be levelled at the state branches in New South Wales and Queensland.
Either way, there are calls for heads to roll. "It's the worst federal campaign I have ever seen," Labor pollster Rod Cameron has said on ABC TV. "The fact that Labor just snuck into government is an absolute disgrace," he said, adding that those in charge should not be allowed to direct a campaign ever again.
Mr Bowen has said there was more to the campaign than just Mr Bitar. "The campaign was difficult in many instances, we had many difficult issues to respond to during the campaign," he has said on his way into Parliament House this morning.
Mr Abbott has kicked off his day with a bike ride. He has said only that it should be "an interesting day".
He is not expected to undertake a wide-ranging reshuffle of the team which nearly toppled a first-term government. But he will have to find room for Malcolm Turnbull's return.
It is suggested Mr Turnbull could take the Communications portfolio, which will see him fighting Stephen Conroy over the net filter and the national broadband network.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/features/federal-election/return-of-the-rudd-as-labor-licks-wounds/story-e6frfllr-1225916242809#ixzz0yzYznOQ0

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10672063

Australia has emerged relieved, but divided and sceptical, from the 17-day limbo that ended when independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott nudged Prime Minister Julia Gillard back into power.

Windsor and Oakeshott have been attacked for the decision by many within their conservative electorates - which overwhelmingly rejected Labor and the Greens - and by senior members of the rural based Nationals, the junior Coalition partner. The two New South Wales MPs had earlier been members of the party.

Liberal Senator George Brandis told ABC Radio that the Government had as much legitimacy as the Pakistani cricket team.

No formal polls have yet emerged, but internet polling has shown conflicting views: on the Age website respondents supported the independents' choice by 53 per cent to 47 per cent, but Daily Telegraph respondents rejected it by 73 per cent to 22 per cent. But the response in another Age internet poll said only 26 per cent believed the decision would deliver stable government, while 20 per cent thought "maybe", and 54 per cent expected instability.

Describing the result as a stunning outcome for Gillard, the Australian said that while a minority Government represented a considerable challenge for Australia, it was not necessarily a negative.

The Sydney Morning Herald said Labor had been given a second chance to show some spine, and the Canberra Times said it came as no surprise the independents saw Gillard as a better prospect for stable, progressive government - but that she had no room for complacency.

The Australian Financial Review saw the result as "the worst possible outcome for Australia - a Government with a weak mandate, uncertain of getting any legislation apart from supply bills through the House of Representatives, and subject to a Greens veto in the Senate". Sydney's Daily Telegraph said the only certainty to emerge from the election was further dramatic uncertainty, while News Ltd Melbourne stablemate the Herald Sun said that despite present relief, "there is an apprehension this seemingly fragile Government is unlikely to serve a full term".

Commentators were divided.

"Persuading a coalition of Greens and four different independents that her consensus style could produce stability as well as outcomes for their constituents, in a situation where Labor won less primary votes, is a stunning achievement," the Australian Financial Review's Laura Tingle wrote.

But News Ltd columnist Andrew Bolt disagreed: "This was the worst way for Labor to win, and the best way for Tony Abbott to lose it. What a discreditable end to 17 days of largely pointless political haggling," he wrote.

Picture: Blackberry. A street in Cbiang Mai.

Safe Haven

2010-09-08T07:38:00.002+07:00

There were a thousand things right and a thousand things wrong; focus on the negative; I don't do happy, the dwarf said; and yet here they were, marooned in a happy place, where the world could get lost and they could feel ultimately safe. He was astonished by what had happened. Where was the misery? Where was that atrophied creature behind seven veils, seven walls; the creature shrieking at the very hint of light? Now the days passed in relative domestic bliss. Ian was coming to stay and he looked forward to his old friend's no doubt chaotic presence; beaming good cheer and healthy lust. If only he could share the same simple pleasures. We were moving deeply into the quagmire, fragile and forgotten. Atrophied not the word, but sheets of pain and ossifying flesh, calcified nails and stringy hair, a corpse walking, a mind deranged, love lost. They could smell the stranger from 20 feet behind; the stench of his urine soaked clothes. Drunk? Shawn asked. Mad, he responded. Mad. They lurched down bewildered, busy streets, and if there was antyhing better to be had, he did not know it.

The synopsis was clearly forgotten, forsaken. Nate was still in Safe Haven and from all reports remained as uncommunicative as ever. Forlorn. Lost. A bricked in kiln. Walls of non-communication the only protection. He would like to have been the same, romantic, stoic, silent, but was far too garrulous, too social, too gossipy, to ever keep it up for long. They would be surrounded. They would make way for younger flesh. Sometimes there was nothing to be said. He could not even warn them they were on the wrong path. He sat in meetings and declared his contempt and hatred. God bless you, the American mumsy said. They would go for lunch at the Saint Louis canteen afterwards; 55 baht for rice with two dishes, a bottle of water and Thai dessert. There were a million Christmases. He would dish out tips to the staff. He could feel his stomach sinking because he did not want to go back; not back to Sydney, that city where he had been so desolated; where he jerked across the pavements like a scattered form, a misshapen ghost, with no emotion matching another, with no coherence but a bitter slide, no hope, that was for the young; and no desires but the unnatural.

Desire was for fluent creatures, with a confluence of instincts, a bright step, a gleam in the eye, a new car a new girlfriend a flash job a neat set of friends. It wasn't for a forlorn creature with a wasteland in its head. It wasn't for a bundle of rags coated in addiction sweat. It wasn't for a grimy skinned wasteoid in a blizzard of conflicting despair, so conflicted self deprecating humour was the only way to operate even as a semblance of normality; and so it was he pretended to be human. Frustrated, even so, by the many inhibitions, limitations of the flesh. A short life time being amongst its many deficits. Here and struggled and gone. A crack a smile a flimsy glare; all in the muted flash of a dark bar moment; and then it was gone and the infinite was nothing, the flash of an artificial firefly in the biggest of nights, a speck of mica glinting under a foreign sun, even less than dust, just a moment. That was all. Seen by some, seen by one, then gone. The skyscrapers soared up around them; and the flashes of joy he had known for so long, they, too, hung precariously in the balance; and waste-oid or not, the flesh eaters were coming to get him. Reminding him of the old cliché: just because you're paranoid does not mean they're not out to get you. The frozen flesh was a barely inhabitable place. And all the infinities of negation, the forms of indulgence and annihilation, they, too, were barely worth the wait; the only thing of value the silent, or not-so-silent, commune between his fellows. On a bare rock. Far, far away.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/features/federal-election/tony-abbott-narrowly-misses-out-on-becoming-australias-next-pm/story-fn5tas5k-1225915620290

HE MISSED out by the narrowest of margins on claiming the nation's top job but Tony Abbott was applauded as a hero by colleagues when he stepped forward to accept election defeat last night.
Mr Abbott will be re-endorsed unopposed as Liberal leader tomorrow, with Julie Bishop staying as his deputy and foreign affairs spokeswoman, and the man he replaced - Malcolm Turnbull - promised a senior front bench role.
The Liberal audience was roused by Mr Abbott's warning the new Government would be challenged, and forced to an election if its performance warranted it.
"You won't be surprised if, as an Opposition, I tend to focus on what can be done better," he said.
But the acclaim for the man who nearly wiped the electoral floor with Labor and at one stage thought he had, will disguise a number of problems within the Liberal Party exposed by the election.
One is the operation of the NSW branch, where candidates were selected quite late and campaign organisation was considered poor.
There also will be questions asked in Victoria where the Liberals failed to make big inroads against Labor, and a renewed crispness in relations with the party's Coalition partner, the Nationals.
First there will be recovery from the emotional turmoil of the 17 days following the five-week election campaign which failed to give Australia a government until yesterday.
Liberal figures, including Mr Abbott, were strongly hopeful of getting the backing of the independents early yesterday after Rob Oakeshott's six meetings with the Liberal leader the previous day.
The overwhelming feeling in the Abbott office yesterday, where MPs and staff watched the press conferences that announced their fate, was disappointment after winning more seats and 700,000 more primary votes than Labor.
"A negotiation is at times a bit of an emotional roller coaster and I certainly felt optimistic and pessimistic, I felt exhilarated and deflated in turns in the course of the last fortnight," Mr Abbott said.
"I'm not surprised that my colleagues sometimes did [as well] and I'm not surprised that occasionally something of their mood was communicated to the outside world."
Mr Abbott warned that the delicate balance in the House of Representatives might lead to an early election should the Gillard Government make a major error.
"How quickly we go back to an election depends entirely on the performance of this Government," he said.
"If the Government's performance is so manifestly deficient that it loses a vote of confidence in the House, then it is highly likely that we will have an election.
"It is entirely in the Government's hands and I certainly would not lightly move no confidence in the Government given the circumstances we are now in and I wouldn't expect people to lightly support such a motion."
Mr Abbott said he could not have asked for more support from colleagues and staff and the Liberal Party.
"The Coalition won more seats and more votes but sadly we did not get the opportunity to form a government," he said.
He wished Prime Minister Gillard well and said he hoped she had "a better government than it was over the last three years".
"For our country's sake, I hope that the Labor Party can rediscover the soul that has been so lacking, particularly over the last part of the previous parliament," Mr Abbott said.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/features/federal-election/tony-abbott-narrowly-misses-out-obecoming-australias-next-pm/story-fn5tas5k-1225915620290#ixzz0ytMzHAvg

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/take-the-centrist-path-despite-greens-tony-blair-tells-julia-gillard/story-fn59niix-1225915661385

TONY Blair has urged Julia Gillard to stick to the "Third Way" centrist path of recent Australian and British Labor governments.

In his first Australian newspaper interview in three years the former British Prime Minister told The Australian that Gillard's new government should carefully wind back fiscal stimulus spending and avoid being locked into long-term deficit spending even if the Greens use their balance of power in Parliament to pressure the government to spend up.

At the same time Blair said the unprecedented influence of the Greens in both houses of the Australian parliament would have the positive effect of increasing the chances of Australia doing more to fight climate change.

The Greens' vow of support for Gillard's new Government "can mean that certain reforms obviously to do with the environment will be easier to accomplish as a result of that support," said Blair, who runs his own think-tank to champion climate action.

Blair said Gillard's announcement that she would appoint her predecessor Kevin Rudd to her Cabinet was not just an astute move it was also personally admirable.

"It is not for me to offer Julia advice, she is perfectly well able to do the whole thing on her own, but I think the fact is that bringing someone of Kevin's experience and talent into the Cabinet is a tribute to both of them actually," he said.

"One of the things that is important in politics today is use the talent that you have got."

The Australian and UK governments now both find themselves in the awkward position of lacking single-party majorities at a time that the public wants clear and strong leadership but it should still be possible for Gillard and her British counterpart David Cameron to provide that leadership, Blair said.

In his new memoir "A Journey" Blair argues that his successor as British PM Gordon Brown lost this year's election because he strayed to the political Left rather than sticking to the New Labour creed of Blair's decade in power, and he said Gillard must avoid the same temptation and keep trying to overhaul public services.

"She is a very, very capable leader, I'm sure she will do well," Blair said in his London office .

"Coalition politics is always tough but the key thing is that (the public) want strong direction."

The biggest challenge for Gillard would be to stick to the approach launched by the Hawke-Keating government and shared by Blair's own government in trying to modernise and prune government rather than resorting to the comfort zone of an old-fashioned "big government" approach.

"I hope very much that Julia does manage to do that and I am sure that she will give it a good go."

"It is a strange thing about today's politics, the paradox is that the public are unsettled and uncertain, it is an era of low predictability, you have got a coalition government in the UK as well as Australia and yet people actually want strong leadership as well.

"So that is the challenge but you know provided (Gillard and the non-Labor MPs backing her government) agree their program they can carry it out but it is going to be interesting because both in Australia and in the UK government is going to have to be taking tough decisions with coalition government in place.

"It is far more difficult but on the other hand it is better than being in Opposition."

Picture: Peter Newman.

Now Is The Time

2010-09-05T08:31:00.002+07:00

All trace of everything was being erased as it happened, a program destroying its own path, physical pain alternating with a blank head. He plunged off the air just as quickly as he regained competence; and everything was delightful. Nothing made sense and yet he should have known better. After the 100th partner, most people start to lose count, the worker at the STD clinic said; when he claimed ignorance to the ridiculous question of how many people he had been with. The mirrored walls. The lithe bodies. The charming smiles. The pain that cramped his shoulder. The winning smiles that drained him of every cent; just as he had done to another generation in another country. As if it was all the same. A continuum. A little gaggle of them went to visit Mark from Wales; another of the charming British. Wise boys and wise scenes. Sow! Forward with strength; Aek kept emphasising, noticing how rapidly he had plunged off the air, disturbed. One phone call and he felt like drinking, that's all it took. They would never be the same again. The human body was not meant to cope with such sustained stress. Indulgence. Despair. An infinity of if not pleasure; then exploration. Work. Everything counted, everything was a quest. Except he didn't know where he was going.

