from Crikey .....

Alex Mitchell writes

Liberal federal Cabinet ministers, backbenchers and hard-heads in the Liberal Party organisation were dismayed and annoyed by the pathetic performance of Treasurer Peter Costello in yesterday's live debate with Labor’s shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan.  

Apologise to asbestos campaigner, Abbott told 

The Federal Opposition is demanding that Health Minister Tony Abbott publicly apologise for not meeting with noted asbestos campaigner Bernie Banton yesterday. 

In what world do these people live?  

True, there'll be no public executions outside Buckingham Palace when His Royal Highness rides in stately formation down The Mall. We gave up capital punishment about half a century ago. There won't even be a backhander – or will there? – which is the Saudi way of doing business.  

from four corners 

"If you think about all the planes that are available as being puppies in a litter, the Super Hornet is the runt." US aviation analyst James Stevenson. 

For more than 30 years Australia has rested its security on the seemingly ageless wings of its F-111 fighter fleet. 

Labor commits to new global warming deal 

The Federal Opposition says it is willing to commit to a new international greenhouse gas emissions target, even if big polluters like China and the United States do not sign up. 

On the critical issue of Iran's uranium-enrichment program, Tehran and Washington are now engaged in a game of geopolitical chicken, which favors hard-liners on both sides, making compromise more difficult, escalation more likely and war - by accident, if not by design - a greater possibility than before.  

Labor says Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey's admission the government is running a fear campaign over ALP union links exposes its fearmongering ahead of the election. 

Launching a new round of Liberal advertising attacking Labor's union links, Mr Hockey told reporters: "Our fear campaign is based on fact.'' 

The Prime Minister's curious facial twitch during the not-so-great debate on Sunday evening set the radio talkback phone lines ringing on Monday. Some people called it a spasm. Others thought he'd been about to drop from a heart attack. 

Mr Cheney made his remarks in a wide-ranging foreign policy speech during a conference on Middle East policy hosted by The Washington Institute, a research organization. During the 25-minute talk, he also took aim at Syria, accusing it of using “bribery and intimidation” to influence the upcoming elections in Lebanon, and made the case, as he has in the past, for the administration’s muscular approach in prosecuting terror suspects.

Chaser song despicable: PM …..

Prime Minister John Howard has labelled as "distasteful" and "despicable" a song by the ABC's Chaser comedy team that attacks famous dead Australians including Sir Donald Bradman and Steve Irwin.

John Howard has dared history, the Reserve Bank and the constraints on growth by claiming that Australia can grow indefinitely. He has recast economics as a matter of national attitude rather than a matter of the factors of production.

In a soaring Reaganite assertion of the power of conviction over the constraints of the concrete, he told the Herald yesterday: "We have to get out of our systems this idea that we can't be successful for a long period of time. We must throw off this cultural inhibition.