When Henry was a little bloke, renowned footy player and commentator Lou Richards was known to bestow the ‘kiss of death’ on a team by tipping it to win. Lou also boasted that he always put iodine on his boots so that his victim’s gashed legs would not get infected.

The clever Kevin Rudd has avoided Paul Keating’s kiss of death. Somehow he has got Comrade Paul to assert that he cannot win. Not because of Rudd’s personal deficiencies, one must understand, but because his advisers and colleagues are so hopeless. The same “no-value” advisers that cost Labor past elections are still in place.

Julia Gillard is doing “not very well”, which was mild criticism by the Master Blaster’s lofty standards, considering that she is about rollback of the labour-market deregulation that has so well served the Australian economy.

“Mr Keating accused Labor of wanting to take Australia’s workplace laws back further than when he was prime minister.”

This wonderful front-page story is somehow not available on the Oz‘s web version, but look for it wrapped around your long weekend fish’n’chips.

Meanwhile, Howard and Costello are reveling in more jobs and a clearly strengthening economy with low inflation. (There is the little issue of Ben Bernanke warning of inflation in a clearly more subdued US economy, but let’s let that go through to the keeper.)

John Howard has seemingly broken the drought with the power of prayer, and which marginal voter would risk all be voting for the other mob when the current PM is so obviously well connected with the rain gods, with a Treasurer who is so good at running the economy?

Careful readers will note that global share markets have been in correction mode since Henry’s article on asset inflation hit the streets. The usual thundering silence from the Old Lady of Martin Place, but it seems Ben Bernanke was taking note.

Meanwhile, in old Europe, George Bush is making his peace with Vlad Putin on missiles and with everyone else on climate change, while running Howard’s “no target” line, it should be recorded. (More evidence of our man’s influence.)

According to The Age:

World leaders agreed today to pursue substantial but unspecified cuts in Greenhouse gases and work with the United Nations to clinch a new deal to fight global warming by 2009.

The agreement, sealed at the G8 summit on the Baltic coast, binds the world’s largest polluter, the United States, more closely to international efforts to curb the gases scientists say are causing dangerous changes to world weather patterns.

But it does not commit the club of industrialised nations — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States — to the firm emissions-reduction targets that the summit host, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had wanted.

Read more at Henry Thornton.