I've just surfaced from a day or so setting up the home office in Adelaide to check out what's been happening in politics. Has there been anything of significance, apart from more policies converging and rumors of Labor rats scuttling the inner corridors of power?

What's the point of all the beating up of Rudd by those in Labor during an election? How does that help the media savvy ALP? Surely they need Rudd to help them with their campaign in Queensland, as he is their local boy made good. Isn't Queensland a key to the ALP winning the election? Isn't the ALP especially vulnerable in Queensland?

What is important in the long run is dead hand of the NSW Right in the form of Senator Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar, the ALP national secretary. As Deborah Snow highlights the consequences of their being hooked on panicky politics driven by focus-group research are far reaching.

At Inside Story Norman Abjorensen comments on what has become increasingly obvious--- the election is about the unaligned voters in marginal electorates and has little to do with a conversation with the vast majority of us. It appears to be about the marginal seats in South East Queensland and western Sydney.

Abjorensen comments:

this focus on unaligned voters hasn’t translated into an attempt by the major parties to convince more of us to buy their goods. It’s more a case of strategists identifying which particular voters in a handful of key electorates need to be persuaded to change or to repeat their vote from the last election. Instead of a national conversation on the big issues in which we can all take part, we have a series of private chats, informed via focus groups and local polling, that effectively exclude the vast majority of the population.

I have pretty much tuned out from the over-scripted and staged current election campaign, apart from listening to the headlines. I find it mind numbing in terms of its slogans and talking points of stopping the boats, end the waste, the Liberals obsession with deficits and debit, Labor's attempts at greenwash and the debate on population policy. Both sides are driven by their party polling research and that is essentially the same.

Bob Brown should have been a participant in the leaders debate. The Greens are in government in Tasmania and the ACT and they have something to offer on climate change that goes beyond the 'not yet.'

When are the two major parties going to realize that there is a now third force in Australian politics, which will soon exercise its balance of power through the Senate? Underneath all the waffle of the staged sound bites of safety first the political ground is shifting. We are moving beyond the two-party model.

The huge cache of secret US military files about the conflict in Afghanistan obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history.

The Afghan War Diary is a compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related details.

The Afghan War Logs reveals how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency. Pakistan is an ally of America.

Australia may soon follow in the footsteps of other international markets with a 'cash for clunkers' program dubbed Cleaner Car Rebate, offering a $2000 boost to new car buyers trading in their old car.The ultimate aim is getting around 200,000 old vehicles off the nation's roads, and the program will offer a $2000 rebate on cars built before 1995. The rebate is part of a plan to cut vehicle emissions by one million tonnes, with mandatory emissions regulations to be introduced for new cars from 2015.

This is an excellent idea, as Australians own a lot of old motor cars, and those old cars guzzle a lot of petrol and they emit a lot of pollution. So how is this rebate to be paid for, given Labor's lean budget commitment? It is an expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and it could be a subsidy for new 4 wheel drives.

'Cash for clunkers' will be funded by redirecting funds from the programs set up to increase the use of solar power and renewable energy, of course. Why isn't the money coming out of the subsidies to the polluting industries instead? These subsidies keep the cost of fossil fuel energy artificially low and make it harder for renewable energy to compete. They distort energy markets, encourage greater use of fossil fuels, create higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions and improve the profitability of energy companies that produce or use fossil fuels.

Electricity generation is the largest source of Australia’s internal greenhouse gas emissions, because of the high percentage of coal in the energy mix. It is also the easiest to transform to renewable energy.

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority has delayed the release of its science-based report on future water allocations in the basin until after the election.

Irrigators --especially Big Ag--- are gearing up to fight the deep cuts they suspect will be made to their water allocations by questioning the independence of the authority and challenging the legitimacy of the basin plan when it is finally released. The delay helps the ALP avoid the backlash from irrigators, Big Ag and the Coalition attack over water cuts. The Nationals oppose any cuts in water rights, they are antagonistic to the Authority's charter emphasis the environment as well as agriculture and rural communities, and are hostile to efforts to return more water to the environment.

