Trump/Murdoch watch Jared Kushner, son-in-law to former president Donald Trump and puppet who became a real boy, has joined the coterie of former Trump staffers wringing a few last drops from the money sponge that was their association with the Aldi despot by writing a book. Titled Breaking History, it explains how he was the one person in the room who knew what was going on, and details what he alleges is one of the more momentous deleted tweets in history (God, you have to say weird stuff to describe the past few years). Kushner writes that Trump called him in 2015, furious at unfavourable coverage from the Murdoch empire in the early days of his political tilt:
He’d clearly had enough. ‘This guy’s no good. And I’m going to tweet it.’
‘Please, you’re in a Republican primary,’ I said, hoping he wasn’t about to post a negative tweet aimed at the most powerful man in conservative media. ‘You don’t need to get on the wrong side of Rupert. Give me a couple of hours to fix it.’
Of course, things eventually got much rosier between the two.
Palmer my hand Mark McGowan, by his own astronomical standards at least, may be feeling a little of the lustre coming off his domination of Western Australia, or at least that’s one impression you could take from his relatively low key “town hall” event in Broome. As a local journalist put it, there was a stark contrast between this evening and his approach to similar events in the heady days of 2020:
If indeed McGowan fears he’s getting more difficult questions than he once did, he must thank his lucky stars for the conclusion of his mutual defamation proceedings with Clive Palmer — the judgment is to be delivered today at 1.30pm AEST. If you ignore the very slightly chilling insight into how power works in this country, the case was certainly a magnificently dumb diversion.
Who can forget WA Attorney-General John Quigley letting McGowan know that he was forgoing any pre-dawn boning to focus on “defeating Clive”, or that time Palmer argued he believed McGowan had a “licence to kill” and could straight up murder him with impunity? Regardless of the outcome, it’s sure to remind WA voters of one of McGowan’s most popular decisions.
Feeling so Lowe Philip Lowe has long been one of the more media friendly Reserve Bank governors, particularly in 2022 when he’s been talking the nation through several interest rate hikes. And of course, he’s seeing the flipside of that — The Daily Telegraph has decided it’s time for him to go:
As Jason Murphy noted in his review of Lowe’s appearance on 7.30 earlier this year, it was the first time in 12 years an RBA chief has submitted to a television interview. Back then it was Glenn Stevens chatting with Sunrise. It may be a coincidence, but Stevens was also the last RBA chief to cop a brutal Tele frontpage, with its notorious “Is this the most useless man in Australia?” headline in 2008:
On this front, perhaps Lowe can take heart — a mere three years later, the Tele was in a much more generous mood, photoshopping Stevens as Santa to thank him for a rate cut just before Christmas in 2011.
Serving looks to the People We’re loath to criticise the literally embattled Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is within his rights to drum up international support by whatever means he deems approprioate. Still, we couldn’t help but look at the following shoot in Vogue and think, Christ, a president and first lady posing for a set of moody glamour shots in the bullet-riddled building carcasses of a literal war zone sure sounds like the kind of thing that would happen in that show Servant of the People.
