Culled from Crikey! this past week

A new political party launched in Australia last week - the Secular Party of Australia. This new party is committed to the separation of church and state and points out that

• The Liberal Party is too socially conservative
• The ALP is too economically conservative
• The Greens are too socialist economically
• The Democrats are confused about their role
• All these parties condone the unwarranted imposition of religious views.

They do have a point there. I haven't heard anything about them in the news except from Crikey!, and a search of Google News resulted in: Your search - "Secular Party of Australia" - did not match any documents.

So nice to see that the corporate media are keeping us informed.

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John Malkovich and British novelist Nicholas Shakespeare are apparently preparing a film treatment of the story of Truganini. Obviously the story of the last Tasmanian fullblood aborigine(TM) will be controversial, and in a way I think it's best that the story is not being done by Aussies. Let's see John Howard try and pressure Malkovich and Shakespeare about not presenting the "black armband" version of history.

Stephen Mayne typoed "cow-towing" for "kowtowing" in an article about Rupert Murdoch, and many ribs were mightily tickled. Obviously cow-towing should now become the national sport: the spectator base seems built in.

Julian "bandwagon" McGauran is an anti-abortionist, likely to support Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce on RU-486, and maybe even get behind Joyce's idea that vaccinating young girls against cancer is wrong-wrongitty-wrongbecause it might encourage them to go out and have promiscuous sex (cue vapours). After all, it's obviously only fear of cancer that's stopped them from becoming right little slappers so far - little things like pregnancy, gonorrhea and herpes not being big enough scarecrows for the religious right it seems. If it wasn't for the fact that it would necessarily mean that their wives (who surely suffer enough just living with them) would also be infected, I'd wish HPV on all these caring family men who can't see the women for their wombs, as being so blinded by genitals they will ignore any symptoms and end up with penile cancer (the only known treatment - amputation). It would only be fair.

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And back to my own opinion: a Prime Minister who bemoans "vulgarism on TV" instead of using that perfectly cromulent word "vulgarity" should be slappised and spankinated, hard. But only by someone committed to civil discourse, of course.