BigAg is not that interested in reforming agriculture----it is a subsidised industrial agriculture is an agricbusiness built around a chemically a saturated, water guzzling, biotech, export orientated agriculture that has little time for sustainable agriculture, organic farming or farmers markets. The latter is the province of small local farmers who are struggling to make ends meet.

In "Labor's Fatal Flaws" in Friday's 'Review' section in the AFR Mark Latham, the former leader of the ALP, says that the fatal flaw of federal Labor today is that the now policy-lite ALP is controlled by the factions, who understand politics in terms of leadership popularity and polling numbers, rather than good public policy.

This is an argument that I have a lot of sympathy with, and it goes some way to explaining the current policy-lite approach of Gillard Labor, which is run by the 'whatever it takes' NSW Right.

Their political strategy is to back away from any policy reform that is too unpopular or too risky with western Sydney. Western Sydney is their touchstone. It stands for the aspirational outer suburbia Australia, which is the real Australia.

The ALP is camouflaging Gillard's retreat on climate change with its citizens assembly to forge a national consensus on action on climate change and advisory panel of scientists to help inform its deliberations. I though t that parliament in a liberal democracy was the citizens' assembly. Does Gillard mean a big focus group?

Oh, Gillard also recommits Labor to carbon trading, and pledges that it will be introduced only when "the Australian economy is ready and when the Australian people are ready". That's in never never land.

What we have from the ALP is a poll-driven retreat covered by a public relations exercise designed to head off new versions of the opposition's "great, big, new tax on everything" campaign.The tougher emissions standards that will be implemented to ensure energy generation is "cleaner and greener"---standards that would ban the building of new "dirty" power stations ----do not apply to the 15 coal-fired power stations already on the drawing board in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia.

The cash strapped ABC, is finally introducing a 24 hour news channel. It starts tonight and shifts to digital TV (HD). It is another example of how broadcasters have had to change and modernise to meet the fast-evolving demands of readers and advertisers.The national broadcaster has been dragging its feet on this, probably because it has lacked the resources and is over stretched.

Better late than never, given that they have the content and the charter. It is another necessary step into the digital age or economy. This is a media economy, in which the way that we use the internet, the mobile phone and iPad makes the half hour 7 pm News followed by the 7.30 Report an anachronism left over from the industrial age. The new digital platforms mean that we can follow a political crisis in real time on free-to-air and have access to more state based news.

Is this going to be more churnalism, regurgitation of press releases from within the State Circle beltway and journalists talking to other journalists endlessly repeated? The news now just bubbles along on the screens in airports, shopping malls, bus stations and squares so that we have chattering walls. The flow of news is now so incessant that an apathy towards the consumption of news is emerging, because the ratio of filler news to real news in the 24 hours news cycle is increasing.

If election campaigns are exercises in marketing then the frame of the marketing in which the content messages are then poured to persuade us to vote for a particular party are undercut by a haunting differance or the trace of the past.

Workchoices for the Coalition is an obvious example. It is a spectre--something that is gone, or dead, but that refuses to be altogether absent; something that is not here, not now, but that continues to stain or contaminate or affect or impinge upon the here and now. Workchoices creepily returns at the very heart of its supposed absence like a zombie arising from its grave:

Hauntology means that the present exists only with respect to the past, and that society after the end of history begin to orient itself towards the "ghost" of the past.The ghost in the sustainable population debate that has emerged from the focus groups is the Whitlam Government in the 1970s, with its emphasis on urban infrastructure and liveable cities.

I emphasis emerging from the focus groups because no way of tackling unliveable cities has been put on the table. There is noting about continual urban expansion into good farmland; nothing about better public transport; nothing about rolling back the car etc. All we have is soothing words

The idea that the state can play a significant role in its citizens’ lives without imperiling their liberties is a core tenet of social democracy that the ALP has defended, and often breached. 'Defend' is a key word here.

The ALP is on the defensive ---preserving the institutions, legislation, services and rights that we have inherited from the 20th-century reform, most notably the welfare state which helped to civilise capitalism. It does by deploying a politics of fear. Defend is a key word because in the context of climate change traditional social democracy looks to have exhausted itself.