They would be armed again. They would be made strong. He would join them in joy. He would go to the country and come back. He would constantly fork out money. Same same Aek, he would ask, as in, he costs money. Happy not to work. But the tumult and the shouting. Happy go school. Except what was real and what was not? He didn't know any more. As if he didn't have his own secrets; as if virtue was imprisoned only in the faithful; as if age didn't creep up on everybody. He couldn't be denied; and yet there was little to recommend either option. He couldn't make the voice recognition work properly. Persevere, Peter advised. Repetitive strain injury from a lifetime of typing was doing him in. There had been advantages to not having a computer; not working. Not indulging in a lyrical strain of imagery. Not pretending to be gifted; when all it constituted was hard work. At least you're doing something you enjoy, something that's a challenge, people observed of the film script he was struggling to complete; and he knew there were other ways, other things, thoughts that should be divined but weren't, forests that should be explored but instead only represented even greater mystery than the skyscrapers that surrounded them.

They went out to Issaan and he felt sick to the pit of his stomach. There wasn't much doubt where this was going when the massage boy appeared entirely naked in the room, generous to a fault, time out of mind, front and back; old soldiers, clamped cramped pain, singing soldiers marching in tight dappled uniforms, their olive skins against the wild dark, the pain that constituted a return to form, a time which was both terrible and perfect, which meant all was heading their way. He couldn't be sure but he was happy here. Never heard you say that; mamma said. But she had also warned, quoting an old song: My mother told me, there'd be days like this. Everything cramped up. Whole worlds slewed away. Earthquakes rocked the planet. Mai mee banhah, he said, there is no problem; although the constant drain on his finances represented exactly that. There were phrases to be had. There were times that should have been altered, transferred, transfixed, plastered into pin points of pain. Migraine, he tried explain, but this migraine was well into its fourth day and the flashing lights and the enveloping pain meant he could not concentrate, could hardly be seen for hearing, could crawl with embarrassments at the stories as they were rewritten; wanted to be safe, wanted to remember everything that had happened; wanted to know why there was no memory, why the machine was failing to function, why he couldn't stand up. If you don't agree with us you are incapable of honesty. Give it a rest. Sober days. He was sick of the lust. Instincts run riot; a quagmire of conflicting impulses. All of them out of line, out of queue, out of proportion. Blessed be the saints.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-election/judges-absent-as-gillard-bids-for-miss-australia-crown-20100831-14fkm.html

THE BIGThe definition of relevance aside for a moment, Ms Gillard was very clearly involved in a beauty contest yesterday.

Never has a larger crowd been assembled for a prime minister to flash her wares to a smaller audience.

Ms Gillard commanded a packed National Press Club, itself beamed nationwide on TV, to sashay her stuff to just three judges. And they didn't even turn up.

The independents whose eyes the Prime Minister most wanted to catch - Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor and Bob Katter - were busily dashing elsewhere around Canberra seeking information from experts about whether they should gaze more kindly upon either Ms Gillard or the buffed Tony Abbott, who has been modelling for them in private.

Ms Gillard the trained lawyer would know, of course, that the longer the jury is out, the less likely the prosecution will get the decision it seeks.

Thus, she had to keep grimly prosecuting her case, which is why she took the stage at the press club to declare that she ought to be Miss Australia.

Why, she wanted to make the democratic system more open and more transparent and, especially, she wanted to ''strengthen the role of the national Parliament in the decisions that affect the everyday lives of Australians''.

Make that the everyday lives of the independents. And yes, ''clearly the new Parliament will also have to focus on the needs of regional Australia''. Which, of course, is where the crucial independents live.

But precisely what did she mean by parliamentary reform? She was asked about question time.

Would long-winded non-answers get the shove in the race to give the independents their desire?

Ms Gillard responded with a long-winded answer that didn't shed much light, though she suggested that time limits for questions and answers in question time and the ability to follow up with supplementary questions were ''obviously important''.

This itself was revelatory, for such tiny mercies had never been given the time of day by prime ministers until the independents were given the opportunity to cast a judgmental eye.

Ah, but what about the right to avoid the question?

''There's the vexed question of relevance, which of course - a bit like beauty unfortunately - is in the eye of the beholder,'' she responded vaguely. Yes, and no one yet knows what is in the eyes - or the minds - of the only beholders who count as this beauty contest grinds its frustrating way to an uncertain conclusion.

Tony Wright is Age national affairs editor.GER STORY:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/31/AR2010083104496.html

Saying there is "still a lot of work to do" politically in Iraq, President Obama on Tuesday congratulated U.S. troops stationed at Fort Bliss for their accomplishments in the war zone over the past seven years. He thanked a gathering of uniformed service members, some of them about to deploy overseas, saying their service made the withdrawal of combat troops possible.

"We are in transition," Obama said. "And that could not have been accomplished had it not been for the men and women here at Fort Bliss and across the country.

Still, Obama said he would not be taking a "victory lap" when he addresses the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday night.

"It's not going to be self-congratulatory," Obama said of his prime-time speech, only the second such address he has made as president. "There's still a lot of work that we've got to do to make sure that Iraq is an effective partner with us."

Obama traveled to the Texas base, home of the 1st Armored Division, on a day unusual for its focus on the two wars he inherited upon taking office - a day his advisers hoped would underscore his fulfilled promise to end the Iraq conflict. Obama rose to national prominence as an opponent of the Iraq invasion and 2007 surge, saying months after it began - as the Democratic primary campaign was heating up - that the troop increase in Iraq "had not worked."

Obama called former President George W. Bush on Tuesday and is expected to mention him by name in the speech. But he has mostly sidestepped the question of whether he has changed his view of the surge, with his advisers saying that it was a combination of added troop strength, political improvements and the Sunni awakening that helped stabilize the country.

Further tests are on the horizon in Iraq, where a government has yet to be formed more than five months after the elections. Under the Status of Forces agreement signed by Bush and the Iraqis, all remaining U.S. troops are scheduled to leave by the end of 2011. The Obama administration has left itself very little room to alter those plans, saying that it would require a request from the Iraqis themselves to leave troops behind and that no request has come in. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said he could not speculate about an extended U.S. troop presence because it is a "hypothetical."

"We have to receive their request before we're able to discuss it," Rhodes told reporters traveling on Air Force One with Obama.

Picture: Peter Newman.
Pi

Liquid Desire Fatal Attraction and the Abandonment Of All Commonsense

2010-08-31T00:57:00.000+07:00

He didn't mean for any of it to happen, didn’t think the situation through for a second, it never occurred to him that a relationship sealed on the first morning with four shots of Vodka before breakfast might be fraught with alcoholic doom. Sober for weeks, he was starting to feel at least partially sane. He had no thought of becoming part of a tribe-let of marauding Thai boys, haunting karaoke bars – once classy brothels, now decaying dens packed with cheap girls and the smell of Thai men; on the hunt, always on the hunt. Oh they’re so naughty, the dry old queen – his alter ego – sighed. My money, their whiskey and girls.

He would wake up sandwiched between sex workers of various genders, hands groping everywhere, the grunt of someone coming in the bathroom and think: nothing could be more beautiful.
Swishy girls and high pitched boys; after cruel abstinence, time spent afresh and anew, woken, from a long sleep, if not at the end of his life then older, much older than he had ever expected. Die young stay pretty had happened to a lot of his friends, but not to him.

Dropping earnest recovery, he had walked out of an AA meeting at the Plaza Hotel on Soi Seven in Bangkok and straight into the arms of liquid desire.

It started this way: his mate Ian was a jolly chap with no apparent source of income who dedicated his affluence to hedonism. He parked Ian in the Biergarten opposite the AA meeting, declaring he would be back in an hour. Ian could hardly have looked happier. From morning to night there were never less than a 100 girls in the Biergarten, all of them available. They varied between charming and drop-dead gorgeous; 500 baht girls went elsewhere.

I'll buy you a boy, Ian had declared cheerfully earlier in the day, anything you want. A girl or two for me, a boy for you. If you don't see a girl you like. Never sure about you.
I'm not really up to it at the moment, he protested.
Oh don't be ridiculous, Ian snorted. This is Bangkok.

I keep picking up these swishy, horrible boys, he confessed. They make me feel worse – sleazy – they never stay very long; and the girls – they just can’t raise the mast right now, I don’t know why. They’re so gorgeous some of them; and they’ll do anything. And I just can’t.

Ian snorted yet again.

All was moving in a discordant accord; he was deeply concerned and mortally frightened. He wanted to be inside everybody's life, inside every moment of history, to be at one not just with this universe but all universes. Ancient voices sprang up strong inside of him, harking back across the centuries, to times when he was a warrior, a guardian, a court official, a lonely drunkard in an English village; a once-young man disgraced.

Re-entering the Biergarten to collect Ian, he realised the number of girls sponging drinks had risen with no sign of decreasing; he whispered: let's try somewhere else. On the way to the Merman show – naked boys underwater – they ended up on Soi Cowboy, yet another red light district dedicated to foreigners.

And so the drinking began; it would be a full two months before it spluttered to a stop.
They settled on a go-go bar, and he thought, oh eff it, I'll just have a few beers and go back to meetings tomorrow. Never confess. What they don't know won't hurt them. The girls twirled around poles and danced naked above mirrored floors; the mama-san organised some of the more delectable to come and flirt with them but nothing quite worked. I’m getting myself a boy, the thought kept repeating as the alcohol began to pulse through his veins.

So they abandoned the hetero-commercial tumult of Soi Cowboy and headed to the Boy Zone. Touts for Bangkok Boys, Beach Boys and X-Size all vied for their attention.

Ian was one of the planet’s most heterosexual males and the Merman show was Gay Bangkok’s most glorious sleaze; his presence was a classic act of Australian mateship. As in, “I don’t care if you are a poof. I’ve never been to a gay bar before, but if you want to watch naked boys with erections swimming in a tank, no worries, I’ll have a beer with you.”

The show was seedy, the boys tacky. They swam naked with condoms over their erections, then strutted about flapping their large appendages against the clients in the hope of a tip or a trick: he and Ian exited the bar. Ian was shaking, flummoxed; they sat down in a makeshift bar next to a gaggle of cheap massage boys.

Patpong, Patpong, Ian kept saying, I need an antidote. I need to perve at some girls, get those dicks out of my head. A man of the world finally ruffled; shocked to the core of what he had thought to be a broad minded being.

But he was a hunter now; gone were the days when he could sit in any gay bar in the world and the drinks and drunks would queue up. He wanted action. But the previous mistakes – swishy little boys, thieving AIDS infested pricks who went through his wallet but who, much to his despair, he liked anyway – made him cautious.

I'm not leaving till I pick up a boy, he announced, watching the flouncing little queens at Bangkok Boys gesturing with their eyes. Too camp too camp; not what he had wanted. He sat there, still drinking; suddenly Ian stood up and headed back down the gay soi. That's the end of him, he thought, he’s drunk as a skunk in the wrong part of town. God knows where he's going to end up. Music continued to pump out of the bars opposite, boys continued to flounce and gesture.

Some minutes later, much to his surprise, Ian returned with a handsome, straight looking young man. What about this one? he demanded, having decided to cure his mate’s indecision. Another round of beers in an already disintegrating evening and it soon became obvious this was not a boy who was going to say no to a drink. They talked briefly and negotiated a price - three thousand baht stay till morning. Pay above the local market price; that got their full and undivided attention. Pay them well treat them well they’re happy you’re happy, went the local mantra.

And suddenly they had a new Thai friend, Baw, who spoke enough English to laugh with them in a nearby restaurant, soaking up the alcohol with a bit of food, but of course with another round. Ian headed home. Leaving Baw. And unlike every other boy, Baw just never quite left.
The next morning they had four generous shots of Vodka each, polishing off the Absolut Ian had left in the room at the atmospheric Romance Hotel, ever after known as “the cheap hotel”, where their happiest early days were spent. Out beyond the last Skytrain Station, where criminal gangs roamed a barely lucid earth; where his own fear of movement left him living stationary in a working class Thai neighborhood, the only foreigner lining up for morning coffee; where he sacrificed himself for the consideration of others.

