Ludwig von Mises argues that: "There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about. In a totalitarian hegemonic society the only freedom that is left to the individual, because it cannot be denied to him, is the freedom to commit suicide." 

We're "winning the battle" in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown told parliament last December.

In January, bushit told the US Congress, "Afghanistan… is now a young democracy where people are looking to the future with new hope". But now the truth is out.

If a museum were built to honour the ancestral political class, it would not look much different from the House of Commons.

Its corridors are lined with portraits of the political greats and its staircases are adorned with old Vanity Fair caricatures.‘Honourable members’ are still treated as if they were just that, with the right to jump to the top of the queue at canteens, bars and the post office.

The Treasurer, Michael Costa, has pinned his future on the sale of the state's electricity assets, saying he will "not hang around in politics if we're not doing reform". 

In a wide-ranging interview with the Herald yesterday, Mr Costa also claimed Labor's state president, Bernie Riordan, had forfeited his right to the job with his outburst against privatisation this week.  

from Crikey ….. 

Which bank spent $50 million on crappy ads then raised rates? 

Jane Nethercote writes: 

There was always something a little strange about the neoconservatives, beginning with the oxymoron of their name.

In the warmonger sweepstakes now taking place among the major GOP presidential contenders, John McCain out-demagogued even Rudy Giuliani, whose studied belligerence seems narrowly centered on the Middle East. McCain’s enmity is universal: if he were president, in addition to taking on the Arabs and the Persians, we’d soon be at loggerheads with the Russians.  

Baldrick: "I have ... a cunning plan. It's as cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University. 

The thing is, we want all this land, but we don't want those Arab people what live on it.  

Alan Ramsey 

Before he died in November 1984, aged 83, Xavier Herbert gave an interview in central Australia in which, during 3½ hours, he talked of the widespread practice in Australia's north and north-west of what he called "gin rooting", as well as boasting of having been, as a young man in the 1920s, "the biggest gin rooter around".  

For the first time in 40 years Americans across the country are finding their homes on average are worth less today than they were just the year before. 

Foreclosures are rampant, up 75 percent nationally last year over 2006, and the number of lender-owned homes nearly doubled in the fourth quarter of 2007 over the same period last year.  

The 9/11 Commission has long been suspected of being a bipartisan whitewash of the Bush Administration failures in preventing 9/11 and its botched immediate follow-up after the event.  

In delivering his seventh & final State of the Union address, bushit faced a steep challenge in persuading Americans to heed his words on the war, economic policy or any other issue, according to administration officials, lawmakers & outside observers, according to the Washington Post.  

"Your papers please" has long been a phrase associated with Hitler’s Gestapo. People without the Third Reich’s stamp of approval were hauled off to Nazi Germany’s version of Halliburton detention centers.  

Today Americans are on the verge of being asked for their papers, although probably without the "please."  

A thousand years ago and one hundred years ago and again today, there has always been confusion between terrorism and resistance.

As it was for mainstream Islam, it is a point of view for today’s US administration that sees terrorists under every rock, that blames every failure on largely unidentified terrorists, and justifies each of its own nefarious crimes on generic terrorism.  

The former president of Tanzania Julius Nyerere once asked: "Why haven’t we all got a vote in the US election? Surely everyone with a TV set has earned that right just for enduring the merciless bombardment every four years."