from the Anti-Empire Report ….

Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher made "unabashedly racist" comments during a meeting with Bob Carr, the Foreign Affairs Minister has told Lateline.

I am not really fond of he Archibald Art Prize... For those who don't know, the Archibald Prize is given to the best portraiture in Australia  — apart from its rival the Moran Prize... The Archibald is prestigious and is usually won by the same artists in a small group of brushies who seem to know their stuff... 

Bob Carr may have been Foreign Affairs Minister for only 12 months, but he started talking to United States diplomats about internal Labor politics nearly 40 years ago.

from The Shovel …..

In a final nod to the benefits of market capitalism, Baroness Thatcher has, on her deathbed, asked that all public memories of her be privatised.

In an interview with Inside Business, NBN Co chief Mike Quigley conceded the capital costs of the Coalition's FttN plan could be more than 20 per cent cheaper.

There is one major ugly factor that has influenced politics around the western world since the early 1970s like no other... His empire has employed armies of scribes, armed with poisoned pens and lies bigger than Ben Hur, to make nightmares come true.

Hitherto unseen evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry by British intelligence has revealed that former prime minister Tony Blair was told that Iraq had, at most, only a trivial amount of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Libya was in this respect a far greater threat.

I could be wrong but I finally have come to a conclusion that astonishes me, myself and my reflection in the mirror: Like Abbott, Mike Carlton is a closet misogynist...

There’s an old Jew­ish prophecy that, as end times ap­proach, his­tory will speed up. Sur­vey­ing the Aus­tralian po­lit­i­cal land­scape, it seems Ar­maged­don must be nigh. Events move in fast for­ward.

Democratic systems struggle to thrive among people threatened by disease - or so says a pair of maverick evolutionary psychologists. Jim Giles investigates their controversial claim

In a sign of just how tough life on Struggle Street has become, the Jones family of Sydney today announced to family and friends that their Christmas holiday to Aspen had been scrapped. The Joneses earn just $250,000 a year.

The 1980 adventure movie Raise the Titanic was one of the all-time box office stinkers. Based on the unlikely premise that the wreck of the great liner contained a rare mineral that could save the world from godless communism, it had a hilarious scene in which the ship popped to the surface apparently unscathed after 68 years on the sea floor.

Tony Abbott is coasting to The Lodge on a dream run, first class up the pointy end. No federal opposition leader has had it so easy since 1941, when Labor's John Curtin gained government after the collapse of the Menzies-Fadden wartime minority Tories. And no opposition leader has so little deserved such good fortune.