And so it turned out that he was suddenly not alone; after the years following his divorce, years bringing up the children alone, never re-partnered. He had never slept alone until his late 40s, after that always. And so he was vulnerable to the cyclone, the fatal obsession, that overtook his life.

He would stare at the boy, handsome and personable, in bars, cafes, nightclubs, with the first drinks of the evening and the final drunkenness of dawn, thinking, I can’t believe I’ve been there. In the end he wasn't thinking anything at all.

Quickly dragged up to a remote province to meet the family, the village boys all came on to him. The handsomest boy in the village declared earnestly to him at three a.m. in school boy English: I am very sorry not to sleep with you tonight. Then back to Bangkok, happy together in that room at The Romance, even with Baw’s girls. No marriage made in heaven; it was a time together which only he would wish would last forever. The Thais just didn't think like that. Sufficient unto the day.
Then they headed to one of the islands, Koh Chang, less developed than Phuket or Koh Samui. Bars lined the beach, he hated every last one of them, the backdrops to an insane and dangerous bust. A kind of honeymoon became anything but, their drinking spiraling out of control. Suicidal drinking, no alternative, Baw plundering the local girls with gusto. You don’t mind?, a local bar owner asked. Boys will be boys, he said, world weary, heart foolish. He regularly woke up sandwiched between a boy and a girl. And then the blackouts, just like in his twenties. Heart haywire: Western love, possessive love, crashed up against the flanks of a straight Thai boy and a communal sense of love, sex.

Oh you are so handsome, or so beautiful, he would say; and always they kept saying, I come your room, no problem. He hadn't had so much sex since time began; it was simply impossible to come more often. The offers often came with amazing good will; of course a tip was expected… Crippled and alone, so sad, so unbelievably sad, with the world and its beauty nothing but a melancholic backdrop for ever greater dissolution.

Devastated, pretending good cheer, he met some English lads at an ATM at 7am one morning. They invited him to the last bar open on the island. He woke up two days later and two thousand dollars lighter, with no idea of what had happened. The scene repeated itself, blackouts merging into each other. Days when he didn't know where he was, didn't know who, didn't care if he died tomorrow. He had done everything he had ever wanted to do; all obsessions realised, sad days and wasted lust. The dream fell apart as he should have known, should have realised it must.

Finale: after having got drunk across half of Thailand, they returned to Bangkok, to the streets, the brothels, the karaoke bars. Regularly waking up with two boys, both called Baw, and often enough with a hooker as well. Much to the horror of the management, until generous tips got them saluting again. He knew deep in his heart how pathetic he had become. An old man trolling the beach, the streets, the bars, looking, looking, for love, for fun, for the sole object of his desire; and knew, too, it was crazy to be like this. As if he hadn't known all along that things would end badly. Crimes against humanity, against nature. Ending in a Godless place, horror dripping in the heat, self-abnegation reaching fatal depths…

It took months of not drinking to recover from the escapade, to once again take control of his life, of marching through evening storms. Of other boys declaring: I go now.

There is a Thai saying, bad things are a good thing, because after the bad comes the good. Maybe that was the only truth he could take out of this situation. Paradise dawns for a brief time, paradise is in the day, not in the heart; in the heat of the sky and the dawning shreds of being.

He stumbled back into meetings, sometimes having had half a dozen shots of whiskey just to get there.
You have a cool heart, he’d been told when he first arrived; and back then it had been true. In the end it was exactly as he thought. He would have a much better time if he changed his attitudes. And in the end that is exactly what he did. Finally happy with another boy he declared: I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been there.

He knew he shouldn't go to see Baw again; that toxic siren luring him onto the rocks, now that he was domestically ensconced with a boy who didn’t drink, smoke or take drugs. But he did anyway, as if seeking an end to the story. Baw was living in a large cheap apartment block, one of those typical Thai arrangements, four to a room. They smoked. They didn't drink but he might as well have. Things went awry very quickly. Indeed he went back several times; and their heads were winding through the clouds and their teeth clenched, instant ecstasy, dripping crystals... And finally he had the very clear thought: I leave you to your fate. Even after that final visit the calls were frequent, urgent; every instinct told him: answer, rescue, be kind. Instead he threw his phone in the bottom of a drawer and left it there for a week. And indeed, left the boy to his fate. And embraced his own.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/tony-abbott-offers-bush-deal-as-julia-gillard-mandate-slips/story-fn59niix-1225912101882

JULIA Gillard's claim to government on the basis of winning the two-party-preferred vote in the election has collapsed, with the Coalition overtaking Labor last night by almost 2000 votes.

Tony Abbott has begun preparing to capitalise on his gains with plans to give a greater share of government spending to rural and regional Australia to appeal to the three rural-based independent MPs whose support he needs to form a government.

As horse-trading to determine the nation's next government finally began yesterday, newly elected Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie staked a late claim for recognition from the major parties, declaring poker machine reform and a new Royal Hobart Hospital were the issues he would consider when deciding which major party to support.

But Mr Wilkie said the only guarantee he would provide either party was that he would not block supply or support any "reckless" no-confidence motions.

More than a week after the election, the Coalition has 73 House of Representatives seats, Labor 72, with four independents and one Green.

Seventy-six seats are required to form government.

After the election produced the nation's first hung parliament since World War II, the Prime Minister asserted Labor had a right to govern on the basis that it won more of the two-party-preferred vote than the Coalition.

Last Monday Ms Gillard, pointing to Labor's lead, urged Mr Abbott to accept its importance. "It is clear that the government has attracted the majority share of the two-party-preferred vote," Ms Gillard said. "What that means is that the majority of Australians wanted a Labor government."

But the Opposition Leader argued after the election weekend the Coalition had a greater claim to legitimacy because it won 500,000 more primary votes than Labor. Last night it had extended its lead on primary votes to more than 618,000.

Yesterday, as the independents converged on Canberra for formal talks, counting showed the Coalition edging ahead of Labor on the two-party-preferred count.

By 10.30pm last night, with more than 80 per cent counted, the Coalition was ahead by 1909 votes after the AEC removed eight seats from its two-party count on the basis that the major parties did not run first and second.

In a stunning measure of the closeness of the election, the Australian Electoral Commission website had the parties locked at 50.01 per cent for the Coalition to 49.99 per cent for Labor with close to 11 million votes counted.

While Ms Gillard made no public appearance, her spokesman said last night the most important resolution was the delivery of "stable and effective" government.

Coalition sources said the shift in the vote would increase the legitimacy of Mr Abbott's pitch to win the support of three independent rural MPs - Bob Katter, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor - to form a government.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/election/julia-gillards-slip-is-showing/story-fn5zm695-1225912081380

ONE of Julia Gillard's major claims to form a new government vanished last night when Labor lost its majority of two-party preferred votes.

The tally - after preferences are allocated - is now 50-50, and it is possible the Coalition could pull ahead later in the week as more postal votes are counted.

The Prime Minister has argued that one strong reason for the return of her government was that Labor had the biggest share of the two-party preferred vote.

But at 6.30pm yesterday the Australian Electoral Commission reported that that majority had disappeared.

Labor had 5,336,972 preference votes to the Coalition's 5,336,911. That gave Ms Gillard a lead of some 61 votes, but the split was rounded to be the same for both sides.

The seat tally of 72 each, plus a likely supporter each, and four independents, remains unchanged.

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On the Monday following the election, the vote was estimated at 50.7 per cent for Labor and 49.3 per cent for the Coalition. The vote collapse was in part because of changes to the count implemented by the AEC, which yesterday withdrew the preference flows from eight seats because they were not classic Labor v Liberal contests.

One of those was Grayndler in Sydney, held by Labor.

This brought about much of the ALP vote slump.

However, the eight seats were equally divided between Labor and Liberal victories, and there is a claim that the national result is thus not greatly affected.

Coalition sources claimed it was possible that postal votes, the last to be counted, would so favour the Liberals and Nationals that the Coalition would be able to grab the two-party preferred majority as well as boasting the highest primary vote.

Picture: Peter Newman.

Hot Male Station

2010-08-30T07:29:00.000+07:00

I'm so hot I wish I could f... myself, Shawn declared enthusiastically on the phone, I keep catching sight of myself in the mirror and I'm transfixed, I can barely get out of the house. I wouldn't sleep with myself for a million bucks, he replied. Probably one reason I'm so generous to the Thai boys. All this banter while he tried to dispel the creeping sense of unease which had been invading his life for weeks. Where did the initial triumphs go? Why was he so worried? If all they did was pay for themselves, if the dancing boys beckoned from catwalks, dressed in their tight white underpants, what was the problem? Opportunities kept presenting themselves, but none of them were very ludicrous; none of them made ridiculous amounts of money. He was staunch and beknighted, glasped and clasped, groping and bewildered, craving affection and listening to the far off grunts, watching the lights come on and off in the building opposite as someone, he knew not who, moved from room to room in that gloomy, puzzling mansion.

Hot Male Station was owned by the same man who owned the go-go bar Hot Male down the road, surprise, and on the previous evening, when they went down to X-Size to watch the f...ing show, to satisfy or entertain the curiosity of one of their visitors, it became obvious that nothing was intended, that his hand was grasped as a display of ownership, that the current boy and the former boy both sat close to him for essentially the same reason, hoping for money, and if all was bewildered and all was lost in this world of Bangkok rent boys, going to the toilet confirmed it. The boards were coming lose from behind the urinal. He wouldn't like to see this place during the day.

Shadows were committed, fine shadows; and they began to arrive early. Hot Male Station did not turn into a disco until one a.m., prior to that it was a karaoke bar. The Thais loved karaoke but he wasn't sure it was improving his language skills, sitting there listening to so many love songs which made little sense. I love you, only you. Embarrassed by public displays of affection. All moved in unison. Nothing was to be watched. The coyote boys, the hot male dancers, came in about three each morning and added a bit of spice and professionalism to the dancing prancing young queens who went off their heads to the endlessly spliced disco tracks, where no single theme or song seemed to last more than a minute or two; and they were all merged together in an endless frenzy. Some of the old hands, who knew every track and surge, danced through every merge in perfect time. Others stood momentarily lost. Ancient things came crawling through the mud. Some things would never be the same. He was happy here. Baw number two, who now appeared to be guiding tourists to the bars in the gay zone, the Twilight Soi as it was sometimes known, for 100 baht every new customer they brought, latched on to him with a cheerful enthusiasm. He looked better than ever.

Perhaps a promiscuity was the only answer. Baw2 might have disengaged, heading back into the Twilight Zone to work more tourists, but the young boy from Chiang Mai in his tight white underpants made it clear enough they had a previous relationship, had played pool in one of those gothic Bangkok buildings he had come to know through the boys, those buildings full of working girls and strange twists of life; and sat closely, if unhappily, next to him for a good hour while on the other side Aek expressed all the affection of whiskey and ownership. Even on the way home, as they passed Prime, one of the boys, the prettiest, handsomest of all their boys as far as he was concerned, clasped his hands together in a greeting and beamed at him. His current lad was smart enough to know what that meant, and insisted, you have boyfriend? What's his name. Aek. Not some massage boy, not some go-go boy at X-Size, not some street spruiker, me. I'm the one who sleeps with you and makes sure you have breakfast and takes care of you properly; in a city seething with rent boys and foreign opportunities. Take it or leave it. Fate has dealt you a hand; and I'm it.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/29/2996462.htm?section=justin

Two of the key independent MPs say they think the election deadlock can be broken by the end of the week.

Four independent MPs are currently negotiating with Labor and the Coalition over who will form a minority government.

Two of those independents, Andrew Wilkie and Tony Windsor, say they aim to make their decision on who they will support this week.

"We're entering into a range of meetings this week. I would hope that by the end of the week we should be able to make a decision," Mr Winsor told Channel Ten.

But Mr Windsor also told ABC1's Insiders that "it could take a little bit longer than that".

He also says there is a small chance Australia will go back to the polls.

"I would say there is probably a 10 per cent chance," he said.

"I don't think it is likely, because I think there is genuine intent on behalf of both of the leaders to actually try to make something work.

"If I sense that that intent isn't there or there is undermining going, on or people just want a temporary parliament so they can go back to the polls in six months time, my vote may well opt for the people to make a decision."

Mr Wilkie is also keen to see an outcome, telling Channel Nine that he will make his decision "very soon".

"I would hope to make my decision Tuesday or Wednesday - that's what the people want," he said.

"I'm well aware that stability is very important, there is already a restlessness in the community that it's over a week since the election and we're still to know who is going to govern Australia for the next three years."

Mr Wilkie says he would be "very surprised" if the political situation takes a fortnight to resolve.

