Lee Atwater. This month saw the 30th anniversary of an event that passed in Australia entirely without mention, for it was on October 5, 1988, that the presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush pulled a TV ad featuring a formerly obscure thug by the name of Willie Horton. A convicted killer, Horton had been granted […]

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They must teach it in journalism schools as a simple, all-purpose standby when you don’t feel like reporting something inconvenient — you know, like the reason power prices are so high or the way in which  flood-level immigration artificially inflates GDP. When conflicterd about covering a real story the solution is simple: just beat up […]

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At National Review, Victor David Hanson writes: … dozens of the careerists and progressive appointees at the Washington FBI, DOJ, CIA, and National Security Council took all sorts of risks to insure a Clinton blowout. They variously sought to warp the FISA court, subvert the Trump campaign, collude with Fusion GPS and its Russian sources, […]

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Arnaud Beltrame: a most unusual Frenchman By now, after years of assiduous preaching in our schools, our parliaments and by taxpayer-supported human rights bodies, all sensitive and caring souls know that stereotypes are wickedly wrong. Thus does everyone now grasp that Melbournians cannot be said to be besotted with AFL, it should not be assumed […]

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It’s funny how you don’t notice things that are supposed to be noticed. Take the labels on wine bottles, for example, which tell you when, where and by which vineyard your meal’s lubricant was made. That relevant information tends to be the only thing we notice when reaching for the corkscrew, the eye skating over […]

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According to the Hansard, the last prime minister before the current one was a certain Malcolm Turnbull, who often spoke of “my government”  and sought to give the impression that he was fully in charge of the seat by the dispatch box where the buck is said to stop. The “Turnbull Liberals” and “Team Turnbull” […]

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For a mob that preaches amity, peaceful co-existence, mutual respect and tolerance, the Greens seem a remarkably intolerant and fractious lot. Melbourne readers in particular will recall the intramural leaking and back-stabbing that surrounded the candidature of Alex Bhathal in the recent Batman byelection, a very ugly business. To the north, there was the snipe-a-thon […]

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Many Quadrant readers have long suspected that your standard-issue climate catastropharian is something of a goose, albeit not when it comes to extracting subsidies and grants from the public purse, a pursuit at which they are very good indeed. Well it seems that impression is wrong. Rather than being metaphoric members of the Anatidae family  […]

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Aboriginal mathematician and aeronautics historian Cindy Berwick. Every Monday evening the Catallaxy Files blog runs a little competition that sees posters predict how many times Q&A compere Tony Jones will interrupt his guests. Last night’s tally  amounted to a mere two interruptions, which represented a record-breaking low but came as no great surprise. The topic, […]

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The sobbing, shrieking sisterhood in action. It can be frustrating to live in Australia, where we have an allegedly conservative government, and watch the genuine reforms being enacted in the US by a president who grasps that paying lip service to the Left brings no dividends. America’s economy is booming as a result, while ours […]

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