saturday night's alright for fighting

The Courier Mail today has a feature on John and Janette Howard at home. At Kirribilli, of course, thta's home. You need to keep the sick bag close by (much as you did with the piece on Kevin07 in the Australian colour mag a few weeks ago), but it does allow some telling insights.

The PM and spouse are asked about whether they have politics-free times. And the answer, as if you didn't expect it, is "no, never".

Which to my mind tells us why and how Howard has given us the government we had to have. His whole life is politics, we wanted to be PM since he was 10 (what 10 year old has any idea about the job and what he would do with it?) and he sees the whole world through the political lens. He has all the answers about how we should live, and it's only those pesky remnant bits of democracy that prevent him from ramming the whole kit and kaboodle down our throats.

So, when asked about the death of Peter Andren, he makes a point about how well Andren did to be elected to the House of Representatives as an Independent. Not about what Andren represented or what he did. Rudd, after a short period of looking like a rabbit in the spotlights (I can see why people think he's plastic, it was like he was actually searching for what to say), talked about how Andren was a man of principle. Indeed. Such an answer should have come without a second thought, you'd reckon.

And Janette has a bit of whinge about Kirribilli: if a large ship passes too closely, the doors rattle. There's a simple solution for that, m'dear - live in Canberra at the Lodge, where you're supposed to be. It'd also save us taxpayers a few shekels.

No Saturday night should be without a decent fright, so to deliver on that we point you to Your New Democracy's short piece of the continuing triumph of faith over reason in the US. You can click through a couple of links and get something like this:

"Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?"

Fortunately we don't have quite that level of undermining the Reason Project in Australia - not yet anyway.

Here's something sort of different, just to cheer you up after that apocalytic vision - Jeremy Clarkson drives the Peel P50 - no, I hadn't heard of it either. Via The Spectacularly Obtuse Blog, so wonderfully named and to my mind what the intertubes are all about. How or why someone spends time looking for this sort of stuff is utterly bewildering, but I'm very glad they do.