Commons Motion To Impeach Blair Gets Go-Ahead

The parliamentary motion to impeach Tony Blair for gross misconduct over the war against Iraq will be published next Wednesday, the day after the Queen’s speech. It will be the first to be tabled in 198 years, since Lord Melville, a close friend of the then prime minister, William Pitt the younger, faced impeachment for misusing public money in running the Admiralty. Senior parliamentary officials, including legal advisers to the Commons Speaker, Michael Martin, on Wednesday night approved the wording of the text as meeting parliamentary rules, allowing the motion to be tabled on the first day of the new session

The Arrival Of Secret Law

That is called ‘sensitive security information’. She’s not allowed to see it, nor is anyone else, he said. Thus, in a qualitatively new development in US governance, Americans can now be obligated to comply with legally-binding regulations that are unknown to them, and that indeed they are forbidden to know. This is not some dismal Eastern European allegory — via meta-roj blog

Netscape/CNN Site Calls Bush An Arsehole

The very citizen journalists who very nearly pushed John Kerry into the White House have continued with their stellar work, uncovering an interesting photo naming policy on a shared Netscape/CNN site. The photo showed a lovable Laura Bush holding her ape-faced hubby. Until late last night, the photo was appropriately called asshole.jpg. It has now been changed to the more innocuous, but less amusing, georgelaura135.jpg

How To Get Off The US Feds Do Not Fly List

All you need to do to get off a do-not-fly-list is modify your name in some way by adding a middle initial or a suffix. In other words, the folks responsible for the list are too stupid to figure out how to prevent false positives, but a true terrorist can get off the list by adding a middle initial

The Trouble With Political Jokes Is That They Get Elected

As if I needed any more proof that the vast number of my countrymen are deeply stupid people, John Howard was re-elected as moron in chief. Not that Latham‘s any better, but it seems Australians are far too apathetic to kick the arses of two of the country’s biggest idiots. At least there is some satire on the matter around: You have betrayed the lord our Gough and his only begotten political son, Latho. Fie, FIE! I predict there will be seven plagues of regret: the sale of Telstra, the destruction of Medicare, more damaging Americanisations, higher interest rates, further embarrassing human rights abuses against immigrants and indigenous people, Christian fundamentalists, and Tony Abbott

Presidential Candidates Arrested

Two Presidential candidates — for the Green and Libertarian parties — attempted to serve papers on the Commission on Presidential Debates, demanding the right to participate. As they attempted to approach the CPD officials, they were arrested. Makes the behaviour of the Australian pollies look tame by comparison — via BoingBoing

Australians Go To The Polls

Voting is under way across the country, as 13 million Australians choose their next leader. Oh joy, the time has come around again where we get to choose to keep the lying mongrel we have or swap him for an almost indistinguishable lying mongrel. I don’t see why we can’t have them both taken out the back and beaten with a stick

Bruce Sterling: Marry The UN And The Net

Bruce Sterling is guest-posting on the global-eco-tech blog Worldchanging and thinks we ought to marry the Internet and the United Nations. The UN has cumbersome rules, no popular participation, and can’t get anything useful done about the darkly rising tide of stateless terror and military adventurism. The UN was invented to unite nations rather than people. The Internet unites people, but it’s politically illegitimate. Vigilante lawfare outfits like RIAA and MPAA can torment users and ISPs at will. The dominant OS is a hole-riddled monopoly. Its business models collapsed in a welter of stock-kiting corruption. The Net is a lawless mess of cross-border spam and fraud. Logically, there ought to be some inventive way to cross-breed the grass-rootsy cheapness, energy and immediacy of the Net with the magisterial though cumbersome, crotchety, crooked and opaque United Nations. It’s obviously part tongue in cheek, but it does make you think