"It would be a bad thing for Australia, it would not be in the public interest to stagger on very long at all - I can't see it lasting that long," he said.

He says he will meet Opposition Leader Tony Abbott tomorrow afternoon and then hold more talks with Prime Minister Julia Gillard immediately after.

Standing alone

Mr Windsor and the two other incumbent independents, Robb Oakeshott and Bob Katter, have acted together so far in negotiations.

While the trio say they will make their minds up independently, they presented a list of requests to Mr Abbott and Ms Gillard last week.

Mr Wilkie, who yesterday claimed victory in the Hobart seat of Denison, is also presenting some requests to the leaders, but he has reiterated he will be acting on his own.

"I'm not criticising the other three independents, it's just not the way I want to go about my business," he said.

"People see them as operating as a bloc, they certainly presented a common list of concerns or demands to the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader.

"That's their business - I think it's my business to be fiercely independent and just focus on what my electorate expects of me."

He also says he will not support either major party if they don't convince him they can deliver "stable, ethical, competent government".

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-election/independents-could-go-separate-ways-20100828-13wxs.html

THE bloc of three rural independents could split and negotiate separately in shaping the next government, amid deep divisions over key policy questions.

New South Wales MP Tony Windsor said it should not be assumed the bloc formed with fellow NSW independent Rob Oakeshott and Queensland MP Bob Katter to assist negotiations with the major parties would last. ''There is no three amigos in this. Anything could happen,'' he said. ''The three of us may or may not agree.''

Adding to questions over the tentative bloc, new Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie, who met Prime Minister Julia Gillard for the first time in Melbourne yesterday, said he had been careful to keep his fellow independents ''at arm's length''.

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''I am not going to go around in an apparent bloc the way they have done, and I suspect some people are a little bit uneasy about the way that bloc appears to have been formed,'' he said.

''Three or four independents standing together in a bloc looks like a political party, with factions.''

Mr Wilkie presented Ms Gillard with a two-page list of 20 issues he considers crucial in weighing up whether to support either major party, or sit unaligned. His push for poker machine reforms, including a $1 limit on bets and a cap on losses of $120 an hour, dominated their one-hour discussion at Treasury Place yesterday morning.

''I made it quite clear to the Prime Minister that the time for inaction has passed. With something like 100,000 Australians problem gamblers with poker machines, it is very, very important that the next federal government finally bring about some reform in this matter,'' he said.

''I reminded the Prime Minister that her own electorate is notorious as one of the electorates with the heaviest losses … and the Prime Minister is well aware of that and I believe she is genuinely interested in bringing about some kind of reform.''

Picture: Peter Newman.

The Fall

2010-08-23T21:27:00.000+07:00

The thoughts were all twisted around inside, hollow of substance, insubstantial of will, everything coalescing. He needed to be free again. He didn't know what was happening. All things colluded to make the biggest con trick of all. I love you, the young man said, and love in this world was a practical thing, haunted, especially, by images of former lives. They lay bathed in sweat and nothing was consequential. The f... show at Night Boys was particularly athletic. Everything was hollow. Not like him or me, they said of a friend, a singer, who made a legitimate income. Although all was seen as legitimate here. Everything came round and round. Haunted by the light, by the right, by the triumphalism of the left. They so believed they were in the right; and dismissed the normal populace, which they were supposed to represent, as having done nothing, of being blind and ignorant, fools long before they emerged from the bush, the scrub, the mud, before these neanderthals crawled onto land and he was trapped in a situation of his own making. Hell hath no fury. It was a tight way to exclaim, to die, to be confounded by what was meant to be love and was nothing but bought sex, time and again, here in the now. You are very kind, they said, and yes, he was generous to a fault. Everything mattered.

Come again, the man had said, all those years ago. Nothing mattered. He was cast adrift. Pale flesh drifted, and ancient concerns undulated off an ocean floor, deep with unease, blessed with timelessness, the unconcerned laughter of the young. All was conspiracy. Nothing was right. And they caught him laughing when he wasn't laughing, and manufactured hysteria when there was nothing to be concerned about. Suddenly the apartment seemed small. Everything was drifting away. Athletic wasn't the word for it, wouldn't want to be caught on the end of that donkey slonger. He went to the meetings and their content drifted over him. Everyone seemed to be in relapse zone; so he had a good fight with an older member, just for good measure, to throw any spanner, any excuse, into the works. Grinding machinery was all that was left. Then he discovered other weaknesses of the flesh. All was caught, fractured, time moving. He was bent asunder. Nothing was right. Those billows from the ocean floor may have been timeless, but in the here and now they impacted on his daily life, his hard fought equilibrium. Asia suits you, his brother in law said, you look ten years younger, as if all the weight has been lifted from you, as if you were a different person. I like it here, he said. And of course part of the like was the easy sex, the fact he did not have to sleep alone.

Whenever we are awakened, we hear the unconcerned cackle, we hear things we should never have heard, suspect things that were barely happening. I love you and he responded same same, wishing it to be. There was an all out frankness. Time was moving inexorably to its conclusion. I'm 82 and I'm happy, the man said, beaming at them all. I love music. He repeated the phrase several times, I love music. And I have two children. And I have grandchildren I have never seen. I'm happy. All was moving in concert; he was deeply concerned and deeply frightened, most of all for his life ending, for time being disconcerted, for a shrug of a shoulder, a drift of a pattern, a hem in a crowded street, a pretty face on a crowded train; all of it mattered. He wanted to be caught inside everybody's life, inside every piece of history past and present, to be at one not just with this universe but all universes. There wasn't any way out of this mortal frame; but it seemed hardly true that this was all there was. The ancient voices still sprang, swam, strong inside of him. He could hear them barking back across the centuries, to the times when he was a warrior, a guardian, a court official, a lonely drunkard in an English village; a once young man disgraced. It wasn't to be, whatever he had hoped to be, this time around. The voices would not be silenced. They would take him soon enough; twenty years, a lifetime, were as nothing to them. They would come for him; and he would never be ready. Too full of regret, too anchored in the present; he looked wistfully across the skyscrapers; and wished he could raise a glass in joy. Beware the heights, beware the fall, that is all.

THE BIGGER PICTURE:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/07/AR2010080700822.html

KABUL -- Gunmen killed 10 members of a medical team, including six Americans, traveling in the rugged mountains of northern Afghanistan, demonstrating the reach of insurgents far from their traditional havens and shocking the expatriate community here.

The attack was one of the deadliest on civilian aid workers since the war began in 2001. That it occurred in Badakhshan province, a scenic mountain redoubt considered a peaceful refuge from the war, added to growing concern that the Taliban has seized on northern Afghanistan as its latest front.

The dead have not been officially identified, and the bodies not yet returned to Kabul, but Afghan and Western officials said the victims were thought to be members of a medical team working with a Christian charity group that has decades of experience in Afghanistan. That team, from the International Assistance Mission, lost contact with its office in Kabul on Wednesday, two days before the attack, said Dirk Frans, the group's executive director.

"We've got a team that has gone missing, and then there are 10 people found dead. At the moment we're working on the assumption that this is the same team," Frans said.

The Taliban quickly asserted responsibility for the killings, saying the medical workers were "foreign spies" and were spreading Christianity. But police officials have not ruled out robbery as a motive, as the victims was stripped of their belongings after they were shot.

The team members -- six Americans, one German, one Briton and four Afghans -- were returning from neighboring Nurestan province, where they had spent several days administering eye care to impoverished villagers. They were traveling unarmed and without security guards, Frans said.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/real_estate/2010/08/06/2010-08-06_house_where_michael_jackson_died_goes_up_for_sale_.html#ixzz0vyOeuBpR

At first glance, it doesn't sound much different from any other Los Angeles real estate listing.

Holmby Hills, 17,171 SF, 1.26 acres, 7 BR, 13 BA, 12 fireplaces, guesthouse, pool, theater, wine cellar, tasting room, art studio, elevator, gym, spa. $28.995M, possibly negotiable.

But this little pad does have one little extra thriller you could throw out to the guests you invite for a cocktail party in the tasting room: It's the house Michael Jackson was renting at the time of his death on June 25, 2009.

If the exterior looks familiar, it's probably because that's where thousands of fans gathered that night for impromptu memorial celebrations.

Jackson was paying $100,000 a month for the rental, where he stayed while he was rehearsing for what he planned as a series of comeback concerts.

The house was built in 2002 and sold in 2004 for $18.5 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. It was listed in 2008 for $38 million, but pulled back when the real estate market deflated, which is why it was available for Jackson to rent.

It is owned by Hubert and Roxanne Guez. He's chief executive of clothing manufacturer Ed Hardy.

Bangkok. Picture: Peter Newman.

Over Soon Enough

2010-08-21T09:18:00.000+07:00

Strange how when he drifted off the air, so did his sleeping companions. All else was lost. He gathered himself up in the storm reaches, water swirling down a drain. He didn't know what situation he had got himself into. He didn't expect them to be anything other than devious. Consternation was at its height; but also a strange fog as he landed back where he had been only two months before; recycling hope, handsome boys, the gift of a smile. The flags still fluttered in the heat. The rickshaw drivers clustered outside the hotel. The begging families, a pregnant woman and her children camped on the pavement all day. The convergence of the Mekong and Tom Lesap Rivers. An ancient creek bed. A time far beyond anything he knew. Wasted moments and wasted days. Cruel discord. Laughter at its most manic. Head buried under the pillows. What have I done? Does love die as fast as it is born? Do moments of intimacy betray us at the heart? Did a lonely old man stumble into keeping a boy almost by accident? Was it a simple desire not to sleep alone. After they had come in the cheap hotel, they lay next to each other, arms draped across each other; and that in a way was the best of it; the one moment of affection they were allowed in the day.

He had become used to the routine now. They met at four, when the handsome young waiter finished work, and he would wait in the cafe for him while the young man had a shower. It was obvious to all. Time stood across many a mountain, and he wasn't himself, not yet, not now. Caught in betwixt and between. So much had happened; alone in those two months when he was never alone; didn't like to sleep by himself and everything came crashing down, caught in so much ceremony, blessed by tiny ritual, forsaken at dawn. Just an old man on a balcony. He couldn't remember why he was here. The time machine was malfunctioning. Motive was out the window. The flags of many nations flapped in the wind, the boats plied the channels further out in the river, and now and then even a tourist boat joined the melee. You're creating an artificial crisis. They knew he wasn't with them. They made excuses. He's a little sleepy, the cousins said. It was a nice way of saying he wasn't all there, not committed, not part of this world. You'll come calling one day, that's for sure. He ran his hands down a flat belly, assured of success.

There was a certain shame in having been so vacant for so many days. But then Cambodia was always an interlude to the main game. He sat and talked to the lawyer in the 12-room mansion. The cook prepared them porridge. They talked of contracts and of scripts; and laughed in acknowledgement because only they knew how truly effed up was the financial situation. It kept on bearing truth. They kept on sighing and waking up, stretching, a physical smell. Was it his fault he couldn't love? Were the boys, three decades younger than him at the least, beginning to wear thin? Was it here in the reaches that he contemplated ending a perfect life; a way of life, the pool on the roof, the attentive staff at the apartment block, the alert security guards? He was so out of phase it made little difference. Only he knew the end could be just around the corner, a simple twist of fate, a couple of weeks off into a crazy world; and that would be it. I can no longer support you, he said warily. He watched as the summer came along, as the rainy season passed. He heard every story and stuck loyally to the story: I love you. Same Same. Brief exchanges. But he didn't know where the answer lay. He said goodbye to the handsome young man in Pnom Penh, and rejoined another in Bangkok. It was a long way from sleeping alone in Redfern. Today he passed from one country to the next. Today one story was sacrificed for another, muffled seclusion, a distant space, and when they swirled together and he ran his hands across that perfect body, all else was lost. He didn't care what the level of fraud was. Love was a practical thing. You take care of me and I will take care of you. A simple exchange. They smiled in their cracked and phoney hearts. They were compromised at the deepest levels. He was glad to see him again, smiling as he lounged in the armchair on the balcony, as he looked out across the currents of the conjoining rivers.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1301214/Pakistan-fury-presidents-playboy-son-using-floods.html#ixzz0vyK5vW00

The playboy son of Pakistan’s president yesterday faced damaging claims that he was exploiting his country’s devastating floods to boost his political career.
Oxford graduate Bilawal Zardari, 21, angrily described as a ‘lie’ the accusation that the five-day visit to the UK by his father, Asif Zardari, was a springboard for his own ambitions.
Bilawal’s outburst, made as he launched an appeal for flood aid, is the latest controversy to overshadow a visit already hit by a diplomatic row over Islamabad’s alleged links to terrorism and growing outrage at the President’s absence during one of the country’s worst-ever disasters.
More than 1,500 people have died and 13 million have been affected, with more rain expected.
Bilawal’s mother was the former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated at a political rally soon after her return from exile in 2007.
Bilawal became co-chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), now the ruling party, which has always been led by a Bhutto or Zardari.
However, Bilawal is yet to take an active part in politics. He was expected to accept sole party chairmanship when he joined his father at a rally of British Pakistanis in Birmingham yesterday, but it is thought the plan was aborted at the last minute as advisers realised it could fan anger back home.
Asked if he was using his father’s visit to launch his career, Bilawal said: ‘This is not the time to play politics. We need to do whatever is necessary to help our brothers and sisters in Pakistan.’
He then denied he ever intended to appear at the rally, shouting: ‘That’s a lie.’

