Australian PM John Howard Loses Election

AP:

Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffered a humiliating defeat Saturday at the hands of the left-leaning opposition, whose leader has promised to immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and withdraw Australia's combat troops from Iraq.

Labor Party head Kevin Rudd's pledges on global warming and Iraq move Australia sharply away from policies that had made Howard one of President Bush's staunchest allies.

Read the whole story: AP

Comments

[HumeSkeptic]

Tell us this trolls. If Bush is so great, how come, having the mightiest military ever at his disposal, and a blank check from the Congress, he still can't defeat that super-power on horsebacks called the Taliban, and after six fucking years of trying?

How come?

And the same goes for those "kids" (per Fred Thompson) in Iraq.

How come?

[LaFeminazi]

Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani has in recent weeks angrily denounced the Kurdish authorities for signing the contracts before the national parliament approves a new oil and gas law, declaring them "illegal".

The government official said the minister had now gone further and nullified all the contracts and had warned the foreign companies involved that they would be blacklisted.

"Minister Shahristani had warned companies who sign contracts without taking the advice of the oil ministry that the ministry would ... blacklist them from any future deals with Iraq," the government official said.

"The minister had told them the oil ministry in Baghdad is the only institution authorised to sign oil contracts before the approval of the oil law."

Shahristani told Monte Carlo radio on Friday that countries neighbouring Iraq would prevent the Kurdish authorities from exporting oil.

"There is an understanding between Tehran, Ankara, Damascus and Baghdad," he said.

"The Iraqi government had warned these companies of the consequences of entering into these contracts," the minister added. "And the consequence is that Iraq will not allow these companies to extract the oil."

The Kurdish authorities reacted sharply on Saturday, saying Shahristani should take the matter to the federal tribunal which deals with disputes between the provinces and the central government.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071124/wl_mideast_afp/iraqoilkurds_071124105749

Now the Kurds are annoyed.

[Turnip]

Howards defeat- humiliating.

'08 Republican defeat- a public flogging.

[StillAmused]

Last one out of Iraq turn off the... oh, forgot -- no electricity.

[Turnip]

Another Conservative taken Down!


Our Surge is Working!

[Turnip]

Only a Republican could manage to lose Poland.

[BoBoBolinski]

Its always been in the hands of a minority to stand up for love, hope and freedom. Just as George Washington had to face a majority of dissenters so George Bush must face the naysayers here and around the world in the fight for freedom and democracy. The hate and fear of the libs has spread around the world and yet the love of freedom will win out.

[insanityfollows]

Thank God!!! I was sure the Aussies had lost it when they put Howard in office. Everyone seemed to have lost their minds with the "conservative" movement. UK came to their senses, and didn't put a Blair clone in as PM, and now common sense has returned to OZ. It will be gratifying to get Bush and his cronies out of office, which I truly believe will happen, but my true hope is that we can round them all up and put them on trial, and have Howard and Blair and some others testify as witnesses, and tried for high crimes themselves if the evidence warrants. Since sanity and sense have returned to Australia, maybe I'll go there. If insanity prevails and the GOP is still running the country after next November, I swear-it's Canada, UK or Australia.

[LiberalLo]

I just love that photo of dumya, with his lips pursed, the petulant little s***wad.

[imsosure]

The rest of the world is waking up and DOING something about their lunacy. Now that's the way to keep the loonies on the path, you have them move along. I just hope we can keep our paths free of the maniacal and obscene long enough to take us through the remaining tenure of our wild-eyed loons.

[FiddleDD2]

Here's giving Johnnie Howard and Chimp a big "thumbs up" in Aussie interpretation.

[bikerdude]

The picture should have been of the coalition of the willing...­Bush and Cheney standing in front of the Halliburton Headquarters and the Blackwater compound..­.oh yeah, and bin Laden cheering them on. Incompetent, self-serving, arrogant fools..

[WARisEVIL]

Forecast: U.S. dollar could plunge 90 pct

Published: Nov. 19, 2007 at 2:16 PM
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RHINEBECK, N.Y., Nov. 19 (UPI) -- A financial crisis will likely send the U.S. dollar into a free fall of as much as 90 percent and gold soaring to $2,000 an ounce, a trends researcher said.

"We are going to see economic times the likes of which no living person has seen," Trends Research Institute Director Gerald Celente said, forecasting a "Panic of 2008."

"The bigger they are, the harder they'll fall," he said in an interview with New York's Hudson Valley Business Journal.

Celente -- who forecast the subprime mortgage financial crisis and the dollar's decline a year ago and gold's current rise in May -- told the newspaper the subprime mortgage meltdown was just the first "small, high-risk segment of the market" to collapse.

Derivative dealers, hedge funds, buyout firms and other market players will also unravel, he said.

Massive corporate losses, such as those recently posted by Citigroup Inc. and General Motors Corp., will also be fairly common "for some time to come," he said.

He said he would not "be surprised if giants tumble to their deaths," Celente said.

The Panic of 2008 will lead to a lower U.S. standard of living, he said.

A result will be a drop in holiday spending a year from now, followed by a permanent end of the "retail holiday frenzy" that has driven the U.S. economy since the 1940s, he said.

© 2007 United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be reproduced, redistributed, or manipulated in any form.

[HumeSkeptic]

There have been several recent posts emphasizing that terrorism in the world today is primarily Islamist terrorism.

This is a valid and fact-based conclusion. However, the conclusion is partly a consequence of how the West, and especially the US, has been able to define terrorism. Instead, if one uses the description of terrorism in the United States Code (Ref: Congressional and Administrative News, 98th Congress, Second Session, 1984, Oct. 19, volume 2; par. 3077, 98 STAT. 2707 (West Publishing Co., 1984).), one might reach a very different conclusion. In fact, one might conclude that the US is the biggest terrorist organizations in the world, and Israel a distant second.

In other words, the conclusion depends on the definition of terrorism.

One must also question the criteria used in determining which individuals or organizations can be labeled “terrorist”, even by the modified definition. For example, it is ridiculous to label groups fighting US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as terrorists. Terrorists don’t fight military forces. Once they do, they are not terrorists. Similarly, labeling Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization is ludicrous. Even the Pakistani groups fighting against their own military, frequently called Pakistani-Taliban, however despicable in their conduct and beliefs, are not terrorists.

In the Middle East, PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah have in the past used terrorism as a tactic. However, going by their activities over the past decade or so, it is not justifiable to label any of these groups as terrorist organizations. Most certainly, any organization fighting for the Palestinian cause is not a terrorist organization.

Once one makes the above distinctions, and even if one accepts the currently popular definition of terrorism, Islamist terrorism still dominates other terrorist organizations. Primarily, that boils down to al Qaeda.

Therefore, a solution to the problem of Islamist terrorism reduces down to dealing with al Qaeda. How we deal with al Qaeda should be our focus. In my view, only military force cannot stop the al Qaeda movement. But, that is a subject for another post.

[lornejl]

Imodium boy had a melt down very similar to what hummer is going through today, copy and pasting himself over the edge of insanity, someone throw a net over him before he hurts himself.hu­mmer screams , don't taze me bro !