One Crowded Hour...

*



Now should you expect to see something that you hadn't seen
In somebody you'd known since you were sixteen;
if love is a bolt from the blue, then what is that bolt but a glorified screw?
and that doesn't hold nothing together
Far from these nonsense bars and their nowhere music it's making me sick
And I know it's making you sick
There's nothing there, it's like eating air
It's like drinking gin with nothing else in
And that doesn't hold me together.

But for one crowded hour, you were the only one in the room
And I sailed around all those bumps in the night to your beacon in the gloom
I thought I had found my golden September in the middle of that purple June
But one crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin

Augie March



The Australian Open is slowly winding to an end. One Crowded Hour. You Were The Only Person in the room. And everything dissembled. Everything fell apart. He was brought together and brought apart; and if only these final days weren't so cruel. He misted up at the very foot. His daughter was packing up her bags for the last time. The children were off into their own lives. Everything had been centred around a single duty, to protect, to nurture. The children came and he went; in a sense. I didn't want to be an old, childless queen sitting on a bar stool, he said, And yet he went back to that bar, the Oxford Tavern, where he used to get blindingly drunk after work, knowing when he started on the bourbon and cokes that soon enough he would remember nothing; soon enough would be the click in his head on the dance floor, and all would disappear.

It was this union with the world, this abnegation of the self, a total loss, that he so repeatedly sought. I was well known in my profession, even admired to a certain degree, but it never brought me happiness, he said. Trying to concoct a story out of nothing but disorganised strands; bits and pieces of another life. In reality nothing but a drunken union with the forces of the dark. He would crawl home to his apartment, but it meant nothing. Their life was meant to be a bold adventure; the personal the political, brave, pioneering, a stroke for a better world. Instead they were just another group of young, prematurely old hasbeens, marking time, trying too hard, phony as. And so he sat in that bar and he drank and he drank; watching the traffic stream by into the night, watching the day turn blind and the barmen become increasingly besieged.

What's this, his friend asked, replaying the old joke as he rubbed his fingers together: the smallest joint in the world, rolled just for you. Another round. Of drinks and gossip. Once again they replayed the recent drama, when his friend had smothered his lover to death with a pillow; all to avoid the final stages of AIDS. Outside the office workers streamed by on their way home to the eastern suburbs; their trite lives and their trite concerns. He couldn't have been more awkward. He had already had two double bourbon and cokes before he wrote up that day's stories for the following day's paper; then he had had a couple of quick schooners which turned into several; and now he was on his way to a darker night. Surely all this meant something? Surely this marathon of self destruction had its own nobility of purpose?

But of course that wasn't the case. He didn't know until he had been shell shocked into an altered consciousness what was actually happening. He didn't realise that he was on the decline. He didn't realise there was another way of being. He didn't realise that not everyone drank like him; or to be more accurate, he didn't realise the consequences of what he was doing to himself. Much like a climb up Mt Everest, he thought of it all as a noble enterprise, having swallowed whole the the lyrical possession of the dispossessed, the noble struggle, the adventure. That this was a journey he was taking on the behalf of others. That to experience this journey, to record it, to document the fellow travellers he met along the way, was in itself the truest, most sincere, most creative thing he could do.

These delusions, acquired through the ether, through the breathing air, through the zeitgeist of the times, may have first formed in lightning moments of youthful camaraderie and shared joys, but solidified into dangerous falsehoods over years. Years he had always assumed would lead into greatness, never enjoying the moment, always looking to the future. William Burroughs. Silver fish boys ejaculating on silver streams. All these enthusiasms, these hallucinations, so hard fought, so heavily manipulated, were meant to be part of a noble history, but instead became a savage falsehood, hiding in the shadows, a wounded dog. Justine Hennana moves into the finals. Andrew Murray in the semi-finals. Nations barracking their stars. The kids waving goodbye.

He didn't know how to make this any difference. The pack mentality was as strong as ever. If the world didn't agree they weren't prepared to utter the thought. Independence was not admired. Independent thought was little more than a joke. Cruel to be kind, that's what he thought, but instead he ordered another double bourbon. The decline took him by surprise. He could see the pity in his visitor's eyes. The malignant nature of the air, the atmosphere, the fabric of things, was everywhere, fighting through the gluey air. He hadn't realised there was any other way of being. That there was any alternative. And, increasingly drunk, he had no idea there was any alternative. Wake up, smell the roses, someone said as he wretched into the gutter. You alright mate, someone asked. He grunted as he looked up. He would never be alright. He had been born fundamentally deformed; and nothing could change that.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article7004691.ece

Mahinda Rajapaksa, the incumbent President of Sri Lanka, was declared the winner of a presidential election today even as his main challenger, surrounded by troops in a luxury hotel, contested the results and accused the Government of trying to have him assassinated.

Mr Rajapaksa, who took power in 2005 and presided over the defeat of the Tamil Tiger rebels in May, won 57.8 per cent of 10.4 million votes in the first peacetime presidential poll in almost three decades, according to the final results.

General Fonseka, the former army chief who led the campaign against the Tigers before falling out with the President and joining the opposition, won 40.2 per cent of the vote on the Indian Ocean island.

"I announce that Mahinda Rajapaksa has won this presidential election," Dayananda Dissanayake, the independent Elections Commissioner, told reporters as the President’s supporters cheered and let off firecrackers in the streets.

The emphatic result dashed opposition hopes that General Fonseka could split the vote of the ethnic Sinhalese majority and win enough support from minority Tamils and Muslims to unseat Mr Rajapaksa.

It came amid high melodrama in Colombo, the seaside capital, with heavily armed soldiers surrounding the Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel, where the General and his team are staying, since the early hours of the morning.

Even as the results were being announced, General Fonseka told reporters in the hotel that he rejected them and had sent a letter to Mr Dissanayake asking him to nullify the election because of vote-rigging and abuse of government resources.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/world_agenda/article7001488.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=6986833

Angela Merkel, once billed as a kind of Iron Lady, has become the Invisible Chancellor. Even Germans who are usually quite happy to have a non-intrusive, modest head of government, are astonished. There is trouble brewing at home and abroad but the leader of Europe's biggest economy is distinguished by her absence.

One of her coalition partners, the Bavarian Christian Social Union, is bracing for embarrassing revelations from the trial of an arms dealer: he is expected to spill the beans about how illicit funds flowed into party coffers. Ms Merkel’s other coalition partner, the Free Democrats, are under fire for cutting value-added-tax for the hotel trade – and receiving hefty contributions from grateful hoteliers. Clearly party funding reform should be on the government agenda. Equally clearly, Ms Merkel does not intend to touch the issue: it is too dangerous, and she is adept at stepping out of the firing line.

At home, she suddenly looks weak. And abroad, there is a sense that her attention is flagging. The failure of the Copenhagen summit was partly her failure. Nothing much has been heard about the grand re-launch of the France-German relationship. For the past half year Germany has had no policy on Afghanistan. It was waiting to see what President Obama would come up with. Now it is waiting to see what will be demanded of it. That’s not exactly distinguished leadership.

An explanation offered by someone who knows her well is: exhaustion. The twin burden of dealing with the economic crisis and of fighting and winning a general election has left her drained. She loses concentration more quickly than three or four years ago; she is said to be sleeping badly. Ms Merkel took a two week mountain holiday at the outset of last year’s election campaign and this set a pattern of absent or remote leadership. Her Christmas break was unusually long. She was spotted reading a biography of Emil Zatopek, the remarkable Czech long distance runner who despite his oddly clumsy gait managed to win Olympic medals in advanced age. Germans see, in this choice of reading, the signs of a leader searching for her second wind.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/violated-by-hypocrisy/story-e6frf7jo-1225824126491

Violated by hypocrisy

* Jill Singer
* From: Herald Sun
* January 28, 2010 12:00AM

TONY Abbott's hairy-chested stance on female sexual behaviour is a boon for nostalgia buffs.

