Wendi Deng

One thing you can say about David Briggs's Galaxy polling service: you gets what you pays for. His former employers at News Ltd commissioned the latest poll, and this is what they got for their money:

Voters will not blame Prime Minister John Howard if interest rates go up as expected this week, a new Galaxy poll has found.

The poll also found that while Labor has retained its election-winning lead, 22 per cent of voters have yet to make their final decision.

What a crock. The rates haven't even gone up yet, and in truth 100 percent of voters still have to make their "final decision". But even Galaxy cannot hide the harsh truth: voters have deserted Howard and they are NOT coming back.

Loathe as I am to call this election three weeks out, the coming interest rate rise surely sounds the death knell for John W. Howard. It may not be the last nail in his political coffin, but it's surely the one that shuts the lid down so tightly that even he cannot escape again. Surely?

The lesson from abroad today is that repressive governments and military dictatorships are not, and never will be, friends of true democracy. The lesson at home is that the Coalition never could be trusted to keep interest rates low. Can someone please tally a list of all the public assets Howard has sold off in the past 11 years? Then add up all the profits made from selling our country's natural resources overseas? Then look at what we ordinary Australians have gotten in return?

So what do you do now, if you are in John Howard's fear-soaked socks? You keep spinning it like it's real. You stick with your Karl Rove playbook and pretend that your greatest weakness is actually a strength, and you use it to hammer your opponents, even if that makes no sense whatsoever. Howard is warning to Costello's talk of a global economic tsunami, ignoring the fact that it was his great mate in Washington, George W. Bush, who criminally misguided policies created that same tsunami.

And Howard cheered him all the way.

Is this the answer to the Liberals' woes?

A GENETICALLY engineered "supermouse" has stunned scientists with its physical abilities.

The mouse can run up to six kilometres at a speed of 20 metres per minute for five hours or more without stopping, British newspaper The Independent reports.

Scientists say that's the equivalent of a man cycling at speed up an Alpine mountain without a break.

The engineered mouse also lives longer, has more sex and can breed well into old age, and eats more without getting fat, the paper reports.

The “supermouse” is the creation of American scientists who are working to create a community of 500 of the rodents,

Scientists say the super abilities came about from a standard genetic modification to a single metabolism gene shared with humans.

The Rodentus Super also lives longer, but is unusually aggressive. Let's hope they keep them all in that cage!

The latest figures confirm what many people have long known:

REAL pay has gone backwards under the Howard Government's new wage setting system, with some workers on award pay rates now more than $15 a week worse off in the past 12 months.

Recent higher inflation has overtaken the modest pay rises handed out by the Australian Fair Pay Commission last month, pushing most of the 1 million workers covered by award rates into the red, according to new figures.

The commission confirmed the figures yesterday, saying it had relied on Reserve Bank inflation forecasts, which were too low.

Meanwhile, the CEO of a company branded the worst price-fixing cartel in Australian history is a close friend who Howard invites around for dinner.

Viva Ted Rall:

The war sucks. On that point, the millions of Americans who were against it from the start (and the many millions more who've come around to agreeing with us) agree with the soldiers serving in it. Forced re-enlistment through the "stop-loss" loophole is placing thousands of lives in suspended animation, destroying marriages and small businesses. Troops aren't getting enough protective gear.

It's also true that Americans have stopped paying attention. I'm a news junkie. And even I flip the page past the same old "2 Dead, 7 Wounded in IED Blast" headline.

But hey, soldier, you volunteered. If not for you, there wouldn't be a war in the first place.

But will it really make a difference?

"One of Kevin Rudd's senior frontbenchers, in an impromptu but nevertheless on-the-record discussion with me, face to face this morning, said that the 'me too' tag will not matter if Labor wins the election because, quote, 'once we get in we'll just change it all'," Mr Price told Southern Cross Broadcasting.

"The frontbencher is Peter Garrett."

Garrett says it was "a short, jocular conversation", implying that he did not mean it. Richard Wilkins confirms that he was just joking.

I recently commented on LP that leftwing critics are probably underestimating Garrett, and that many Labor voters will be secretly hoping that Rudd is NOT going to be a Howard-lite PM (as the Libs now paint him). And it IS late Friday afternoon... So maybe this blooper will actually work in Labor's favour?

Let's see what the media make of it.

One thing to keep in mind: if Labor don't win both houses, they will need to compromise with the Libs to get their laws passed. So maybe it WOULD be a Howard-lite government. Unless the Greens win the Senate, in which case they really WOULD have to dump all the Howard-style policies. Vote Green for the Senate!

I have said before that I never - ever - read Andrew Bolt. But in this case I clicked through unknowingly from Antony Loewensteins' blog. And loathe as I am to give Bolt's unadulterated crap the oxygen of publicity, this bullshit should be the last column he ever writes.

The battle is actually over. Iraq has been won...

Bolt pretends only 100,000 Iraqis have died, then estimates that Saddam killed 400,000, which means the war was "worth it".

Before you start adding your two cents to the readers' comments (already jam-packed with well-deserved criticism), consider who pays him to write this stuff, who benefits commercially from the online hits his self-generated controversy invites (advertisers love it), and who is the great, unspoken cheerleader of this horrific, illegal war.

Murdoch should sack Bolt for this, and Teh Oz should be inundated with letters to the editor (not comments to Bolt). But there must also be a reckoning for Murdoch, the blood-soaked warmonger behind the wingnut wordsmiths.

"Which finger is for John Howard, mummy?"




"Wake me when the election is over."




"I'm so glad I won't have to see that man's face on TV any more."




"Look at me Daddy! I'm an Islamofascist!"




"Do I still get a Right To Life if I'm born in Iran?"




"When is Mr Howard going to ask mummy to release me?"