Maybe it was just the August winds or the prime meanster simply laying false trails again, but someone sure put something in the Liberals’ drinks this past couple of weeks.

When federal liberal backbencher & former leadership aspirant, Bronwyn ‘Boadicea’ Bishop, recently posited that the recruitment age for the ADF be lowered to 14, her suggestion received all the serious attention that it deserved.

Pat Robertson’s basic assumptions echo those of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, including that the ends (the dominance of the United States) justify virtually any means & that securing oil reserves is tantamount to preserving US national security.

The Bush administration has declared that previous restrictions outlawing assassinations as a legitimate US foreign policy instrument were not relevant to a nation at war. The administration has resorted to the notion that all is fair in war to justify pre-emptive murder by the United States & Israel, even when the targets could have been captured alive.

In the wake of the dreadful Bali bombings that killed 202 people in October, 2002, including 88 Australians, the Australian government introduced stringent new anti-terrorist measures to minimize the possibility of the third world war, the “war on terrorism

‘Derek Burney, Pat Carney, Allan Gotlieb, Simon Reisman and Gordon Ritchie were key members of the negotiating team that forged the 1988 free-trade agreement between Canada and the United States.

‘Thomas Friedman is a famous columnist on the New York Times. He has been described as "a guard dog of US foreign policy". Whatever America's warlords have in mind for the rest of humanity, Friedman will bark it.

He boasts that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist".

He promotes bombing countries and says world war three has begun.

‘America needs to drop its obsession with being number one. It is time for the United States to become a member of the world community rather than a murderous bully.

Obscene over-consumption has become a hallmark of the United States. While not all Americans fall prey to Madison Avenue's propaganda glamorising gluttony, many do.

‘Why do they hate us? 

President George Bush posed this question to the American public shortly after 9/11. 

The 'everyday low prices' super-chain refuses to carry books & music that dare criticize conservative values.  

As you have probably heard, the "everyday low prices" at these concrete boxes of utopian consumption have tremendous costs for our environment, our workers, our wages, our communities & the public coffers.

‘This is the model for the future - a model that takes its cues from historical success of sharpening an ideology that truly speaks for America's middle class, not the historical failure of trying to simultaneously appease both the Big Money perpetrators and their middle-class victims in a corrupt political system gone mad.

This is a grassroots model that comes from America's most successful political stories, not from the class of professional election losers in Washington who preach an ineffective, split-the-difference politics.

This, in short, is the way our country can take its government back. It is up to us to take the first step. If we do, America will follow.’

BELOW IS A TRANSCRIPT OF THE ADDRESS GIVEN TODAY AT THE VP DAY COMMEMORATIVE CEREMONY, AT THE AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL, CANBERRA, BY THE PRIME MINISTER THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP

BELOW THAT IS A LETTER WRITTEN BY ROBIN GOLLAN OF SCULLIN, ACT, PUBLISHED IN THE CANBERRA TIMES ON AUGUST 13

This film shows how the U.S. attacked Panama and killed 3 or 4 thousand people in an invasion that the rest of the world was against.  (Sound familiar?)

The excuse given was to get the drug lord, General Noriega, who had been on the CIA's payroll for 20 years.  

We see not only the devastation we did to poor cities in Panama, but also how our media was complicit in the way all of this was presented to the American public.  

An Open Letter To Cindy Sheehan, Crawford, Texas

By Ralph Nader

May You Prevail Where Others Have Failed

‘From your grief over the loss of your son, Casey, in Iraq has come the courage to spotlight nationally the cowardly character trait of a President who refuses to meet with anyone or any group critical of his illegal, fabricated, deceptive war and occupation of that ravaged country. As a messianic militarist, Mr. Bush turned aside his own father's major advisers who warned him of the terroristic, political, and diplomatic perils to the United States from an invasion of Iraq. He refused to listen.

A stated belief of the Liberal Party is: “We believe in a just & humane society in which the importance of the family and the rule of law & justice is maintained.

‘In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush & his senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq's "patrimony" for the Iraqi people.  

At a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, what he meant by patrimony was exactly that - Iraqi oil.

In their "joint statement on Iraq's future" of April 8, 2003, George Bush & Tony Blair declared: "We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit

‘Michael Mandel’s How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes Against Humanity is my favorite book of 2003-2004. (Numbers two and three are Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival and Frank Ackerman’s and Lisa Heinzerling’s Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing.)

Mandel’s book is a scholarly, but eminently readable and completely convincing demonstration that the U.S. wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the institutional apparatus that has given them legal support, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY, Tribunal) and the UN, have made a travesty of the law and are returning the world to the law of the jungle.’