After four years watching the disastrous consequences of the invasion of Iraq unfold, it's easy to forget the atmosphere of panic in which the war was sold to the American public.

The main U.S. disaster-response agency apologized on Friday for having its employees pose as reporters in a news briefing on California's wildfires that no journalists attended. 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, still struggling to restore its image after the bungled handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, issued the apology after The Washington Post published details of the Tuesday briefing. 

from Crikey On November 1 last year, The SMH carried a front page interview with Peter Costello in which the Treasurer said the commodities boom was over.  

Judge Michael Mukasey's nomination for attorney general ran into trouble Thursday when two top Senate Democrats said their votes hinge on whether he will say on the record that an interrogation technique that simulates drowning is torture.  

Utopian fantasies have long transfixed the human race. Yet today a much rarer fantasy has become popular in the United States. Millions of Americans, the richest people in history, have a death wish. They are the new "Armageddonites," fundamentalist evangelicals who have moved from forecasting Armageddon to actually trying to bring it about. 

US troops in Iraq are not an occupying army. At least not technically: not legally.

Coalition troops are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government & that's important because being an occupier brings with it a host of rights & responsibilities under international law.

UK ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair has accused Iran of backing terrorism and warned the world faces a situation akin to "rising fascism in the 1920s".

Mr Blair told a charity event in New York that Iran was prepared to destabilise peaceful countries.

In his first major speech since leaving office, Mr Blair again defended the decision to go to war in Iraq.

There is an open secret in Washington. I learned it well during my 22-year tenure as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. All members swear to serve the interests of the United States, but there is an unwritten and overwhelming exception: The interests of one small foreign country almost always trump U.S. interests. That nation of course is Israel.

At a Stanford University discussion, Gen. John Abizaid (Ret.), the former CENTCOM Commander, said what we all know:

"Of course it's about oil, we can't really deny that," Abizaid said of the Iraq campaign.

The latest revelations in the Bush Administration's long unfolding, ever growing illegal wiretapping scandal carry with them a multiple sting.

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

Pangea

from Crikey …..

first fibs from Dear Leader

Mungo MacCallum writes: 

Always start the way you intend to continue; so our Dear Leader began his official election campaign with a great big fib.