George W. Bush pressed Tony Blair yesterday to ensure proposed new European defence plans did nothing to undermine or duplicate NATO - a message that was drummed home in Brussels by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Afghanistan? The US-appointed president, previously an associate of the Bush family in the oil industry, needs a Praetorian guard of Americans to keep him safe in Kabul.

Lucky Australia - thus far, not one fatality. But we’ve been party to a slaughter of the innocents that should make every one of us feel deeply ashamed.

It’s now clear that only one man was honest about WMDs in the run-up to the war. Not Bush. Not Blair. Not Howard. It was, of course, Saddam Hussein, who denied having them.

We now learn that there were desperate back-door attempts by Baghdad to prevent the conflict. To cut deals on almost anything and everything Washington wanted.
The Bush administration - condemned by almost the entire membership of the UN and supported only by Blair and, God help us, Howard - has been revealed as dangerously delusional.

"I'd always thought that miscarriages of justice were an aberration and that our justice system, overwhelmingly, worked well," he said. "But I was seeing error rates of 10 to 15 percent. I was very struck by how pervasive the problem was."

a few days after he collected $US850,000 from a fundraiser in Pittsburgh, a steel-making centre -- Mr Bush said he would lift the tariffs earlier than planned.

Hardliners in the Bush administration are pushing for a tougher stance on Taiwan and preparing for an all-out trade and propaganda war against China to boost President George W. Bush's chances of re-election next year. There is speculation Mr Bush might declare that the US opposes Taiwan's independence. This would be not just a victory for Beijing but a significant break with Washington's previous ambiguity on the issue.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger lent verbal support to Argentina's military junta, which had been cracking down on dissidents, according to newly declassified documents obtained by a U.S. watchdog group.

Bush: he's got a great sense of humor. At a recent fund-raiser, according to The Associated Press, he described eliminating weapons of mass destruction from Iraq and ensuring the solvency of Medicare as some of his administration's accomplishments.
Then came the punch line: "I came to this office to solve problems and not pass them on to future presidents and future generations."

The I.R.S. denies charges by Bill Henck, one of its own lawyers, that it buckled under political pressure. Coincidentally, according to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Henck has suddenly found himself among the tiny minority of taxpayers facing an I.R.S. audit.

a spokeswoman for British Airways in North America, said two British Airways aircraft were in the area at the time and neither radioed the president's plane to ask if it was Air Force One.

The nation's 17 largest airlines were to blame for at least 116,000 late flights within the USA from June through October -- about 4.3% of all flights


The nation's unemployment rate slipped to 5.9 percent in November, the lowest level in eight months, but employers added new jobs at a slower pace than expected.

mr ed: Go to Google, type in "miserable failure" and hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button
this is the response: http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html
ha ha ha

Scientists have long known that some diseases can cause behavioral problems. When penicillin was first used to treat syphilis, thousands of cured schizophrenics were released from mental asylums. Now, however, scientists have evidence that infections may play a far bigger role in mental illness than previously thought.
They’re beginning to suspect that bad bugs may cause a great many other mental disorders, too.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says that nine out of 10 cases of Lyme diseases remain unreported.

Geneticists believe that diseases may trigger the onset of inherited mental illnesses by activating key genes. Avoiding and treating infection may be just as important as the genes you inherit, and a whole lot easier to do something about.

"You hear it in the streets of Israel; people want revenge. But we should not behave like that. We are not a mafia."
More than 30 pilots have now endorsed the letter refusing to fly bombing raids on Palestinian cities

The essence of the RNC's first commercial was that if you don't re-elect Bush, the big, bad boogeyman will get you. You should remember that it was on Mr. Bush's watch that the big, bad boogeyman got us on Sept. 11, 2001. So far as we know, Mr. Bush didn't have a clue.

The secret of the game afoot is that Mr. Bush has no desire to win the war on terrorism. What he wants is perpetual war, because that means perpetually enhancing the power of government.
First it was fascism, then communism and now Islam.