When you're on a crappy idea, stick to it. (And I'm not just talking about the insistence on uploading videos in the wrong aspect ratio.)
Update 28 September 2009: This video, apparently, is now "private". Personal keepsake of John and Jeanette, perhaps?
The day of Howard's End is upon us, and of all the election-related videos, serious and otherwise, that I have featured over the last 728 years of the campaign, two stand out: Chairman Kev is one, the other is my Grand Final Election Youtube Do Dia.
Presenting the music video of "It's Time to Go For Growth" by the Axis of Awesome.
That noted Texan vote-rigger, Lyndon Baines Johnson, utilised a notorious thirty-second ad in the 1964 presidential election which more-or-less stated that a vote for Barry Goldwater was a vote for nuclear holocaust. (And this just months after that other great fictional event, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.)
The Greens have adapted the LBJ masterpiece to convey the threat of climate change. Watch the Greens' 2007 Australian election ad, followed by the US Democrats' 1964 original.
When the facts are examined against the panicked rhetoric of Howard, I suggest there is only one conclusion to which you can come: it is time for him and his Government, with all their misrepresentations of the truth, to be gone.
- Bob Hawke, The Age, 21.11.07
The former Prime Minister's opinion piece on John Howard can be read in full in today's edition of The Age.
I'm unashamedly going in hard in my support for The Greens over the next few days. Firstly, the concept of the balance of power explained through animation. Secondly, footage from an anti-pulp mill rally in Hobart. And thirdly, one of The Greens' thirty-second ads featuring Dr Bob and Dr Bob.
A quick summary of my endorsements for the Federal Election:
House of Representatives: The Australian Labor Party to form government.
It's possible. Dagenham and Redbridge FC could win the English Premier League in 2011. Likewise, the Liberal and National Parties coalition could win the Federal Election this Saturday night.
More likely, the Daggers won't make it out of League Two, and the Labor Party will win this weekend. Comfortably.
How fortunate for John Howard that World Diabetes Day falls during the election campaign. (PS: Keep an ear out for Johnny's Special Bonus Illness.)
This is appalling. Maybe it should just be ignored, but John Howard is becoming so desperate that he is now playing the Disabled Child card.
Watch in disbelief as the outgoing Prime Minister exploits a young boy with cerebral palsy, but remember that, all being well, in fourteen days time this arrogant self-centred old man will be consigned to the non-recyclable wizbin of history.
(And no, the Liberal Party's technical boffins still don't know to convert a 16:9 video to 4:3 for Youtube.)
If Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley were to re-appear in contemporary Australia and remake her most famous novel, Telstra would be the monster. John Howard would be Dr Frankenstein, and Richard Alston would be Igor.
The privatisation of Telstra is arguably the worst of the Howard Government's economic failures. It was a classic example of putting ideology before economic sense.
Selling off a government-owned business in order to reduce capital debt is not, in itself, a bad concept.
Selling off a highly profitable government-owned business can work if done properly.