His latest pronouncements on the value of female virginity (it's a gift, presumably for husbands) place him firmly in the mid-20th century - an era that continues to inspire wistful longing for a simpler life, solid moral values and tailfinned automobiles.

It's an era I've been immersing myself in over the holiday season, courtesy of a boxed DVD set of Mad Men, the hit TV series focusing on 1960s advertising executives and their alpha-male lifestyles.

How it takes you back to that cosy time when a woman's place was in the home, daddy knew best, girls who "did it" were sluts and boys were left blissfully free to "sow their wild oats".

The Mad Monk's views on women and sex dovetail perfectly with those of the Mad Men - as the story goes, women must retain their virginity until they are married, otherwise men will view them as devalued, second-hand or shop-soiled goods.

One might also add that Abbott's tender appreciation of female chastity would sit happily alongside that of an unreconstructed cave-dweller such as, say, Osama bin Laden.

How that heady combination of political leadership and religious worship can facilitate male bonding, transporting them far beyond any constraints of time, culture or reason!

Now that he has nailed female virginity as a commodity that can be exchanged for a wedding ring, Abbott might further plunder the historical archive in his quest to restore respect for it.

If we zip back to the Middle Ages, for example, women were convinced that their virginity was worth dying for.

Lest she be rendered imperfect in God's eyes, a good and godly nun would rather kill herself when threatened with rape than allow herself to be soiled. Now, that's self-respect for you.

If Only, Be Brave

*



The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,

which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.

It rises at one end of the heavens
and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is hidden from its heat.

Psalm 19.



If there was no other cause, then he no longer belonged. He was astonished, disturbed, at once wondering pointless through the back streets weaving from the city to the beach, walking, walking; entirely disengaged. He looked with envy at the well formed lives of those around him. They could sneer, he knew that, there was no love or affection or sense of belonging. He had been betrayed on every level, by the place, by himself, by his own worse angels. Oh cruel, cruel, distance yourself, not just from the complicated plays of the crowded city around him, but from everything, the fabric of things, the wash of coloour that was the day. The song erupted in the cul de sac outside his bedroom window at around 5am: "One crowded hour... You were the only person in the room."

They were all drunk, spilling out from some party. He focussed on things. You can't feel guilty if you haven't done anything to feel guilty about. How short and sweet these evangelists were; the zealots. The sad tired eyes of those who watched his demise. And the group of the young singing in perfect tune with the record: "One crowded hour..." One crowded hour indeed. How strong it had been, the chaos; the marshalling of the forces in order to triumph, the indignity upon indignity heaped upon him by life itself. There were half formed stories. It had all the elements of a good journalistic story - controversy, topicality, narrative structure. The street light was hidden behind a veil of leaves. He kept expecting to see someone he knew, anyone he knew, but the city, chance, was simply not that kind. The poisonous dwarf would forever be.

There was a narrative structure but in the shape of a city, vast, little stories, like fireflies, darting here and there. So much of the public culture was an unadulterated lie; worse now that there were left wing governments at every tier of government, and anyone who dared to disagree, with global warming, with domestic violence propaganda, with the unadulterated virtues of multiculturalism and the terrible, crippling embarrassment of what had once been a proud history. Millionaire left wing media commentators ridiculed the genuine beliefs of the populace as old fashioned, out of date. What was out of date was honesty, truth. There were places in this city where lice and scabies and all form of known disease crawled in the black leather rooms and young men bared their arses to all and sundry, young and old. The vice crawled up across his skin. He was letting go of everything now.

There had to be another story. Everything was known and yet their past, evil, lackadaisical problems, came to dominate everything they did, their every waking moment. He was shocked by what he had seen. And shocked, no less, by the sudden absorption of his narrative back into the past, to be swallowed whole by the city. He wanted to belong to a village, where he could point to a hut and say: I built that. Where he could point to an old woman perched in the doorway, keeping a beagle eye on the children, and say: that is my grandmother, she is my aunt. Instead he could have been a ghost for all the impact he made; barely collecting dust as he moved from one path to another, past houses where he had lived, corners he had waited on.

The street people did not know him, nor did the young office workers spruiked and ready for work. He wanted to tell them a story, a cautionary tale. He wanted to say: these are the lessons to be learnt; be proud, be strong, be ready to fight. There were cul de sacs behind the Cross. There were apartments where he had been decades before. There were stories he had wanted to tell; but now they all merged together and meant nothing. Their import was gone. The Australian Open dominated the airwaves; but it wasn't easy, that was for sure. He could have sighed and been measured; but he knew the property owners banded together and betrayed him, he knew that they whispered behind his back, he knew that his own lack of power, property, prestige was enough to justify their killing him as a mere inconvenience, dismissing the tale he had to tell.

There, there, he felt like saying, pointing up at the bland concrete exterior of Withering Heights aka Gotham City, we used to live there; party there. We saw the future and embraced the past. We were a significant part of the city's destiny, our unique talents, striking personalities, our desire for strength and a future. They had always been about overthrowing the central ground, measuring pleasure and pain, telling stories to the sky. They wanted to be significant, loud and proud. The personal is political went the slogan of the era; minted by feminists at the beginning of their long career of male bashing lies; and all he wanted to do was stand up and tell the truth. To record what had happened here. Away from natural disasters, away from the telltale signs of a purposeful life, a strong gait, head held high, clear eyes; a sparkling smile and a clean wit. He missed them now, decades later, just as he had missed them then, all those years ago, the very events of their lives draped with the melancholy of altered lives.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/25/ethiopian-airlines-crash-lebanon

Investigators were tonight carrying out DNA tests on severely burned bodies recovered from the sea after an Ethiopian Airlines flight carrying 90 people caught fire during a lightning storm and crashed into the Mediterranean minutes after taking off from Beirut.

As darkness fell no survivors had been found in the stormy waters off Lebanon, despite search and rescue efforts by the country's military, UN naval peacekeepers and units from nearby Cyprus who were tonight joined by British and French helicopter teams.

The plane's 83 passengers included 56 Lebanese – two with dual British nationality – 22 Ethiopians and individuals from Canada, Syria, Iraq and Russia, as well as the American-born wife of the French ambassador to Lebanon. By tonight at least 34 bodies had been recovered.

Lebanon's National News Agency tonight confirmed that 57-year-old Afif Karshat was one of two Lebanese with dual British nationality among the casualties.

Lebanon's president, Michel Suleiman, said terrorism was not suspected in the crash of the Boeing 737-800, which was headed for the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. "Sabotage is ruled out as of now," he said. Lebanon's defence minister, Elias Murr, blamed bad weather for the crash. An official investigation has been launched, but the plane's black box has yet to be recovered.

Several eyewitnesses reported hearing an explosion and seeing a ball of flame in the sky just after 2.30am today, during a fierce winter thunderstorm.

"There was huge thunder and it was raining like crazy. The lightning was coming down from the clouds. The electricity had gone out, but I couldn't sleep. Then I heard an explosion," said Hassan Ramadan, a 39-year-old engineering contractor from Khalde, just a few miles from where the plane went down.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/26/2801101.htm?section=world

One of Saddam Hussein's most hated offsiders has been executed for ordering the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Kurds more than 20 years ago.

Ali Hassan al Majid was better known as Chemical Ali for his role in the gassing of at least 5,000 Kurds during the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. Most of those killed were women and children.

His execution was announced shortly after suicide bombers struck the Iraqi capital in a coordinated attack, staging three car bombings aimed at well-known hotels in the city that killed more than 30 people and injured at least 70 more.

