I'm having an ethical crisis. Over the last couple of years I've been looking in shadows for details, and now I'm wondering if it's a current-affairs equivalent of a meerschacht test.. you know, when a pychologist shows a patient ink-blobs and analyses their interpretation.

I'd read, seen and heard things and added them to pieces of information I knew, and become convinced that the answer I came up with was correct. In blind faith I've looked for proof of my "deductions" and broadcast my fears to the best of my abilities.

‘In a replay of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
charade, neo-conservative supporters of George W. Bush are pushing the U.S.
intelligence community to take a more alarmist view about Iran’s nuclear
program - only this time, the nation’s top spy John Negroponte is resisting the
pressure unlike former CIA chief George Tenet. 

Tenet joined in Bush’s hyping of the WMD evidence about Iraq - famously
telling the President that the case was a “slam dunk.”  

 Parts of Adelaide's city centre are closed today after an explosion struck a building over night.

The explosion occurred in the heart of the city at 3 am this morning.in  Pirie St, in the very centre of the city.

ABC News said the three storey building has been "destroyed"

Snr Contable Mick Turnbull "It's going to take a while for us to sift through here and see what's actually happened here"

 SA Premier Mike Rann, from  the scene of the incident said that he wa "shocked
by what's happeneed here in the middle of Adelaide nd I'm shocked by
the extent of the damage.  When  you look at this from above the damage
goes back quite a long way"

‘May 1st, 2006, is the third
anniversary of the end of "major combat" in Iraq. It was a glorious
day when George Bush flew onto the deck of the Abraham Lincoln and was
hailed by the rapturous throngs of toadie "news" persons like Chris
Matthews ("And that's the president looking very much like a jet, you
know, a high-flying jet star." 

"Hardball," May 1,
2003) and Bob Schieffer ("As far as I'm concerned, that was one of the
great pictures of all time.

 
‘George W. Bush
has been more emphatic about spreading democracy than any president since
Woodrow Wilson.  

Yet Bush’s
policies have subverted elected governments, corrupted foreign elections, and
tainted democracy itself. For most of the American media, however, Bush’s
pretensions on democracy remain sacrosanct.  

From the ABC and the wind vane

Antarctica ripe for mining, says Joyce
National Party Senator Barnaby Joyce says Australia should consider mining the rich resources of Antarctica, before other nations do.

Senator Joyce visited Antarctica in April on a month-long mission in his role as a member of the federal Parliament's External Territories Committee.

He has told Australian Story that Australia's claim to 42 per cent of the frozen continent is not recognised by a lot of countries.

"There's minerals there, there's gold, there's iron ore, there's coal, there's huge fish resources," he said.

"What you have to ask is: do I turn my head and allow another country exploit my resource or do I position myself in such a way as I'm going to exploit it myself before they get there?"

He says he fears that Australia does not have any real power to stop other nations exploiting Antarctica.

"They're whaling in our area, we can't stop them, we don't have the economic or military power to be a threat to them, so what are we to do?" he said.
------------------------
read more at the ABC

...and see all the cartoons on Joyce on this site... The little big man who's been doing the "conscience" illusion vote-dancing for Howard's benefit

‘Yet we now live in a nation in
which the president has the omnipotent power to ignore all constitutional
restraints on his power. That might not be the way the president and his legal
advisors put it, but that is the practical effect of what they are saying to
justify his powers. They effectively claim that the Constitution vests the
president – as military commander in chief during the “war on terrorism” – with
such extraordinary powers that he is able to ignore restraints on his powers
imposed both by the Constitution and by Congress.  

Not my favourite place to visit, I was dragged into the Adelaide Casino last night. After an hour I left because I didn't feel safe  Two hundred people dancing in a venue three stories up from our central railway station didn't seem like a good place to be.

Even though the rubbish bins were taken out of the station two years back because of similar fears.  I couldn't help thinking of the psychological impact on local culture that an attack on such a place would cause.

I didn't want to be fighting my way to an unavailable exit while the floor collapsed beneath me.  Given that the casino's interior was recently re-engineered  by Halliburton/KBR I would assume that expert consideration of such a situation would have necessitated the incorporation of contingency plans.  However, all I could visualise was people jumping of balconies, clawing past each other on the escalators, dodging falling chunks of marble debris... I tried to force myself to stay, but felt compelled to get as far away as possible.

Exxon Mobil Profit
Rises on Soaring Prices

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company, on Thursday
reported that quarterly profit surged, driven by rising oil prices. Anger over
gas prices is gaining traction in many midterm races around the nation as
Democrats attack Republicans for being too close to oil companies. 

Exxon
Mobil Profit Rises On Soaring Prices 

 
As mentioned yesterday by Gus but
here is confirmation:

From the New York Times …..

Bush Picks Fox Commentator as Spokesman 

WASHINGTON, April 26 — President
Bush today named Tony Snow, the Fox News radio and television commentator, as
the new White House press secretary, despite Mr. Snow's past criticisms of his
policies. 

 
‘Mr. President,

Do you ever wake up in the middle
of the night? Do you? Do you ever wake up sleepless in the middle of the night?
What have you done in Iraq? Do you ever realize, in the middle of the night,
what you've done? Do you?’ 

A Wake-Up Call For President Bush

 
‘Twelve hours: one circuit of the sun from horizon to
horizon, one course of the moon from dusk to dawn. What was once a natural
measurement for the daily round of human life is now a doom-laden interval
between the voicing of an autocrat's brutal whim and the infliction of mass
annihilation halfway around the world. 

Twelve hours is the maximum time
necessary for American bombers to gear up and launch an unprovoked sneak attack
– a Pearl Harbor in reverse – against Iran, the
Washington Post reports. The plan for this "global
strike," which includes a very viable "nuclear option," was
approved months ago, and is now in operation. The planes are already on
continuous alert, making "nuclear delivery" practice runs along the
Iranian border, as Sy Hersh
reports in the New Yorker, and waiting only for the signal from
President George W. Bush to drop their payloads of conventional and nuclear
weapons on some 400 targets spread throughout the condemned land. 

‘You ask about the motivations, and that is one of the
patterns that comes through when you look at these things all together. 

There’s really a three-stage
motivation that I can see when I watch so many of the developments of these
coups. The first thing that happens is that the regime in question starts
bothering some American company. They start demanding that the company pay
taxes or that it observe labor laws or environmental laws. Sometimes that
company is nationalized or is somehow required to sell some of its land or its
assets. So the first thing that happens is that an American or a foreign
corporation is active in another country, and the government of that country
starts to restrict it in some way or give it some trouble, restrict its ability
to operate freely. 

 As the Australian Prime Minister's opinion polls sag from the mud of a
bribery scandal, a flag-draped Australian hero is brought home to be
honoured on our annual day of war remembrance.....

It was bad luck that I was re-watching "Wag The Dog" while reading
about the death of the Aussie sniper... maybe otherwise I wouldn't have
been feeling so cynical. For those who don't know the movie, it's about
the media staging of a war to save the US President's election
campaign. Anyway, I was listening to Dustin Hoffman uttering the words
in the title as my eyes fell on this Melbourne Herald-Sun paragraph: