brainsnorkel.com

There must be a Liberal Party guide to campaigning that has an entry on what to do when you’re behind in the polls. The gist of that entry seems to be that you should preface your “I need to work harder” rhetoric with a certain phrase…

Not the line at McDonalds on Victoria Road — a possible new Labor star recruit candidate to help the Prime Minister achieve transcendental shrillness before the next Federal Election.

High-profile media personality Maxine McKew will run as a Labor candidate in the next federal election.

Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd’s office confirmed that Ms McKew, an ABC journalist for more than 30 years, would stand as a candidate at this year’s election.

Mr Rudd’s spokesman could not confirm which seat Ms McKew would contest.

But ABC TV reported on Sunday night that Ms McKew was expected to run against Prime Minister John Howard in his Sydney seat of Bennelong.

I’ve done some quick calling around to check voter sentiment. My recent poll suggests Maxine can expect 100% of the vote in Bennelong*.

* Poll taken in one household in Bennelong with a sample size of two people**.

** I was one of those people.

Yes — I thought I had misheard — but I really did hear John Howard tell Laurie Oakes that a Democratic Party victory in the US presidential elections in 2008 is exactly what Al-Quaeda should be praying for.

LAURIE OAKES: On that subject, Senator Barack Obama’s announced overnight he’s running for the Democrat Presidential nomination, and he says if he gets it he has a plan to bring troops home by March, 2008 and his direct quote is “Letting the Iraqis know we’ll not be there forever is our last, best hope to pressure the Sunies and Shiah to come to the table and find peace”. So, basically he’s agreeing with the Labor Party.

JOHN HOWARD: Yes, I think he’s wrong, I mean, he’s a long way from being President of the United States. I think he’s wrong. I think that would just encourage those who wanted completely to destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for Obama victory. If I was running Al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats.

I’m sure the Democratic Party-controlled US Senate and Congress are cowed by this, and will be happy to discuss it during the next trade talks.

Update: Oops forgot to link. And this is all going to smart once congressional investigations into the AWB heat up.

There are many companies that don’t seem to do periodic sanity checks on their billing systems to determine if they are brain-dead automata, unnecessarily harassing their ex-customers. For example, I still receive a quarterly bill from Telstra telling me that they owe me $0.25 for a phone I had disconnected in 2001.

I guess the cost of sending physical or email bills is so low that they don’t think it’s economic to settle, or write-off the account. I certainly can’t be bothered working my way through their IVRs to someone who can fix my problem.

Worse still, is Pacific Internet who have been emailing me monthly invoices that look like this, since I stopped being a customer in late 2004.

Below is an Account summary as shown in your invoice.

Account summary
----------------------------------------------
 Previous balance:                    $0.00
 Payments:                            $0.00
 Balance:                             $0.00
----------------------------------------------
 Data charges:                        $0.00
 Voice charges:                       $0.00
 Vocal charges:                       $0.00
 Adjustments:                         $0.00
 GST included in new charges:         $0.00
----------------------------------------------
 Total payable:                       $0.00

 Due date:

Please note this Account summary does not constitute a Tax Invoice.

That last sentence is an understatement.

Apologies for the lack of new posts. I added Google reader Shared Items link over on the right to help shake the cobwebs off.

Chris’ shared items: link.