Bushit & Nouri al-Maliki want to sign a long-term security treaty.  

Both are supposedly leaders of nations with Constitutions that require treaties to be ratified by their respective legislatures & both know that ratification doesn't stand a snow-ball's chance in hell of happening. 

President Bush urged Congress on Monday to resist efforts by Democrats to pass a second economic stimulus package, saying that while the economy is “in a rough time right now,” he is confident it will begin to rebound by the end of the year.

Iraqi Prime Minister Threatens to Block Shiite Cleric's Party. 

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will pick up the pace again as he meets British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street and the Queen at Windsor Castle. 

Half way through his 18-day global tour, Mr Rudd had a brief reprieve from his heavy schedule.

Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out? 

For months, a debate raged at the top levels of the Bush administration over how quickly to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. But the discussion shut down soon after President Bush flew to Camp Arifjan, a dusty Army base near the Iraqi border in Kuwait, in January for a face-to-face meeting with the man whose counsel on the war he values most: Gen. David H. Petraeus. 

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops.  

They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees.  

A March 25 George Lekakis column in The Herald Sun summarised the case: “Data collected by Bloomberg News shows that the default risk of Australian banks has never been higher, with Macquarie Bank emerging as one of the riskiest banking players in Asia. ... ‘Macquarie is the closest link in Australia to the problems that are afflicting Bear Stearns and other US investment banks,’ said David McDonald, of Shaw Stockbroking.”  

At the NATO Summit in Bucharest this week, our Kevin found time to catch-up with an "old friend".  

At the start of the session on Afghanistan, Kevin saluted the world’s greatest terrorist, war criminal, thief & draft dodger, establishing his own credentials as the US replacement for little rattus as as regional ‘deputy sheriff’. 

The head of the crisis-hit investment bank Bear Stearns has blamed short sellers and market manipulators for spreading negative financial rumours to induce a collapse of the 85-year-old Wall Street institution. 

On the small, remote island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean halfway between Africa and Indonesia, the United States has one of the most secretive military bases in the world.  

President George W. Bush's successor should renounce his monarchy. It betters the instruction of King George III, which provoked the Declaration of Independence. 

from Crikey ….. 

Torture for Dummies: a US Justice Dept primer 

Jeff Sparrow writes: 

In his bleakest economic assessment to date, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Wednesday that the American economy could contract in the first half of 2008, meeting the technical definition of a recession, and he encouraged Congress to help homeowners caught up in the mortgage crisis.