At best, in line with the "new" information regarding its accounting, Telstra T3 lost about 6 billions of its value even before being sold... On this we have to add the 3 billion dollars to appease Barnaby joyce and another billion in contingencies...

All up, in the space of just a few weeks, the government has lost about ten billion dollars from its coffers by not being a good manager of its managers...

Poor mums and dads who may have to accept what they bought a few years ago from johnny — their very "best" friend — would have lost more that half the value.

The same applies to all other Australian values, including cultural values that Johnnee has sold off or is virtually selling off to uncle Sam... Halliburton never had it so good...

The chopper mode hasn't escaped our own Kim B, either. He is determined to prove he is on a winner, so he is back on the defense of his choice of words, re options for plucking stranded Aussies from the wreckage. It's a little surprising that he took the time to write to The Oz.
.. John Howard and Alexander Downer were caught flat-footed by this disaster. When this was exposed, their only response was to try to misrepresent my suggestions, and claim that I wanted the armed forces to commandeer aircraft and rescue Australians. As soon as the PM made this ludicrous claim, I corrected him and brought attention to the fact that Mr Howard was misrepresenting my position. ... ... The Government is so out of touch with community sentiment that it is satisfied with its response. Mr Howard and Mr Downer's smug attitude is a slap in the face to the worried Australians with loved ones caught in New Orleans.

'I know how you feel, mums and dads.' The ever-compassionate, but staunchly conservative, Kim.

Was Kim spotted at RPDE?
Defence Minister, Senator Robert Hill, today opened new facilities in Canberra for the $20M collaborative Defence and Industry Rapid Prototyping, Development and Evaluation (RPDE) program, which is designed to achieve rapid and substantial improvements in the ADF’s warfighting capability.
Senator Hill said that the RPDE program provides local specialist companies with an opportunity to contribute their innovation and ideas along with multinational firms.
“RPDE is proving to be an effective example of partnering between industry and the Australian Department of Defence with 48 participant companies, from global trans-nationals to small regional Australian companies involved.
“The collaborative environment benefits RPDE members and associates as they gain a greater understanding of the needs of the ADF in a Network Centric Warfare (NCW) setting. Defence benefits through rapid access to expertise across key industries to resolve NCW issues and make better capability decisions, resulting in quantitative improvements in the ADF’s warfighting ability,

More regrets, this time Powell regrets UN speech on Iraq WMDs
... "It [Iraq invasion] may not have turned out to be such a mess if we had done some things differently." ...

Sounds like man with his eye on the 2009 ticket. When is the Gulf I veteran, and Gulf II skeptic, going down to the new Gulf war of words?

From World Economic Forum  January 2003- Remarks from Colin Powell
... We in government bear the responsibility foremost for providing a secure environment in which confidence, well-being and freedom can grow and spread. We need your help to set high standards of accountability and habits of integrity throughout society. We need you to use your positions of leadership to foster tolerance, promote democratic principles, stem the HIV/AIDS pandemic. We need your innovations and investments to expand the global economic, sustain development and eradicate poverty. We need you to use your vast resources, your vast networks, to link the least of God's children living in the farthest corners of the Earth with the knowledge that they need to succeed.  ...

Maybe Powell has got a whiff from the stench of nameless dead (black) bodies now floating towards the pumps on the New Orleans levees. If he starts talking (again) about the one-sixth of global population that subsists below the poverty line, I tip 'Game on'.  And if Powell does go into training, it will be interesting to watch Cheney and Rumsfeld handle a mid-term rout of Republicans out of Congress.

Is Kim in touch with Colin?

From Pentagon Revises Nuclear Strike Plan
The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. ...

"Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations" is currently unavailable at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jpoperationsseriespubs.htm
but is here [PDF 1.8MB] Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations

From The mosquito and the hammer
... TD: Knowing the Pentagon as you do, what kind of a price do you think that will be?
Carroll: I would say, alas, that one of the things we're going to resume is an overweening dependence on air power and strikes from afar. It's clear, for instance, that the United States under the present administration is not going to allow Iran to get anywhere near a nuclear weapon. The only way they could try to impede that is with air power. They have no army left to exert influence. If the destruction of the United States Army is frightening, so is the immunity from the present disaster of the navy and the air force, which are both far-distance striking forces. That's what they exist for and they're intact. Their Tomahawk and Cruise missiles have basically been sidelined. We have this massive high-firepower force that's sitting offshore and we're surely going to resume our use of such power from afar.
One of the things the United States of America claims to have learned from the '90s is that we're not going to let genocidal movements like the one in Rwanda unfold. Well, we've basically destroyed the only military tool we have to respond to genocidal movements, which is a ground force. You can't use air power against a machete-wielding movement. And if you think that kind of conflict won't happen in places where poverty is overwhelming and ecological disaster is looming ever more terrifyingly, think again. What kind of response to such catastrophe will a United States without a functional army be capable of?
You know, in this way, we're now like the Soviet Union once it collapsed into Russia. When it could no longer pay the salaries of its soldiers, Russia fell back on its nuclear arsenal as its only source of power. In a way the Soviet Union never was, Russia is now a radically nuclear-dependent military power. The Red Army doesn't really count for much any more. And we've done that to ourselves in Iraq. This is what it means to have lost the war already. We didn't need an enemy to do it for us. We've done it to ourselves. ...
...We Americans are full of our sense of ourselves as having benign imperial impulses. That's why the idea of the American Empire was celebrated as a benign phenomenon. We were going to bring order to the world. Well, yes ... as long as you didn't resist us. And that's where we really have something terrible in common with the Roman Empire. If you resist us, we will do our best to destroy you, and that's what's happening in Iraq right now, but not only in Iraq. That's the saddest thing, because the way we destroy people is not only by overt military power, but by writing you out of the world economic and political system that we control. And if you're one of those benighted people of Bangladesh, or Ghana, or Sudan, or possibly Detroit, then that's the way we respond to you. We'd do better in other words if we had a more complicated notion of what the Roman Empire was. We must reckon with imperial power as it is felt by people at the bottom. Rome's power. America's.

From SPENGLER : Demographics and Iran's imperial design
... Muslim birth rates are collapsing as literacy rises, that is, as the modern world intrudes upon traditional society. Islamic traditional society is so fragile that it crumbles as soon as women learn to read. ...
... The rising elderly dependent ratio, that is, the proportion of pensioners in the general population, has given rise to a genre of apocalyptic literature in the West: governments will raise taxes, debase the currency, cut pensions and flail about hopelessly as the cost rises of supporting the rising number of aged. In the US, pensioners now are 18% of the population, but will become 33% by 2050, according to the United Nations' medium forecast. In other words, a full additional 15% of the population will require support from the remaining population. ...
... the Islamists have to strike quickly and decisively, not only to advance their cause in the West but also to consolidate their power in home countries where conditions will become unstable before long.

With all that in mind, I guess it makes sense to lock up a peace activist. We might think that promulgation of peace is something the mainline churches would be about, but maybe not if they want government funding for their private schools.

See cartoon at the head off this line of blogs and contemplate the prophetic pathetic words from our illustrious grocer... Now about to sell some more, with incentive sauce of course...

remember when... Howard was telling the investor mums and dads they had no better friend than Himself...

see toon at top....

Now, most of the shareholder mums and dads of aussieland have lost their underpants... and it's definitely not Kev's fault... Howard encouraged greed on credit and other such greedy tricks...

The Australian sharemarket has slumped to a new five-year low after a plunge on Wall Street overnight.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed below 7,000 for the first time in 12 years after insurer American International Group (AIG) posted a quarterly loss of $98 billion.

Australian stocks hit their lowest point since 2003 in early trade today and just before midday AEDT the All Ordinaries Index was down 54 points to 3,149.

Banking stocks are extending yesterday's declines after the ratings agency Moody's downgraded its outlook for three of the big four banks.

see comment above...