Majid had been sentenced to death three times before, but each time his lawyers managed to delay his execution. Now, a week after his fourth sentence, he has been hanged.

Majid was a close cousin of Saddam Hussein.

He had also been previously sentenced to death for war crimes committed during a Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, and the murders of dozens more Shiites in Baghdad and Najaf in 1999.

Bomb blasts

On the same day, at least 36 people have been killed and 71 wounded in three massive car bombings that targeted hotels in Baghdad, in an apparently co-ordinated attack less than six weeks from a general election.

Iraqi and US forces have warned of rising violence in the lead up to the March 7 vote, the second parliamentary ballot since the 2003 US-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein but ushered in a deadly and long-lasting insurgency.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/26/2801092.htm

At least 36 people have been killed and 71 wounded in three massive car bombings that targeted hotels in Baghdad, in an apparently co-ordinated attack less than six weeks from a general election.

Iraqi and US forces have warned of rising violence in the lead up to the March 7 vote, the second parliamentary ballot since the 2003 US-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein but ushered in a deadly and long-lasting insurgency.

The first bomb struck near the Palestine and Sheraton hotels in Abu Nawaz, close to where a giant statue of Saddam was symbolically toppled almost seven years ago, at around 3:30 pm (local time), an interior ministry official said.

The second and third blasts just minutes later targeted the Babylon Hotel in the central district of Karrada and the Hamra hotel in Jadriyah, in the south of the capital, he added.

Iraqi military spokesman in Baghdad Major General Qassim Atta said all three car bombs were suicide attacks.

An interior ministry official said that 36 people had been killed and 71 were wounded.

The first explosion which shook ground miles away from the site of the blast sent plumes of smoke rising hundreds of metres into the air.

Monday's attacks differed from recent high-profile bombings that have become increasingly common in Baghdad in that they targeted hotels rather than government buildings.

The most recent deadly bombings in August, October and December last year occurred at government buildings, including the ministries of finance, foreign affairs, and justice. Those attacks killed nearly 400 people.

US and Iraqi politicians have warned that the election could be a focus for violence.

The Crippled Wings Of Flight

*



When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead -
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.

As music and splendour
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The heart's echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute -
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead seaman's knell.

When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

Its passions will rock thee,
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.

Percy Shelley




He knew he had entered a new period of crisis. Jim Courier commenting on the Australian Open, causing consternation and difficulty across hundreds of thousands of Australian households as they struggled to mute him out while still watching the game and picking up the odd interesting bits. It was a skill, blocking out Courier's voice in the mind while tuning into the others - not to mention the accomplishment of other tasks. The cicadas screached and the Australian Open hummed and murmured, went through peak and trough, the blue of the Melbourne courts a fixture in so many people's lives. At this time of year. As if the passing of years could be measured by past victories. Federer. Of course. Playing Hewett tonight. He isn't, from what he could pick up, certainly in his household, popular amongst teenage girls. Two gorgeous babes, he laughed, the girls dolled up for a party.

These were the final days of an entire cycle of life. It was time to man the barricades against the destructive patterns of the past. To protect himself against himself. If anything could be more tedious. The stereotypical fear. New waves of tourists crowded Campbell Parade, the boulevarde, if you could call it that, along the front of Bondi Beach. The muggy heat interfered with his own mercurial, melting state. Things were collapsing and there was nothing he could do to control them. Everything was being stripped away. He had become an invalid, in need of protection, even from himself. These were dark times when the evil engineers who had populated those institutional corridors ate away into the fabric of his brain.

And in order to survive he was forced to create his own army of evil agents; to fight against the fabric of things; to ensure that good conquered evil, just for once, just once. Courier continues his technical love affairs; today with Davidenko - "he is not afraid to go forth" - while the Australian commentators, such as John Alexander, are virtually mute in comparison; their coverage dignified, restrained, unopinionated and non-self obsessed coverage is lost in the American accented babble. Why does the Australian Open have an American as its most public figurehead? It is just ridiculous. But these things, these idle things, were lost in the summer heat; tragendy in Haiti, Nigeria, far away. Still, it was hard to believe.

If he could have crumpled up and disappeared he would have. It was not possible to be more restrained. He said nothing to no one. He would not, could not communicate. People sensed his reluctance, and rarely bothered to engage. Oh what stupid things people say. It was too painfully cruel. The tennis balls bounced. The world turned on its axis. Postcards drifted by; the boy in the gutter, the queen peering down, oh so concerned, of course, a shower a blow job $20 and on his way, he was that sort of kid; the acres of pain that the Rex Hotel presented, the epistles he had heard from people disturbed decades later; alcohol can save you and destroy you, one path obviates another; but nothi9ng could be more painful than a thousand hands reaching out, plucking, plucking, wanting, wanting. He was only one person and they could easily eat you alive.

It wasn't healthy; they didn't even for a moment pretend that it was. Life was effed and that was all too it, they could cluster around the Fountain and swap notes, escapades, intrigues, opportunities. Who was paying what, who was getting what. Who had stolen what from whom. If he had spent his childhood reading his way systematically through the school library, here was something that presented a real world experience. People who had no idea what The Great Books were, much less the Encyclopaedia Brittannica which his father had so ostentatiously bought for their education. The old drunks living up under the Harbour Bridge frightened him each night as he walked to work, the sound of smashing bottles. It was so painfully cruel. He had seen too much.

Thus, as his mind searched for any possible excuse to destroy him, to dive off the ledge and never come back, to embrace chaos and die a sad relic, "no harm no fowl, great point" says Courier, deuce says the empire, there was a terrible realignment of the stars. They all seemed so happy, so preoccupied with their own laughs, the teenagers he waded through, past the shops selling board shorts and suntan lotion, past the girls in skimpy outifts, sustained by attentive boyfriends. Hands clutch casually, lustilly together. He was determined there would be another way out. It was a strange point to have reached. One narrative ended and another began. Projects loomed large but all he wanted to do was disappear. There would be shadows; there would be light. The elements needed to be realigned. He could be reabsorbed; in a world drenched with information, stories, broken narratives.





THE BIGGER STORY:

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/23/haiti.earthquake/

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- The Haitian government has declared the search-and-rescue phase over for the survivors of the massive quake, the United Nations said Friday.

International search teams have rescued 132 people since the 7.0-magnitude quake rocked Haiti on January 12, the U.N. said.

While the search-and-rescue phase was ending, humanitarian and relief efforts were still being ramped up, the U.N. said.

The Haitian government has confirmed 111,481 deaths from the quake, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in its latest report on the relief effort.

Fires are expected to flare up in the quake's aftermath, from broken mains and other damage. A massive blaze consumed a textile factory in Port-au-Prince Friday night as U.N. workers tried to contain the flames and spare nearby buildings. The cause of the fire was not immediately known.

Meanwhile, aftershocks from the 7.0-magnitude quake have become a way of life for people here as they spend their days searching for food, water and shelter.

Haitians brace for each aftershock as they wait for supplies and sustenance to reach them.

More than $355 million in donations in the United States alone has been raised for the relief effort, but stacks of aid -- baby formula, pain medication, antibiotics and other much-needed supplies -- are sitting on the tarmac and in warehouses at the airport in Port-au-Prince.

Whatever you call last week's Massachusetts Revolt – Massachusetts Miracle? Massachusetts Message? – one thing is unmistakably clear: Republican Scott Brown winning Ted Kennedy's Senate seat changes everything for President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats.
Also Online

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/editorials/stories/DN-obama_0124edi.State.Edition1.295f2aa.html

What's The Big Story? Find out at dallasnews.com/opinion

Blog: Opinion

At the very least, Brown is the 41st Republican senator, removing Senate Democrats' filibuster-proof majority to pass big initiatives on party-line votes.

