‘When I saw the Newsweek cover featuring Big Daddy Bush muscling toward the front with a diminished little Dubya skulking in the background, my first thought was: How is Junior going to react to this? Bush II's resentment toward his father is well-known – a resentment no doubt compounded by his lifelong, abject dependence on Daddy's financial and political pull – and I knew that Little Bush would not simply accept this media humiliation and move on.

Because for all his vaunted (and totally mendacious) "unconcern" with opinion polls and popularity ("Ah just do whut muh gut tells me is right"), Little Bush is actually one of the most vain and insecure men ever to sit in the White House; only Nixon can match him in this regard. Why else would he need to have his authority bolstered in such ludicrous ways – such as all those little "Commander-in-Chief" and "President of the United States" tags embossed onto his fancy quasi-military jackets and his running gear and belt-buckles and boots – and probably his toilet paper as well?

‘They say the fountain in London's Trafalgar Square turned the color of blood on Armistice Day last weekend, as Britons in the hundreds of thousands trudged out in the November gloom to commemorate the end of the First World War, and lament the dead in all the wars thereafter.

But the turning of the water was no miracle, no divine judgment on the leader whose fateful partnership with George W. Bush is producing - week after week, month after month, year after year - fresh cause for future mourning. The color came from the thousands of fake poppies tossed into the fountain in what The Observer called "a spontaneous act of remembrance": an offering of the ubiquitous charity emblems worn by most of the population in the week leading up to the memorials.

                            charity begins at home .....

 
‘As the red wheel of Operation Iraqi FUBAR* continues to roll, spewing hundreds of corpses in its wake, it becomes clearer by the hour that there is only one way for America to end this stomach-churning nightmare it has created: get out.

That's it. The occupying armies – including Bush's 20,000 corporate mercenaries – should leave now. They should never have been sent in the first place on this ghoul's errand: a war of aggression, a mission of murder and plunder – the perversion of every enlightened value of the civilization that the Coalition's "Christian leaders" purport to defend.

 Former Defence Minister Robert Hill now joins PM Howard and Ministers Downer and Vaiille in being implicated in the AWB cover-up.

Only a few sleeps away from the delivery of the AWB Report we learn that 70 employees of the the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade knew about the bribes to Saddam as far back as 2001

A cable from Australia's mission to the United Nationse refferring to "kickbacks"  was sent to DFAT, the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Defence Department, and marked for the information of the Prime Minister, the Trade Minister, Austrade, the Foreign Minister and the Defence Minister.

 
from the US Centre for Constitutional Rights

Today, CCR filed a criminal complaint in Germany under their universal jurisdiction law charging Rumsfeld, Gonzales and other high-ranking officials in the Bush administration with war crimes . The complaint was filed on behalf of 11 former detainees who were victims of severe beatings, sleep and food deprivation, hooding and sexual abuse in Abu Ghraib, and one detainee at Guantánamo Bay subjected to torture and abuse there under Rumsfeld’s specific authorization.

from Our belittled ABC ….

No need for constitutional convention, PM says

The Prime Minister says there is no need for a constitutional convention in the wake of this week’s High Court case on industrial relations.

Several premiers say yesterday's ruling has changed the basis of the relationship between the Commonwealth and the states and have called for a convention to debate the situation. 

‘British Prime Minister Tony Blair made an open plea on Monday to United States President George Bush to recognise that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies at the core of any hopes for wider peace in the Middle East, including Iraq.

In his annual foreign policy speech, seen as a chance to recalibrate Britain's Iraq strategy, Blair said a solution to the conflict was central to a strategy that "pins back the forces trying to create mayhem inside Iraq".

only $1500 a head at an American Club Dinner …..

from the ABC ….

Murdoch urges Australians to stick by US

News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch has warned Australians not to allow anti-American sentiment over the Iraq war to damage the country's relationship with the United States. 

‘The growth in global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels over the past five years was four times greater than for the preceding 10 years, according to a study that exposes critical flaws in the attempts to avert damaging climate change.

Data on carbon dioxide emissions shows that the global growth rate was 3.2 per cent in the five years to 2005 compared with 0.8 per cent from 1990 to 1999, despite efforts to reduce carbon pollution through the Kyoto agreement.

‘The United States last year provided nearly half of the weapons sold to militaries in the developing world, as major arms sales to the most unstable regions - many already engaged in conflict - grew to the highest level in eight years, new US government figures show.

According to the annual assessment, the United States supplied $8.1 billion worth of weapons to developing countries in 2005 - 45.8 percent of the total and far more than second-ranked Russia with 15 percent and Britain with a little more than 13 percent.

Poor Alexander Downer!  His leash has been cut, he's about to receive the political equivalent of a snip from the vet, and everyone's trying to put him down.

It's  bad enough that through the demise of the Bush Administration's power supply he's  just been demoted from alsatian to poodle, but now that the the Democrats are about to control the US' own Australian Wheat Bribe investigations, he's just lost the "flea collar" of ministerial non-accountablility that he buried in Commissioner Terence Cole's terms of reference.  No matter what Cole says when he hands down his findings in the next few weeks, Downer is about to be judged by the US Congress.  Where Cole can't find Downer guilty of participating in one of the more heinous war crimes of the Iraq invasion.   Democrat congressmen can, and probably will, banish him from the international political arena  as punishment for his crimes.