the heat is on

Comrades,

The Miracle of Democracy is certainly hotting up here in the Canterbury-Bankstown local govt. election campaign.
The heat is on.
Thanks to the wacky Earlwood Environment League, we now have more of an idea of just who this Jennifer Azzi is.
Jenny, you'll remember, is heading up the three person ticket for Our Local Community [noamalgamations@gmail.com].
The EEL's have managed to get hold of her handwritten nomination form lodged with the NSW Electoral Commission [hey, you've got a leaker in there, guys!]
And an enlightening read it is too...

A high school teacher?
God save her students.
A Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Education degree awarded to someone who is more or less illiterate?
God save the whole goddamn edookation system.
Whatever happened to "Teacher's College"?
Jeez, Jen, who's foolin' who here?
What a strident, magnificent voice yours will be on council for the long suffering rate-payer.
Are you a stooge?
Surely this Our Local Community mob must be a front for One Nation, on the grounds of the utter dunder-headedness alone.
Labor is running an all female ticket headed by Clare Raffen on a predictably Pinko agenda of anti-over-development, stop privatisation of council services, save parks, gardens & sporting facilities from capitalist thieves, supporting our multicultural community et al.
Nothing unusual there, and of course, all very worthy.
The Liberals and the Greens tickets are yet to be heard from, not a hide nor hair seen of them at this stage, so only the Gypsy knows what they'll be on about...and the election is ten days away.
It's clear they are spending no money on the :"campaign", perhaps they're in this only as token runners, now knowing there are no dark horses in the race.
Why bother really, when in a rock solid working-class district, Labor will always have a majority on council?
Seem to remember an old saying that went along the lines of "people get the politicians they deserve".
Joy.

"Where Interesting Happens"

Comrades,

With complete political idiocy on display on both sides of the vast Pacific Ocean, who knew that I am required to go to the polls in a little under three weeks?
Crikey!

The folk at Ancestry Dot Com are making a fortune selling dodgy DNA testing kits in Canberra, as pollies don't usually queue up at the Registry Office of any country, let alone inquire as to where their grandparents used to call home through OTC.
Dual citizenship, anyone?
Haven't I've been through all this before?
And I still haven't heard of any particular concern about s.44 of the Constitution; there is no great push for change there.
Anyway, everyone knows what happens when lawyers and High Court judges become involved, interpreting extremely fine detail of Constitutional Law in a case that, to most people, seems to be as clear cut as black and white.
Pardon the pun.
If that's not enough, something that doesn't need a referendum to fix and can easily be sorted out by an Act of Parliament now becomes some kind of $122M [plus variations] "postal survey" asking enrolled voters a vague question about whether or not those perverted poofs and lezzo's should be allowed to no longer live-in-sin, to be run by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the same mob who made the recent Census into a world-class cock-up, you remember, those people.
And good ol' Australia Post are apparently in charge of deliveries, after getting away with reducing the standard of service while jacking up the price of stamps.
Crazy.
That's no VOTE.
Where's the Miracle of Democracy in that?
Are these Tories right outta their brains?
Some kind of weak half-hearted joke at taxpayer's expense?
Haven't I've been through all this before, and still they bark on about it like rabid dogs?
I mean, really, can someone please just tell me what the faark is going on?

First thing I knew about being told to go to the polls was when a card that looked like it had been printed by the bloke who prints schmick slick real estate agents cards telling me to VOTE 1 JENNIFER lobbed in my letterbox.
Ah yes, the NSW Local Govt. elections are on, amid the hue and cry of the recent amalgamation of local councils which instead of the mad Tory intention of cutting red tape, actually increases ridiculous duplication.
Jennifer Azzi is from "Our Local Community" at noamalgamations@gmail.com.
Enough said.
Then, nothing more in the letterbox.
When the local Canterbury City Council was forced to merge with Bankstown Council by the former Premier Vile Mike Baird, they sacked everyone at the top and put in an unelected Dictator, officially known as an "Administrator", to run the show with the promise of elections in Sept 2018!
Hang on...almost two years without any democratic representation at all sounds a bit dodgy to me.
So, the elections were fairly promptly moved forward to Sept 9, 2017.
In one of his first jobs, The Administrator took out an ad in the local papers and put out a suggestion box, asking for ideas on a snappy new slogan for the newly merged council.
It seems my contribution of "If anyone can ban it, CanBan Council will!" didn't make the cut or was simply ignored.
"Where Interesting Happens" was announced as the winner, after being vetted by a mob of highly-paid PR types over a very long pissy lunch.
Fingers down yr throat territory there, no?
Anyway, one of the two local rags boasted that the newly merged Canterbury-Bankstown Council had a "population as big as Tasmania!".
Well, not quite; there are about 385,000 people in my district, and counting, while Tassy struggles to maintain a population of half a mill.
Still, no more flyers.
So, a quick look at the publicity-shy NSW Electoral Commission's list of candidates for the Canterbury Ward, reveals that its been a stitch-up.
Everyone knows that the area 'round here is rock solid Pinko, so they'll just divide up the seats on Council in what is effectively a multi-seat constituency, and Labor will always have a majority.
So the choice we get at the polls are VOTE 1 JENNIFER and the two bozo's on her ticket, three Greens, three Liberals and three from the Labor Party.
No lunatics, space cadets, extremists, god-botherer's or nut job independent candidates at all.
None.
Just four tickets of three candidates each.
That's it.
The preferences have already been clearly rigged.
Simple.
Gotta be happy with that.
Done deal.