Despite gloom on the left, this could be good for Obama and his party – not to mention the country – if it forces them to lose some of their hubris and govern more from the middle. Now Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid must get at least a few Senate Republicans to sign off on major items like health care, deficit reduction and immigration reform.

If this recalibration proves a good thing, it's only too bad that we had to have a third consecutive presidency where the administration learned the hard way that governing solely from the base is a ticket to trouble. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama each got their comeuppance after aligning too closely with partisan congressional leaders. Before Massachusetts, voters in Virginia and New Jersey, two states Obama won in November, sent similar messages of distress at the nation's direction.

Former Democratic Sen. David Boren of Oklahoma puts a fine point on this problem in today's Point Person interview. As he explains, Congress has become a much more polarized place. When a president hands off a big issue like health care to his party's leaders on Capitol Hill, as Obama did, it is only natural that they exclude the opposition party.

More than that, they will frame most pieces of legislation in a way that attracts only party die-hards. And that is something Americans have said over and over that they don't want. Voters don't want a hard-right or far-left country.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/americas/Obama-scrambles-to-revive-economic-optimism/Article1-500876.aspx

President Barack Obama is seeking to reassure voters he is determined to create jobs while his administration is trying to protect an architect of the increasingly unpopular banking bailout that may have helped prevent a financial collapse.

Obama's efforts on the economy come after a Massachusetts Senate election this past week that suggested voter unrest when Republican Scott Brown claimed a Senate seat in Democratic hands for more than a half-century. Brown gives the Republicans a crucial 41st seat in the 100-seat Senate, taking away the Democrats' supermajority and threatening Obama's agenda.

And the administration has been working to shore up eroding support for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who is seeking another four-year term.

In the face of daunting political conditions, Obama was sounding feisty as he told a town hall crowd he was more determined than ever to help the economy and pursue his agenda.

"I'm not going to win every round," Obama said in Ohio Friday. But he pledged, "I can promise you there will be more fights in the days ahead."

He tried out a revamped message focused mainly on the economy that is part of a stepped up effort to convince Americans that he's doing all he can to create jobs.

Second Take

*







http://www.abc.net.au/compass/s1618196.htm



Father Ted Kennedy (archival):

I remember one cold night about 3am being called out of my warm bed by a man called Hughie who was drinking at that time. But he had a friend and he was really concerned the friend didn�t understand Christianity, and he asked me to do down and tell him about Christ. That was one of the turning points of my life. I realised that it would be an affront to Christ himself if I were to go back to that warm bed having given a class in Christian doctrine in a place like this. I decided very strongly at that time I had to open my home to the homeless and that I had to fight for social justice.

Rebel Cooper BBC archive:

If I knew God, I reckon he�d be the same, Father Ted is powerful, he�s just, he�s understanding, people say they mightn�t like me or something like that, but Fr Ted accepts me for what I am, a person.



Narr:

It was here in Redfern that Ted Kennedy carried out the first act that branded him a radical � he opened up the priest�s house to Aboriginal people, having as many as one hundred staying at any time.



Father Ted BBC archive:

A presbytery should not be a fortress as so many presbyteries tend to be, where the poor particularly don�t feel welcome. But gradually the Aborginal people who are undoubtedly the most dispossessed in Sydney found it became their home and I think I see now that this place, the old presbytery is much more the home of the Aboriginal people than it is mine. I like to think of myself as their loving friend, their guest.



Narr:

Ted Kennedy died at the age of 74 after serving 31 years as parish priest at Redfern.









Custard flavoured milkshakes. Villages lost in time. A sense of community. All these things he craved, and apart from the custard flavoured milkshakes, which were rarely seen in Australian milkbars after the 1960s, he found all of these things in the Redfern Streets. His little family, him and the kids, found their peace and security behind the well locked doors, the grated windows. Until an evil landlord named Ian Tuit destroyed their cosy life; a pissy little man exerting power over the only person he had power over. And so he felt utterly betrayed. These dogs were everywhere, these evil little pricks out to destroy, grubs, absolute grubs, and yet through his own mistakes he had allowed these ghastly little people to have power over him; and he was betrayed, utterly betrayed, by people he had naively trusted.



It was cruel; to have so much faith and to be so utterly double crossed. But these slime buckets would never have had their power if he had not fallen off the Sydney real estate ladder; if things hadn't gone so badly. The years passed and the kids grew. They passed from Primary school to High School and still they were there, behind the Redfern walls. Major, the dog, made their little grouping seem like a genuine family; the constant barking of Lucky next door, neglected by their Lebanese owners, gave it a sheltering, neighbourhood feel. And Craig next door, with his quiet wife Mel and his two young children, Venus and Annise, was always kind. Until it came to crunch time and owners always win out over renters; and they were dynamited out of their home, the only home the kids had known for more than half their lives.



Everything changed, where they lived, his work. What had once been so secure, so much a part of who they were, disappeared. The neighbourhood characters who dominated their landscape simply vanished out of their lives. Sometimes it seemed as if the car drove through Redfern of its own accord. The streets were so plain, washed of colour. Little groups of aboriginal kids gung on the corners, their fast patois, the voices of the street, impossible to decipher. There were no parents in sight. He stopped and went to check the beer garden at the Glengarrie, that crummy little piece of concrete where he had been so happy, where the conversation flowed so wildly across so many interesting subjects, where people confessed and drank and laughed and moaned and partied, partied, because this was the best day, the best life, the single best place to be.



Now it had all changed. As he walked up from Bondi Beach his 18-year-old son walked past in intense conversation with a girl, a little nerdy, with glasses, pimply, that terribly awkward age. They didn't even notice him as they walked past; and he stopped and watched as they went down the slope and onto the beach, and then walked towards the waves, still in conversation about God only knows what. Life had passed him by with astonishing speed; and here he was watching his own son, talking to a girl! He had missed them, as he had always said, long before they were gone. But this time it was for real. This time there was only a week left in Sydney and it all came to an end; and the life he had built and the life he had lived, it too was being washed away into history.



Televisions were on everywhere; with the Australian Open on constant display. There was no loyalty to him; only loyalty to themselves. He knew the world was a harsh place, but had naively believed that if he did the right thing he would be rewarded, one way or the other. It was in the back of a cafe in Paddington that someone said: those who try their best are on the road with all the rest. And it was so true. It didn't matter how earnestly he had worked, how cleverly he had marshelled the words, how many hours he put in at the mill, his fingers flickering across the keyboard. It didn't matter because it would make no difference, whatever the result. They were here for the briefest of times; the human lifespan barely a blink in the flow of history.



His daughter, dolled up to the nines, went out to a party with a friend. She, too, was suddenly grown and flown, looking model-like, as he told her, as she flounced out the door, seeking his approval but at the same time determined to announce that she was woman, on her own, indepedent, almost a woman now. He had walked down the streets with the two of them on either side, snuggling close to him so that it was impossible to be any closer. Now they were teenagers and there was no snuggling to be had. Now he was old and they were young. Nausea gripped him as the medication changed. The person he was was not the person he would be. Sparkling sands were only part of the story. Now the narrative was entirely different. He could no longer suffer the journalist's disease - you're only as good as your last byline - because he no longer worked for a newspaper.



It had been the proudest moment of his ofe, there at the Sydney Morning Herald, when they had reached out their hand and given him the job. Now, decades later, he was the grey haired old hack and new young things populated the news floor and the general news pages. It was someone else's turn. But the fact that it was his own children's turn, their time to twirl in the spotlight, to live their own lives, was the hardest to bear. They had been so close, so inseparable, building their cosy union in a hostile world. But it wasn't to be, wasn't to be. He could not see any way out; except day by day. One thing passes and another begins. One door closes and another opens. How could we have been so stupid? How could they have been such arseholes? Couldn't they see his distress writ large?







