Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

"We are a nation that has seen promise amid peril, and claimed opportunity from ordeal.  Now we must be that nation again.  That is why, even as it cuts back on the programs we don’t need, the budget I submit will invest in the three areas that are absolutely critical to our economic future:  energy, health care, and education. "- U.S. President Obama

Mrs. Clinton went on: "There is a pent-up desire on the part of the United States government under the Obama administration, as well as partners around the world, that we begin to work together to solve a lot of our common problems...

Molan says that the troop numbers required to win the war would be about 500,000. He also says that if the West in unprepared to commit these kind of resource we should “cut our loses now and get out”. I think he is right. I doubt if the US is prepared or now even has the will to commit the resources needed.

Too many women in the third world are being denied access to legal abortion. These women often have to resort to illegal backyard abortions. Many die as a result. It is time Kevin Rudd stood up for these women and gave them the same rights that Australian women enjoy.

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

Let's not leave Barack Obama alone to clean up the mess. As he takes his oath today, please take one yourself -- to work harder than ever to end these wars, create universal health care, save our planet, end poverty, increase knowledge and establish a true government "of, by and for the people" (Michael Moore)

Presidents can try to avoid hard decisions and therefore avoid controversy. That's just not my nature. I'm the kind of person that, you know, is willing to take on hard tasks, and in times of war people get emotional; I understand that. Never really, you know, spent that much time, frankly, worrying about the loud voices. I of course hear them, but they didn't affect my policy, nor did they affect – affect how I made decisions. (President George W. Bush)

Throughout the Bush years, politicians and the media, both in Australia and abroad, have been prepared to play brazen Alice in Wonderland games with definitions. ... You can admit to the use of stress positions, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and the rest of it – brutalities long familiar from the dungeons of the most sinister regimes in the world – so long as you barefacedly announce, as Bush did in 2006: "The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values." (Jeff Sparrow)

If we wish an end to terror, then we need to act to halt terror from the sky. Well-resourced airstrikes, slowly improving blasts from Gazan shanty-towns and mad mullahs invoking the gods; they all reign over terror, with innocent civilians too often on the receiving end. Bearded cult-leaders from all three Apocalyptic or Messianic faiths have to be reined in. Their ill-considered orthodoxies, centred on out-dated doctrines damage children, be they blasted bodily as cost of war, or blitzed conceptually by head-rocking rote drills from holy scrolls of one era or another.

We are Australian Jews who join thousands in Israel and around the world condemning ongoing Israeli military attacks on Gaza. Together with Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, we condemn the current war as "inhuman, superfluous" and "abominable". While Israel has the right to protect its citizens and to demand an end to the crime of Palestinian rockets that target civilians, this cannot be used as a pretext for the grossly disproportionate military assault on Gaza ...(Australian Independent Jewish Voices)

Tolstoy argues that no class of man has the right to punish or sit in judgement upon another, and, from out of the crucible of complexity which he has painstakingly built his story, gives a conclusion almost point-by-point worthy of a lesser evangelist.

The latest update from the Democratic Audit program at Swinburne on how our democracy is working.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan went into a state of ‘high alert’ last weekend and was eyeing India for possible signs of military aggression, after a threatening phone call made to President Asif Ali Zardari by someone from Delhi who posed himself as the Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee. Whether it was mere mischief or a sinister move by someone in the Indian external affairs ministry, or the call came from within Pakistan, remains unclear, and is still a matter of investigation.

The US National Intelligence Center releases its quadrennial scenario for the next twenty years. Grim reading.

All political leaders conduct themselves as though they were in a state of permanent media, cultural and political warfare. Media cycles must be managed, everyone must stay on message, and leaders become so insulated that they actually start to believe as true their own spin. All politics becomes destructively partisan, with everything reduced to petty point scoring, when larger and more important issues loom, demanding serious attention.

There was another milestone this week – the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” so known because of the shattered glass from the windows of Jewish homes and businesses, when murderous riots were orchestrated in nearly every town and village in Germany where Jews could be found.

It is the victory that, not so long ago, dare not be spoken of. A victory that, forty-seven years ago, RFK dared suggest might happen – in forty years. It is a victory that has repudiated the presidency of GW Bush, dead these past years, utterly. It is a victory redolent with expectation and invested trust.

Fox calls Ohio for Obama.

America’s Tuesday, our Wednesday, will be about a different, two horse, race. McCain versus Obama. So what are some distinctive points about this race. Well, the first is that the vice presidential nominees matter a great deal more than they historically have.

For over 30 years, the 180km-wide Taiwan Strait had been the largest barrier separating people on two sides, physically, culturally and politically. However, it never separates lovers living on two sides of the strait.

There has been a long-term shift of how the public gets its news. In the past several months, more young adults are tuning-in to the late-night television parodies and satirizations of the 2008 US Presidential election than the “real” news broadcast coverage.

This election the candidates are becoming the celebrities themselves. With appearances on popular television shows, such as Saturday Night Live, the David Letterman Show and the Oprah Winfrey Show, Presidential candidates need not to be worried if their political careers fall through because they now have acting as a back-up profession.

In this month's update: how public servants have become part of the 'permanent campaign', putting at risk the distinction between marketing and explaining government policy and between genuine and politically tailored data; a comparison of political donations in the US and Australia; and a history of voting in the US.

Maybe the time has gone when national societies were go-it-alone concerns, and perhaps we now need to give constitutional recognition to global interdependence. I can think of no more effective way of doing this than an extension of the franchise to all payers of American taxes. (Desmond Ryan)

To step in and juggle the demands of an economic meltdown, two deadly wars and a deteriorating climate crisis would stretch [Governor Palin] beyond her range. Like picking Sen. McCain for president, putting her one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time.

It is too soon yet to predict exactly how badly the poorest countries will fare in the financial crisis and resultant economic downturn. But it is clear that reduced demands for exports to developed countries and lower foreign investment will mean less growth and government revenue for already-fragile social protection and services. For millions of the world’s poorest citizens, it is literally a matter of life and death.

Four babies were killed and more than 12,600 were hospitalized by the melamine-tainted infant formula produced by SanLu earlier last month. At first glance, people thought it was only a random incident. But when further investigations were undertaken, it was revealed that almost every milk product sold on the Chinese market contained excessive melamine.

Oliver Stone's latest film W has just been released in the US. It covers the period from George W Bush's student days at Yale to 2004, the last year of his first presidential term. Its reception has, to put it mildly, been mixed.

And yet for perhaps the first time I can remember I found myself agreeing with Marie-George Buffet, the leader of the French Communist Party who said: "So we stop the match, then what? Is it going to solve the problem of these men and women who in a way are expressing that they don't feel right in our country?"

"The dramatic drop in the stock market that we saw yesterday will have a direct impact on the retirement accounts, pension funds, and personal savings of millions of our citizens. And if our nation continues on this course, the economic damage will be painful and lasting. "  - U.S President George Bush