HALLIBURTON SACKED BY U.S. ARMY !!!

Happy happy day.... I've been skipping around the kitchen since I
heard this on the radio. Halliburton's army supply deal has been
cancelled, and the global supply job will be retendered later this year.

There's a catch however. This means that instead of one global corporation
following yank troops around the world, now there will be four or five.

[Reuters extract}

Army officials said they will not renew the contract
awarded in 2001 to Halliburton subsidiary KBR to provide water,
dining and laundry services and transport fuel and other items,
including mail, to U.S. troops.

Instead, they described a plan to divide the work among
three companies, with a fourth supporting the work. "It will be
rebid," said Dave Foster, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon,
adding KBR is free to take part in the new competition.

Texas-based Halliburton, formerly run by Vice President
Dick Cheney, has drawn scrutiny from auditors, congressional
Democrats and the Justice Department for the quality and
pricing of its work in Iraq.

KBR has gotten orders worth $17.1 billion since the start
of the contract, including about $15.4 billion in Iraq,
according to Army figures.

"The termination of Halliburton's contract is long overdue.
Taxpayers can breathe easier knowing that the days of $45 cases
of soda and $100 bags of laundry are coming to a close," said
Rep. Henry Waxman, top Democrat on the House of Representatives
Government Reform Committee.

But the good news is that even the U.S. troops have decided
to never be manipulated again (at least on such a major level) by a
blatant commercial profiter..... oh who am I kidding- I just want to
wear rose coloured glasses again for this one day!

At the very least the leverage the contract provided for manipulating the Australian government will be gone...

In that spirit, I'd love to see Brendan Nelson do the same thing here...

Big Brother's Banana- Stiff Upper Lip !

Bad enough, the Big Brother Brouhaha, but The Age hasn't helped matters. My seven-year-old daughter had the sense to switch channels tonight (I intend that we stay switched) so I didn't see all of how the matter was treated. What I've read of two days of media reports is, however, quite enough, thanks.

Whatever banter of cameraderie accompanied the footage that was streamed over the net on Friday night.. basically what you've got, as depicted in at least The Age's online version, is one bloke holding a girl down while another shoves his groin near her face.

What's inappropriate on the newspaper's part is accompanying the story with an online ad for help with erecton problems- complete with the ever-analogous banana!

Some people might consider the tiiming of the ad as a little inappropriate... but maybe they're being overly stiff about it.