THE BIGGER STORY:



http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/fairytale-as-prince-visits-the-block/story-e6frg6nf-1225821403692



IMAGINE for a moment that you are a nine-year-old indigenous girl, and you've been told that a handsome young prince is coming to visit you.



What would you ask him about?



Little Peneloppee McGrath, who met Prince William on day one of his three-day Australian tour in Sydney's Redfern yesterday, didn't hesitate.



"Does your grandmother live in a big castle?" she asked.



"She does," replied the prince.



The exchange was one of many that will linger long in the memories of more than 30 delighted indigenous children, and hundreds of other Australians, who met Prince William at the Redfern Community Centre yesterday.



That such a meeting would ever take place was surely inconceivable, even 20 years ago. The community centre sits at the heart of The Block, a neighbourhood once notorious for filth, violence and Aboriginal hopelessness.



Successive governments poured money into The Block but in the end, it was the community - the Gadigal people - who took the place back from the pushers and spivs who once roamed its streets.



Such has been their success that instead of drunks rolling around, there was an ice-cream van parked there yesterday, selling soft-serve cones to the crowd.



Many people in the 1500-strong crowd admitted they'd come not only to see William, but to pay their respects to his late mother, Princess Diana, whom they loved.



http://www.smh.com.au/national/two-catholic-worlds-collide-as-church-disagreement-deepens-20100118-mgt6.html



The fight, ostensibly, is over a baptismal font and some words in chalk on a wall, but the latest in a series of rows at St Vincent's Catholic Church in Redfern shows the conflict runs much deeper.



A recent clash between the parish priest, a conservative Catholic from Brazil, and a group of long-standing parishioners is really a battle between traditional Catholicism and the more vernacular version practised in Redfern for years.



A group of St Vincent's church-goers has accused Father Clesio Mendes, a 41-year-old Perth-trained priest, of disrespecting local Aborigines by scrubbing a line of hand-scrawled poetry from the wall of the church.



They also say he has removed a baptismal font sacred to the memory of the late Father Ted Kennedy, the beloved former parish priest whose shoes his successors have struggled to fill.



The font was brought to the church by Father Ted, who is revered as a compassionate priest who was unafraid of church authorities.



Len De Lorenzo, who has attended St Vincent's for about 30 years, said the font had been removed by Father Clesio, prompting one concerned parishioner to send a petition to the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, asking for it to be reinstated.



http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/prevent-jail-time-for-aborigines-calma-20100122-mpyj.html



The money spent on incarcerating indigenous Australians would be better spent on preventative programs, a report has recommended.



Delivering his sixth and final Social Justice Report in Sydney on Friday, Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma called for what he labelled "justice reinvestment" in communities with large numbers of offenders.



Indigenous adults were 13 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-indigenous adults, while indigenous children were 28 times more likely to be placed in juvenile detention, Mr Calma said.



He said better prevention programs were needed to target problems like substance abuse and chronic unemployment to help drive down the imprisonment statistics.



"You can put an individual offender through the best-resourced, most effective rehabilitation program, but if they are returning to a community with few opportunities, their chances of staying out of prison are limited," Mr Calma said in a speech at the Redfern Community Centre.



"The money that would have been spent on imprisonment (should be) reinvested in programs and services in communities where these issues are most acute in order to address the underlying causes of crime.



"Justice reinvestment is as much about economics as it is about good social policy."



Mr Calma, who steps down as commissioner next week, has also called for better protection of native languages.



"Prior to colonisation, Australia had 250 distinct languages which expanded out to 600 dialects," he said.



"Today, only 18 indigenous languages are fully intact and even these are endangered.



"Without intervention, indigenous language knowledge will cease to exist in Australia in the next 10 to 30 years," Mr Calma said.





Redfern Station, Sydney, Australia.

First Call

*



Lyrics to "Bondi beach"

From an old French
airfield,
Tan Son Nhat,
a kaki clad
Yank surfer
flew
four thousand miles
a mission of redemption
to New South Wales
into the water over rocks
the Aborigines
call
Bondi beach.

A mate’s long board
overhead,
dinged
water logged,
the Yank surfer
twisted
by ever strong winds
made his way
down
into the water over rocks
the Aborigines
call
Bondi beach.

Flat
on
his long board
arms
cutting
the surf,
the lone
silent rider
left in his wake, rice paddies
and triple canopy jungles,
kept head of rip currents
and deadly bull sharks
into the water over rocks
the Aborigines
call
Bondi beach.

For the seventh wave
he waited, the Yank
surfer
took off
all out
the twelve foot high
wave
crashed
over head,
sent the long board
flying
like an arrow,
driving him
deep
into the water over rocks
the Aborigines
cal
Bondi beach.

Bondi Beach, Copyright Mike Marcellino, 2008, 2009

http://notebookwriter.blogspot.com/2009/11/bondi-beach-song-of-australian-surf.html



It wasn't fair, but he could feel the prickling heat in the back lanes of Paddington, and stared at the back gate which had once been his back gate. He had kept chooks in the backyard toilet, there in the that house next to the Bellevue Hotel, and this day, more than 30 years after he had lived there, he looked again, as if placing flowers on a grave. These streets were his own private citadel. Each mawling cat, each familiar scene, was in itself a prayer, a hymn of forgiveness, gto a group of people who had long since scattered, and many of whom had died. The star characters had long since disappeared. John Bygate, the man who's story had made him the first money he had ever made out of writing, had once lived just up the road.

Before the rot set in. How wonderful they had been; their in the cool morning of the bar, the smell of beer, the stab of last night's cigarettes. Cruel to be kind, that's what it was, so why did we keep crawling over the same old ground, why did we keep revisiting sights which held no significance whatsoever to anyone but him. He wanted to pay his respects to the past; even to the person he had once been. I've done a few things, I've had a few experiences, the boy said, indicating he was no longer a virgin, and they had all laughed in the long summer sun, in those days when mandies, methaqualine hydrochloride, was common and the manddrax stagger fashionable. We had thought we were the centre of everything.

Our colourful clothes and outrageous behaviour picked us out, put us at the forefront, and while the slaving masses opened their doors each morning and went off to work in their suits, they rose when the bar opened and their bleary embraces, their grotty little passions and sticky, triumphant embraces, these had seemed to be the mere elements of their pioneering lifestyle. The individual was the political. Each toke was a strike against the systme. Each day that passed was a confront against conformity. Their days in the bar were the beginning of the revolution. I've never known anyone as thirsty as you, Ian had said, there one morning amongst the glistening leaves of Centennial Park.

But Ian was long dead, Bygate was long dead, Lynn, pushing a pram as she wobbled plastered up to the shops, was dead. And the other characters that had populated that time and place, Russell had gone on to be a successful actor and had recently been in A Streetcar Named Desire with Cate Blanchett, but all in all so many of those bodies on the floor of his loungeroom, those bodies he had picked his way across on the way to work or more nefarious activities, had gone. He was shocked at what had happened. That so many of these people had gone. That these working class terraces he had felt so at home amongst were now million dollar pieces of real estate. And he looked in at the ground houses; and he looked in at their comfortable interiors and thought: I so much want a part of the world.

If only I had been sensible. If only I hadn't pissed it up against a wall. But these thoughts, so human and so unproductive, flittered through as if they were part of an armour of someone long gone, to be pitied not applauded, that so much talent could be so wasted. They had been, like Cocteau, the centre of their own universe; and the intricacies and parables, the gossp and the adventures, all marked a time when the world was turning on its access; and they were honoured to be passengers. There on the giant highway, on the whirling wheel, there in the summer air which passed dense and congealed over their suburb and their lives; there in the cool interior of the pub and the gentle exchange of greetings with the manager. We were the elite. We were the inner sanctum. Nothing could be better than this.

