The surest sign yet that the PM is in real trouble: Hartcher's playing the mojo card

Peter Hartcher in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday:

JULIA Gillard got her mojo back. She won the first landmark legislative accomplishment of her prime ministership yesterday. She personally negotiated a vital bill for the government's National Broadband Network through the Senate. The magnitude of her success is illuminated by considering the alternative. It came down to an impasse between the Broadband Minister, Stephen Conroy, and the independent senator from South Australia, Nick Xenophon, the last and vital vote in the Senate. "If Gillard hadn't got involved, this wouldn't have happened," Xenophon said.

Miranda Irvine SMH, February 26:

BY question time, Rudd had found his lost mojo, having made it to the end of the sitting week relatively unscathed, despite Abbott's valiant efforts.

Michael Harvey in the Herald Sun, August 7, 2004:

"MOGADON Mark", his critics called him, as Mark Latham appeared permanently tranquillised a few weeks ago. Now it's more like Mojo Mark -- as in got his mojo back.

Preston Foster's 1956 blues classic:

GOT my mojo working, but it just won't work on you; Got my mojo working, it just won't work on you; I wanna love you so bad till I don't know what to do.

My brilliant career. Tim Dick interviews Kerry O'Brien for Fairfax yesterday:

DO you have a motto?

O'Brien: I take life as it comes and do the best I can with the cards I am dealt.

My career goes bung. Dick reports:

AFTER a stint organising furniture removals for ABC journalists came the Channel 9 cadetship, and then an offer of a job at News Limited's infant national newspaper. He gave notice at Nine, only for the paper to announce its first round of redundancies. He was one, retrenched before he began.

But mummy, isn't that where the common people shop? Elizabeth Farrelly in the SMH yesterday:

THAT'S John Stuart Mill's tyranny of the majority for you, which he figured (and I believe him) was worse than the tyranny of government. But we don't have to like it. Any more than we have to like the vile new Westfield that has wrapped itself like broken-glass do-do around the bottom of Centrepoint Tower. Admittedly, I'm not a mall person. Even at the Bondi Junction Westfield I have to take a compass and water bottle, plus extra rations of snuff. But WBJ (rumoured to have been designed for Frank Lowy's mum) is positively white linen handkerchiefs compared with the low-rent nightclub feel of the new Pitt Street Mall. Strange really. It's not like they're short of a few quid. Yet the effort to squeeze in every possible retail floor means you hop off the escalator, already woozy from the glum labyrinth of curved mirrors, and into a space with all the dignity of a club, its floor a ghastly veined marble and mirrored ceiling so low you could touch it with your credit card, held flat.

Matt Smith in The Age yesterday:

ONE of the most effective ways to save the world could be to eat your dog. When it comes to an ecological footprint, a dog is the equivalent of two Toyota LandCruisers, and this includes both the manufacture and use of the car. A cat is the equivalent of a Volkswagen Golf. Two guinea pigs have the same energy footprint as a plasma television. It might be better to grow some plants instead. At least plants are edible.

Facebook page on Can I recycle my Granny by Ethan Greenhart:

A COMMITTED ethicist, green writer and activist, Ethan favours euthanasia as a solution to the world's over-crowding problems, is opposed to throwing confetti at weddings because it contains bleach and artificial colourings that leak into the earth and thus is the "Wedding Day equivalent of acid rain", and he doesn't travel anywhere that can't be reached by foot or coracle.His book [is] written on a computer powered by solar energy, or, when the sun goes down, by a water-based treadmill that the author's children power with their feet.

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