It’s been said that there are two
essential qualifications that a US ambassadorial aspirant must possess: they
must be a personal friend of the President & a significant donor to the
President’s political party. Diplomacy doesn’t rate a mention. 

After allowing the position to
languish vacant for more than a year, the US has now announced the appointment
of Robert McCallum as its Ambassador Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary to
Australia. 

Sydney, Australia
March 16, 2006

FOREIGN MINISTER DOWNER: Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin by saying
how delighted I am to host this visit to Australia by Secretary Rice.
It's her first visit as the Secretary of State though she was here not
that long ago with President Bush when he was last in Australia. We had
this morning, the first part of the visit, which is our bilateral
meeting, I suppose it’s been an hour or an hour and ten minutes, and we
have a series of other functions and meetings over the next couple of
days, culminating on Saturday in the Trilateral Security Dialogue with
Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso.

Tomorrow No-War are going to walk around corners on the green lights, and Resistance are going to protest at Downer's King William Street office at 4.30.  So what?

 One thousand people came out in New York.   So what?  15,000 of London's population came out.... so what?

If we don't get out and support these protests, the message that we're sending is that we don't give a damn, and can't be bothered with doing more than paying lip-service to peace.

From the ABC ….. 

Rice
salutes Australian troops 

US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has thanked a small contingent of Australian
troops who have returned from Iraq, Afghanistan and Sumatra at a gathering in
Melbourne. 

‘The British Labour Party apparatchiks have come a long
way in a few years. The upper reaches of the Labour Party lead lives that bear
no relationship to the lives of their supporters. To the leadership, playing
around with extravagant sums of dough is, well, just normal. Why do bus
drivers, office cleaners, schoolteachers, and gardeners fail to understand
this? 

The political classes in Britain
(and no doubt the US) are beneficiaries of double standards and condescension.
They preach to working people about the importance of hard work and of paying
ever-increasing taxes, yet play footsie under the table with those whose job it
is to provide advice on how to squirrel away their wealth and earnings. 

With St Patrick's Day falling on the eve of the South Australian election, I'm having a think before I go for a drink, and I'm thinking that this election campaign has turned into the worst kind of Irish joke.

The "bread and circuses" environment created by the combination of the Festival of Arts, the Fringe, WOMAD, the Adelaide Cup (moved for the first time into this month)  have contributed to a city-wide mild sense of euphoria that has dulled the population to the action, or lack thereof, in SA's political arena.

Hell, the Liberals only started advertising on the telly this week.  Did they believe that blitzing the Sunday night movies and The Simpsons was going to reverse the effect  of Labor's incessant  media campaign? The media preview of the ad even misspelled Labour with a "U". Do they really want to win?

‘Even as he was telling Iran not to produce nuclear
weapons, President Bush was urging Congress to pay for a new nuclear weapon
designed to destroy underground military facilities. 

Although
the nuclear "bunker-buster" is still on the drawing board, Iran can
be expected to charge the United States with atomic hypocrisy during the
current war of words.  

Does anyone even remember why we
went to war with Iraq? 

Wasn't it to remove Saddam and
capture the Weapons of Mass Destruction? 

Well Saddam was removed &
there were no WMDs. So, why are we still there? 

Oh, I forgot, with the Bush
administration, war, death & hundreds of billions dollars spent on
contracts with Halliburton & other war profiteers doesn't have to make sense.

‘Tom Fox understood the kind of devotion and service to
humanity, particularly to the poor and the oppressed, that wearing the garments
of Christianity required. Bush, a man born of wealth and privilege has no
conception about what it means to labor, to sacrifice and to serve others. He
is all about serving those of his kind—the enemies of peace, the violent
oppressors of the poor and the just. Bush, like his predecessors, is taking
from the poor and giving to the rich; he is fomenting violence and death all
over the world - his actions, his life, cannot be reconciled in any way with
the teachings of Jesus Christ. Bush is an apostle of class elitism, of wealth
and empire, not of god. 

‘Introducing the Human Rights
report, Secretary Rice said, "How a country treats its own people is a
strong indication of how it will behave toward its neighbors. The growing
demand for democratic governance reflects a recognition that the best guarantor
of human rights is a thriving democracy," with rights such as accountable
government and a free press. 

The report, released in
Washington March 8, reviewed human rights achievements and setbacks in some 190
countries and regions around the world. It called the human rights records of
key Arab allies poor or problematic, citing flawed elections and torture of
prisoners in Egypt, beatings, arbitrary arrest and lack of religious freedom in
Saudi Arabia, and floggings as punishment for adultery or drug abuse in the
United Arab Emirates. Iraq's performance was "handicapped" by
insurgency and terrorism that affected every aspect of life, the State
Department said. 

From the ABC ….. 

No
need for ads on the ABC: Labor 

The
Federal Opposition's communications spokesman says the Government should rule
out the introduction of advertising on the ABC.

‘March 20 is the third anniversary of the Bush regime's
invasion of Iraq. US military casualties to date are approximately 20,000
killed, wounded, maimed, and disabled. Iraqi civilian casualties number in the
tens of thousands. Iraq's infrastructure is in ruins. Tens of thousands of
homes have been destroyed. Fallujah, a city of 300,000 people had 36,000 of its
50,000 homes destroyed by the US military. Half of the city's former population
are displaced persons living in tents. 

Thousands of Iraqis have been
detained in prisons and hundreds have been brutally tortured. America's
reputation in the Muslim world is ruined.