Thirty years later and it had all come to nothing. His private citadel was nothing but a web of streets in an over crowded city. None of their dreams had come true. Richard Meale had died, just like any other mortal. Bygate's brain haemorrage had come only after years of declining misery and increasing incohearance. A failure inside and out. The creature that hid behind the screens nothing but an artiface. Thirty years later and he felt like pushing the gate open, as if the house was still his home, as if he had been sensible and bought it at the #30,000 they had sold it off for then, not the million dollars it would cost now. The rooster crowed once more across the dreaming suburb. Yet another group of people were knocking on the door, ready for the party that was always going on at his house. He could hear their pointless, intimate chatter, those woinderful sun kissed moments when the world had seemed eternal. And he threw his cigarette butt on the ground, wishing he didn't still smoke, even if it was only a few each day; and way, way away he turned, not caring if he never saw this back gate again. He could never own the world; even the past; in the way he so desperately wanted.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/22/2799436.htm

The Indian community in Brisbane says it fears two bashings last night were copycat crimes triggered by a spate of attacks on students in Melbourne and Sydney.

Two Indian men were bashed on the city's south side in separate incidents, but police say there is no evidence to suggest they were racially targeted.

One Indian man was attacked at a phone box near Macgregor State High School, police said.

They say he was making a phone call to his home in India when he was punched twice in the head. His cigarettes and his wallet were then stolen.

Police say the other incident involved an Indian taxi driver with two drunk passengers, who punched him repeatedly in the head over a fare dispute.

"Generally the clearest indicator [of the motivation for an attack] are comments made by the offenders to the individuals," Acting Commissioner Kathy Rynders said.

"Both complainants in these matters have said there were no comments in relation to their ethnicity by the offenders during last night's attack."

But the taxi driver who was attacked last night, Sandeep Goyam, is now considering returning to India.

"I don't think I will be much longer in this country," he said.

Police have already charged two men over the attack on Mr Goyam, but the assaults have shaken the Indian community in Brisbane.

The Queensland president of the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin, Umesh Chandra, says locals fear the assaults in Brisbane were triggered by the spate of attacks on Indians in Melbourne and Sydney.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/nation/stories/DN-obamasyear_20nat.ART.State.Edition1.4bf65b5.html

President Barack Obama begins the second year of his presidency much like he started the first: with a long list of things to do.

President Barack Obama visited Iraq in April. The future of his strategy may depend on March elections there.

The overhaul of health care remains a goal. One in 10 Americans is out of work. The federal budget deficit has exploded. The country is engaged in two wars – and must help Haiti after a catastrophic earthquake.

Unlike a year ago, however, the president can't rely on the good wishes of the American people or a splintered Republican Party to win policy battles. Today, Obama is much less popular than when he took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009.

And he probably will be even less popular in a year.

"This is as good as it gets," said Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia. "That's why he's pushed so hard and will continue to do so this year, while he's got the votes."

It's hard to imagine any president facing a first year with more complicated challenges than Obama. The result? A record of some achievement mixed with falling public support and a resurgent Republican opposition.

A recent study by Congressional Quarterly, for example, concluded that Obama enjoyed unprecedented success with Congress in 2009 – winning almost 97 percent of the votes in which he took a position, better than Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan.

Narrow victories

"He's been a pretty impressive first-year president," said Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas.

But Obama's victories have been extraordinarily narrow. Republicans almost universally opposed the nearly $800 billion stimulus package. Divisive energy legislation remains trapped in the Senate. And his biggest goal – health care legislation – passed the House and Senate, in different forms, by the slimmest of margins.

http://www.escambray.cu/Eng/world/obama100120334

A year after the inauguration of US President Barack Obama, his approval rating among Americans dropped to 50 percent.
Obama: Broken Promises, Low Popularity

Obama´s approval rating among Americans dropped to 50 percent.

With 12 points less than when he assumed his post on January 20, 2009, the head of the Oval Office is among one of the first worst judged US presidents during their first 12 months in office, according to a poll by CBS network.

Indicators point that among the last nine presidents of that country only Ronald Reagan is below him with 49 percent after a year in office.

There are no celebrations in the White House on Wednesday. Spokesman Roberts Gibbs just said in a press briefing that "the main priority is to continue working hard on directing the economy and creating jobs."

The anniversary takes place after the poll in Massachusetts, where the Democrat party lost on Tuesday the Senate seat of late Senator Edward Kennedy.

Republican candidate Scott Brown won with 51.9 percent of the votes in comparison to the 47.1 percent of his Democrat rival Martha Coakley, according to a report in The New York Times daily.

With this defeat, the Democratic party ceded the absolute majority in the upper house, so from now on, Obama's initiatives as the health reform are in danger, because the party cannot now count on one of the 60 seats it had from the 100 the Senate has.


Sydney, NSW, Australia 2009.

Passive Violence

*



Fill For Me A Brimming Bowl

Fill for me a brimming bowl
And in it let me drown my soul:
But put therein some drug, designed
To Banish Women from my mind:
For I want not the stream inspiring
That fills the mind with--fond desiring,
But I want as deep a draught
As e'er from Lethe's wave was quaff'd;
From my despairing heart to charm
The Image of the fairest form
That e'er my reveling eyes beheld,
That e'er my wandering fancy spell'd.
In vain! away I cannot chace
The melting softness of that face,
The beaminess of those bright eyes,
That breast--earth's only Paradise.
My sight will never more be blest;
For all I see has lost its zest:
Nor with delight can I explore,
The Classic page, or Muse's lore.
Had she but known how beat my heart,
And with one smile reliev'd its smart
I should have felt a sweet relief,
I should have felt ``the joy of grief.''
Yet as the Tuscan mid the snow
Of Lapland dreams on sweet Arno,
Even so for ever shall she be
The Halo of my Memory.

John Keats



Don't stop at Tambar at night, goes the warning, they've got two heads and six fingers. It was a warning only half in jest; as they deal with the muck raking and the classic convoluted games played by every devious, lazy little prick in the area. They were so hopeless. He clung to whatever little cash he had. They had about their faces a defeated, empty look. Drained not by life and their own internal torments, but by laziness and inactivity, by the hours spent arguing over the smallest things, by a life he could only dream about. In Bondi, he watches two parking police, women, walk by in the street. They are gossiping together, these horrid, nasty cockroaches in their yellow jackets, their lined contemptuous faces. How he hated them. The heat settled into all the different gaps in his life; and all was not lost.

He could have struggled to the surface; rising through the waters to make a life anew. He drove past, time and again, the places which had been so significant so long ago. The Alemain fountain in the cross, where he had hung around as a street kid literallhy 40 years ago. Past the house in Hargrave Street, where he had lived for years next door to the pub. They had painted every top of the iron grate a different colour; the hippies, the world lives here; and he couldn't help but look to see if there was anything remaining of the silver and orange and pink. But there was nothing. Everything had settled into a kind of blank, unpleasant conformity. Oh how could these shadows be so cruel? Why couldn't the empty hole be filled?

He saw in the useless local yokels, the little country towns populated by practising alcoholics, all of them to a man and woman welfare dependent, cringing examples of what he could have been. Life was tough. Time to progress. But these people watched the sun rise and set, let their children crawl all over them, followed one course of action to another, and cried, cried, come and get me, as he alternated between bush and beach in these final days. He had spent his life in servitude to someone else. He had built elaborate constructs and surrendered to them. He wanted to be free, but did not know how. He came and went, flittering in the gathering shadows of the afternoon, not to surrender, not to be granted some grand destiny, some higher purpose, but simply to exist; there in the spaces in the middle of nowhere.

