Great news from the diplomatic front. Not only does Australia have a new US Ambassador, but he’s like, totally cool with the whole think-for-yourself thing:
“I want to get out across the entire continent of Australia” to say that “it’s OK to disagree with this US policy or that US policy but still be pro-American […]

Can you spot it?

But the Prime Minister dismissed the note as “old news”.
“Those notes of Mr Quinn’s that were taken of his interview with Colonel Kelly, those notes were attached to the statutory declaration that he gave to the Cole inquiry in April of this year,” the Prime Minister said.
“They don’t conclusively prove anything.”
Share This

The Hon. Alexander Downer, MP
MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS, AUSTRALIA
Speech to the National Newspaper Publishers’ Conference
Gold Coast, 28 August 2006
My point is this: in a grown-up society such as our own, the media cannot expect to get away with parading falsehoods as truths, or ignoring salient facts because they happen to be inconvenient to the line […]

Everything in Iraq is going, um, great guns, according to a US General:
The top U.S. general in Iraq said Wednesday he believes Iraqi forces can take over security with little coalition support within a year to 18 months.”I don’t have a date, but I can see over the next 12 to 18 months, the Iraqi […]

Full marks to Mother Jones for this all-singing, all-dancing searchable timeline of the Bush Administration’s dubious case for war. This image is of one tiny segment of the whole thing. Click the image to go to the site and see how it works.

Share This

President Bush has visited New Orleans, site of the downfall of his Presidency, on the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Think Progress offers this to-do list for the apologetic President:
– Less than half of the city’s pre-storm population of 460,000 has returned, putting the population at roughly what it was in 1880.
– Nearly […]

Or so argues Robert Pape, holder of “the world’s largest database of information about suicide terrorists”, and author of the book, Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism. This is an extract of an interview with him by The American Conservative magazine (link sent to me by reader Ian):
RP: The central fact is […]

Given that my fascist denial syndrome has finally been outed, I’d better link to this piece so you’ll know I’m back on the ball.
As Kerryn says, the notice she mentions is “So rich and ripe…for mockery that I scarcely know where to start.”
Share This

Was quite taken with this searing insight into blogging from The New Statesman (via Daily Briefing):
Until now, the founders of the blogosphere have jealously protected their online world. This was easy when blogging was a difficult and complicated business, requiring at least some working knowledge of computer code. Early blogs tended to be written by […]

Back on August 15, Newspoll released its latest polling which showed a two-party preferred vote of 51-Liberal; 49-Labor. In The Australian, they ran the news in a Dennis Shanahan article under the heading, ‘Coalition clears hurdles to lead’ and Shanahan wrote:
THE Howard Government has opened an election-winning lead over the ALP despite rising interest […]