In this excerpt in the New York Review of Books from his Ill Fares the Land Tony Judt says:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The cultural war run by The Australian in its partisan fashion over the last decade look as if it has run out of puff. This has been a culture war against Aboriginal self-determination, multiculturalism, postmodernism in education, the non-nuclear family and the environmental movement.

Maybe Mitchell and co think that, as conservatism is alive and well and thriving, they can just leave it to their odd commentator--such as David Burchell--- to pursue. To give credit where credit is due Burchell endeavors to do his best in fulfilling Murdoch's job requirements. The trouble is Burchell's best is not very good.

In his latest op-ed on the election ---Underwhelming war of words could get tedious ---he continues to play off healthy suburban and provincial Australians against the effete (or sickly ) inner city professionals in the classical culture wars style.

In the outer-urban and provincial Australia in which I live, there are hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of people whose tenor of life has not altered to any remarkable degree since their parents' days. They treasure their ageing V8 utes and winter dinners of fibrous roast beef served with Yorkshire pudding. They know in their hearts that Australia is God's own country, even if they've never left its shores. They still fondly imagine a trade apprenticeship to be a passport to a solid 50 years of the good life, in a cosy life-niche. And they nurture the comfortable conviction that just about everybody else in the country - aside from a few mildly amusing egg-heads who drive through their towns in Audis, Saabs and Subarus - feels more or less the same.

Joy Lo Dico at Prospect says that if we value good journalism, then we pay for it. According to Lo Dico that is Murdoch's challenge to internet users and consumers of news. The context is that our local and regional papers are withering away; regional television and radio news is hopelessly inadequate and our national papers are making losses that probably cannot be sustained for much longer. Hence Murdoch's paywall.

I have no problem with the general principle. However, it is not a simple either or: paying for news in opposition to the wider web ethos of “free”--- the idea that the internet should be an Eden where knowledge can be exchanged without a price attached.

My problems emerge with Murdoch's practice. He does not deliver good journalism, or to put it in market terms, a quality product. For instance, what is offered in Australian is partisan journalism of a conservative nature that is directed at undermining a Labor government. Why should I pay for that, even from The Australian, even if it is Australia's only national newspaper?

As expected Julia Gillard has called the "game on" election-- for 21 August. For those interested here is a list of policy issues that are in play. Both major parties are light on policy say The Greens. I agree. Both are in retreat because of panic about reform.

Will Abbott make it to the centre of the electorate? Will Labor be able to hang on to its slender lead? Queensland is important as it contains a fifth of the country’s seats, it is volatile and has more than its share of marginal electorates.

Julia Gillard's speech to the National Press Club was designed to show Gillard's record as a reformer in education and industrial relations and to point to the future reforms. I found it disappointing in understanding what "moving forward" slogan stands for policy wise. Moving forward to where?

Most of the Canberra Press Gallery commentary is about the Laurie Oaks bomb (based on a leak from Rudd) that reminds us of the nature of Australian politics.

In her speech Gillard says that the upcoming campaign will have strong elements of ‘clean' and ‘green' but above all else it will be very lean. So how will moving forward to clean and green be delivered, given that Gillard says that the context of heightened global uncertainty caused by the global financial crisis time for prudent and careful economic management. She adds:

In the 1980s and 1990s, Labor Governments led economic reform by recognising that in changing global conditions, only an open, market-driven economy could prosper. That meant floating the dollar, reducing tariffs, ensuring wage restraint and implementing sweeping competition policy reforms. But as conditions change again, we need more than economic stability to ensure future prosperity. We need active reforms to improve Australia's ability to compete, to make sure that all our assets are utilised productively, and to make the most of our value-adding capacity.

Jonathan Holmes writes perceptively about current journalism--as illustrated by his he said she said journalism article. In his latest Balance the scales column at The Drum he says that ABC journalists will:

be trying to implement the managing director's recent exhortation to his staff: It is a legitimate role firmly and impartially to scrutinise the records and the promises of those who want elective office at the time they are directly seeking the electors' nod. That's more easily said than done...An ABC journalist who, in a Federal Election campaign, decides to scrutinise the claims that politicians make, and especially a journalist who reports that one side is making factually justifiable statements, and the other is not, is laying themselves wide open. For however carefully researched, and objectively presented, stories like that will be accused of being 'unbalanced'; and a large number of viewers or listeners or readers, as well, of course, as the opposing party, will undoubtedly blame the supposed political bias of the individual journalist, or the program, or the ABC as a whole.