Bum f... nowhere, is the way they described it, and when he looked seriously at the prospect of spending time in this remote, desolate, lost place, he shuddered at the thought of entering their mindless world; what a bunch of useless characters, he thought. The shops, their flat faces, the dreary store fronts, all of it seemed so mundane. Bundles of them would exit from hot, sweaty vehicles. They would argue over nothing and everything. He was proud to be who he was; to stand on that deck watching the fireworks erupt accross the city; not to be trapped in these mundane places living a mundane life. He had worked so hard, had so little to show. Could see the end looming. We're closer to sixty than fifty; he said to his friend. And they shrugged. How had that happened?

He couldn't believce it either; that so much of their lives were over. Hadn't they been destined for greateness. Hadn't their wild times just been the forerunner to some bigger, grander fate; applauded by the world, thunderous applause as they bowed on stage. But nothing like that happened. The world passed on by, layer after layer of the days settling over their lives; and they were marginalised into some cul de sac or obscure avenue, not at the centre of things at all. Their children had a grasp of the technology; and laughed at their hopeless parents who couldn't work the video player much less the CDs, who couldn't work out how to download a movie or a song, who couldn't work their i-phones or their i-pods. But wait, wait, weren't we the centre of everything?

Well, if they ever had been the centre of anything it was a long time ago. He had been left crying on the pavement, to be picked up by whatever passing queen preying upon the disaffected. He had been so vulnerable; and they had attacked. Nothing he could do, lifting himself from that gutter, would alter the course life had set. These strange moments in the swirling streets, those moments when old men looked down on his young frame and said, all so concerned, not, of course, taking in his handsome face and slim features; along with his stinking clothes, those moments were long ago; injustices that could never be fixed. An entire industry had been built around child abuse; but he had missed the circus. He could only look on and say: God, what was done to me would be illegal now. The beatings. The abandonment. He forgave. He forgot. He moved on. But whether it was to a little village in the middle of nowhere populated with practising alcoholics, that was a different question.



THE BIGGER STORY:

President turns on banking industry in hope of harnessing anger that helped Republicans to Senate election victory

Barack Obama adopted a strongly populist tone today when he announced new curbs on the banking industry, a direct response to the Republicans' stunning election win in Massachusetts.

The move had been planned for a month but the timing and language were a direct result of Massachusetts. Obama, who as president has prided himself on cool, moderate language, spoke about the banks who "took huge, reckless risks in pursuit of quick profits and massive bonuses" and promised to "rein in the excess and abuse".

The Republicans immediately responded by saying that Obama was making the banks the whipping boy for the Democratic party's election defeat.

Scott Garrett, a Republican member of the House financial services committee, said: "This renewed focus on financial services reform by the Obama administration is clearly a transparent attempt at faux-populism, in light of the outcome of the Massachusetts Senate race."

Obama will make many more speeches and statements critical of the banks and Wall Street in the months ahead. It is almost certain there will be at least one such passage when he delivers his State of the Union next Wednesday.

By turning on Wall Street and the banks, Obama is seeking to tap into widespread public anger that helped the Republicans in Massachusetts, where voters expressed hostility towards Obama's healthcare plans but also towards Wall Street. Voters spoke of their outrage over the bonuses that banks who had benefited from federal bailouts had awarded to senior staff.

In poll published last November, voters were asked what issues made them most upset. Forty per cent chose "big banks and Wall Street getting handouts while nothing is done for working Americans".

What Obama and the Democrats want to do is persuade the public that it is the Republican party that is the friend of the banking industry. Obama's main White House adviser, David Axelrod, hinted at this in a recent interview with the National Journal. "[If the Republicans] want to stand with the insurance industry on healthcare and protect the status quo, let them defend that in an election," he said. "If they want to stand with the banks and the financial industries and protect the status quo, then let them explain that in an election."

This reflects the emerging Democratic strategy, presenting the Republican as elitist, on the side of big business against the ordinary Joe, and obstructionist to reform. The loss of Massachusetts has curtailed Obama's legislative options. He may or may not get his health bill, but other plans for this year, primarily climate change and immigration legislation, have effectively been killed off.

The one bill that is still alive is regulation of Wall Street: what Obama described as "the most ambitious overhaul of the financial system since the Great Depression".

The Republicans, as keen as the Democrats to swing discontented voters behind them, could back at least parts of that bill and try to avoid the Democrats portraying them as the party of big business.

Chris Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Senate banking committee, issued a double-edged statement today, reaching out to the Republicans to back regulation while adopting similar populist language as Obama's. "Companies that choose to take such risks should do so on their own dime ," Dodd said.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/01/21/john-b-judis-forget-massachusetts-obama-s-problem-is-nationwide.aspx

Bill Clinton didn’t know he was in big trouble until the very eve of the November 1994 election. Barack Obama knows now, barely a year into his presidency. While the party loyalists can blame Martha Coakley’s defeat on her ignorance of Red Sox baseball, it was clearly a message to the President and his party. Yes, a less inept candidate might have beaten Scott Brown, but if Obama and his program had been more popular in Massachusetts, even Coakley could have won — and by ten points or more.

There were no network exits polls, only a limited sample by Rasmussen, but some of the polls taken beforehand bear out Obama’s role in Coakley’s defeat. In the final January 17 poll by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning North Carolina outfit that picked up Brown’s surge early in the month, 20% of the respondents who voted for Obama in 2008 said they’d vote for Brown. Among those voters, only 22% approved of Obama’s presidency, and only 13% backed his health care plan.

In fact, the percent of 2008 Obama voters who were backing Brown almost perfectly matched the percentage who were dissatisfied with Obama’s health care plan, which Brown himself singled out for criticism in his campaign. According to the Rasmussen exit sample, 52% of Brown voters rated health care as their top issue — a clear indication that they were viewing the election in national terms.

The most important question raised by Coakley’s loss is not what she could have done better, but why Obama’s popularity is so low that a Democrat could lose Massachusetts. A conservative Republican Senate candidate winning Massachusetts, which Obama carried by 62% to 36% in 2008, is comparable to a liberal Democrat carrying Utah.

If you believe some of the blogs, the Democrats lost Massachusetts, and Obama’s approval is plummeting nationwide, because he alienated his left-wing base. Perhaps that does account for an absence of turnout among young voters in the Virginia gubernatorial or Massachusetts Senate races, but the polls have not shown growing dissatisfaction among young, minority, or liberal voters — the three voting blocs that accounted for Obama’s strongest support in 2008. Where he has lost ground is primarily among white working and middle-class voters and senior citizens.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/01/18/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry6112366.shtml

As President Obama contemplates his first year in office, he might be forgiven for recalling the words of Queen Elizabeth II, looking back on a year rife with royal scandal: an annus horribilus, she called it, and you don't need six years of Latin to translate her sentiments.

Mr. Obama has suffered the steepest decline in job approval of any first year president since they started keeping such data: in most surveys, he is barely at, or under fifty per cent. His health-care plan, the signature effort of his first year in office, has grown steadily less popular and its survival, as one Congressional Democrat put it, "Hangs by a thread."

It may, in fact, be doomed on the precise one-year anniversary of his Inaugural, if Massachusetts voters send a Republican to the U.S. Senate today to fill the seat held for nearly half a century, by Edward Kennedy, the patron saint of liberal health care.

CBSNews.com Special Report: Obama's First Year

The coming year does not appear to hold out hope for better times: the jobless rate is likely to remain at or above ten percent, and the real unemployment rate -- which includes those who've given up looking and those working part-time who want full time jobs -- is at 17 percent. And historically, no president in modern times has significantly improved his approval numbers in his second year -- a gloomy atmosphere in which to move into midterm elections.

What's happened: "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan," John Kennedy famously said -- but political trouble also has a thousand diagnosticians, each offering (sometimes contradictory) notions.

