We’ve seen this kind of over-reaching from the Bush administration before. It has usurped far too many powers under a banner of urgency — think wiretapping — and abused those powers. Now, Congress and the American people are being told that unless they quickly approve sweeping executive powers for the bailout, capitalism may collapse. Even if this administration weren’t so untrustworthy, rushing ahead would be a bad idea.
The Republican presidential candidate says he will work with the Rudd Government to establish a global framework that would encourage China and India to become part of the solution to man-made climate change. Senator McCain says he is committed to a market-based cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing carbon emissions. And he wants a closer bilateral partnership on other key issues such as nuclear proliferation, trade liberalisation and combating terrorism.
Insisting he was not pushed, Senator Eliision said he had received assurances from new Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull as recently as this morning that he could continue in his current portfolio. But he said the demands posed by constant travel across the country and having a young family had prompted him to consider retirement.
For political fringe-dwellers like the Greens, there was no threat to Australia’s national security to warrant the 2005 anti-terrorism laws. The legislation was, they said, all a ruse to hide the government’s real agenda, ramming the new industrial relations laws through parliament during that first week in November 2005.
The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants’ increasingly secure base in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
A man remembers getting broken: that’s why Senator McCain fought the use of torture by the Bush administration. His condoning of Gov. Palin’s mocking of legal rights is appalling. Foreign policy be damned if you can score a God-fearing macho-versus-liberal constitutionalist point.
In the wake of a warning from NATO’s new top commander in Afghanistan that the international coalition is “struggling to win” and about 15,000 more troops are needed, Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon said he would not be increasing troop numbers in the region. However, he would not rule out using infantry in combat roles.
Labor’s policy on Afghanistan has consistently been that Australia’s presence there, rather than Iraq, represents our commitment to fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban at “the coalface”. But the promises Labor made while in Opposition are forcing our troops into a long fight that will test even the might of the United States.
Monday’s turnover of responsibility to the Iraqis for security in Anbar Province, once Iraq’s most violent territory, serves a purpose for each man. It allows President Bush to claim that five years after the invasion, Iraq is achieving stability, and it allows Senator McCain to argue that he was the first to come up with the winning strategy.
Baghdad in 2008 is a city tantalisingly close to a genuine transformation. The first impression after an absence of two years is the stunning reduction in the appalling level of violence that had torn the city’s suburbs apart over the past four years. A relative calm has now descended. On the day I arrived, there was not a single serious security incident across the whole of Baghdad.