Malcolm Turnbull is largely divorced from the Howard era. Coming into parliament only at the 2004 election, Turnbull was not present for the early successes, only the later failures. The intriguing test is where Turnbull takes the party. How will he reinterpret Liberal beliefs? How will he unite the conservative and liberal traditions in the one party?
Senator McCain lied first, in a Spanish-language ad that accused Senator Obama of helping to kill immigration reform last year, by voting for amendments that supposedly doomed a bipartisan bill. Mr. Obama’s retaliatory ad, also in Spanish, was just as fraudulent. The country needs to hear better answers, stated clearly and forthrightly.
Sarah Palin’s good looks are all very well if you are single and your dating pool consists only of vice-presidential candidates. But for the rest of us the question we’d ask is less likely to be “are you lonesome tonight?” and more likely to be “what are you going to do about this flailing economy? Iraq? Pakistan? Afghanistan? The health system?”
Brendan Nelson lost his last hope of remaining leader through two tactical decisions. One was threatening to purge his front bench. In the party meeting, Nelson denounced destabilisers and promised retribution Several Liberals who might have voted for him, even people Nelson did not necessarily have in mind, were now fearful.
Some Liberal MPs this week pointed to Labor’s Crean leadership experience and say they just wanted to “end the agony”. Some who changed their support from the original safe option of Brendan Nelson as leader said they did so at the last minute because they realised a vote in his favour now would only be tested again in a month or two.
Nobody had warned the Ohio crowd that John McCain had just morphed into a new persona — a raging populist demanding more regulation of the nation’s financial system. Unfortunately McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them.
The commonly held view among political junkies like myself is that the racy bits of ‘The Costello Memoirs’ have already been published in the papers. John Howard did it in the library with the candlestick. So why bother shelling out $55 to read what amounts to 380 pages of filler?
The Workplace Relations Minister will not readily admit it, but a fair slab of the Howard Government’s Work Choices regime will remain: things such as restrictions on the content of union bargaining claims, no industry-wide strikes and no arbitration of union wage claims except in exceptional circumstances.
The American economy is stressed to the breaking point by fundamental problems — in housing, finance, credit, employment, health care and the federal budget. And as a result, American workers have taken a beating. John McCain lavished praise on workers, but ignored their problems. That is the real insult.
Congress’s investigation of the Justice Department is of the utmost importance. It now seems clear that the department, under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, operated as a partisan political actor, using its prosecutorial authority to help the party in power win elections. That was a grave abuse, which undermined American democracy.