From Longform.org, a story of a fire in an abandoned warehouse - The Perfect Fire: The message that there might be people inside was relayed over the fire-department radios. Brotherton and Lucey walked back across the roof to the AB stairs, tromped down one flight, and started searching the top floor for people. Routine. At 6:22, only the thinnest haze of smoke hung in the corridors. More than two dozen men were in the warehouse, looking either for homeless people or flames. Each man had a tank strapped to his back filled with oxygen compressed to forty-five hundred pounds per square inch–enough for thirty minutes of relaxed breathing, half as long humping through a burning building–and connected to a plastic face mask. But the air was so clear that no one had bothered to put his on. ...

Apparently, the biggest single issue that “ordinary Australians” have with Julia Gillard is that she has “lied” about introducing a carbon tax, breaking an election promise. It goes without saying that Gillard is far from the first PM to have broken a election promise, let alone one about tax; the difference is this time, her opponent hangs on to that and doesn’t let go of a line until it proves to have wormed its way into the psyche of the average voter. ...

Gerard Henderson contends today that Malcolm Turnbull has no hope of being Prime Minister after his appearance on Lateline last Wednesday: Turnbull’s lack of political judgment has blinded him to the fact that his body of support is located outside the joint-party Coalition room in Canberra. Most Liberals and all Nationals parliamentarians who watched Lateline on Wednesday would not have regarded themselves as viewing the performance of a potential prime minister. ...

Matt Taibbi, who once called Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”, writing in Rolling Stone about the Levin report on the causes of the GFC: Thus, while much of the Levin report describes past history, the Goldman section describes an ongoing? crime — a powerful, well-connected firm, with the ear of the president and the Treasury, that appears to have conquered the entire regulatory structure and stands now on the precipice of officially getting away with one of the biggest financial crimes in history. ...

… in with the same old story. You’ll have to pardon me if I’m somewhat cynical about government, newly elected in a historical landslide, coming in and saying there’s a $4.5 billion dollar “hole” in the budget not revealed by the previous administration, and that means all our policies have to be “reviewed”. It sounds like the perfect excuse to abuse the broad mandate handed to the incoming government. The spin is already revving up - the “hole” is over forward projections: ...