What does the world think? Obama has been using air strikes and drones against civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and probably Somalia. In his March 28 speech, Obama justified his air strikes against Libya on the grounds that the embattled ruler, Gadhafi, was using air strikes to put down a rebellion.

Flanked by eight American flags, Mr Obama said that faced with the prospect of "violence on a horrific scale" in Libya, he felt compelled to act.

During a door-knock in Balmain last week supporters of Verity Firth found themselves face-to-face with an ALP diehard who is so disillusioned with the party that she tried to close the door in their faces.

"But we're not Labor," they protested, "we're Verity Firth."

This is a party which is so on the nose and so demoralised that it dared not speak its name to the electors.

So how does it make a comeback from the political graveyard? Not easily, is the short answer.

If ever we wanted a classic example of how damn broken our parliamentary system really is, we had it yesterday.

In one corner we had the rabid budgie smuggler talking-up a 'people's revolt' that turned out to be such a dud, that not even police would take it seriously, & in the other, big red, suitably indignant because her good name & that of her office had been publicly brought into disrepute.

There they both were folks, treating us to another second rate round of parliamentary theatre costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to stage, welded implacably to opposite sides of the stage, mouthing the most offensive language at each other.

You don't expect Australian charities to be winning international design awards. Then again, you mightn't expect the world epicentre of supersize houses to tolerate homelessness for one in 200 of its citizens, either. The obvious design solution to an affordability crisis in one of the world's richest cities is to make houses smaller. Much smaller, in this case, but perfectly formed.

Julia Gillard told her caucus on Tuesday that Tony Abbott has made three errors on climate change.

His day one position of declaring the carbon price plan the end of the world ''makes it difficult to say something else on day two''.

The decision to repeal the tax if elected meant he would have to also repeal the compensation that went with it.

And his broad pitch to the sceptics made him hostage to the climate-change deniers, a support base, the views of which, he could not publicly advocate for fear of offending a broader audience.

However, the ''arms and legs'' of his ''people's revolt'' are climate-change deniers and occasionally he has to throw them a bone.

I assume that to some, I dare say, to the majority of Western citizens, it must be a relief to see that 'our' force for good has not lost its momentum - that humanitarian benevolence which characterizes the self-portrait we paint of our societies as we ponder on our own exceptionalism, our magnanimity.

Another scandal has engulfed the state government with a senior public servant referred to the corruption watchdog over a $12 million land deal involving a developer with links to senior ministers, including the Transport Minister, John Robertson.

An immediate investigation into the chief executive of the Land and Property Management Authority, Warwick Watkins, has been ordered by the Premier's Department over his role in the last-minute purchase by the government of the historic Currawong site at Pittwater from the developer Eco-Villages Pty Ltd.

Police rushed a pair of officers in a marked car to a park after two young sisters were spotted picking daffodils.

Sienna Marengo, four, was seen picking flowers with six-year-old stepsister Olivia in Poole, Dorset.

A member of the public reported them to police and two constables attended and advised the girls' mother, Jane Errington, that she and her partner, Marc Marengo, could be arrested for criminal damage.

The couple expressed anger at the "heavy-handed" response and accused police of wasting time.

When the Labor Party's national secretary announced his resignation on Wednesday, Julia Gillard put out a glowing tribute to the man. It unwittingly encapsulated the central problem facing Labor.

The Prime Minister thanked Karl Bitar for his efforts that "helped us be re-elected in 2010 allowing us to deliver our plans to make Australia a stronger and fairer society". In just 20 words, Gillard said so much, and so much wrong.

The party's looming death as a stand-alone political entity is the biggest story in contemporary Australian politics.

Labor's end - that's all, folks

The other night I watched as a Libyan 'rebel', brandishing a heavy machine gun, screamed for foreign intervention to stop Gaddafi from attacking civilians like himself. Very credible indeed.

Whilst it may seem like a highly unlikely scenario, if a few thousand Australians, fed-up with the tyranny of our corrupt parliamentary system & its leaders, somehow broke into a military arms depot & took to the streets in armed revolt, wouldn't we expect our government to move swiftly to crush such a rebellion? How is Libya any different?

The rest - all of it - the carrier battle groups, the scores of air wings, the dozens of bases, the tens of thousands of tanks, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers stationed all over the world - it's really all about projecting power - that is, about war - on others. Who have done nothing to us, other than resist American hegemony, or otherwise behave uncooperatively. All for the sake of the profits of the military industrial cartel.

RUBY HAMAD: Hi. Prime Minister, in your gushing speech to US Congress last week, you tearfully proclaimed that America "can do anything!" Millions of Australians cringed. In the year 2011, can we really not have a relationship with the United States without paying lip service to the myth of American exceptionalism?

Julia Gillard has taken a double whammy in the latest poll.

The Prime Minister's approval rating has reached its lowest point, apparently over her carbon tax plan. And she is losing to Kevin Rudd as preferred Labor leader.

Today's Herald-Nielsen poll confirms that the Labor Party remains near its historic low point among voters and would decisively lose an election held today.