A wickedly funny faux-children's biography recounts Young Dick Cheney’s youthful lust for guns, oil, and the girl of his dreams. 

He was born among the big skies and cow pies of the Great American West.

And yet from these humble beginnings, he would grow to become the most famous, most powerful Dick ever to inhabit the Vice Presidency.

The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the build-up in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute. 

California is to mortgage lending what Chicago is to pork bellies. For years, that meant it was a place with soaring house values; today, the foreclosure rate across the state is twice the national average and going up fast. Riverside County, outside Los Angeles, may be the foreclosure capital of the country, with a rate close to six times the national average. And housing prices are in freefall. 

President Bush often argues that history will vindicate him. So he can't be pleased with an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted by the History News Network. It found that 98 percent of them believe that Bush's presidency has been a failure, while only about 2 percent see it as a success.  

Not only that, more than 61 percent of the historians say the current presidency is the worst in American history.

One day after gasoline hit a record price of $3.29 a gallon, senior executives from the big five oil companies - BP, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, ExxonMobil, and Shell - sat before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming Wednesday to plead “not guilty” for high oil and gasoline prices. 

This 47-year-old White male, [redacted], died of blunt force injuries and asphyxia. 

The autopsy disclosed multiple blunt force injuries, including deep contusions of the chest wall, numerous displaced rib fractures, lung contusions, and haemorrhage into the mesentery of the small and large intestine.

The Editor,

Sydney Morning Herald.                                                                         April 12, 2008.

The country's intelligence watchdog, Ian Carnell, has called on the Federal Government to make substantial changes to anti-terrorism laws, saying some of them can hinder counter-terrorism efforts by unnecessarily antagonising Muslims.

Tribunals for six detainees at Guantanamo Bay charged with war crimes related to the September 11 attacks have "hit a snag" as military defence lawyers are "in short supply."  

The Bushit administration’s Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act redefines what a terrorist is.  

Bushit & Nouri al-Maliki want to sign a long-term security treaty.  

Both are supposedly leaders of nations with Constitutions that require treaties to be ratified by their respective legislatures & both know that ratification doesn't stand a snow-ball's chance in hell of happening. 

Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out? 

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops.  

They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees.  

A March 25 George Lekakis column in The Herald Sun summarised the case: “Data collected by Bloomberg News shows that the default risk of Australian banks has never been higher, with Macquarie Bank emerging as one of the riskiest banking players in Asia. ... ‘Macquarie is the closest link in Australia to the problems that are afflicting Bear Stearns and other US investment banks,’ said David McDonald, of Shaw Stockbroking.”  

At the NATO Summit in Bucharest this week, our Kevin found time to catch-up with an "old friend".  

At the start of the session on Afghanistan, Kevin saluted the world’s greatest terrorist, war criminal, thief & draft dodger, establishing his own credentials as the US replacement for little rattus as as regional ‘deputy sheriff’.