Word: monarchism
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...public vote held to name a cat on the children's show Blue Peter (producers rejected the winning entry, Cookie, in favor of Socks) and showing a trailer for the documentary A Year with the Queen with scenes shown out of sequence to suggest (deceptively) that the monarch had stormed out of a photo session...
According to the Australian constitution--a document written for us by the English at the turn of the century--it is ultimately the English monarch who rules Australia through an unelected viceroy, the Governor-General. This official may be Australian or may not. He may, on behalf of the Queen, cancel any law enacted by the Australian government or even throw out the government and call for new elections. Or he may not. In practice he almost never does. The last and only time he did was in 1975, when the G-G, Sir John Kerr, fired the Labor government...
...triumph of electoral timidity, worsened by fake populism. By a queer flip-flop of logic, a majority of Australian voters (55% to 45%) decided that to have an Australian President appointed by a democratically elected government was elitist and unsafe, whereas to have an immensely rich hereditary monarch as their head of state was somehow democratic and good. To understand how this weird inversion could occur, one must be aware that Australians are even more skeptical about the character of their "pollies" than Americans are, though they have little reason to be: the level of serious political graft in Australia...
...fined the magazine's publishers 3,000 euros for "insulting the monarchy.") The couple were already having a tough year: A few months earlier, Letizia's sister had committed suicide. This fall, groups of Catalan nationalists publicly burned photos of the king and queen, and last week, Morocco's monarch temporarily recalled his ambassador from Madrid to protest the Spanish monarch's visit to the contested cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Through it all, Juan Carlos and his wife Sofia have maintained their habitual calm, confident, no doubt, of both of their high approval ratings and their own exquisite manners...
There is only one possible complaint about this scene. Clark’s execution of Big Daddy is flawless—he is every inch the crude-mouthed monarch of his family—but he has not quite acquired the Southern accent. Especially when he lectures from an arm chair, Big Daddy comes off more as The Godfather than a Mississippi aristocrat...