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KURT Campbell can shoot from the hip and September 11, 2007 was no exception. Writing on a blog on The New York Times that day, having recently returned from a family trip to Australia, Campbell claimed that George W. Bush and "his massive entourage" diverted from a secret trip from Iraq to Sydney the week before just to help out an "old mate" John Howard get re-elected. "While the agenda in Australia also called for a meeting with 21 Asian leaders to discuss weighty policy matters like global climate change and to listen attentively while others opined - just the...

REPORTS that Kevin Rudd is considering a request from US President Barack Obama to resettle in Australia 17 Muslim Uighurs from China held in Guantanamo Bay raises some interesting questions all round. Whenever John Howard agreed to a request made by George W Bush, the Left went apoplectic, complaining that the then Australian Prime Minister was behaving like a lap dog for the then US President. Remember the cartoons? Remember the protestors depicting Howard as a dog with its nose up the backside of Bush? Recall the accusations of Howard, the deputy sheriff, diminishing Australia’s national interest? It was cheap...

Kevin Rudd likes to talk about showing moral leadership for the world on climate change. But the better example for other governments to follow is the Australian Prime Minister's backtrack on a costly emissions trading scheme. Mr. Rudd announced on Monday that he will delay implementation of his trademark cap-and-trade proposal until at least 2011. With luck, that will be after the clouds of a global economic slowdown have started to clear and -- more important for Mr. Rudd's Labor Party -- after the next parliamentary election. The draft Mr. Rudd floated in March would have imposed total carbon permit...

White paper orders huge military build-up Patrick Walters, National security editor | April 25, 2009 KEVIN Rudd is set to announce Australia's biggest military build-up since World War II, led by a multi-billion-dollar investment in maritime defence, including 100 new F-35 fighters, a doubling of the submarine fleet, and powerful new surface warships. Kevin Rudd is set to roll out the biggest military build-up since World War II. 04/09 Sky News Views today: 21Sorry, this video is no longer available.The new defence white paper will outline plans for a fundamental shake-up of Australia's defence organisation to ensure that the nation...

Mark Rudd, 60s Communist Weather Underground Terrorist and fellow bomb throwing pal of William (just another guy in the neighborhood ) Ayers, made the book tour rounds in San Francisco this week. Old Glory Radio Interview with Wm. Mayer, Editor and Publisher of Pipe Line News, who spent some covering the various events. Old GLory Radio audio inteerview 04/24/09. - LINK TO APPROX 12 MINUTE AUDIO INTERVIEW -

Once he's on board he turns into Barry Humphries, he turns into the pig of Australian politics...Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been labelled the "pig of Australian politics" for his blow-up over food on a RAAF VIP flight earlier this year. Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton said the incident in which it was reported the prime minister's anger had reduced a female RAAF flight attendant to tears reveals the real Mr Rudd. "He's been described lately as the Barry Humphries of politics; he's up on top of those stairs hopping into the VIP flight overseas,...

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has opened the way for a possible snap election by promising to reintroduce laws for a tax on alcoholic soft drinks already rejected by parliament. The centre-left government can call a double dissolution election in both houses of parliament if identical legislation is twice rejected by lawmakers, with a three-month gap between attempts. Political analysts have speculated that Rudd, whose popularity is at near record levels ahead of scheduled elections in late 2010, could call an early poll to skirt the worst of an expected recession, peaking in the middle of next year. Conservative rivals...

A NEW poll shows Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is rivalling Bob Hawke as Australia's most popular prime minister, while support for Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has slumped dramatically. The latest Nielsen poll shows Mr Rudd's approval rating has risen to 74 per cent as Labor forges a crushing lead over the Coalition. In a concerning turn for Mr Turnbull, more voters now disapprove of the job he is doing as Opposition Leader than approve. On a two-party preferred basis, Labor leads the Coalition by 58 per cent to 42 per cent, a six percentage point swing to the government since...

Poor old Gordon Brown. While he was being savaged in Strasbourg, the Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd was getting a terribly thoughtful present from President Barack Obama - a rare original printing of sheet music, the "Anacreontic Song", by John Smith, known these days as the "Star Spangled Banner". This was, as the Aussie press was not slow to point out, in stark contrast to "the lousy gift of DVDs Obama gave Brown" during his recent visit. Rudd had given Obama a personally signed and inscribed copy of Thomas Keneally's biography of Abraham Lincoln. Not bad, but not quite as...

