‘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:

‘Usually watching CNN with one
eye as we blog from our undisclosed location doesn’t give us much new fodder,
except for the occasional "stuck landing gear" crisis. But
this week we were aghast at the coverage of Chinese President Hu Jintao at the
White House. 

At an outdoor ceremony, Bush told Hu: 

 
From the ABC ….. 

22/04/06

Beazley urges Howard: stay on until election

The Federal Opposition Leader Kim
Beazley has issued a challenge to John Howard to contest the next election. 

There has been more leadership
speculation in the wake of the Prime Minister yesterday declaring he was not considering
retirement. 

As Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage sticks up for the
Howard Government again, I start to wonder about him. Armitage, who has
ties to the company that provided the commercial torturers working in
Abu Graibh (including the one from Adelaide)
has attempted to draw a curtain over the Howard Government's
negligences revealed in the AWB Inquiry. Armitage says that nobody in
the USA gives a damn about Australian Government corruption.

Wow, they are just like us Aussies after all

 
As our great holy men of faith
leapt about the landscape this past week, loudly protesting the cruel &
inhuman treatment visited on refugees from West Papua by our evil neighbours,
the Indonesians, the rest of the world, including Great Britain, was busy
complaining about the inhuman treatment being meted-out by our great friend
& ally, the US, on the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay (Guantanamo
Detainee List Draws Wave Of Complaints).

‘How extraordinary. Something is
happening here that has never happened in America's history. A consensus is
sweeping the nation. Not that the war in Iraq is wrong, or that oil companies
are screwing us blue, or that the climate is going to hell, or that good-paying
jobs are being replaced by low-paying jobs, or that our national health care
system is a disgrace, or that that the rich are getting a lot richer while the
middle class gets poorer.