Here are my questions for Christopher Pyne:

1. I know you think language is important, because you have claimed it is offensive to call someone who disagrees with something a “denier” because that language effectively identifies them as a Nazi sympathiser. So how offensive is it to refer to a woman in public life as a “bitch”, and in particular, as someone else’s bitch?

2. Can you – or anyone else – show me a photograph of Sophie Mirabella, Brownyn Bishop and Tony Abbott on a stage together. Because it’s a little bit suss to get the ladies up front right now. Or do Liberal bitches just do what they’re told?

That’s three questions, isn’t it?

PS – I wondered why Christopher Pyne came into my head thinking about this – it’s because he’s got form.

“Obviously, if you are going to win the election you have got to secure the people who regard themselves as rusted on Coalition voters and then you have got to reach out to the middle ground,” Mr Abbott told Fairfax Radio today.

“And ‘Howard’s Battlers’, to use that phrase, were basically working people who respected John Howard because he thought that, in his own way, he was one of them.

“We can reach out and claim those same people … maybe this could become Abbott’s Army.”

I think I know what Abbott’s Army looks like already:

Photographer: Andrew Meares and others

When it all gets a bit much around here, I quietly think about being Tony Abbott, scheduled to debate Nicola Roxon in another city in a couple of hours, listening to both Howard and Costello address some dumb launch before being able to speak himself and getting to the airport to make the freaking debate. That thought – to see the day Tony Abbott’s charmless bullying and incompetence saw him become a public has-been – warms me up sometimes when I’m in need of encouragement.

* Author’s own heh. Should’ve gone for Ed Keupper, he never would have fucked up like that. And I can’t imagine Nick Cave running for Parliament. Seat in the House of Lords, maybe.

Pardon me while I go get a bex.

… from this morning’s rally in Canberra.

Important for all the family.

Update: lots more photos in the Your Rights at Work flickr group.

“It’s not plausible, it’s not based on anything other than a house-to-house survey,” Mr Howard said.

From the front page of today’s Canberra Times, “Iraq toll study ‘exaggerated’ ” which (really unbelievably this time) is not online.