Julia Baird's excellent "Being Julia: Australia’s new prime minister breaks the glass ceiling"; while Alex Sink's campaign in FL flounders painfully

Well, despite the often very accurate knock about Twitter that it is the greatest tool for people to share their nonsense about their hum-drum life since Alexander Graham Bell did his thing with the telephone -see Our True, Tweeting Selves,Why historians salivate over Twitter

at http://www.newsweek.com/2010/04/21/our-true-tweeting-selves.html sometimes Twitter is actually very useful, as when I checked in on one of my go-to people this afternoon, Newsweek's Deputy Editor Julia Baird, courtesy of her Twitter account at http://twitter.com/bairdnewsweek .

There I saw that she'd just posted this: "My column for Newsweek on Australia's first female Prime Minister, the straight-shooting Julia Gillard."

It's excellent.
Baird shoots and she scores!

Newsweek
Being Julia
Australia’s new prime minister breaks the glass ceiling

By Julia Baird

What a gloriously surprising day it was when Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister.

The trumpets sounded, journalists roared, and Australian women updated their Facebook status to, simply, “Julia.” The circumstances were not ideal—she ousted a once popular prime minister, and she had not won a general election—but the significance of the moment was enormous. Finally, after centuries of bowing to queens while women were locked out of the highest echelons of political office, Australians watched a straight-shooting, unaffected woman seize the real reins of power.

Gillard, 48, the daughter of a coal miner and a former industrial-relations lawyer, has a pragmatic approach to politics and a record of fighting for better conditions for workers, and for greater numbers of women in Parliament. She is well respected and hails from the left of her party.

See the rest of the article at: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/24/being-julia.html

See her story on Gillard for the Sydney Morning Herald, her former newspaper for nine years, Lessons from sisters who fell on the way

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/lessons-from-sisters-who-fell-on-the-way-20100624-z3qr.html

Check out this SMH video: -I accept the anger: Gillard
Friday, June 25, 2010 4:33 AM
Julia Gillard tells Paul Bongiorno that she fully accepts the anger of the Australian people at the removal of Kevin Rudd.

Julia Gillard's first press conference as Australian Prime Minister.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdXlUdSBOYk

For more from Julia Baird, see http://www.newsweek.com/authors/julia-baird.html

FYI: Not enough time to get into it here now, but back when I was at JFK Junior High in North Miami Beach, circa 1973-'75, my family was all set to move to Sydney. Typically, besides reading all the materials from the Australian Embassy from cover-to-cover, I made it my job to learn everything I could about Australian Rules Football, since I didn't want to show up at school and be odd man out. http://www.afl.com.au/

Not so easy in those pre-Internet days at the Lafe Allen Library in NMB. Actually, try impossible!