Tony Abbott's budget attack is shamelessly contradictory. He slams the $2 billion saving from family benefits as ''class warfare'' that will hit ''struggling families'', but he is also blaming the government for looming interest rate rises because he says it is spending too much.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic

It's increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition-except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress "suspects."

The hubris turns megalomanic as the President of the Most Powerful Nation on Earth grandly announces: "America can do whatever we set our mind to." The pattern falls into place. Bush the Senior had said years ago, "What We Say, Goes."

Just a few decades ago, during cold war, Communism was projected as Enemy Number One by United States and its minions. US policies aimed at conquering the World economically, politically and also militarily where possible. Socialist block was a big obstacle for US ambition. Around this time Russian army occupies Afghanistan, and supports Afghan Communist regimes' efforts to bring in land reforms.

There is something fundamentally crazy-making about the fact that Osama bin Laden, damned murderer of thousands, met his demise on the anniversary of the day George W. Bush, damned murderer of thousands, pulled his infamous "Mission Accomplished" stunt on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

I suspect that, had Mr. Bush managed to back up his big talk and actually bag bin Laden before his second term expired, we would have seen him jump out of an attack helicopter at Ground Zero wearing a SEAL uniform - complete with night-vision scope and even larger codpiece - under a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished II."

The belief that relations between the old Australian population and migrants should be governed by the ideal of multiculturalism was threatened by a growing conviction that one or other of the religious-ethnic groups - ''Asians'' first, then after Tampa and September 11, ''Muslims'' - posed a threat to national cohesion. Because of the influence of a crass new cohort of right-wing commentators - Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, Miranda Devine, Janet Albrechtsen - the cultural struggle against old patterns of racism was reinterpreted as the arrogant attempt of self-appointed thought police to impose their elitist values on the commonsense virtues of ordinary people.

Really .....

Australia secretly worked with the United States to weaken a key international treaty to ban cluster bombs, leaked US diplomatic cables show.

Despite taking a high-profile stance against cluster munitions - condemned as the cause of large numbers of civilian casualties - Australia was privately prepared to pull out of international negotiations on a global ban of the weapons if this threatened ties with US forces.

When was the last time you heard a Labor leader declare him or herself ''the most progressive leader the ALP has ever had''? When was the last time you could be confident that a Labor leader would challenge powerful interests - especially economic and corporate power - and not back down? When was the last time you could be sure of what a Labor leader stood for, and be proud of him or her?

Strange problems make for strange solutions.

In a country where people of good conscience are ignored in favor of megalomaniacs like Donald Trump and Sarah Palin, our society has been well-trained to sit up and pay rapt attention in matters regarding the military.

We worship at the altar of the armed forces, and for two basic reasons: 1. Average people pay respect to those in the military because that service to our country is worthy of praise; and, 2. A few very influential people - in the defense industry, the oil industry, and the media - make vast fortunes off the defense budget and the wide coverage any military engagement is given.

from Crikey .....

And we now cross live from London's Green Park Royal Wedding media compound (housing over 8000 broadcast journalists and technicians) to veteran US television journalist Dan Rather...

'The Independent' has a proud tradition of covering royal matters less slavishly than its rivals. We have loosened up a bit since our early days, when the 1988 birth of the Duke and Duchess of York's first child was marked with a single grudging sentence in the News In Brief column.

from Crikey .....

The bureaucracy of Gitmo: Franz couldn't have made it up

Crikey Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

China has urged the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to study its ''tremendous progress on human rights'' and ''show basic respect'' as she begins her most testing outing on the international stage.

Ms Gillard, who arrived in China last night for her first visit in a decade, said she was confident of extending economic and practical co-operation while pressing human rights concerns.

But returning to a pragmatic, Howard-like balance will not be easy in an environment where the Chinese state's willingness to assert its own political interests appears to be growing at least as fast as the Chinese economy.

The decade after the 9/11 attacks has seen the creation of a profitable cottage industry of self-styled "experts" on Islam. As Sarah Posner recently noted in an article on Religion Dispatches, anti-Muslim fear-mongers, ranging from politicians to national security experts, have "cultivated a wide-ranging conspiracy theory that totalitarian Islamic radicals are bent on infiltrating America, displacing the Constitution, and subverting Western-style democracy in the U.S. and around the globe."