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/national/national/general/latham-rudd-overshadow-gillard/1907246.aspx

PRIME MINISTER Julia Gillard's predecessors continue to overshadow her campaign, after she was confronted by Mark Latham and sat down with Kevin Rudd for the first time since dumping him as leader.
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott played down concerns the Labor ''soap opera'' threatens to overshadow the Coalition's official campaign launch in Brisbane today, when he will announce tougher penalties including mandatory jail sentences for people smugglers.

It comes as the latest Nielsen-Fairfax poll shows the Coalition remains ahead of Labor. Its two-party preferred lead has dropped from 52-48 a week ago, to 51-49, thanks to a 1-point shift from the Coalition to the Greens.

Mr Latham, who is working for the Nine Network's 60 Minutes program, confronted Ms Gillard at Brisbane's Ekka show yesterday, demanding to know why Labor had complained about his presence.

Ms Gillard tried to laugh off the confrontation, but Mr Latham told her if she wanted to make complaints, she ought to ''have a dig'' at Mr Rudd, who was trying to sabotage her campaign.

Earlier, only a cameraman and photographer were allowed into the first meeting between Ms Gillard and Mr Rudd since she deposed him, and that too for only about one minute.

Footage showed the two, accompanied by Labor officials, never making eye contact while looking at a map of Queensland.

Bangkok. Picture: Peter Newman.

Out Of What?

2010-08-09T08:50:00.002+07:00

The towers went off in every direction, myriads of spikes heading off into the distance. Each contained thousands of stories. Sometimes he wished he could be part of all of them; embrace everything. From the street workers, the men pushing their trolleys of noodles, fresh fruit, drinks, through the benighted, chaotic streets. Everything came falling down at once. He saw some handsome Asian boy flirting with some fat American bastard in Soi Four, at the Balcony, and could see every bit of artifice that had been applied to him in that tricky face, the easy affection. He felt like a fool. Everything that had been applied to him. We'll look back and say, this was your drunk boyfriend, this was your getting sober boyfriend, this is your staying sober boyfriend, Jack, the gargoyle queen, had said. He felt a stab of I hope it isn't true; and in any event the years were marching so rapidly by it hardly mattered any more. Every trick had been applied to him. Oh what a surprise. They went and sang karaoke songs at Hot Male Station; it didn't convert to a disco until after one, usually more like two, when everyone came in from the other clubs, when handsome coyotes, male dancers, performed in the corners and smoke machines and lights added atmosphere. I have dirty boy for you, 18, some spruiker declared when he wandered 20 feet down the soi, restless, deeply restless. Those calls had disturbed him on some infinite level, and he was out of sorts at the cracks that had shown up in everything. Nothing was right.

And yet here he was, equally disturbed by the 300 page manuscript he had printed off with his newly acquired printer; all that power, all those years of frustration, all those years of seeing the world askance paid off in texts which picked apart every functioning moment of the world they had come from, the hypocrisy of the courts, the blind adherence of the media, the abhorrence of the talentless, herd like journalists who equally followed the precepts of the conformist masters above them. He was sick of it to the core. Originality was despised. It would always be thus. After decades of everyone deciding to think "outside the square", of mul-mul-mul-multiplicity every strange station, every askance thought, every tiny wave of originality, was abhorred. They travelled in packs, thought in packs. He couldn't bear it. No wonder you never get asked to share, the tubby ex-con said to him when he finally heard him speak. You don't give the gospel according to them. You don't say what they want to hear. They're a cult, he snapped back, suddenly weary and embarrassed; tired of being different, tired of the insomnia, the manic energy, the long walks when the rest of the city slept. More than anything he was tortured by the unfinished manuscript, by the hours it would take to complete the project, by a thousand possibilities which never occurred, by the lives he would never be a part of. He wanted to drape himself in everything, the street sweepers, the masculine security guards lounging in the front of buildings, or in the car park at the back of the Bangkok Bank, the sleepless beggars who still sat awake on the street despite the lack of passing traffic, the queens spilling out of DJs, the last of the massage boys lounging at the front of the Angkor Spa.

He could find comfort in the strangest of things, was already passing through the I don't know who I am phase, as the liquid desire splashed out on to concrete streets, as he physically recovered and mixed in different circles, as obsessions and destructive behaviours evaporated into the passing days; and now, it was just a matter of getting the work done. There would be rewards at the other end. Now was not the time. He watched the falangs, the foreigners, with their Thai or Asian boyfriends and felt stabs of the heart, caricatures of his true self, a dream scape filled with whites in a land of tiny brown men, pert, often astonishingly pretty women, of disco anthems and endless fascinations. These intoxications didn't belong to anyone any more. They were part of a dream scape which had morphed into reality; they were as much a part of the real world as the crushing morning crowds of office workers buying their favourite breakfasts and queuing for coffee in the morning crush along Silom. Everything was different now that he at last saw clearly. Confiding in no one, talking to no one, he would make it through this extra piece of desolation into the sunny uplands just as he had endured every other piece of misinformation and dislocation, only to wake up to Shawn and what he regarded as the perfect joke, characterising as it did so many sacred cows: a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi were walking down the street when they passed a 14-year-old boy. Ooh, I'd like to screw him, said the priest. Out of what? asked the rabbi.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/08/2976681.htm?section=justin

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has taken a swipe at former Labor leader Mark Latham after he confronted her yesterday, saying he is still struggling with the 2004 election loss.

Mr Latham is working on a story for Channel 9 and yesterday approached Ms Gillard in Brisbane, asking if Labor had made a complaint about him.

Nine Network CEO David Gyngell has since apologised for the incident.

The confrontation threatened to derail another day of campaigning for Ms Gillard who earlier in the day had met with her predecessor Kevin Rudd for the first time since he was deposed.

Ms Gillard has described Mr Latham's behaviour has inappropriate.

"Some people take election defeats better than others; I think Mark's still struggling a bit," she told ABC 1's Insiders program.

"I'm made of pretty tough stuff but I did think that this was inappropriate.

"We're in the middle of an election campaign; I'm the Prime Minister of this country. I'm not a human interest story."

Ms Gillard has conceded she has had some "hurdles" in her way during the campaign but is adamant she will not be distracted.

She described yesterday's meeting with Mr Rudd as positive and constructive, despite suggestions they looked uncomfortable together.

"I'll let other's engage in the pop psychology of one still image," she said.

Mr Rudd will today begin campaigning in some parts of Queensland.

Ms Gillard is campaigning in Darwin today as the Coalition officially launches its campaign in Brisbane, where leader Tony Abbott will outline mandatory prison sentences for anyone convicted of people smuggling.

But Ms Gillard says the Government has already brought in laws to crack down on people smuggling.

"In May this year, legislation went through the Parliament to toughen up on people smugglers, including those people who assist people smugglers," she said.

"We've got mandatory jail sentences in the current legislation."

But Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison has told ABC News 24 says Australians are concerned about Labor's handling of immigration.

"This issue has got to where it is today because of the failure of Labor's policies," he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10904903

More heavy rain in Pakistan is frustrating efforts to help about 12 million people affected by severe flooding in much of the country.

Helicopter missions in the north-west have been grounded and a red alert has been issued for the south.

One dam in Sindh province has been breached and engineers are warning that the huge Tarbela and Mangla dams are close to their maximum levels.

The worst floods in the region for 80 years have killed at least 1,600 people

Pakistan's meteorological office has warned that at least two more days of rain are expected in Sindh, where authorities have declared an "imminent" and "extreme" flood threat.

Further downpours are also forecast in the badly-hit north-western province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

"Things are getting worse. It's raining again. That's hampering our relief work," said UN World Food Programme spokesman Amjad Jamal.

Many helicopter aid flights in the north-west have been grounded by the bad weather.

The helicopters are essential in the region's rugged terrain because the floods damaged or destroyed most of the bridges, cutting off many survivors from relief.

"The situation is bad, particularly in the Swat valley, and we have advised people in low-lying areas to vacate their homes as river water levels are rising," said Adnan Ahmed, an official with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa's government.

The deluge has brought the water levels behind the Tarbela and Mangla dams - two of the world's largest - dangerously close to their maximum, engineers warned.

A dam in northern Sindh's Kashmore district has already been breached, inundating large parts of the surrounding area with floodwater and forcing thousands of residents to take shelter on rooftops or in trees.

One man told the BBC said his entire village had been destroyed and all its livestock washed away.

The floods, brought on by seasonal monsoon rains, began in the north-west, but have now inundated a stretch of Pakistan about 1,000 km (600 miles) long, primarily along the Indus river and its tributaries.

With the flood surge heading south, authorities have evacuated more than half a million people living near the Indus river as hundreds of villages have been inundated by floodwaters.

Picture: Bangkok: Peter Newman.

No Good At Heart

2010-08-08T07:11:00.002+07:00

*
*

Their Christmases came early. Pat called and everybody called. Family matters. He was seeking an end to the story so he could submit it to Hack Writers in time for their deadline; but the end hadn't happened yet and the repeated calls had done nothing but throw him, making him want to drink. Already there was suspicion and changed atmosphere on the home front; and nothing had happened, a couple of calls. An embarrassing incident left him fleeing to the dentist; and there he called back. I miss you. I never do with anyone like you. Same, he said, which was true enough. I just want to meet, talk, Baw said. I have a boy now, he said. I'm glad, Baw replied, happy for you. I just want to talk. We had some good times, and bad, he said; and they both laughed together because they knew how crazy it had all been; all the things they had done; all the places they had been; the bars they had stumbled out of; the nightclubs they had impressed, the clapped out buildings with their Thai karaoke bars and 500 baht hookers; all of that, all of these things. She was no good, Baw would complain, too many customers, sloppy. Well why go there; but nothing would stop these lads, nothing. He learnt a lot about Thai culture from the bottom side up. He learnt a lot about Thais. And when different things came along; well you wouldn't be here if you hadn't been there; that was all there was to say about it.

Pat called and they talked about Henrietta; who had to set up Skype. It takes five minutes, she said. Even my mother, who's tipped 80 now, has Skype. The free internet phone service. Or free for skype to skype calls, anyway. There were forests of bars, their neon signs shining out. The desire to drink was upon him in waves; and he sat through boring meeting after boring meeting with a bunch of utterly self obsessed Americans, and thought: I don't know how anyone gets sober in this environment. But things would pass. Times would change. He printed out a book to work on. He managed to come clean just on the surface, just in the way of things, and made as if to be clear of all they had ever worked for, to take a sip, just one sip, before abandoning his life for ever, heading to the streets of Calcutta, throwing away everything he had built up. Is that what you want? Not really, he answered. I'm happy here. But I just can't believe it. It doesn't seem real. I don't do happy. Well it's time to learn, he was told, to be a normal person, a human amongst humans, not to waste away paradise in some forlorn gesture only you can see. The sweep of the arm, the scattering bottles, the broken glass, stumbling out into the dawn after a night on the tiles. It wasn't heroic. In the end it wasn't even interesting, although he enjoyed some of the characters along the way. Buck up deary, no reason to be dreary, and everything, everything walked away and left him: cold stony sober.

