‘Senior Shiite politicians said
today that the American ambassador has told Shiite officials to inform the
Iraqi prime minister that President Bush does not want him to remain the
country's leader in the next government. 

It is the first time the
Americans have directly intervened in the furious debate over the country's top
job, the politicians said, and it is inflaming tensions between the Americans
and some Shiite leaders. 

 
Phone-tapping bill on the way ….. 

SMH
March 30, 2006 

Police and intelligence agencies
are to be given sweeping new powers to tap the phones of innocent people who
come into contact with terrorism suspects, although a bipartisan committee
urged substantial changes to the proposed laws. 

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?

 Tony Blair, in calling for Australian assistance, has invoked the circumstances of Australia's UK support in World War Two

Two months from the date of 6/6/06, the British Prime Minister has called for what is basically a Global Alliance against Islam.

After spending a few minutes on jokes and feelgoods to "warm up" his audience (dodging crows in Adelaide as a child taught him to deal with the media, etc) Blair launched into his prepared invitation to join the US in a global Alliance.  This alliance is, unlike the Bush version, not "against" or "on" anything, but "for" the values that Western society holds dear.  "If we want to secure our way of life, there is no alternative but to
fight for it... we need to construct an alliance for these global values
and act through it." Mr Blair said.

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?"