Meantime, on the other side of the "endless" Pacific, the continental United States has been plunged into darkness by a total eclipse of the sun while the DJ Trump! presidency continues to crumble before our very eyes as he punts his Chief Strategist while making inflammatory remarks about some rioting someplace.
Nothing wrong with a good riot in the Land of The Free, but that Stephen K Bannon bloke; jeez - a nasty piece of work from the off.
Just look at him.
Not satisfied with that, Trumpy then sacks all of his business advisory boards as the country's CEO's announce will have nothing to do with the Trumpotus, after they didn't buy his hair-brained one trillion dollar infrastructure package.
No siree.
Who needs 'em anyway as DJ! knows everything there is to know about business.
However, a little birdie is singing that The Donald may now be beginning to look for a way out of a bad deal [i.e. being elected President] when it all goes pear-shaped and the fecal coliform covered fan starts to really fling turds back at him - done it before, can do it again - like, say, sack Special Counsel Three Sticks looking into them pesky Ruskies, and then promptly resign the Presidency, so no-one's got nothing on him, nothing at all, then return the keys to the Oval Office to the Grand Old Party, go to home to Trump Tower in Manhattan and in a very worst case scenario, lean on Mike Pence for a pardon down the track, but only if required.
You might be thinking "in your dreams", but stranger things are happening.
Done deal.

And who knew that across the Tasman Sea, our cuz in New Zealand will be gripped by the Miracle of Democracy when they go to a general election on 8 November?
In a brave move, the Pinko's in the NZ Labour Party knew they were a country mile behind in any run for the Beehive, so their leader Andrew Little [not a great name for a Leader of The Opposition anyway] graciously fell on his sword 22 days ago in favour of another one of those so called "rock-star" politicians with charisma, brains, and talent - or so they say - in the form of their Deputy Leader, Jacinda Arden, who's just turned 37.
Never mind that a rock solid trade union man like Little is toast at age 52.
Plus, Arden looks presentable on the television by all reports [I've never seen her on the telly] and is always good for a quote to keep the press happy.
NZ Labour's popularity has shot up from a very low base, and Jacinda's been described as a "young Bernie Sanders" [who is an agrarian socialist if there ever was one]; she is also sometimes mixed up in the press as a "young Jeremy Corbyn in reverse" and some tabloid fishwraps have even gone so far as to say that she is on the verge of creating a wave of "Jacindamania!".
Woot!
New Zealand has the most stable democracy in the South Pacific, has for a very long time.
They don't churn through Prime Ministers like we do, but that could, might, but only perhaps, change.
Who knew that both sides can still play this populism game?
Done deal.

Only in the Land of The Long White Cloud.

