Sydneysiders’ goodwill towards World Youth Day has been eroded by revelations of large-scale city road closures and an $86 million bill to taxpayers. 

A Sun-Herald/Taverner poll found that 64 per cent of Sydneysiders were in favour of World Youth Day being held in Sydney. But that number fell to 47 per cent when taking into account the disruption to traffic and road closures announced by Deputy Premier John Watkins. 

Of course, the Pentagon has long poured U.S. tax dollars into private coffers to arm and outfit the military and enable it to function.  

A Los Angeles-based firm "is pouring millions of dollars into developing the Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience, a massive American-style amusement park that will feature a skateboard park, rides, a concert theatre and a museum."  

from Crikey ….. 

Cardinal Pell throws thank you bash for Howard 

Alex Mitchell writes: 

The government and corporations are aggressively collecting information about your personal life and your habits.  

They want to track your purchases, your medical records, and even your relationships.  

This morning I received a message from Mark R. Picton via our website contact mechanism. 

Mark’s message appears below in full. 

‘Hi folks, 

A few days ago I registered to comment that the purported Reagan quote about Bush (from the reagan diaries …..) was a joke and did not come from the Reagan diaries. I see that the post has been removed and that (obviously) my comment didn't get published. 

The bushit administration is expected today to order commercial airlines & cruise lines to prepare to collect digital fingerprints of all foreigners before they depart the country under a security initiative that the industry has condemned as costly & burdensome.  

Readers have been shocked to learn that California has about 1 million citizens who are literally above the law.

Members of this group can drive their cars as fast as they choose.  

They can drink a six-pack of beer at a bar and then get behind the wheel and weave their way home.  

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900. 

That notorious entertainer, Alexander – call me “fishnets” – Clowner was treading the boards again yesterday. 

Mustering his vast diplomatic skill to condemn suggestions from last weekend’s Summit that Australia might become a Republic, the Adelaide hysteric said:  

An American expert in torture techniques has denounced his government for allowing "waterboarding" to be practised against terror suspects, just as a graphic advertisement showing the brutal reality of the technique is unveiled to British cinema-goers. 

It’s been obvious almost from the beginning of the first Bush Administration that neither Bush nor his kitchen cabinet had much interest in or knowledge of the world outside the USA.

They blundered from one embarrassment to another, screwing up or forgetting funny foreign names, confusing Sunnis and Shiites (that’s after the penny finally dropped that the Middle East wasn’t populated by homogeneous Muslim terrorists), expressing child-like amazement at the size of Brazil on a map and so on. 

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay.

alan ramsey 

Most of us thought the country, tired of Howard's miserable mob, had elected Rudd's new mob to "get on with it" and govern with a bit of decency and policy difference. What we didn't understand was the new bloke's quaint idea of just what that means. 

Kevin Rudd's world tour might be over, but his fingerprints were everywhere this week. Clearly emboldened by his receipt of a campy faux salute from Kevin Rudd a fortnight ago in Bucharest, the American President himself this week experimented with the Rudd tactic of high-level informality - on the Pope.