Today’s the day? A quiet – but supposedly well sourced – rumour claims the federal election will be called today.

John Pilger’s war on democracy. John Pilger couldn’t be better qualified to make a film called The War on Democracy. In the early nineties, he threatened legal action against the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary of New Words for including Auberon Waugh’s joke verb, “pilgering”.

Aged services crisis crisis. Crikey hears that Liberal MPs on Sydney’s Northern Beaches have been organising public meetings on aged services. One seems to have created more problems than it solved – little in the way of parking, wrinklies locked out, the hall opened late, no chairs set up and no PA. It was all too much for the old, frail and hard of hearing – the target audience – who left in droves.