The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled,
And a staggering piece of insight
Kept running around in his head.

When the flame of truth hits the ship of state
And the tides of time are turning,
They tend to bucket the captain
When the ship is what is burning.

Bruce Petty, 1972

This is what they call "teamwork"?

Mr Costello said he had not spoken to any colleagues in the past week to offer his services as leader if Mr Howard stepped aside.

"The meetings didn't involve me & I didn't know they were taking place,'' he said.

"This Government is a team & the team is led by John Howard & me.”

I Started It, Says PM

So a handful of trans-national corporations, backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are aggressively taking over the management of public water services in countries around the world, dramatically raising the price of water to the local residents and profiting especially from the Third World’s desperate search for solutions to its water crisis.

Some are startlingly open; the decline in freshwater supplies and standards has created a wonderful venture opportunity for water corporations and their investors, they boast.

President George W. Bush is fond of reminding us that no terrorist attacks have occurred on domestic soil since 9/11. But has the Administration's "war on terror" actually made us safer? According to the July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, al-Qaeda has fully reconstituted itself in Pakistan's northern border region.

Terrorist attacks worldwide have grown dramatically in frequency and lethality since 2001. New terrorist groups, from al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia to the small groups of young men who bombed subways and buses in London and Madrid, have multiplied since 9/11.

The Premier of New South Wales,

Mr Morris Iemma,

Parliament House,

SYDNEY. NSW. 2000.

Dear Mr Premier,

"No American President Can Stand Up to Israel"

These words came from feisty Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations (1967-1970) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1970-1974). Moorer was, perhaps, the last independent-minded American military leader.

Admiral Moorer knew what he was talking about. On June 8, 1967, Israel attacked the American intelligence ship, USS Liberty, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 173. The Israelis even strafed the life rafts, machine-gunning the American sailors leaving the stricken ship.

‘a long-term aspirational global emissions reduction goal’, without targets.

Remember that joke film clip that President Bush made for the Radio and Television Correspondents' dinner in 2004 wherein he made a mockery of the search for WMD's...looking under a chair in the Oval Office and so forth?

Well, it turns out that that was about as seriously as he took the CIA and their intelligence that there were no WMD's in Iraq before he sent us to war.

Perhaps the most ridiculous statement to have emerged from the neo-conservative regime that runs the Republican Party is that bin Laden and his gang of terrorists murdered thousands of innocent Americans because "they hate our freedoms." If you are a Fox News Channel viewer or a Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity/Michael Savage/Michael Medved radio show listener you have probably heard this refrain at least 10,000 times.

But Americans were much freer decades ago, before the governmental Leviathan became as gargantuan as it is now. Why didn’t Muslim terrorists attack us then, if they hate our freedom so much? Whey did they wait until 2001?

The White House has proposed military spending of $647 billion in 2008. Adjusted for inflation, that would be the highest level since World War II - topping even expenditures during Vietnam and the Reagan years, calculates Hartung. The current request for Iraq-related spending for 2008 is $116 billion, which would raise total Iraq war spending to $567 billion.

Bushit claims that al-Anbar province in Iraq had been written-off to al-Qaeda some six or eight months ago.

Continuing the outhouse’s usual propaganda, bushit continued to justify the butchery in Iraq by linking it to 911.

Forty years ago, Aboriginal Australians were recognised (by Anglo-Australians) as Australian citizens. Many Australians, including Aboriginal Australians, thought the days of racism and dispossession in Australia were numbered. They were wrong. Aboriginal Australians remain a marginalised community, unprotected from colonial ideology and laws that violate basic human rights.

Few average Americans have been changed, however, by what the CIA does in our name. Blame that on the tight official secrecy that continues over how the CIA extracts information. On July 20, the Bush administration issued a new executive order authorizing the CIA to continue using these techniques - without disclosing anything about them.

On Monday, President Bush will visit Australia to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. The White House is using the trip to try to influence the Australian election, where Bush’s good friend John Howard is pitted in a contest against Labor leader Kevin Rudd.

Howard was an early supporter of the Iraq invasion and has remained one of Bush’s few solid foreign allies. Prior to the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Howard weighed in, claiming a Bush reelection was needed in order to “stay and finish the job” in Iraq.