From the ABC 7:30 report

Cole inquiry lacks powers: Opposition
Reporter: Michael Brissenden 

Foreign Affairs, after gagging his family via "security issues", said that incident highlighted the extreme dangers Australians faced in Baghdad.

The fact that an Australian-based mercenary company gunned down an 72 year old Iraqi academic as he drove home from a shopping outing, for fear he might be a suicide bomber, doesn't seem to be a factor in the minds of DFAT's spin-doctors.

For three months of the year Professor Kays Juma lived in the Adelaide suburb of Flagstaff HIll, a couple of miles from a university that had never heard of him, and not much further from Alexander Downer's house.  The bulk of his life was spent teaching animal husbandry at the University of Baghdad.

Addressing our federal Parliament this week, John Howard
said: 

“My job as Prime Minister of Australia is to represent
the interests of my country and to interact with the leaders of other countries
to the best of my ability. And in Tony Blair I have found a man of courage, of
moral purpose, of high intelligence, of a capacity to articulate with great
clarity the challenges of the contemporary world.” 

Our little flatterer went on to
quote Blair’s great friend, the Anglican priest, Peter Thomson, who allegedly
said: 

The Department of Trade and Economic
Development held a forum in Adelaide recentlyy to inform more than 70
SA businesses about multimillion-dollar opportunities in the Official
Development Assistance market.

Department chief executive Raymond Garrand
said the global official development market was valued at $108 billion
last financial year "and still growing".

"Australia allocated $2.3 billion annually to the official
development market through AusAid, and is ranked 15th amongst the OECD
(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries in
that market," he said.

From the SMH ….. 

‘Downer's memory at a loss over
wheat deal talks’
By Cynthia Banham and Marian
Wilkinson
March 28, 2006 

The Foreign Affairs Minister,
Alexander Downer, said yesterday he could not recall details of a
conversation he had last September with the head of the United Nations
investigation into the oil-for-food scandal, when he allegedly said AWB had no
option but to pay kickbacks if the company wanted to do business in Iraq. 

‘Psychological torture, sleep deprivation, brutality,
severe sexual humiliation, and murder summon visions of a dank dungeon in a
remote region of pre-invasion Iraq, Iran, or North Korea, replete with evil
inquisitors and hooded executioners. However, those manifestations of horror
did not spring forth from the Axis of Evil. They are actually drawn from
official post-9/11 US policy. Despite its fabled commitment to human rights,
the United States government has been committing and enabling acts of torture
for half a century. Not even Superman had the power to snatch “Truth, Justice
and the American Way” from the crushing jaws of imperialistic ambition and
avarice.

Ironically titled, Albert McCoy’s A Question of Torture probes and exposes the
extent of “the Land of the Free’s” involvement in human torture over the years.
Only a mainstream media 90% controlled by five major corporations (whose
executives and major stockholders are amongst the de facto rulers of the
America’s so-called republic) could so effectively maintain the illusion that
the United States is the world leader in protecting human rights. Somewhere out
there, David Copperfield is burning with envy. Rest easy, David. They are
running out of magic. Destroying our Constitution and reversing the
humanitarian gains achieved by millions of Americans with a social conscience
throughout our nation’s history, the Bush Regime is extinguishing the candle of
hope America once offered to humanity. Despite the exhaustive efforts of the
media handmaidens, people are taking notice.’ 

This isn't a comedy script.. this is reality.

TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
INTERVIEW WITH NEIL MITCHELL,
RADIO 3AW, MELBOURNE
24 March 2006

MITCHELL: Prime Minister the AWB bribery scandal. Do you think people care about it?

PRIME MINISTER: Well I care about it. I want to get to the bottom of
it. That’s why I established the Cole inquiry. This seems to have been
forgotten.

MITCHELL: But what about the electorate? What about the voters?

Children of Abraham: Death in the Desert

One of my least favourite ex-premiers, having privatised our water
and electricity and brought the globals into Adelaide, is now telling
us that we need to change our ways.  He says that Americans live to
work while Australians work to live and has addressed Adelaide business (who put all their support behind Olsen's former opposition) with such choice phrases as

"In the U.S. you get a pat on the back ... in Australia someone says who did you rip-off to make that money?"

‘How three young men from the UK
ended up in the world's most notorious prison. 

Every American Should Be Required
To Watch This Video. 

This docudrama shows the sadism
and stupidity of the US and British soldiers. The guards behave with the same
cruelty you expect to see from SS officers in lurid second world war movies. It
takes a moment or two to realize that these events reflect the reality of those
held in Americas notorious gulag.’ 

‘When President Bush signed the
re-authorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum
saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform
Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers. 

The bill contained several
oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special
terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The
provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often
the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the
administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain
dates. 

From the Seattle Times

Seattle to Kyoto: You can't get there by car
By Warren Cornwall
Seattle Times staff reporter

If Seattle is going to do its part to slow global warming, people are going to have to get out of their cars.

That's the cornerstone — and also the biggest challenge — of a plan to be unveiled today for how the city can join countries from around the world in trying to meet the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 international treaty to reduce climate-changing gases such as carbon dioxide.

The report, written at the request of Mayor Greg Nickels, says that if the city really wants to cut greenhouse gases, it needs to spend millions more on transit, build more compact neighborhoods, encourage energy efficiency and use more fuels from plants rather than petroleum.