Tim Blair

I don't buy it that much. I got a copy last year, though, when I was in Sydney with my relatives, which had a lovely, lovely editorial dissecting Green policy. My relatives were shocked. I was heartily amused.
To hear that this paper could have been taken over by a bunch of lunatic lefties is terrible.
Who edits the Fin. Review, anyway?

A left-hand drive four-cylinder 'Vette.

Or a fish with a bicycle.

I read the Fin Review only for this twice-weekly column.

Anyone who can introduce the 36-hour week, Club Med, the dead French from the heatwave, the Cole report into the building industry, Eminem, Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, Homer Simpson, the People's Republic of Victoria, the quality of recent Melbourne architecture, Celine Dion, Greenpeace, Bonnie and Clyde, the Dalai Lama and aromatherapy into one item has to be a must-read.

The rest, forget it.

Your link is to a pay-per-view; I'm assuming it was to an item by Peter Ruehl- he's ok, sort of a P.J. O'Rourke Lite. His sister is a bit of a hornbag for an old bat, though.

Damn that pay-per-view. I paid for the goddam view so I should be able to post the sucker. Typical AFR. They print shit then stop people reading it. (I mean the rest of it, not the Ruehl piece. That's a hoot.)

As for his sister, with a name like Mercedes, how could she not!

Yeah, but I think her vintage is about that of those big open buggers that Goering used to ponce about in at Luftwaffe parades.
She would have been a bit of a spunk before the Korean war.

Pooh. Vettes are left hand drive as they are made for the US market.

It's right hand drive which are the sacralegious ones.

Pay per read at AUD 2.20 is ridiculous. There may be a way to make money from publishing on the Internet, but this isn't it. Who's going to put out that kind of jack for one newspaper column? Sheesh.

Jack Stiglitz would feel even more like he's reading The Guardian with today's AFR piece by academic Amin Saikal. No link because of pay-per-view but here's the conclusion:

'This (losing on all four fronts: Israel-Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror as a whole) would be a very heavy price to pay for allowing a group of neo-conservatives to dominate US foreign policy by exploiting al-Qaeda's extremism to push their own extremist agenda. The sooner this group is marginalised in American politics, the better the prospects for delegitimising Islamic extremism and ending what has developed as a "clash of extremisms" in world politics.'

So there you have it. The war on al-Qaeda is simply a pretext for neo-cons to push their own extremist barrel.

Let's go back to Clinton's renowned foreign policy.

Bruce

You're right about pay-per-view cost. There's no way you'd pay that for one column. However, readers qualify for online content if they also have the paper delivered - including to a workplace.