Marcia Angellm, the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, has an article in the Boston Review on BIg Pharma and academic medicine. It is part of a series of articles or a forum run by the Boston Review on the impact of the pharmaceutical industry on medical training and science, and the responsibilities of physicians.

Angellm's argument is that financial conflicts of interest are a serious impediment to good medical research, education, and clinical practice. She says:

Over the past two or three decades....academia and industry have become deeply intertwined. Moreover, these links, though quite recent, are now largely accepted as inherent in medical research. So what’s wrong with that? Isn’t this just the sort of collaboration that leads to the development of important new medical treatments?

Increasingly, industry is setting the research agenda in academic centers, and that agenda has more to do with industry’s mission than with the mission of the academy. Researchers and their institutions are focusing too much on targeted, applied research, mainly drug development, and not enough on non-targeted, basic research into the causes, mechanisms, and prevention of disease.

I've always been puzzled by the way that the Catholic and Anglican Church sets its face against modernity even though, as an institution, it is a part of the process of modernity. One could even talk in terms of Catholicism's "cold war with modernity" --a Catholic anti-modernism.

By modernity I mean the objective transformation of the social fabric unleashed by the advent of the capitalist world market which tears down feudal and ancestral limitations on a global scale, and psychologically the enlargement of life chances through the gradual freeing from fixed status hierarchies. Chronologically, this covers the period from the mid nineteenth century accelerating to the present and it gives rise to T a social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form.

Most welcome this process as it means greater individual freedom. Not so the Christian Church. I should say that the Christian Church (Catholic and Anglican) tears itself into halves over the way that the movement of history in modernity challenges its fixed status hierarchies over secularism, freedom and the declining influence of Christianity in the West.

It is to the credit of the ALP that, despite its stubbornness to a mandatory internet filter, it is still resolutely committed to building the National Broadband Network (NBN), one of Australia's biggest infrastructure projects.

The stated aim is to provide universal broadband access to all Australians, and deliver broadband services over optical fibre to 90% of all premises at a high-speed data rate of 100 Mb/s.The other 10% will be provided by wireless and satellite. It is a mark against the Coalition's negative strategy that they lack the vision to see that this kind of nation building infrastructure project will enable Australia to become an information/knowledge society. The Coalition does appear to be backward looking on the idea of a broadband enabled society.

The twenty-first century’s official image of the internet, like the nineteenth century’s image of the city, is always a picture of light and shadows. The case in favour of spending money on broadband and the good things must then be coupled with the appearance of decisive action dealing with the nasty things. What gets lost, and needs to be argued for is a digital understanding of fair use.

The energy challenge facing Australia and the rest of the world is ultimately one of environmental, geopolitical, and resource sustainability. Copenhagen failed, even though the risks of climate change become more visible, increasing numbers of people have come to recognize that the longer we hesitate, the more expensive the problem becomes.

Dealing with climate change is dismissed by those opposed to shifting from a fossil fuel economy to a low carbon one as anti-growth, when it is the only viable growth strategy. Australia hesitates to make the shift. So does the Gillard Government, as it keeps lurching to the right in order to keep itself competitive with the Liberals, making mere gestures to the Left in the process.

The political reality here is that the ALP is losing its social base as its policy agenda fades to blue grey, and the policy differences between Liberal and Labor become minimal under pressure from its NSW factional bosses. Sustainability is one of the casualties.

As Daniel Gros points out at Project Syndicate Europe continues to constitute the epicenter of Act II of the global financial crisis, which has now mutated into a sovereign-debt crisis within the eurozone. The distressed economies of Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, have been and are, in the sights of international financial markets.

The problems that underlie the crisis (the precarious state of Greek public finances and that of the Spanish real estate sector) have not been solved. Secondly, EU’s banking system is weakly capitalized that it cannot take any losses, while also being so interconnected that problems in one country quickly put the entire system at risk.