So perhaps that's why the calls so fundamentally disturbed him, like a siren call from a past he never wanted to answer. They had been so drunk together so often; and he drank in a way he hadn't drunk for decades, in the way he drank in his 20s, when he could still physically handle the stuff; before liver disease ate away his confidence and ability to cope. So the fact they were merry, united in a party, united on the home front, two men out prowling with their flashing love and strange level of intimacy, accepted by girls and bartenders alike, was a way of saying: get real. You're just another foreigner and they're just taking your money. Well that they did do. But nothing can happen for that long without other things occurring. So when the calls came it was like a temptress on a rock, a siren call to the dark side; and even the other Baw, the lyrically handsome one who came by bludging money and had frightened both of them, it was easy to come by and easy to be free, who had said immediately they met: I have a new girlfriend, I can get a big bag of ice, you can watch me fuck her, we can have an orgy together; and the new boy responding with horror. Sad he whispered in his ear. Sad. Well that was one way of thinking about it. So the siren call came fast and early; and he wanted to live not just beyond his means but in some strange emotional comfort zone where he had never been before. And when the boy started helping him number the pages of the book he was printing out he just thought: you complete me. That's what it is. I am happy with you. Why risk everything for a flirtation with the dark side? Just because. Ting Tong. Crazy. Because you are insane. Because they're cute with their clothes off. Because you've always been dysfunctional, damaged goods; and this would be living proof, you're no good at heart.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/30/2968356.htm?section=justin

Former Labor leader Mark Latham has launched a vitriolic attack on Kevin Rudd, accusing him of being the source of the latest leak to hit the Gillard Government.

Mr Latham called the former prime minister a "snake" and said he should "be a man" and own up to the leak, which claimed Prime Minister Julia Gillard was opposed to the Government's parental leave scheme and questioned the aged pension rise.

"It's the coward's way to get on the blower with Laurie Oakes and say, 'I'll tell you this but you're not allowed to identify me'. It's the snake's way," he said.

"I challenge Kevin Rudd to be a man, to be honest, to have some honour, and actually if he feels this strongly about it, put his name to his words."

The firebrand former opposition leader told Sky News he was sure Mr Rudd leaked the information to Channel Nine reporter Laurie Oakes.

"When you're lying in bed at night and hear the pitter-patter sound on the roof you don't actually have to see the drops to know that it's raining," he said.

"So too, you don't need to have a wire tap on the conversation between Kevin Rudd and Laurie Oakes to know it was Kevin Rudd.

"It too is one of the laws of nature, that Kevin is a serial leaker."

He said Ms Gillard's decision to leave Mr Rudd on the backbench would have contributed to the leak.

"I think he was insulted when having lost the prime ministership and wanting to go onto the frontbench he wasn't accommodated," Mr Latham said.

"He was really quite humiliated by being left on the backbench by Julia Gillard."

Mr Rudd's spokesman has issued a one-line statement in response: "Mr Rudd has not responded to the substance of anything Mr Latham has said over the past five years. He does not intend to start now."

Previously, Mr Rudd issued a statement saying he never comments on private Cabinet discussions.

Ms Gillard has said she thinks Mr Rudd is "honourable" and is welcome on her frontbench if Labor wins the upcoming election.

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/latham-morphs-into-the-hack-he-despised-20100806-11o5c.html

He told any who would listen just how vile and depraved journalists were and now he has become one.

Former Labor leader Mark Latham is working with the Nine Network's 60 Minutes in the lead-up to the federal election campaign.

Mr Latham appeared in Canberra on Friday and interviewed Australian Greens leader Bob Brown before observing a press conference with a TV crew in tow.

n his incendiary diaries, Mr Latham routinely attacked journalists.

Asked by a reporter for his thoughts on the election campaign, Mr Latham said he was not at the press conference to answer questions but rather to observe.

Wearing sunglasses, a dark suit and security clearance card, Mr Latham was a far cry from his former self.

A Nine spokesman confirmed he was working with a news team.

"Yes Mark Latham is working with 60 Minutes," the spokesman told AAP.

"Having been there himself, Mark's intimate knowledge of campaigning will give our viewers an honest, unvarnished insight into what's really happening because for all the talk of realness it's all turned a bit unreal," a statement from the network said.

"It's not a square-up or an exercise in character assassination.

"Mark still has his gall bladder intact but he says it's not about bile."

The story will be aired on August 15.

Picture: Bangkok. Peter Newman.

The Sky Bar

2010-08-07T06:14:00.002+07:00

Old people never vote Labor, Australia's first woman Prime Minister Julia Gillard said, or probably said, depending on how much you believed the leak. They were all superficial, antagonistic, utterly incompetent. Labor was on the nose and they knew it. These things, this election form afar, the machinations of politicians in his country of origin, meant less than nothing here. Jack the high camp Washington lawyer who calls everyone dear, is off to Pattya with his boyfriend, who he calls a partner although they only spend a month or two together each year, that Jack who almost no one liked because he had an unerring ability to offend everyone, including Tommy. I've seen how Tommy lives and I don't want to be like that, he had said, referring to Tommy's tendency to wander around. I exercise, he said when he insisted on confronting him after the meeting, I've got a bone to pick with you, and so yes, I'm out about, in the confrontation they had after the meeting. It was all a misunderstanding dear, Jack said, but he doubted that was Tommy's version of events. Tommy was a former co-owner of Studio 54 in New York. He told some colourful tales of living the high life, partying in giant houses, partying with America's rich and famous. His partner of 20 years drank himself to death. Everyone's story is different, he said, after the urge to drink and smoke and obliterate himself came smashing back in. Forty seven days and he wasn't going out there again, but some days, petty frustrations, underlying tow lines, everything combined to bring the world back into focus, the appalling consequence into place, everything combined.

Perhaps it was the call from Baw number one in the morning; when he could hear the boy he had been so obsessed with in a group. Number one friend from Australia, he heard him explain to whoever he was with. The Thais, as he had said before, never came alone. That was the universal bender. That was the place he had thought he would never escape. That truly was the heart of darkness, as they staggered across devastated landscapes. Yet moments had been such fun, and so outrageous, and he had loved spilling out of clubs at dawn just as if he was twenty again, and catching the first shifts of light across the city; or the town, or the beach, wherever it was they were on that epic bender when days would disappear and he would have no memory; his only knowledge the reactions of those around him. Oh my God. And the woman who kept dragging him off to AA meetings, even though he didn't want to go. There was always some time or space to rip apart the heart. Well dear, why don't you just write what the publisher wants, Jack said to Nate, who had written the 1,000 page book he had wanted to write about Pol Pot, and had no intention of bending to the putrid desires of some idiot editor who knew nothing of what she spoke. Art was art and masterpieces were masterpieces. He said. When he spoke out about the shadows. When Aek asked him about The Wire which he was obsessively watching his way through; and he pointed out the words masterpiece, genius, powerful, in their well worn Thai English dictionary.

Jack had punctured all his illusions, as he had a tendency to do with everyone he met, an arch old queen in the old fashioned style, a style of campery, of being gay, that hadn't been around much for decades, escept amongst this little bunch of aging middle aged queens, he could see them now, having their little drinking meets in comfortable restaurants and exclusive bars, keeping track of each other's lonely lives, who was doing what, who was dying now, who had made a fool of themselves falling in and out of love. He had seen them in Sydney; used to catch one of his old bosses in one of those eternal gaggles. They were all working. They all had hearts of stone. They all lived their neat little lives in their neat little apartments. They were all falling apart in the inside, if they had the sensitivity to do so; which many of them didn't. He knew exactly what it was like to sleep with them, dreary deary, and he didn't like any of them if the truth was known. But he was drawn to Jack as if to a gargoyle, and when Shawn, the academic who was a walking encyclopaedia of contemporary culture and could quote the lyrics of rock song classics to you with ease, something suitable for every occasion, every twist of the conversation, when you're torn apart by the forces within you, come on up to the house, and the mean street jargon and the forces of change, and the whispy winds of the sighing dears, there was a right song for every turn of phrase and abnegation. So he rang him and said: I felt like a cigarette so I thought of you. The last one he had being at Coffee Circle where the tables were filled with swishy boys and Shawn smoked his menthols constantly. And Shawn said of Jack: I didn't like him at first, what he said about Robby, but he's a fascinating character, I can see that. I'm not sure if I like him, but he's fascinating. Are you sure, dear, he replied, and they both laughed.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/commentary/it-takes-two-to-tango-but-one-to-lead/story-e6frgd0x-1225901825100

FOR the first weeks of the campaign, Kevin Rudd was a shadowy and destructive figure behind Julia Gillard and the party that dumped him.

Now Rudd is out in the open and campaigning for Labor.

Unfortunately for the prime minister, Rudd's campaign is likely to be no less destructive than when he was kept in the background.

Labor now has two "leaders" campaigning against Tony Abbott, one who said the government under Rudd had lost its way and the other one saying the government wasn't perfect but had the policies about right.

Rudd began his campaign yesterday defending his record while Gillard has spent the first 2 1/2 weeks of the campaign walking away from it and "fixing" the issues of asylum-seekers, the mining tax and climate change.

What's more, Rudd made it clear yesterday that he was stepping in to save Labor from losing the election as the Coalition and Abbott slid to victory by default. Losing by default because the new Labor leadership wasn't winning after starting the campaign with a 10-point lead on a two-party preferred basis.

It is confusing and bizarre in the extreme that Rudd, who was so unpopular and seen to be leading Labor to a generational loss, has been wheeled in to save Labor.

Of course, Rudd has declared that he is doing this for the Labor cause, that he has no resentment or anger and he just wants to stop Abbott "tearing up" what his government had achieved.

"My mum taught me years and years and years ago, life's too short to carry around a great bucket-load of anger and resentment and bitterness and hatreds and all that sort of stuff," he said on Phillip Adams's ABC radio program.

"And, she's absolutely right, there is too much to be done.

"The bottom line is I can't just stand idly by at the prospect of Mr Abbott sliding into office by default," he said.

His magnanimous offering will be welcomed by many and give heart to some Labor supporters but the manner of his arriving at this position, the confusion it creates and the potential for political disaster in the last two weeks of the campaign is enormous.

His statements are also redolent of all the divisions and bitterness that have marred Labor's campaign so far and further damaged the Labor brand.

Rudd's very public presence will drain attention and focus from the real Labor leader. He will be asked to defend his policies - which she has changed - and whether he thinks the attempts to change the policy on asylum-seekers represents the "lurch to the Right" he said he wouldn't stand for.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/julia-gillard-denies-doing-a-deal-with-kevin-rudd-to-get-him-back-on-campaign-trail/story-fn5z3z83-1225901951996

JULIA Gillard has denied she’s struck a deal with Kevin Rudd in return for his help to revive Labor’s struggling campaign.

The Prime Minister said she and her predecessor have been exchanging text messages and will catch up tomorrow to thrash out Mr Rudd’s return to the campaign trail.

Mr Rudd yesterday agreed to Ms Gillard’s “request’’ to help her struggling campaign and is expected out on the hustings this weekend.

Ms Gillard denied she had offered her former boss anything in return for his help.

“There’s no deal, there’s his enthusiasm to make sure the Government is relected…so he can keep pursuing the things that he passionately believes in,’’ she told the ABC this morning.

The Prime Minister said if Labor was relected, she would honour her pledge to give Mr Rudd a frontbench spot, but had struck no deal with him about a portfolio.

“There’s no deal, there’s no arrangement, what I’ve said publicly is all that there is to know,’’ she said.

Ms Gillard said the two were yet to speak, but had been texting.

“We’ve chronic, chronic texters,’’ she said. “We’ve been communicating like that and we’re going to catch up face-to-face on Saturday.’’

It has been just weeks since Ms Gillard knifed Mr Rudd and took his job, saying the Government had lost its way under his leadership.

However she said the two had fought some “big battles together’’ and could put the recent past behind them to unite and defeat Tony Abbott.

“There are bigger things here than things about us and people and personalities,’’ she said.

Picture: Peter Newman. The Sky Bar on the top of the State Tower Block, Bangkok.

Dear

2010-08-05T17:18:00.006+07:00

There were clouded times, but there were also times of infinite success, infinite happiness. And it was the latter that caused him so much grief. He didn't know who he was any more. He had never been happy, simply didn't do happy, and so it was a confusing quagmire, these balmy, blissful days, not on an island, not cursed by palm trees, but here in the heart of the city, in a sea of glass and steel, with skyscrapers for mountains and buildings for trees, hemmed in like the forest of old. Perhaps it was the same as that brief, blissful time, in another life, when he had returned from the township afar to that tiny, rustic village nestled in the foothills, and fallen in love in the cold European spring, and yes, been happy as the years rolled by and the children came along. He couldn't conjure her face now, not from so long ago, not across so many life spans, but he did remember that brief respite from the wars and angst that had bedevilled every last stay. Nate got into Safe Haven and while he seemed to expect the world to pay for it, these brief sad times, moi, moi, drunk, drunk, the interconnectedness that played out in farcical reunions, in collapsed realities, in passing friendships, also played out as he sat in the garden restaurant near the Malaysia Hotel with Alex the author of books for teenage girls, Boyfriends With Girlfriends being the next item out, and they talked about anything and everything, as if there was no need for pleasure.

