Mr Gates said that he and President Bush had settled on the four-star general for the post because he is best suited to oversee American operations, not just in Iraq but also in Afghanistan and other areas where the United States is engaged in “asymmetric” warfare, a euphemism for battling terrorists and non-uniformed combatants.

The government and corporations are aggressively collecting information about your personal life and your habits.  

They want to track your purchases, your medical records, and even your relationships.  

This morning I received a message from Mark R. Picton via our website contact mechanism. 

Mark’s message appears below in full. 

‘Hi folks, 

A few days ago I registered to comment that the purported Reagan quote about Bush (from the reagan diaries …..) was a joke and did not come from the Reagan diaries. I see that the post has been removed and that (obviously) my comment didn't get published. 

The bushit administration is expected today to order commercial airlines & cruise lines to prepare to collect digital fingerprints of all foreigners before they depart the country under a security initiative that the industry has condemned as costly & burdensome.  

Readers have been shocked to learn that California has about 1 million citizens who are literally above the law.

Members of this group can drive their cars as fast as they choose.  

They can drink a six-pack of beer at a bar and then get behind the wheel and weave their way home.  

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900. 

That notorious entertainer, Alexander – call me “fishnets” – Clowner was treading the boards again yesterday. 

Mustering his vast diplomatic skill to condemn suggestions from last weekend’s Summit that Australia might become a Republic, the Adelaide hysteric said:  

Even as American and Iraqi troops are fighting to establish control of the Sadr City section of this capital, the Iraqi government’s program to restore basic services like electricity, sewage and trash collection is lagging, jeopardizing the effort to win over the area’s wary residents.

An American expert in torture techniques has denounced his government for allowing "waterboarding" to be practised against terror suspects, just as a graphic advertisement showing the brutal reality of the technique is unveiled to British cinema-goers. 

The head of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, Professor David Flint, says the selection of the governance panel at the 2020 Summit was a gerrymander worthy of an African dictatorship. 

Professor Flint told a Sydney lunch celebrating the Queen's birthday that the governance panel that called for an Australian republic was stacked with pro-republican delegates. 

It’s been obvious almost from the beginning of the first Bush Administration that neither Bush nor his kitchen cabinet had much interest in or knowledge of the world outside the USA.

They blundered from one embarrassment to another, screwing up or forgetting funny foreign names, confusing Sunnis and Shiites (that’s after the penny finally dropped that the Middle East wasn’t populated by homogeneous Muslim terrorists), expressing child-like amazement at the size of Brazil on a map and so on. 

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay.

"President" Dick Cheney  - since our little boy Bush was being occupied by a dinner with a pope - attended the 2008 dinner for Radio and TV correspondents as a guest speaker.

Either he wrote his own gags or he had a team of army sergeants and neo-con neo-comics who wrote them for him, splurging on the bad taste like mouldy marmalade on toast.  

alan ramsey 

Most of us thought the country, tired of Howard's miserable mob, had elected Rudd's new mob to "get on with it" and govern with a bit of decency and policy difference. What we didn't understand was the new bloke's quaint idea of just what that means.