George Soros, in The Crisis & the Euro at The New York Review of Books, says that getting the European economy on a new, better course after the global financial crisis is running into difficulties:

The situation is eerily reminiscent of the 1930s. Doubts about sovereign credit are forcing reductions in budget deficits at a time when the banking system and the economy may not be strong enough to do without fiscal and monetary stimulus. Keynes taught us that budget deficits are essential for countercyclical policies in times of deflation, yet governments everywhere feel compelled to reduce them under pressure from the financial markets. Coming at a time when the Chinese authorities have also put on the brakes, this is liable to push the global economy into a slowdown or possibly a double dip. Europe, which weathered the first phase of the financial crisis relatively well, is now in the forefront of causing the downward pressure because of the problems connected with the common currency.

The inner city professional is a fixture of the political landscape, especially for those right wing conservatives and populists --eg., those in The Australian--- who dismiss this new class as cosmopolitan elitists disconnected from the common sense and working lives of the ordinary battling Australians who are the salt of the earth.

If we step behind this stereotypical thinking of the us versus them" cultural conflicts of the cultural wars, which divide up the population into warring tribes that then demonize each other, then what do we find?

One answer is this review of Dalton Conley's "Elsewhere, USA. This text refers to a class of people in fast capitalism who live their lives buffeted by the many streams of information coming to them via their BlackBerries (iPhones?) and laptops, where the old boundaries of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are shattered, and where work and leisure combined, and the e new ‘portable office’ is the norm. This is the lifestyle of white collar professionals employed in the knowledge and information economy at the beginning of the 21st century.

This is a completely different world to that of breadwinner husbands and breadmaker wives—as depicted in the television series Mad Men, which successfully dispels the conservative myth of the 1950s suburban picket fence as a golden age. It is one where all the spheres – home, work, social life – have collapsed into each other.

I've noticed that Julie Gillard, our new fang dangle PM, has been doing a bit of policy housekeeping in Canberra this last week or so --cleaning up the "dirty" issues that have been hurting federal Labor in the electorate, such as the mining tax and asylum seekers. The leaks say that the global warming issue will be cleaned up too--pushed under the carpet?

Get these slow burns off the agenda and the ALP sails home to a famous victory. Clever politics says the Canberra Press Gallery. The ALP was justified in removing a badly performing Rudd.

The trajectory of this kind of housekeeping is a marked shift to the Right: appease the multinational miners on the resources tax; appease the angry right wing populists on asylum seekers; and doing a bit of green wash on climate change (its real folks) to keep the ALP looking credible--- ie., not looking as if its been well and truely captured by the coal industry.

If you recall the central reason why the US has invaded Afghanistan is to knock out Al Qaeda. Recall that the then Taliban regime provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda, and were Afghanistan to allow Al Qaeda to come back into Afghanistan, that clearly gives Al Qaeda a freedom of movement. Remember Bali?, says a government minister. So we have the justification for the never ending War on Terror against Islam.

In this interview Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Leiter says that:

in Afghanistan, you have a certain number, a relatively small number, 50 to 100. I think we have in Pakistan a larger number. [In Pakistan there are] Upwards—more than 300, I would say. And I think the key has been not going after every foot soldier—although that can be very important. … but more critically … trying to decimate Al Qaeda’s leadership ranks. I think we’ve had a lot of success there.

500 people folks and that's from the horses mouth. No wonder John Faulkner tossed it in as Minister of Defence and returned to the back bench. The gap between the problem and the military response is so great that not even a man as loyal to the Labor Party as Faulkner could stomach the spin required to cover the yawning gap.

Paul Kelly is considered the doyen of the Canberra Press Gallery. He has the track record to justify speaking to us from his Olympian heights about the shape of Australia, its history, problems and future. Kelly writes his op-eds and we all read them for the pearls of wisdom and nuggets of insight. He offers PM's advice about how best to govern the country, and they listen attentively as he one of News Ltd's quality journalists that we should be willing to pay big bucks to read.

Or so Murdoch would like us to believe. Should we? Well, Kelly has just written his usual penetrating article on the population issue that offers free advice to the PM. The best way to understand the issues is in terms of whether one should plan to throttle back economic growth in the cause of environmental restraint and adds:

The policy problem is obvious: the need for better integration between the immigration program and social, transport, environmental and infrastructure provision, much of which involves state governments. This is where Australia must lift its planning and governance.