PICK the odd man out: Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd, John Key. Only one of them, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Key, has any material personal experience of how to make a dollar in the private sector. Rudd may be the wealthiest Prime Minister Australia has had, because of his wife’s admirable business acumen, but even that business is built on government contracts. Rudd’s experience is that of a lifelong public servant and politician, with a short stint as a consultant with KPMG. Obama is the world’s most famous community organiser, lawyer and, since 1996, full-time politician. Only Key - who was...

In this deleted scene, we told the story of how 1960s campus radicals morphed into today's academics. Three of those radicals were Ayers, his now-wife Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd. Together, they led the Weather Underground, a group committed to the violent overthrow the U.S. Government. To bring about their hoped-for communist utopia, the Weathermen bombed dozens of targets around the country including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and military recruiting stations. In executing their various attacks, the Weathermen killed a few of their own and also murdered two police officers and a security guard while robbing an armored car....

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd will hold talks with US President Barack Obama in Washington next month. Mr Rudd will meet Mr Obama on March 24. "I will be discussing with him a co-ordinated international response to the global economic crisis and how we can work together in Afghanistan,'' the Prime Minister said.

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd said arsonists in Victoria had committed mass murder as the death toll in Australia's worst ever bushfires rose to 108 this morning. The final toll was expected to rise further and fires were still burning out of control and putting towns at risk in the Beechworth and Yackandandah regions in the state's northeast. Amid speculation some of the fires were deliberately lit - and with reports yesterday that people were returning to relight blazes after fire crews had left an area - Mr Rudd said: "There are no words to describe it other than mass murder."...

The Australian army will be brought in to help in the worst bushfires in Victoria's history. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered army troops to help firefighters control 26 fires around the state that have claimed at least 26 lives, injured hundreds and destroyed hundreds of properties, Premier John Brumby said. "The army will become involved, I spoke to the prime minister in the early hours of this morning when I was in Bendigo," Mr Brumby said.

KEVIN RUDD has denounced the unfettered capitalism of the past three decades and called for a new era of "social capitalism" in which government intervention and regulation feature heavily. In an essay to be published next week, the Prime Minister is scathing of the neo-liberals who began refashioning the market system in the 1970s, and ultimately brought about the global financial crisis. "The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes," he writes of those who placed their...

PM KEVIN Rudd wants to recruit an army of volunteers to help the elderly, feed the homeless, and clean up the environment. In exchange for giving up their time, members of the new Community Corps would get discounts on their university HECS debts. The proposal could attract tens of thousands of volunteers from the 1.3 million Australians with a higher education debt. The average ex-student has a $12,000 HECS debt, which typically takes more than seven years to pay off. The scheme could wipe out students' debts as they accumulate hours of community service. The plan, backed by top business...

Prime Minister Rudd’s emissions reduction target condemns Australia to economic suicide, on the basis of the lie of man-made global warming, Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood charged today. “I can tell you, most scientists know that a man-made climate disaster is absolute nonsense,” Mr Isherwood said. “Don’t believe the lying mainstream media or Hollywood’s ‘climate porn’—this climate dictatorship is run by the same City of London/Wall Street bankers who caused the current global financial crisis. “The fact is, global warming stopped a decade ago and this year has been much colder than most. Earlier this year, China had its...

Australians could vote on whether the country should drop the Queen as head of state and become a republic within two years Greens Senator Bob Brown has introduced legislation to the upper house that would enable the public to vote on severing ties with the Crown at the next federal election in 2010. Senator Brown has introduced similar legislation before and the Greens Party hope the move will help gauge public opinion on the prospect of a referendum. The Greens will closely follow the reaction of both major parties to the legislation. Both the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and...

The global economic crisis is a result of the "comprehensive failure of extreme capitalism," Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Wednesday as he took aim at bulging executive pay packets. The centre-left Labor Party leader named greed and fear as the "twin evils" at the root of the financial sector collapse, which began in the United States and swept the world. "What we have seen is the comprehensive failure of extreme capitalism -- extreme capitalism which now turns to government to prevent systemic failure," Rudd told the National Press Club in Canberra.

Former weatherman Mark Rudd, who worked closely with William Ayers is a signer with the group, ”Progressives for Obama“.