know knews is good knews

* i havent found anything new abuot gop-ers' outbound travel schedule.

* the 'children overboard' thing is going mad here. seems everyone cept howard reckons he lied about it - remember, howards lies about this issue are widely recognized as having won him the prev election. "i dont want people like that here" he sed - evil racist (and scarily successful) bastard. i dont want people like him here. anyways - he's expected to call the election today for 0ct 2 or 9 according to the press rantings. we'll see. unfortunately for my paranoid nervous tendencies, its not obvious why howard would rush into an elecetion now - specially while he is taking a bath and all polls have him behind (cept liljohnny tells us comfortingly that his internal polling has him ahead). why would he rush to an election when he is taking such a hit? either he thinks that more and more lies will come out, or praps one mite argue that he wants to get in before the US election cos a 43 loss would hurt howard - but thats getting tenuous, and 43 is in a 'statistical deadheat' as we all know anyways. the economy here is going well and logic would suggest that howard might as well wait till april or whenever when the uselection is forgotten and the current 'truth in govt' heat is forgotten and all that jazz. http://au.news.yahoo.com/040311/2/o3ab.html

the 'Feature' section in murdochs Australian yesterday (the same slot where he put the hitchens f911 piece) offers this piece of insight "But Mark Latham has put together four superb weeks and the only way Howard can shift the debate from his own credibility to Latham's lack of reliability is by calling the election -- now." http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10589629%5E28737,00.html

if howard calls a pre-election election, it might be time to strengthen our "no US election" trading position - and theres no shortage of stocks/indices we could short. virginblue being the most obvious prolly.

theres still no mention of madrid, and oddly yet relatedly - no mention of the possibility of calling off an election - surely someone saw the noise about calling off the US election in the face of a terrorist attack and investigated whether/how/why the same issue might also arise here. surely it was be irresponsible (ie dereliction of duty) not to at least look into it - either to be prepared to stand firm - or to realise that its the legal/resposnible thing to do in certain situations - or to signal to errorists that the election will go in regardless or woteva. its not like they are trying to keep us unscared - cf downers recent 'nth korea could nuke sydney'.

madrid seems like forever ago - but it was only 5 months ago - and the most recent election in a major 'coalition' country. seems to me to be more obvious than not that something similar might occur here. the silence is deafening.
the major concern of course is that its not obvious that a madrid size attack in the US herself would lead to a cancelling of the us election, let alone if it happened thousands of miles away - therefore the size of the attack here would have to be enormous to meet that purported objective - say an oiltanker blowing up on sydharbour, or 2 or 6 briefcase nukes - simultaneuosly of course - blowing up around the country.

of course, this isnt the first time we've had 'red-hot' election speculation - so we'll have to wait and see. parliament is sposed to start again tomorrw (for 2 weeks) - and it seems that it gets cancelled if an election is called. i dont know the rules but it seems that howard wouldnt call an election while parliament is sitting.

* re russian planes - the speculation seems to have shifted from 'the jet fuel did it' to 'the chechens did it' - the evidence for chechen involvement seems to be a) the same type of explosives have been used in attacks previously attributed to chchens (this is an old favourite) b) a chechen woman was hardly recognizable so she prolly had a bomb strapped to her c) a chechen woman in each plane hasnt been collected by her family d) the tickets were bought just an hour before the flight (we are told tellingly). if i was trying to blow up planes simultaneuously, id prolly wanna actually make sure i got on the flights - so i wouldnt wait till the last minute - and im not sure what benefit there is in booking at the last minute. seems like a big avoidable risk to a serious plan

as if on cue - cnn showed investigators flicking thru a charred passport at the scene. this is the same trick we saw at the madrid bombers' apt explosion (altho cnn didnt explicitly say it was the passport of the chechen woman)

meanwhile we've got cablenews experts telling us that it makes sense for the chechens not to claim credit cos a faceless enemy is scarier - i can imagine that might be true for anarchists - but less so for any group trying to achieve any polical goal. of course, the chechen leadership is actively denying involvement - and if they were trying to hide their involvement, they would prolly use an explosive type other than their 'signature' hexewoteva explosives.

also curious is the 'hijack' sig that was sent from the plane - the supposed suicide bomber has nothing to gain and lots to lose by announcing herself - all she needs to do is pull a cord or whatever. anyone who has seen a movie knows that the badguy oughta just shutup lest the good guy gets away while badguy is being diabolical.

luckily they found the black boxes - seems they learnt a lesson from the skepticism re the 911 destroyed blackboxes - so the russian bboxes survived, but were somehow turned off sometime before the explosion. nice one guys.

* lovely to see the athens/powell protests actually having an impact. fingers x'd (in vain) for the same in nyc.

________________________________________________________________________________
four more tears. four more tears.
wotisitgood4.blogspot.com