Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

My sister's kids have been planning a 'reverse Halloween' with their primary school class mates. This involved a little stint with the local Oxfam activist (nice hippy gal), the kids giving out Fair Trade chocolates in the main shopping centre...

This election the candidates are becoming the celebrities themselves. With appearances on popular television shows, such as Saturday Night Live, the David Letterman Show and the Oprah Winfrey Show, Presidential candidates need not to be worried if their political careers fall through because they now have acting as a back-up profession.

Forget the dead tiny mouse with a pair of diamond eyes and the brooch with a real bird wing, this time is ossuarium, a container for holding the bones of the dead. Macabre is the forever theme in Julia DeVille’s works. Whenever you feel gruesome or attractive, Julia DeVille is always there.

In this month's update: how public servants have become part of the 'permanent campaign', putting at risk the distinction between marketing and explaining government policy and between genuine and politically tailored data; a comparison of political donations in the US and Australia; and a history of voting in the US.

Downer's attempt at diplomacy, through an email from one of his senior DFAT officials, was carried out four days before Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews cancelled Haneef's visa and had him sent to the Wolston Correctional Centre.

Maybe the time has gone when national societies were go-it-alone concerns, and perhaps we now need to give constitutional recognition to global interdependence. I can think of no more effective way of doing this than an extension of the franchise to all payers of American taxes. (Desmond Ryan)

To step in and juggle the demands of an economic meltdown, two deadly wars and a deteriorating climate crisis would stretch [Governor Palin] beyond her range. Like picking Sen. McCain for president, putting her one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time.

As market confidence continues to plunge some of modern economics’ most popular ideas are now looking a little under-dressed. This paper deals with just one of those ideas - the myth that market participants are always rational decision-makers who act to maximise their own best interests. (Miriam Lyons and James Murray)

Would this bloody breakfast never end? Then again, what ends are there? Howard’s End [available in all good bookshops, published by Penguin]? Will there be a Malcolm’s End and when might it be and for which one of us?

It is too soon yet to predict exactly how badly the poorest countries will fare in the financial crisis and resultant economic downturn. But it is clear that reduced demands for exports to developed countries and lower foreign investment will mean less growth and government revenue for already-fragile social protection and services. For millions of the world’s poorest citizens, it is literally a matter of life and death.

Julia Bishop, we x chromosomes seem to agree, is like the Head Girl who is selected by the Headmistress, not by the student body. Julia Gillard's breasts are too small, hips too large, seems a popular verdict. Sarah Palin has the ready popular appeal that Pauline Hanson had for a moment or two. Is she the future?

Four babies were killed and more than 12,600 were hospitalized by the melamine-tainted infant formula produced by SanLu earlier last month. At first glance, people thought it was only a random incident. But when further investigations were undertaken, it was revealed that almost every milk product sold on the Chinese market contained excessive melamine.

Damn if I didn’t have it here somewhere. A large, thank you James. Damn, not under the chair is it, m’dear? Last few Chapters of Prince Crispian. Damn. Oh here it is inside today’s Tele. Oh, that’s not it. Same typeface. What’s this then? Oh things do change so when you’re dead...

Commercial television - where most Australians used to get their news and information - has dropped the ball. Even more disturbing, I think it’s showing serious signs of pulling out of the main news game. I think what we need - desperately - is to find some new models of those ruthless, old privateers we used to sneeringly call media moguls. (Ray Martin)

The decision to axe one of this network's most distinctive and important programs has been approved by the director of ABC Radio, Sue Howard, and it will condemn Radio National to even greater irrelevance. (Stephen Crittenden)

Normally the most amazing thing about a thermos flask would be along the lines of the old joke "It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold.. how does it know?"  Since September 11 2001 such an object is now capable of halting cities.

So there you have it – situation average in Canberra. ‘Go for Coe’ is now one of my electorate’s members of the Assembly... Webdiarist David Markham reports on the aftermath of the ACT election.

Oliver Stone's latest film W has just been released in the US. It covers the period from George W Bush's student days at Yale to 2004, the last year of his first presidential term. Its reception has, to put it mildly, been mixed.

As the foundations of our lives erode, we search for an anchor, and social politics very often provides it. When all else fails, we may still rally around old certainties: nation, culture, religion, race. We crave strong authority figures that can imbue us with certainty and articulate for us a sense of self. That often involves fabricating a scapegoat who becomes a mortal enemy. (Waleed Aly)

This week’s Rudd Government stimulus package is a good start, but more is needed now. It is imperative for the Federal and State Governments to stimulate business with tax cuts otherwise both unemployed and "underemployed" will jump ... . In addition the Reserve Bank must cut interest rates another 1% at each of its next two or three monthly meetings. (Gary Morgan)

Since I moved house recently I have not found anywhere to put up my dart board, so I have no means of working out who to vote for. A friend has told me that he dislikes all the candidates that he knows so intensely that he is only going to vote for candidates that he has never heard of. This sounds like a very sensible plan.

And yet for perhaps the first time I can remember I found myself agreeing with Marie-George Buffet, the leader of the French Communist Party who said: "So we stop the match, then what? Is it going to solve the problem of these men and women who in a way are expressing that they don't feel right in our country?"

What’s the take away? For Costello, he has learnt that the Liberal party has a cult of the leader. Too many in his party saw Howard as a virtual god. For the reader, we have discovered not to trust the promises of a hungry politician, for they'll step on anyone's neck to get to their desired destination. Voter beware!

After Treasurer Foley's announcement yesterday, planted on ABC Local radio in the morning and moved through the media over the day, our Premier and our Infrastructure Minister trotted themselves out on the telly overnight to suggest the possibly that abandoned projects might be saved by Federal funds.

A motion calling for a judicial inquiry into the Commonwealth Government's People Smuggling Strike Team's actions, including those concerning the boat known as SIEV X and its tragic loss of life, has been voted down by the Senate.

In Australia, there are three key arenas in which the limits of racial, cultural, ethnic and religious diversity are tested. The first is in the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The second is at our borders as defined by our immigration policies. The third is in the policies directed at managing cultural and ethnic diversity in Australia. (Petro Georgiou MP)

It’s been estimated that the average Australian basket of food travels around 70,000 miles  That doesn’t include the energy costs in the actual food’s production – from manufacturing to the use of pesticides and fertilizers. For example, it takes 2,200 calories of hydrocarbon energy to produce a can of soft drink containing 200 calories.

This announcement by the Prime Minister, if correctly reported, is a recipe for disaster because of its open-endedness. The agreement of the Leader of the Opposition is equally rash. To guarantee deposits for the big four with substantial assets makes some limited sense but ...

The “greed-is-good” era brought the stock market crash of 1987, the savings and loans debacle in the United States and the global recession which gripped many countries in the early 1990s. It is perhaps time now to admit that we did not learn the full lessons of the greed-is-good ideology. And today we are still cleaning up the mess of the twenty-first century children of Gordon Gecko. (Kevin Rudd)

Henson has done nothing wrong under the law and for lawmakers to be carrying in this manner is actually an appalling dereliction of their role in our political system. Indeed arguably undermining of it. They need to be called on this, every one of them.