Addressing a libertarian think-tank in Perth last July, the British climate change sceptic Christopher Monckton urged Australians to create a home-grown version of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. The "super-rich", he said, should invest in the media, install like-minded commentators and give the country "a proper dose of free-market thinking".

Bernard Keane is absolutely correct in his assertion that Parliament has been shamed over its failure to deal constructively & effectively with the asylum-seeker issue (‘Substituting treaties for hard thinking on asylum seekers’) & an ocean of phoney tears, cynically shed for the benefit of the media, won’t change that.

from Crikey .....

Coalition MPs will probably utter something like "yesterday was a grim day on our borders" as they face the press today.

They'll say the Coalition had hoped that it could "end the evil people trade and vote for a policy solution" but that Julia Gillard "drove the Parliament back into deadlock when she had the opportunity to reach a genuine consensus and enable us to move forward".

They'll say the deal that passed the House of Representatives last night - and will almost certainly be defeated in the Senate today - is a dud (or words to that effect). "It compromises our standards and it will not stop the boats," someone from the opposition will exclaim.

Tony Blair has said he would like another stint as prime minister, but accepts it is unlikely to happen.

Mr Blair said he did not want to leave office when he quit in 2007, but feared he would spark a "very bloody battle" inside Labour if he tried to resist pressure to go.

He praised current Labour leader Ed Miliband's "sensible" decision to keep the party in the centre ground.

And he warned that it was wrong to believe that the fall-out from the financial crisis meant Labour should swing to the left and drop its links with business.

from Crikey ....

Ashby is no Grech moment ... unless you're Mal Brough

Crikey Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

JAMES ASHBY, LIBERAL NATIONAL PARTY, MAL BROUGH, PETER SLIPPER

The Foreign Office revealed last night that it would be challenging the Israelis over their treatment of Palestinian children after a report by a delegation of senior British lawyers revealed unconscionable practices, such as hooding and the use of leg irons.

In a traditional cowboy movie, we know what to do: we look for the guy wearing the white hat to be sure who to cheer, and for the one wearing the black hat to know who deserves to die, preferably gruesomely, before the credits roll. If Hollywood learnt early to play on these most tribal of emotions, do we doubt that Washington's political script-writers are any less sophisticated? Western military intervention is exactly what factional nations in the Middle East and North Africa do not need. (AFP/Timothy A. Clary)

While many people are led to believe that US support for Israel is driven by the American establishment and U.S. national interests, the facts don't support this theory. The reality is that for decades U.S. experts opposed Israel and its founding movement. They were simply outmaneuvered and eventually replaced.­

Apart from the rotten government - or more likely because of the rotten government - the root of our troubles is what we are told is the two-speed economy. Australians west of Alice Springs and north of Toowoomba are whooping it up in their McMansions and their Ferraris while the rest of us are battling to pay off the eight-year-old Camry. The latest slug, sky-rocketing gas and electricity prices, will have us huddled for warmth around the light of a guttering candle.

Five weeks ago Grace Yeats was a normal, happy child.

The Mail on Sunday can today reveal devastating new claims of abuse by British soldiers carried out at a secret network of illegal prisons in the Iraqi desert.

"If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people he gives it to."

Dorothy Parker