Time out of mind they called it, but Jack the lawyer from Washington who called everyone dear was all excited because his boyfriend was flying in from Malaysia or Singapore or wherever it was, and he was declaring they would have a quiet dinner and almost for free, just like that, he would have sex and be loyal. It's the best sex I've ever had, dear, Jack said. It wasn't an erotic thought. He'd only been happy, on their inspection of so many of Bangkok's available apartments, when they were in high rise buildings, antiseptic flats on the 24th floor. And an extra room, well he didn't need that dear. You'd only have to cool it. What, no one's ever going to come and stay? You wouldn't like a study? But the views were spectacular in an ice like way, while he was happy to look out on the backs of houses, walled in, with the sound of the metal grinder in the evening and the blanket privacy, as if they were ground into a heart, as if nothing mattered, as if the full weight of circumstance hadn't crushed them already. There was no narrative sense because life didn't flow in a linear fashion. He bought his ticket to Pnom Penh and didn't want to go; although once he got there it would be a different story. The sins of the past and the sins of the future, they would all come down to a simple afternoon in a five dollar flea pit; where nobody asked any questions and the crack down on vice had never happened. Not that this was vice. It was simple love; passion in a passionless life. A land bereft of love.

Im, I'm full, Aek said, rubbing his belly after a confusion over dates and times and a trip down to Silom for food. The previous day Nate and Shawn and he had walked through Limpini to Ruhm Rudi after sitting at Coffee Society near Salen Dang for an hour. Being close to DJs, there was barely a straight person there, a couple of tourists who must have wandered in by accident, otherwise nothing but gangs of swishy young men. But Jack, with his infinite capacity to offend almost everybody, showed up later at the meeting; after which, as they walked off down the soi, he declared loudly of Nate: "That's a sad case, dear", only turn to find him right behind them. It was typical of Jack. Who was no doubt happy this morning, after the advent of his lover. He had sought out Chinese herbal viagra the night before, but when the chemist had it in stock decided against it, frightened of a heart attack. Have you ever tried it dear, he asked Alex and Shawn and himself. No, they replied in turn. Oh you're all young, dear, he declared unabashedly. They were on the way to a restaurant. Foreigners were always on their way to a restaurant in this town. It was easy to put on weight. They had spent part of the afternoon in a very up scale French restaurant around the corner, not a Thai in sight, except for the staff, and a little woman who looked for all the world like Coco Channel, but when he said she looked very much like Coco in the movie, she had no idea what he was talking about; and they had no idea who Coco was, or what a Channel shop was. But when they finally got the idea there was a movie they grinned: and the male waiter explained: you look like a superstar in a movie. That got a grin, and a hoped for tip. And as they left and the owner, sitting at the bar, thanked them for their custom Jack declared once again: That's alright, dear.

THE BIGGER STORY:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/12a40d5d1a598dae

As Pakistan turns 63 years old in exactly nine days time, its worst floods in 80 years have left up to 3 million souls stranded amid outbreaks of disease after monsoon rains forming floods kill almost 1,500 people.

The situation is grim over most of the country. The water which broke from breached Muzaffargarh canal is now a threat to the nearby oil refinery and Kot Addu Power Station which produces 1400 megawatts of power. “Main highways are cut off as bridges across the country’s inflated northern rivers have been washed away,” said the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

According to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA): "More than 29,500 houses were damaged and a key trade highway to China was blocked by flooding.”

Over 900,000 cusecs of water was released from the head Chashma in Layyah over the past three days, now posing a threat to Taunsa. “The floods have damaged 8,16,842 acres of crop across the Punjab province,” said Shahbaz Sharif, Chief Minister of Punjab province.

The South province of Pakistan, Sindh, is to face the worst of all, as the combination of the flood streams from the north and north-east finally heads down to the south. About 100,000 extra cusecs of water has entered the Guddu Barrage and the level is speedily mounting in River Indus. The water level at Guddu Barrage now points to 470,000 cusecs and to 225,000 cusecs at the Sukkur Barrage in Sindh.

“Sindh has been put on code red and there are fears that up to 150,000 people could be displaced in the province," says a government official. “In case of further rain, it is expected that out of 23 districts in the Sindh province, 19 will be affected.”

Torrential rains are forecasted for the next two days by the meteorological department, so the River Indus will be in a very high flood situation. DG Met Office Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry forewarns: “The first half of the current month [until August 15] is critical as another system of heavy rains would enter Sindh province from Bay of Bengal on August 8 or 9."

The Pakistan Army has rescued over 60,000 stranded people in the last five days, a spokesperson of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said on Wednesday. Some 40 helicopters and 450 army boats are participating in the continuing rescue activities in the wide spread areas of the country.

The army is also providing cooked food to flood-affected people at Army relief camps, set up at diverse places. Army engineers are working on opening roads and making diversions to facilitate the flow of traffic. Around 2,600 tourists have been evacuated from Kalam. Thirty Chinese engineers, who were working on the Dobair-Khwar Hydel project in Kohistan, have been safely evacuated to Bisham. Helicopters and boats have so far ferried 28,000 people to safety from the areas nearby.

Pakistani officials warn the shortage of drinking water is spreading diseases, including cholera, a stern bacterial infection which chiefly affects the small intestine. Syed Zahir Ali Shah, health minister for the Khyber-Pakhtunkhua province, says around 100,000 souls, mostly children, are suffering from illnesses such as gastroenteritis, involving both the stomach and the small intestine, resulting in acute diarrhea.

https://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/12a40d5d1a598dae

PR flaks buzzed anxiously as Crikey arrived at the University of Melbourne's Carrillo Gantner lecture theatre last night to witness PJ Keating lay down a well-researched speech on the Australian media's notorious allergy to privacy.

As the country's 24th PM gasbagged with Vice Chancellor Glyn Davis, Centre for Advanced Journalism chief Michael Gawenda warned the audience about the exhaustive analysis to come, chortling that "if you haven't had a comfort stop, you'll need one at the end," before Keating shuffled to the front to slam News Limited and deliver a 17-page plea to reform Australia's hodge-podge of media snoop laws.

This was a no-nonsense restatement of the country's shortcomings on privacy -- that, given News' obsession with pointless and ineffectual self-regulation, was both well overdue and getting worse.

Keating started big, quoting privacy's intellectual forbears Warren and Brandeis on the "right of the individual to be let alone" and universal charters on civil and political rights. Those concerns were lined up against the modern day perils of Google StreetView, "peek and seek provisions" and data mining by business and government.

The current toothless triptych of the publisher-funded Australian Press Council, the Australian Communication and Media Authority and internal union processes has meant that complaints almost never get up, and sanctions are never enacted. Self regulation was a joke, with the "everything is working well" line bleated by News supremo John Hartigan and his Right to Know coalition utterly indefensible. Keating said it was telling that amid all the failed attempts at self-policing the one accountability mechanism that stood out was Media Watch.

Serious opprobrium was reserved for former Sunday Telegraph deputy editor (and current Woman's Weekly editor) Helen McCabe who, in the aftermath of the Pauline Hanson debacle, famously chirped that the public interest was anything her readers might find interesting.

Other potentially actionable incidents, including the Tele's decision to run photos of Sonny Bill Williams and actress Candice Falzon's toilet tryst and Adam Walters' report on David Campbell exiting Kens of Kensington using a "taxpayer-funded vehicle" (an hypocrisy pointed out by Crikey hours after the story appeared).

Tellingly, no News Limited publications decided to report Keating's comments this morning, despite editors and journalists being provided with copies of the speech well in advance of their deadlines yesterday.

The former PM's renewed interest in privacy was almost certainly piqued by an outrageous Sunday Telegraph piece last November, that claimed his lobbyist daughter Katherine had threatened to "kill" a News Limited photographer while dressed as Amy Winehouse at an Absolut Vodka Halloween party.

Crikey understands that Keating has been fastidious in his desire to wrap an intellectual framework around his anger ever since.

The day after the offending report Keating used Fairfax newspapers to assail News, prompting a war of words with Hartigan who said it was "difficult to stomach the hypocrisy of Paul Keating". Last night, Keating hit back, making special mention of the News chief on four separate occasions.

Keating turned Hartigan's words from last year back on himself: "The hypocrisy, to use a John Hartigan phrase, is ‘stomach-churning’," he demurred.

Other senior News figures also came in for a bollocking, with in-house lawyer Julian Quill questioned over his take on the Herald Sun's decision to run Brendan Fevola's camera-phone picture of Lara Bingle on its front page.

Picture of Bangkok: Peter Newman.

Tragic, Dear, Tragic

2010-08-05T05:08:00.002+07:00

There were shifts in the pattern of distinction. There were ways forward; and a battalion of new beginnings. Doors, like those lined up along an old fashioned beach, painted different colours, rusty in the sun, cursory in their intensity, superficial in their beckoning desires. Doorways to another place, other places. To laughing, frolicking and dancing in the shallow water's edge; far from the deep where scientists kept discovering new creatures hidden in the depths. He stood in the glinting glare. He watched with envy as the boy kicked a soccer ball along the edge of the beach. His body ached from the last appalling binge. Everything was clouded. The glare was just a knife through a sodden heart. And then it all changed; by dint of change of landscape; and they were in other hotels, in other circumstances, in other bars, surrounded by other new found friends. These catastrophes were minuscule in answer. They fathomed from a random place. And when he landed in a new found place: and could truthfully declare, I wouldn't be here if I hadn't been there, none of it made much sense. Jack the appalling old queen from Washington continued to offend everybody, thinking aloud in that strange syndrome the elderly get, where they are immune to the embarrassment they cause everybody, where they lose the social graces and talk of things better kept to oneself. "Well you're all at sixes and sevens dear," he told one of the most together people in Bangkok AA.

Nate was continuing to mop up resources and sympathy; I've only got 25 baht to my name changed to I've only got 50 baht, the story kept changing. That beautiful lap top they had bought for him was long gone. Everything was gone. The woman who was looking after him had tossed him out. The embassy was about to repatriate him. Jack managed to tell him pretty bluntly, well there isn't much hope, dear, you can't stay here, too much temptation, too many bars, you don't have any resources, go home to your family. I've burnt every last bridge, Nate said, I can't ask them for any more. They don't want to know me. I've been through 16 rehab centres in the past few years and no one wants to help me any more. Surprise surprise. All the good intentions, the world famous stories he broke, the years in the jungles of Cambodia, were as nought now as he tried to get into Safe Haven for free; when they weren't too keen. It would normally cost 600,000 baht they told him. Lord let me be a channel of thy peace, went the prayer; and he bought him lunch and bought him coffee and at the end of the day, when Nate said: thanks for looking after me, he doubted if any of it was genuinely appreciated. These days were shallow and passing, and the crisis that everyone had conspired to help bring about, by turning off every money faucet, by dialling up the tough love option, by refusing to enable him any more, to live on past glories, to sit at the bar and tell great stories of being a war correspondent across half the world, that crisis was the here and now.

They stayed with him throughout the day, despite their own biting scepticism and the "heart of stone" that Jack claimed to be; ring your parents, mother will always help. I can't do that, he kept insisting. Well dear, write a book, make some money. And at the end of the day, after they left Ruhm Rudi and were walking through the damp streets, Jack declared: "what a sad case dear". He shrugged. He had seen worse. It's hard to get sober when you've got no resources, Nate said, but he had no resources because he pissed them all away. He sponged off everybody and pissed them all away. Tough love was called for, everybody said, and no one was prepared to fork out $20,000 for yet another rehab centre, not after the past failures, not when it was never coming back. Never. Or that was the likelihood. So the once great cut sad figures, and they sat around his apartment in the afternoon, and while Aek reacted to the words super star, a journalistic super star did not hold any of the same fascination as a television super star, not to a Thai, and a foreign journalistic super star even less so. Particularly one on hard times. One who had drunk himself almost to death, certainly into dereliction. Facing repatriation, compulsory government detox, spat out on to the mean streets; nothing to show for all those years, all those stories, all those triumphs. You'll rise again, Phoenix from the ashes, he advised. And once again you'll be sitting on the 34th floor of some stunning upmarket hotel; on your book tour, talking about Pol Pot. And you'll think; life is wonderful, the only thing that could make it better would be whisky and cocaine. And it will all begin again. Life is a wonderful thing. Tragic dear, just tragic, Jack declared. For God sake's don't let him sleep in your spare room. You'll never get rid of him.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/05/2973837.htm

Forget gender and policies, it's all about Gillard

By Barrie Cassidy

Rather than talk about a change in campaigning style,Julia talked about a change to herself. (AAP: Alan Porritt)

At the halfway mark of the election campaign Coalition strategists are convinced that "brand Gillard" has been damaged, maybe not irreparably, but certainly to the point where she cannot mount a sustained or a convincing comeback.