One of the most commonly heard refrains -- one that makes a lot of sense -- is the broad appeal that was Mr. Obama's political strength became a governing liability. As he himself once said, he was a vessel into which people poured their own political desires. He was the tribune of progressivism, the man to redeem the promise of Robert Kennedy. No, he was the post-conflict president, the candidate who promised to "turn the page" on the wearisome conflicts of the past.

Because so many people expected Mr. Obama to do so many different, conflicting things, he could not possibly hold those who voted for him together. More important, he did not come to office with a strong sense of where he was going.


Bondi Beach in a dust storm.

The Cruel Times Were Over

*



Blue Bottle Stranded on Bondi Beach

And as I walked on Bondi's burnished sands
the Australian sun beating at my brow
my tender skin stepped upon a beating heart
blue-veined transparency
tendrils reaching for the unreachable sea
rounded body gelatinous and vulnerable
'Blue Bottle'
stranded pulsating jellyfish
lost and alienated from its shoal
when, in her fear
she whipped and stung and clung
numbing me into submission
but for a moment
then shivering as her strength depleted with the ebbing tide
her frightened eyes begged forgiveness
as I scratched and fumbled at the reddening wound
I left her lying there
then, turning back with towelled hands
I bent over her
clasped her greasy roundness
so small against my shadow
and within a wind's breath
my jellyfish tasted salty waters
while the white horses claimed their prodigal mermaid
as she vanished into their unfathomable watery stables
and I began to limp homeward on burnished sands

Bondi Beach,1986

Penny Hemans



The cruel times were over. The Australian Open had begun. Hours crawled by and all the token efforts, they were gone. He had spent a lifetime in servitude to a different person. These moments of deep rhythmic liquidity, the sky and the sand and the silhouettes of swimmers on the edge of the baths, the Icebergers hanging over the cliffs, drinkers spilling out on to the balconies. Everything was so comfortable. It was impossible to be depressed. The joggers moved past and he was gone, gone, into another time and place. Ridding himself of everything; even memory; as he passed through the eye of the needle and all else failed; he would be triumphant.

Those cruel sadists who had inhabited the hospital halls and bred their power from dysfunction of the sick, they, now, were nothing but powerless old men, their theories out of fashion and their client bases sinking. One too many professional squabble had left them as relics in a rapidly evolving scene. They clung to their past glory, their legendary status, but it was nothing. Nobody cared anymore. The glittering bodies of the future littered the sands and flash cars rolled down wealthy avenues; for this was a new and different era. He wasn't going to be free, not yet, but there was hope, because everything else was dying, dissolving, every attachment, every belief.

All he was left with was a dazzling perception, as he sat in the alcove high in the cliffs and puffed on a cigarette away from his children's prying eyes. They had been so close; a family; and now he was old and they were young and seizing the world. It was terribly different days. He had missed them before the were even gone and now the disentanglement was almost complete. The days crawled by and the decoupling, thread by painful thread, followed in the enduring hours. He couldn't be free, not yet, but he was close; and the road beckoned like never before. How could you be so deceitful, so treacherous, so low, he thought, as he listened to a woman talking about stealing single shallots from bunches in grocery stores. How could you do that to yourself, grubby your own soul.

Should he claim leadership? Do the right thing by the situation time and time again? Look up and wonder where it had all gone wrong? Hang around his old drinking haunts drinking lemon squash; talking to old mates. There had been so much fun. If only it could stay that way. It never stayed that way. Dark, dark, as he folded himself off the cliff and soared into the gutter, desperate, darting, a cruel and indifferent gap in the synapses, a shockingly brutal slap in the face. Old church halls loomed in his conscience. They had sat and listened to stories of Mary and Jesus and three wise men, of arks and old people, there in the cicada screeching heat of the Australian suburbs. The summers had crawled.

And now they crawled again; here in Bondi, 19 years after he had also briefly passed through here on, living in an apartment for several months; with their mother increasingly pregnant. It had been a lifetime ago. They had been different people. Time had not always been kind. There was plenty of cause for regret. He could flagellate himself forever; lost opportunities; failed parenthood, sneaking, crumby, scummy, lurking round corners and hiding, always hiding, while the fresh mask of charm flicked across his face as insincerely as he had ever been. He looked up at Withering Heights, to be called Gotham City by a later generation, and wondered: where were they all?

He knew the answer for a lot of them: dead.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/world/desperate-battle-for-life-in-haiti/story-e6frfkyi-1225820665322

An Australian man has been killed in Haiti, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says.

The dual Australian-British citizen was a United Kingdom resident working in Haiti for the United Nations, Mr Rudd said.

The Department of Foreign Affairs has spoken to the man's next of kin to pass on Australia's condolences.

Mr Rudd said said British authorities were providing consular assistance to the man's family in the UK and Australian authorities were on standby to help if required.

"This is obviously a very, very sad day for this man's family, his loved ones and his friends and I'm sure I speak on behalf of all Australians when I say that our thoughts and our prayers go out to his family and his loved ones on this tragic occasion," he said.

"Haiti, of course, reminds us of a tragedy which has been felt by tens of thousands of families around that country and of course more

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/01/18/leogane-a-lost-town-at-the-haiti-earthquake-epicentre-115875-21975452/

The town of Leogane is at the epicentre of Haiti’s disastrous earthquake – with up to 30,000 dead and almost all its buildings flattened.

A 40-strong British search and rescue team was the first to reach it yesterday – and the Mirror was with them.

Twelve miles west of capital Port-au-Prince, it used to have a population of 100,000 but now its centre is just a waste land with fallen twisted power cables threaded through rubble like spiders’ webs.

Two mass graves line the main road, a few yellowed bodies thrown in to start a third. Nearby, huddles of people beg for help. Armed men stand defiantly to defend a health clinic-turned-shelter against all comers.

This area had received no aid since last Tuesday’s cataclysm and the scene has been described as apocalyptic.

David Orr, of the UN World Food Programme, said: “It’s the very epicentre of the quake, and many, many thousands are dead. Nearly every house was destroyed. The military talk about 20,000 to 30,000 dead.”

People have fled to surrounding sugar cane fields or mangrove swamps to get away from the destruction. Tens of thousands are living in the open in church compounds, school playgrounds and market places.

Jean Ky Louis, a shop worker, said: “We have seen no rescues here, no help at all. People are dying of starvation, even the survivors. We have nothing, we need help. We welcome the British with open arms. We hoped they would come.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/17/haiti-earthquake-humanitarian-disaster

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said yesterday that the Haitian emergency was the "most serious humanitarian crisis faced by the United Nations" in decades, surpassing those caused by the Asian tsunami, the recent Pakistan earthquake and cyclone Nargis in Burma.

Its effects were greatly magnified, said the UN, because the earthquake hit a densely populated capital city rather than a remote rural area, devastating so many of the organisations and people who would normally lead a rescue effort. "It meant that the civil service, police, emergency services, all the organisations which would normally have key roles in responding to a major disaster were affected," said Stephanie Bunker, of the UN office for co-ordination of humanitarian affairs in New York.

"The Asian tsunami may have strained the emergency services of countries, but it did not disable capital cities like Jakarta or Colombo … Haiti is very poor. It just does not have the resources or the money to respond to an emergency. What capacity it did have to respond was completely knocked out. This earthquake hit a country which was already barely functional."

Factors specific to Haiti have made the emergency harder than usual to respond to. The UN already fed more than 1 million people in Haiti before the quake, which destroyed many of its warehouses as well as its Port-au-Prince headquarters. Key Haitian government officials and civil servants also died, making co-ordination between the emergency services and the international aid effort more complex.

Alison Evans, director of the Overseas Development Institute, said contact between citizens and the government was important for recovery efforts, and the lack of government institutions would slow down any legitimate relief.