Category — Politics

Lauren Williams of The Daily Telegraph writes:

Is this the ultimate humiliation for a whale?

While these white beluga whales don cute little Santa hats to entertain visitors to a Japanese aquarium, their humpback cousins face a degrading end in cold storage at the hands of Japanese whalers in Antarctica.

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Watch and listen. This is important.

A humpback whale breaches in Jervis Bay, NSW. Photo: Ken Robertson

A Japanese whaling fleet left today for an expedition activists say will for the first time target humpbacks, a perennial favourite among whale-watchers.

The Nisshin Maru, the 8000-tonne flagship of Japan’s whaling fleet, left Shimonoseki port for the Antarctic along with catcher boats around midday, environmental group Greenpeace said, adding that others in the fleet were expected to follow soon.

Japan, which says whaling is a cherished cultural tradition, abandoned commercial whaling in accordance with an international moratorium in 1986, but began the next year to conduct what it calls scientific research whaling.

Greenpeace said its Esperanza campaign ship was in waters off Japan, waiting to intersect the fleet in the coming days to demand that the expedition return home.”

Here we go again. When will they ever learn?

The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

Karl Rove, aka, ‘The Architect’, ‘Bush’s Brains’ and ‘Turdblossom’ has quit.

The world breathes a little easier.

What a dickhead. Just listen to this 1994 interview — and weep!

Weep for thousands of American soldiers killed in a futile battle, weep for hundreds of thousand of Iraqis killed for naught.

A 90 second book review by Lee Arnold. A must-watch video.

Vince O’Farrell of The Illawarra Mercury and The Melbourne Express sums it all up.

Paul Begala, writing in The Huffington Post captures the ’soul’ [if he has one] of George W Bush. As he says, Bush is …

Tough enough to execute Karla Fay Tucker — and then laugh about it.

Tough enough to sign a death warrant for a man whose lawyer slept through the trial — and then snicker when asked about it in a debate.

Even tough enough to execute a great-grandmother who murdered her husband — after he abused her. A friend of mine at the time asked Bush to commute her sentence, telling him, “Betty Lou ain’t a threat to no one she ain’t married to.” No dice.

Mr Bush is tough enough to invade a country that was no risk to America, causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths and shedding precious American blood in the process.

Tough enough to sanction torture. Tough enough to order an American citizen arrested and held without trial.

But if you’re rich and right-wing and Republican, George is a real softie. As George W. Bush demonstrated in giving Scooter Libby a Get Out of Jail Free Card, he is only compassionate to conservatives.

Hi guys, thought I’d share some holiday snaps from my recent trip to Brazil. Very friendly folks they were … GWB

This fan was obviously trying to entice me … Better not let Laura see it.

No quite sure why they asked me for a specimen, but they all wanted a sniff …

This looks like another one of their crazy festivals celebrating some dictator from the past. Funny looking moustache he has though.

Got a few shots like this. The cops look like they were trying to practice their golf strokes. They need to follow through a bit more because look where the ball ended up in the top right …