Bush has abdicated the role of the USA as a broker of peace in the Middle East by failing to call for a UN sponsored cease-fire between Israel and Hezbullah. He and America are no longer viewed as a neutral player in this debacle, but then they never were truly neutral.

On Tuesday Bush told reporters that Hezbullah was the "root cause" of the strife in the Middle East. Anyone with any knowledge of the region will tell you that the problems in this region are the result of nearly 60 years of oppression of the Palestinian People by Israel.

While the situation in the region has continued to fester, Bush has been obsessed with his disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, a continually esculating melay of death and destruction brought on by his and his cronies lies about WMD and Iraq's non existant connection with the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Centre.

 Bush has effectively condoned the isolation of the democratically elected government of Palestine, the "kidnapping" of more than two dozen ELECTED government officials in Palistine and the depriving of the Palestinian Government of it's own tax revenues. Bush also raised no objections when Israel destroyed the only energy plant in Gaza, leaving thousands of Palestinians without electricity.

‘What is transpiring in the Holy Land is anathema to human civilization; it is an embarrassment to six billion people who are good, decent human beings. If our governments refuse to act, then so we must, for the sake of innocent and peaceful Palestinian and Israeli people, for the sake of human decency and for the sake of our future generations. Walls and fences that imprison and dehumanize cannot stand, for they help set mankind back in time to days dark and repressive, unenlightened and barbaric. Together, united as one we can become the massive tremor that helps bring walls and tyranny down.

from the pen of Richard Neville …..

‘Familiar lies are music to our nation’s ears.

Australians always punch above their weight. We are the most generous people on earth. Our soldiers are the most professional in the world. In fact, we’re so professional, that even when our troops shot at the Iraqi Trade Minister’s bodyguards in June, killing two people and wounding four others, our military carried out an investigation without bothering to interview any Iraqis. Defence Force chief, Angus Houston, found that our soldiers had “acted in accordance with their rules of engagement”. In November, when the US Marines murdered Iraqi women and children in their homes in Haditha, this action was also said to comply with the “rules of engagement”. In that case, the toll was 24. Perhaps it was this death disparity that led Air Marshall Houston to conclude, “the Australian soldiers might have been over-cautious”. While the government has agreed “in principle” to pay compensation, it has decided “in principle” not to apologise.

From the ABC …..

Hicks outcry falling on deaf ears, father says

The father of Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks says he is afraid public outcry against his son's detention is continuing to fall on deaf ears.

More than 400 people have signed an open letter that will be sent to the Prime Minister John Howard calling for Hicks's release.

Another 35,000 have signed an online petition.

‘The lives of Muslims mean nothing. They’ve become the “expendable” people whose security simply doesn’t matter. Their wholesale slaughter appears regularly on the evening news while heart-wrenching stories are spun about the suffering of Israeli fathers and mothers who lost loved ones in retaliatory attacks.

Don’t Muslims have mothers and fathers? Is it so important to demonize them that they must be stripped of every trace of humanity including parents?

The Centre for American Progress reports …..

“Americans are worried about debt and believe it is just going to get worse. "The public is more worried about falling into debt, particularly from medical bills, than about being the victim of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster." According to a new poll sponsored by the Center for American Progress, 86 percent "insist the number of Americans having trouble with household debt has gone up in the last five years." Unfortunately, their worries are well-grounded in reality. The average American savings rate in 2005 was negative 0.5 percent, "the lowest since the Great Depression."  As everyday expenses continue to rise, the problem of debt will continue to burden working Americans.

‘In Iraq, officials said Wednesday that U.S. and coalition forces as well as an increase in sectarian violence were behind the surge in civilian casualties cited in a U.N. report.

The report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq said nearly 6,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in May and June in a wave of assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, torture and intimidation.

‘When we last left off, our gallant crusaders, Bush Wayne and his trusted confidant, Dick Grayson-Cheney - oil executives by day, freedom fighters by night - had earned yet another significant victory in their divinely inspired war on terror. 

Another “corner was turned” as our heroes sent on a one-way trip to paradise that diabolic villain, the elusive, brilliant mastermind of the evil Iraqi insurgency, the once-invisible man known only to us mortals as al-Zarqawi: the (unelected) leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. 

 
‘US Ambassador John Bolton said there was no moral equivalence between the civilian casualties from the Israeli raids in Lebanon and those killed in Israel from "malicious terrorist acts".

Asked to comment on the deaths in an Israeli air strike of eight Canadian citizens in southern Lebanon Sunday, he said: "it is a matter of great concern to us ...that these civilian deaths are occurring. It's a tragedy."

Vanstone faces accusations of animal cruelty over her share in piggery July 13, 2006

A Piggery part-owned by the Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone, is breaching industry guidelines by keeping pigs in cramped conditions, animal welfare activists allege.

Animal Liberation said it lodged a complaint yesterday with South Australian police, complaining of conditions at the Wasleys piggery,  near Adelaide.

Senator Vanstone said she owned shares in the piggery but had nothing to do with the running of the operation, thought to be one of the largest in the state.

‘The fight over the Hamdan ruling heats up - as fears about its reach escalate.

David Bowker vividly remembers the first time he heard the phrase. A lawyer in the State Department, Bowker was part of a Bush administration "working group" assembled in the panicked aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Its task: figuring out what rights captured foreign fighters and terror suspects were entitled to while in U.S. custody. White House hard-liners, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and his uncompromising lawyer, David Addington, made it clear that there was only one acceptable answer. One day, Bowker recalls, a colleague explained the goal: to "find the legal equivalent of outer space" - a "lawless" universe. As Bowker understood it, the idea was to create a system where detainees would have no legal rights and US courts would have no power to intervene.