So we are back to the Pacific Solution to asylum seekers with the Gillard Government, only it is not a Pacific Solution ---it is a regional processing centre in East Timor. From where I stand the effect is the same-- to send asylum claimants to a handy and none-too-appealing offshore destination to await processing.

The appeal to the xenophobic voters in marginal seats in western Sydney and elsewhere, who are demanding a hard line on those asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat, is the same as Howard's. Apparently the public or political debate on asylum seekers is somehow being constrained by political correctness that is equated with self-censorship. Isn't that what Howard used to say?

Victor Harbor is definitely John Howard's One Nation conservative territory. It's Anglo-Saxon, white and very Christian in a fundamentalist sense--in the sense that the evangelical Christians believe that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs, talk a lot about Intelligent Design, are anti-science and want their creationism taught in classrooms. They are frightened by economic insecurity, threats to moral purity and the gradual disappearance of a national white Christian culture. They want to restoring the nation to some moment when the country was white and safe and to protect the family from “worldly dangers.”

I'm on holidays at Victor Harbor and doing some photography. So posting will be light for this week.

Australia appears to be insulated from what is happening in Europe: call for cutbacks in public spending, savage budget cuts in response to the big budget deficits run up by government to prevent a recession (or is it a depression?) and saving the big banks from the global financial crisis they caused.

We have the new austerity voices in Australia--eg., the Coalition and News Ltd--but the mining boom is cushioning us, and keeping the neo-liberal slashers and burners at bay. If Europe is shrinking its economy, then Australia has the option of growing its way out of the budget deficit problem.

The UK, for instance, is facing future cuts to public spending up to 40% according to the Treasury.

Alan Greenspan in devoting two pages in the 531 pages of his memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, to the climate issue, illustrates the neoliberal minimization of the issue. What needs to be defended is the free-market ideology that rejects strong regulation of the economy.

His first tactic is minimization of the issue. He has “little doubt” that climate change is real and human induced (p. 454). But he offers merely one proposal to address the issue: an increase in the gasoline tax to protect America’s energy “security”.

There is no commitment about the need for state investments and subsidies to recast the infrastructure of consumption in the zones of transportation, housing, and power production; no urgency to cooperate with other states and international organizations to protect the earth’s forest and ocean systems, though both are key absorbers of carbon dioxide. No exploration of how changes on these fronts could also empower constituencies who seek to foster a positive and timely austerity of material desire.

In Against counterinsurgency in Afghanistan in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Hugh Gusterton says that the US's counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is failing because it is an inherently flawed project. He says:

historically, counterinsurgency campaigns have almost always failed. This is especially so when the counterinsurgents are foreign troops fighting on the insurgents' territory. The U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam failed. The Soviet counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan failed (as did the British one about a century earlier). The British counterinsurgency campaigns in Northern Ireland and Kenya failed. The white Rhodesians' counterinsurgency campaign against black guerrillas failed. And the French counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria failed--although that has not stopped the U.S. military from building their current doctrine around the theories of David Galula, one of the leaders of that failed campaign. A rare example of success is the recent Sri Lankan campaign against the Tamil Tigers, but success was achieved by a government on its own territory following a military strategy of exterminist ferocity. Surely the U.S. does not want to go down that path, does it?

David Bromwich in his review in the New York Review of Books of Karl Rove's Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight quotes Rove and then comments:

“To be successful,” he [Rove] explains, “an attack must be perceived as both fair and relevant, backed with credible evidence, and launched at the right time.” The half-truth here is “credible evidence.” Rove means evidence that only appears credible, evidence that sprays fast enough and drips far enough to resist removal from the popular mind even when the whole truth comes out later on.

The miners evidence--about the collapse of mining and sovereign risk--- only appeared credible, but it sprayed fast enough and dripped far enough to resist removal from the popular mind even when the whole truth comes out later on. There was no sovereign risk.

No doubt the "credible evidence" in conservative political history will barely mention what is left out---the truth of the matter--as they seek to undermine Gillard's political fix that has cut the ground underneath the Coalition's partisan bloodlust and attack on the RSPT.