going to water

Comrades,

Lord Almighty.
How weak are the Tories?
Weak as gnat's piss, that's how weak.
The five 'rebel' Liberal MP's; a mob of complete unknowns in the form of The Hons. Trevor Evans, Dean Smith, Tim Wilson and Trent Zimmerman, as well as the always colourful Warren Entsch for good measure, threaten to take a proposal to the party room to amend the Marriage Act by a free vote of Parliament to enshrine 'gay marriage' in the legislation.
Simple, you would have thought.
There was bolshy talk of "crossing the floor" and getting the [non] issue out of the way before the next election so as not to distract the disinterested electorate.
So what happens?
With a Prime Minister beholden to the alt right - read fascist - fundamentalist faction and other sundry God botherer's in the majority of conservative ranks, the 'rebels' couldn't get the numbers and immediately go to water, and settle for something called a "non-binding voluntary postal plebiscite", something which resolves nothing at all, and has never before, as far as I am aware, been attempted in the history of the Commonwealth.
A postal plebiscite?
WTF?
A bureaucratic nightmare for the Electoral Commission at the very least.
Has anyone noticed the price of a postage stamp these days?
As of June 30, there were 15,882,788 enrolled voters in Australia.
That's a helluva lot of taxpayer's cash, even if they can get a bulk rate off Australia Post.
First, legislation needs to be passed to allow for the the plebiscite to he held [which has a snowflakes chance in hell of getting through the Senate away, just like the original Liberal election promise of a vote at the polls], then it needs to be conducted at enormous expense, but then when happens?
Anyone's guess.
Not a Tory seems to have thought that far into the future.
The only thing that is clear is that the whole debacle has yet again seriously damaged Malcolm Trundle's already fatally wounded leadership.
Uncle Bill Shorten doesn't even need to say or do anything while the Tories implode.
The latest opinion polls suggest that the 'issue' is of little interest to most of the electorate and a "Yes" vote would easily get up by simple majority in all of the six states, as it would in a free vote in the Parliament.
For fuck's sake people, just get on with it; the law can be changed with the stroke a legislative pen.
End of the matter.
As an aside, I may get a little controversial here, but why gay people would want to get married in the first place has always been a mystery to me.
Why would they want to embrace the most conservative of social institutions?
Marriage is in serious decline in the heterosexual community, and is increasingly unpopular for many reasons among the millenials and yuppie scum, who much prefer more flexible personal living arrangements such as "living in sin".
I have discussed this with gay friends of mine, and most of them are similarly perplexed.
Of course everyone agrees that gay people should by rights as citizens be afforded the complete set of rights now currently available to heterosexual de-facto couples, including succession and proxy rights and the legal recognition of the children of such unions and so on, but marriage?
My friends say there will be then be, ipso facto, the unforeseen consequence of 'gay divorce', and all the unnecessary unpleasant consequences of that; everyone knows what happens when lawyers and the Family Court become involved.
A fervently Pinko gay mate of mine even went so far as to say to me "What ever happened to gay pride, for chrissake!? For me, being gay always used to be a point of difference, a refusal to conform, a matter of pride that we live our lives in a different way that suits us, not them. Why do we want to get involved in all that hetero shit just to be seen as "normal", to somehow "fit in", to be accepted into the mainstream, which we are clearly not a part of, never have been, never will be, and for me, never want to be?"
A very good point, and an argument that's been going on in the gay community for a good while...this, just as a purely random example, is six years old now...


https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/gays-against-adam-and-steve/

eight resident goats

Comrades,

Of all the lies, obfuscations, recusuals, allegations of unlawfulness and illegality, administrative chaos, a creaking, leaking bureaucracy, the goddamn proliferation of fake news, inquiry's into inquiries, tweet, tweet, tweet, the vomit-making moments, interfering in other people's shit just for the fun of it, for a start off -- and the endless parade of colourful smart operators and spectacular bumbling fools coming out of DC in the last few months, little wonder everybody talk 'bout The White House.
So it's comforting to see just about the only recent thing in The Free Press that approaches the truth of the matter come from a sports magazine, with a first class essay with impeccable sources on how the POTUS DJ Trump! approaches the game of golf.
There is no doubt at all that The Donald is a very good amateur golfer, would probably play off a handicap of "eight or nine" on most good golf courses, but of course, that is still not good enough for him.
He's had plenty of practice, and he will not be defeated by the game.
But the Pres., well, he knows in his own mind, and the people's mind, that he's No.1, so why try harder?
He is the "richest best golfer in the world", or is that "the best richest golfer in the world"?
It doesn't matter how long it takes.
Trumpy will go to any length at all to play every trick in the book to break, bend, and shape-shift The 28 Rules of Golf [plus the contentious rules 29-34 + "local rules" + the "Etiquette"] to produce a better score, and even then some of his best scores have doubtful provenance.
To be the golfing partner of DJ Trump! must be an absolute nightmare with all that endless commentary.
So hats off to Sports Illustrated for a very clever analysis of the way The Leader of The Free World behaves...

http://www.golf.com/tour-news/2017/08/01/president-donald-trump-relationship-golf-more-complicated-now

You'd have to hope that The Donald's left his phone at the White House after going on a "17-day working holiday" at Bedminster, NJ, to commune with his "eight resident goats".
It's so nice there at this time of year, they say, he's even arranged to be buried at the joint, for chrissake.
Lord, save them.

Photo: B.Smialowski—AFP


"If you wish to hide your character, do not play golf"
P.Boomer
"golf is a good walk, spoiled"
M.Twain [alleg]
"Is golf a dying game?"
FOX5 (Las Vegas) 2014