The good news, they say, is that even without the "world of hurt" inflicted by the leaks, Gillard does not have a coherent cut-through message that is coming up in focus groups.

That is important because election 2010 has been characterised by the greatest volatility in voting intentions for decades.

The ALP lost 6 per cent of its primary vote in two weeks. They cling to the hope that what went down, might come back up again, or at least by enough to scrape back in.

But the Coalition strategists are seeing enough in their feedback to encourage them that views formed over the past fortnight are "not cursory or superficial," but suddenly "illuminating and firm".

Undoubtedly the leaks hurt Labor, for two reasons. They came from within, creating a sense of disunity. But more to the point, they went straight to family values; maternity leave and pensions. Whoever leaked the material had a good sense of both Cabinet deliberations and Gillard's vulnerabilities.

That is not to say the Coalition believes the election is won. Far from it. The results are so uneven around the country, the mood so different wherever you look, that this is the toughest result to predict since 1993.

When you average out the three major opinion polls, the two-party preferred vote is split almost 50-50, with the Coalition having a slight edge.

Allowing for a uniform swing, that would give the Coalition 14 seats, enough to cost Labor its majority, and close to delivering the Coalition government without the support of the cross benches.

But it's not as simple as that. It never is. Incumbent governments often defy general swings by exploiting incumbency.

On the face of it, that is not such an advantage this time around because of the 12 seats Labor needs to win to retain its majority, only four have sitting members, Solomon (NT), Corangamite (Vic), Hasluck (WA) and Bennelong (NSW).

But Labor strategists are nevertheless, hopeful that three seats in Queensland could run against what is for them, a hostile environment. They are Dawson, Herbert and Longman.

If a handful of seats in Queensland and New South Wales defy the general swing, then Labor can be re-elected, however narrowly.

Even if that doesn't happen, strong support for Labor in Victoria and South Australia might partially compensate for heavy losses elsewhere.

But that is an indication of just how tight the contest is.

Labor strategists, though a little shell shocked after the past week, insist that Gillard can turn the campaign around, and that is why the Prime Minister started this week with such a dramatic flourish.

The problem was that rather than talk about a change in campaigning style, she talked about a change to "Julia" herself, a confusing concept so effectively exploited by the Opposition.

For Labor, the great unspoken hope is that when voters go into the privacy of the booths on August 21, two things will guide their shaky hand. One, that Tony Abbott is genuinely a risk; and two, that surely it would be a big call to throw out the country's first female prime minister after just a few weeks.

To the first, Abbott has gone yet another day without stuffing up. Time is ticking away. He remains controlled and even at times, prime ministerial.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan-combat-rules-20100804,0,5192303.story

The new American commander of Western forces in Afghanistan has issued a directive asserting troops' right to defend themselves but also calling on them to continue efforts to safeguard Afghan civilian lives, military officials said Wednesday.

Gen. David H. Petraeus' tactical directive, his first since assuming command last month, appears aimed at countering some grumbling within the ranks that Western forces' hands are tied in confrontations with insurgents because of battlefield rules handed down last year by his predecessor, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.

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It is a delicate balance to strike, because civilian casualties are one of the most inflammatory issues between North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces and the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The proportion of civilian deaths attributed to Western troops has declined significantly since last summer's directive by McChrystal. In a departure from previous practice, he ordered that airstrikes and artillery not be used if civilians might be present, unless troops are in imminent danger of being overrun.

Petraeus' directive, which supersedes the old one, is classified, but parts of it were made public on Wednesday.

U.S. military officials speaking on condition of anonymity said the new version includes some refinements to guidelines on use of aerial bombardment and artillery fire, and spells out more instances in which such methods should not be used.

However, the directive is also meant to address what those officials described as a "misperception" among some junior field commanders that airstrikes and artillery — two of the international forces' main battlefield advantages against the insurgents — were all but forbidden.

"We believe the most pertinent issue in play is uneven application of the [previous] tactical directive," said Lt. Col. John Dorrian, the operations spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force. The new guidelines, he said, are "intended to ensure that everyone is on the same page."

In the unclassified portion of the directive, Petraeus writes that "every Afghan civilian death diminishes our cause." But he added that the directive "does not prevent commanders from protecting the lives of their men and women" and included an admonition to subordinates not to put further restrictions on use of force without his explicit approval.

Petraeus was a driving force behind McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy, which holds that winning the war is impossible without also winning over the populace. Petraeus earlier this week issued what he said would be the first of a series of counterinsurgency guidelines telling troops to be friendly and respectful in their dealings with civilians.

Bangkok. Picture: Peter Newman.

Fate Had Already Sealed The Windows And Locked The Doors

2010-08-04T06:26:00.023+07:00

There was a certain liquid feel to it, as if fate had already sealed the windows and locked the doors. The hauntings of infinite resource, always on the border, always just out of reach. But at the same time moments of hilarity. The funky smell of unwashed boys. The drawling "deeaaar" of the hyper-camp Jack, the retiring lawyer from Washington who would quibble over every little point and tell anybody what they thought of him; or denounce anything he didn't approve of. Complaining that Andrew, who was showing him around apartments, hadn't contributed to the taxi fare, all of about four dollars between two separate incidents, despite his having surrendered hours of his day. Well you two guys are a lot of fun, Andrew said, as they left, thanking them for the afternoon. All was washed away. All was free to be overblown, overgrown. Well, dear. He made as if to assuage a great guilt; and caught another promise like a catcher in a cricket game, out of the air, out of the sky, thunderous applause from the assembled ghosts. All the pasts had come to haunt, but not just the pasts, the crowds that populated the stands had not lived in this century, had not lived for a very long time, and their ghostly clapping chilled him as he waded through the disintegrating matter that had once been the streets. 45 days and climbing, he thought. Getting increasingly organised. Oh please, please, replace my heart with a practical machine; the windswept emotional life of a gargoyle; frozen, while he chatted vacuously on Face-book and welcomed anyone he came across into his life, into his smart apartment and briefly luxurious life.

Andrew, one of the few people he had chosen to like at the Saint Louis Hospital meetings in Bangkok, showed them an entire range of apartments, after they had trundled down the street opposite the hospital to an Indian restaurant Jack particularly liked. Vegetarian. They sat and talked; although as usual he said little. But Jack and Andrew swapped notes about Rome, about apartments, about people they knew from the so-called fellowship, about the astonishing state of real estate, ask your own price, make it up, in particular parts of Rome where only a few of the oldest families, or entrepreneurial taxi drivers from New York in the 1950s, had had the foresight to buy apartments. The day slipped away, as did the opportunity for nefarious adventures. He was shadowed, indeed haunted, and yet his head snapped away as if he was in the ceiling watching the pair of them talk about various characters even they themselves had largely forgotten. Their voices were large, loud, in the tiny restaurant; the food Indian; odd, in a sense, after having lived with the Thais, who very much didn't like Indians and made no pretence about it, for so long. They were the most overtly racist people he had ever met. Falang, falang, they would chant at the sight of a foreign tourist; as if such a sight was indeed astonishing, these visitors from Mars, these infinitely peculiar things. In the West racism had been a crime of conscience for decades now; here no one even bothered to think about it.

He had been shadowed, he had made way for the mark, he stepped out of the fire ring into the cool of the surrounding forest, he knew the eyes of the wolves were on him and he knew the dark was full of danger. Perhaps it was why he chose the heart of a modern metropolis to live out his days, infinitely expensive, the skyscrapers often comfort, a human scale in an inhuman place, everything reversed. His back garden was a pool on a roof, surrounded by construction and sweeping tall buildings, and he loved them and he loved the light and felt safe, as the security cameras monitored everything, including his every move. They had wanted to know where he went at 5am, in the days before he had got sick and the spirits had cast him out; to survive here in a kind of suspended luxury, patiently, ill at ease, undiagnosed, unassisted. Knowing that everything was fleeting. Who's Bambi, his daughter had asked on Skype, catching sight of Aek in the background. He looks about 12. How old is he? 22 he replied. Dad, that's not much older than us. She laughed, she always liked a bit of good gossip. What's Bambi's name, she asked, and he told her. Well that's another reason I'm not coming to Bangkok, she pouted. I can hitch you up with some rich Thai boys, he said. I don't want an Asian boyfriend dad, she declared. Swivel the computer round, I want to see him, she said. He didn't oblige. Alright, introduce me. Finally he did. In a strange way she seemed comforted by the fact that things now made sense; kind of. But they kept calling him Bambi anyway. Maybe Bambi would like to come out to Sydney for a while? Maybe, he replied. Maybe. And maybe I'll take him down to Tasmania, where Steve is living with his appalling boyfriend and five cats in a large house atop a cliff. Anything could happen.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/abbott-not-unelectable/story-fn59niix-1225900814866

Paul Kelly

THE most pervasive and perhaps fatal perception in this election is that Tony Abbott is unelectable.

This entrenched idea is killing the Labor campaign; yet Labor has cultivated the notion and it has been an article of faith among progressive political and media elites in Australia for years.

This week's Newspoll testifies to the sheer dogmatism of this belief. Taken last week, the poll showed a 50-50 split (with the preference allocation pointing to an Abbott win) yet Labor voters are sure Abbott is unelectable. Among ALP voters 77 per cent think Julia Gillard will win and only 5 per cent think Abbott will win. In short, Labor voters think the election is a no contest. Somehow, some way, they are convinced Abbott has no hope when the exact same poll shows him winning!

By contrast Coalition voters are more realistic, being split 42-38 per cent in predicting an Abbott victory. And the nation overall is confident that Gillard will win 56-23 per cent.

This testifies to the Abbott phenomenon. He has got under Labor's radar and he keeps doing it. There is only one conclusion: Abbott is repeatedly under-estimated by his opponents.

On last weekend's two main polls, A C Nielsen and Newspoll, Abbott is heading Labor. Gillard has no illusions about the seriousness of the threat. Her correct diagnosis is that Abbott is getting away with a "protest vote" strategy and is not being assessed by voters as an alternative prime minister. Labor is now desperate to puncture the public complacency and disengagement that it believes assists Abbott.

Underestimating Abbott has deep roots in both the Labor and Liberal parties. It is a function of the hostility towards conservatism and Abbott's disarming unpretentiousness, his habit of parading his flaws along with his strengths, an unusual trait for an aspiring PM. Recall the universal sentiment when Abbott won by just one vote in the partyroom over Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey last December. It was a surprise result. The Rudd government was delighted because, yes you've guessed, it knew Abbott was unelectable. Even the Liberals were worried.

At that time the Coalition was ready to declare Abbott a hero if he could reduce its margin of defeat to that of Kevin Rudd's 2007 victory. They would settle for a respectable loss. Nobody saw a Coalition victory as obtainable.

Above all, Abbott was assumed by the pro-Labor progressive culture to have far too much baggage. Even more than John Howard he divides the nation between its cultural opinion-making elites and its mainstream tradition of voting conservatism.

For years, Abbott has been mocked and demonised as a far Right, anti-woman, Catholic zealot, climate-change sceptic and political thug too reactionary for the Australian people. This narrative was supposed to prove, beyond doubt, his unelectability. This branding did Abbott much damage but it had a dividend; it stamped him as a conservative with convictions. In short, as a values politician. Many mainstream voters who elected Howard four times were drawn to Abbott as a values politician.

http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/Insurgents-Attack-Southern-Afghanistan-Military-Base-99824299.html

Taliban Attack Main US Base in Southern Afghanistan
VOA News 03 August 2010

Afghan officials say Taliban militants on Tuesday attacked the main U.S. military base in southern Afghanistan.

Officials say the attackers, wearing suicide vests, first launched rockets on the Kandahar airfield and then tried to storm the base. The assault sparked an hour-long gunbattle, in which one international soldier was wounded and all of the attackers were killed.

Taliban insurgents previously tried to storm the Kandahar base in May.

Also Tuesday, NATO said one of its service members was killed in an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan.

Elsewhere, Afghan police said robbers killed six security guards at a branch of the Kabul Bank in the northern province of Balkh.

The robbery took place in the provincial capital, Mazar-i-Sharif, and the robbers got away with at least $275,000.

In other violence Tuesday, NATO said foreign and Afghan forces destroyed a house rigged with wire links to homemade explosives in Kandahar.

And, a NATO statement said international and Afghan forces seized the last Taliban stronghold of Sayedebad in southern Afghanistan.

Picture: Peter Newman.