---

Never in a pink fit would I have thought that Google would play such a huge part in the Australian election. Well the Queensland Premier Peter Beattie urged the audience to search Google for John Howard non core promises, noting there are 33,000 results. [ There is no result if one places the sentence with quotation marks, just imagine if the surname used happened to be John Smith result on my imac is 66,666]
My message today comes straight from the (Google and ) people of Australia. Latham's campaign launch speech :
Fairfax Digital Analysis ;
Fox The Omnipresent Decision Makers So Help Me God

Eye on Local & Global Political Issues: Reality is Back in Political Fashion
A specter is haunting America – the specter of anti-Americanism. All the powers of patriotic America have entered into a corporate alliance to exorcise this specter: draft-deferrers and women-gropers, grammar-challenged and duel-challengers, oil diggers and grave diggers. It is the duty of all upstanding American citizens to fully understand and identify the leading symptoms of anti-Americanism, so that our homes, homeless shelters, reading chambers, torture chambers, chocolate refineries, weapons factories, and places of worship, such as churches, temples, and Wall Street, are completely free from the poison of anti-war sentiment. The patriotic American must save both himself and others from becoming an anti-American American by learning to be an active, honorable, anti-anti-American American. It is with this pressing obligation in mind that the following signs of anti-Americanism have been compiled and exposed.
• How to Avoid Becoming an Anti-American ; [Daniel Ellsberg Leaks and truths worth telling; The proliferation of political rights and dilution of corresponding duties United States has a long, sad history of sanctioning murder and torture ; Lawfulness of Interrogation Techniques under the Geneva Conventions ; He Says Jozef, You Say Yusuf, I Say Youssouf ]
• · Matt Liddy's Poll Vault Weblog There are people - quite a few number crunchers, actually, - who want to believe the absolute best and worst about the election night If all stories were written like science fiction stories: How Antony Green votes; Bryan Palmer at Oz Politics is tracking the election odds Scatterplot of Bellwether seats which the apparatchicks do not want you to see
• · · Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts accused President Bush on Monday of making the world a far more dangerous place, calling his handing of the war in Iraq a toxic mix of ignorance, arrogance and stubborn ideology. A mushroom cloud over any American city is the ultimate nightmare, and the risk is all too real
• · · · Leave it to the Washington Post's Dana Milbank to discover that Allawi's rhetoric was not only similar to Bush's, at times it seemed to have been written by the same person. I guess the White House speechwriters are getting a little lazy
• · · · · Robert Goodin: (PDF version) Representing Diversity
• · · · · · Indonesian Susilo Bambang Yudhoyona and the End of Euphoria A number of major tests and taxing times ahead for the next president in his first 100 days of office;
[Tragedy marked the closing of the Paralympics in Athens, when seven Greek schoolchildren were killed in a car accident on their way to the competition.]