Wendi Deng

... swinging!

Senator Nettle says if he [Kevin Andrews] will not resign, the Prime Minister needs to sack him.

"The evidence points to him conspiring to subvert the court's decision to release Dr Haneef," she said.

"We can not have a minister in this Government that operates in that way to try to undermine the processes that are going on in our courts."

Labour is just calling for an enquiry - rather lame, IMHO.

Follow the logic... Thanks to John Howard's legendary economic management, the government now has billions of my taxpayer dollars to throw away in this campaign. But when it comes to money for Foreign Aid, Howard suddenly cannot make any promises. Why not?

Mr Howard says he will assess the country's domestic financial position before making aid commitments beyond 2010...

Labor's policy, launched in July, is to raise foreign aid to [a miserly] 0.5 per cent of gross domestic product by 2015-2016, up from 0.35 in 2010-2011. The Coalition has so far refused to match the policy.

And of course, he's not going to match the Labor target, is he? Because the Libs are busy accusing Labor of stealing all their policies. So he just lies:

"We have significantly increased our foreign aid, we've doubled it, and it's working."

And once again - twice in a day! - congratulations to whoever at News Ltd let this get past the editorial team:

However, it was revealed in May that $644 million of aid earmarked for Iraq in 2006-07 never left Australia, and that the Government included funding for the so-called Pacific Solution and the AWB inquiry's legal bill in it's foreign aid figures.

Speaking of dodgy logic, Howard says he will be handing over to Treasurer Peter Costello "well into the next term":

"The average Australian understands exactly what I am saying and they accept it," he said.

"They know at some point everybody has to be part of a transition - it happens to everybody, it happens to Australian cricket captains.

"So if it happens to them it has got to happen to the prime minister."

Well, Australian cricket captains also get hit in the groin quite regularly...

NOT:

"I think about it a lot because I'm the person in the end who sends men and women into battle," Mr Howard told Sky News.

"I feel a very direct responsibility for any death or injury that occurs on the field of battle and it's the greatest burden that anybody has to carry and discharge."

Obviously, it's only Australian casualties that matter. Let's not even bother counting the untermenschen.

Meanwhile, buried inside Bush's latest request for many more billions of dollars in war funding was a little US Department of Defence request for special bomb racks:

The new Big Blu bomb is 20ft long, weighs 30,000lb and carries 6000lb of high explosives. It is designed to go deeper than even existing nuclear bunker-busting weapons.

The bomb is designed to be dropped from as great a height as possible to achieve maximum velocity and penetrating power, guided on to target by satellite and accurate to within a few feet.

Each B2 bomber would be able to carry only one weapon because of its weight. The B2s, normally based at Barksdale, Missouri, flew round-trip strikes against Baghdad in 2003, but would ideally be positioned closer to its targets for missions against Iran.

Airplane hangars on the CIA prison gulag island of Diego Garcia are already being renovated to accommodate the new bombs.

And don't get me started about Diego Garcia... I was up at 3:30 am today reading a chapter on the Chagos islanders' long struggle, in John Pilger's book, Tell Me No Lies. If you are in the mood, check out these satellite images, showing tennis courts and swimming pools for US soldiers on an island the Blair government once tried to pretend was uninhabitable.

A minister's resignation is just what John Howard's lacklustre campaign needs right now, isn't it? Today Kevin Bloody Andrews goes into hiding and lets a spokeswoman invoke the old John Howard Defence on his behalf:

"He didn't see the emails. He hasn't seen the emails. Never heard of the police officer (mentioned)," the spokeswoman told AAP today.

She said Mr White could have received the email and failed to hand it on to the minister, but maintained the minister had a healthy relationship with the department.

"Absolutely, a relationship that any minister would have with his department.

"But there would be no reason for the minister to be seeing such (emails) because they are completely unrelated to his actual decision."

Mr Andrews first considered revoking Dr Haneef's visa on Monday July 16 and that was the only time he considered detaining the doctor, she said.

"The visa cancellation was entirely unrelated to the criminal proceedings and the bail hearing.

"I mean the cancellation of the visa is entirely a matter for the minister. It's only something that the minister can decide so there is no way that anyone could have known what the minister would decide."

That last bit is the Condi Rice and George W. Bush defence, BTW.

This is from the email in question:

"Contingencies for containing Mr Haneef and detaining him under the Migration Act, if it was the case he was granted bail on Monday, were in place as per arrangements today," the email said.

Written by Brisbane-based counter-terrorism coordinator David Craig to commanders of the AFP's counter-terrorism unit on Saturday July 14, the email was then forwarded to immigration department public servant Peter White the following Monday.

Two days later, Haneef was granted bail. Kevin Andrews immediately revoked his visa.

Resign.

Now.

You.

Bastard.

UPDATE: Lest we forget:

JOURNALIST: Were doubts raised in the meeting, did anyone…..

PRIME MINISTER: No the meeting I had at the Lodge nobody on my staff mentioned to me, nobody on my staff has ever raised at the relevant times doubts about the photographs no.

JOURNALIST: What do you mean when you say “relevant time”?

PRIME MINISTER: I mean relevant time, I mean before the election and I mean up until right now. I mean I’ve got to be careful that I don’t say nobody’s ever said anything to me about the photographs because unless I fix that in time that might be sort of taken out of context.

JOURNALIST: Can you fix at a date?

PRIME MINISTER: In relation to my staff I don’t think….I mean I probably would have had some discussions with them generally after I decided to commission the inquiry, generally some discussion with them perhaps late in November and they were, I mean to the best of my recollection I’d really have to go back and check and, hang on can I just finish answering Glenn, I’ll go back and check that, otherwise I might give an inaccurate recollection.

UPDATE 2: Crikey's email today asks some good questions:

Firstly, did Mr Prendergast, a senor AFP officer, brief his Commissioner Mick Keelty on the plan to detain Dr Haneef if the bail application was successful?

Secondly, did the DPP’s lawyers know of the plan when they were arguing against bail being granted on Saturday 14 July, and if they did, why didn’t they tell Dr Haneef’s lawyers?

Thirdly, is Mr Andrews’ statement today that he knew nothing of the plan credible given that he is the Minister for Immigration and there would be no point putting a plan to detain Dr Haneef in place without knowing that the Minister, the only one who could approve such a detention, was going to play ball?

Finally, how credible is Mick Keelty’s claim to The Bulletin a fortnight ago that he told the DPP that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Haneef when his own officers are hatching a plan to use the Migration Act to detain Haneef if he got bail?

Crikey also has this interesting analysis from Jeff Sparrow:

The leaked emails essentially vindicate the position taken in that case by the Australian Greens, at a time when Labor marched arm-in-arm with Kevin Andrews – yet the story appears alongside a poll showing a slump in Green support.
It’s one of the bizarre ironies of this campaign: even as the issues they own become more and more mainstream, Bob Brown’s mob seems to be becoming more marginal.
You’d think the changing political climate over global warming would, in and of itself, propel the Greens into double figures, given that Bob Brown was campaigning about it back when John Howard denied it even existed (oh, hang on – that’s still going on. But, no – as The Age says, the Greens were "polling 8 per cent in early October, but have been on 6 per cent since the campaign began."
The Greens have been vindicated in their opposition to the Iraq war, and their position on WorkChoices reflects the visceral hatred about the IR laws revealed in all the surveys, much more so than Labor’s wishy-washy stance. Yet none of it seems to have done them much good.
Quite simply, people want the Liberals out. And, for most of them, that means a Labor vote. Yes, we all know about preferential voting but, somehow, it doesn’t quite seem real. You want rid of Howard, so you vote for the other bloke. You don’t mess about with 1s and 2s and 3s.
It’s not much consolation for this election but one suspects that, like John Howard in the nineties, Bob Brown will be able to say of the next decade: "The times will suit me."
If the anyone-but-Howard mood leaves little space for a third party, consider the landscape after a Rudd victory. The Liberals will be so preoccupied with fratricidal bloodletting that traditional Toryism will be off the agenda for some time, even as a Blairite Labor Party reveals that economic conservatism coupled with social conservatism equals something pretty damn conservative. In those circumstances, one could easily imagine Brown becoming a focal point for disappointed Rudd voters.

WaPo picks through Donald Rumsfeld's emails:

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war...

Under siege in April 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him and called for his resignation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. "Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists," he wrote.

People will "rally" to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. "They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory."

... He also lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims "from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed," he wrote. "An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism."

Well, that might explain John Howard's latest policy.

It's always a bit confusing when you find yourself agreeing with opinion articles in Teh Oz. The fact that this piece by Michael Costello even got published (at least without much heavier editing) tells you as much as today's AC Nielsen poll about where this election is headed:

It was always completely bogus to argue that Labor's association with the trade union movement would lead to economic cataclysm.

Consider these numbers. When the Fraser government, of which Howard was the long-running treasurer, fell in March 1983, GDP growth was running at -2.5 per cent a year, inflation was 11.4 per cent, unemployment 9.9 per cent, cash rates 16.7per cent and housing interest rates 12.5 per cent. The profit share was 18.1 per cent and the wages share was 61.1 per cent.

When the Keating government fell in March 1996, GDP growth was running at 4.9 per cent, inflation at 3.7 per cent, unemployment at 8.2per cent, cash rates at 7.52 and housing interest rates at 10.5 per cent. The profit share was 23.2 per cent and the wages share was 55.4per cent.

The numbers tell the story. The Hawke and Keating governments, with the active and constructive engagement of Australia's trade union leadership and membership, rebuilt the economy from the steaming wreckage left by the Fraser government into the powerhouse it still is, despite the dumbed-down policies of the Howard Government. Howard's trade-union bogy is bogus: always was, still is.

To the extent that Abbott's performance this week unpicks the first stitch in the tale Howard is trying to weave on Labor, unions and the economy, it could be one of those memorable moments that campaigns turn [*] on.

And that's in a Murdoch paper, right?

What next? Right-wing US bloggers taking on FOX News? Ouch! The pain...!

[* or "don't turn", more to the point. The rock-solid stasis of the polls over the last year suggests to me that Australian voters have already "locked in" their decision on Howard.]

So is it time for Kevin Andrews to resign yet? And Mick Keelty too?