Am I right in remembering the First Home Owner Grant comes from the federal government?

Then this is some very special political opportunism.

Using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scientists have recently discovered a gigantic, mysterious structure in our galaxy.

This feature looks like a pair of bubbles extending above & below our galaxy's centre.

Each lobe is 25,000 light-years tall & the whole structure may be only a few million years old.

Americans keep odd things up on the mantelpiece, or in the fridge: Dad's ashes in a biscuit tin or, in Barbara Bush's case, the foetus she miscarried, stored in a mason jar. As her eldest son disclosed this week on national TV, she then handed it to the teenaged George Jr, to take to the hospital. "George, honey, could you hold this while I get the car keys."

"What is it, mom?"

When Julia Gillard and Hillary Clinton announced they wanted to ''make solar power competitive with conventional power sources'' within five years, they left out one important detail.

Their goal was based on solar being competitive with coal-fired power after a carbon price had been imposed.

Banks will be put under further pressure this week when the government releases the formal definition of the term ''gouging'' that it will use to guide prosecutions.

Since July it has been illegal for a bank to charge a mortgage exit fee any higher than needed to cover its costs.

But until now no bank has been taken to court because the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has been preparing what it calls ''regulatory guidance'' detailing what it will regard as unfair.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said yesterday the guidelines would help crack down on the fees ''that keep people bound into their banks even though they want to change''.

US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, sat in front of a tame audience on the ABC tonight & held-forth on the wonders of the awesome awstraylen-american relationship.

Earlier in the day, 'Our Kevin' almost wet himself with ecstacy when the well briefed yankee diplomat referred to him as the Prime Minister.

Be afraid - very afraid.

A tsunami of Yemeni mail-bombs is about to bury us: this week, "inspectors from the U.S. ... [headed] to Yemen to monitor security practices and to try to find the holes in their system that allowed two explosive packages to leave the country. ... a team of six inspectors from the Transportation Security Administration [TSA] will make recommendations and give Yemeni officials training to improve their cargo security."

That oughta have the mail-bombs absolutely flooding the ol' Homeland.

Oh ye of little faith - a little pricing power causes wholesale abandonment of confidence in markets to sort out supposed hubris. So much for a robust free market economy.

The bank mania sweeping Canberra, whipped along by the usual populist commentaries, is starting to take on bizarre proportions as the two major parties compete to sound the most interventionist and to display the least confidence in the market mechanisms. The outbreak of posturing by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission isn't a good look either.

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number.

Shake your chains to earth like dew.

Which in sleep has fallen on you.

Ye are many - they are few.

These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy may seem unattainable. I don't think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spread sheet.

from Crikey .....

Reclaiming reform: why Labor needs to explain itself better

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

Yemeni authorities have arrested two women on suspicion of sending explosive devices to US synagogues. Yemeni security forces arrested the women in their homes, where it was claimed that they had been hiding. The women had been identified through the contact phone numbers they had given to UPS when arranging to forward the parcels. Authorities are convinced that the parcels were bombs sent on behalf of the Saudi Arabian branch of al-Qaeda, even though the contents were still subject to analysis.

Editorial, The Australian, September 9:

More than 70 elected leaders of the state's peak farming body have called on the Murray-Darling Basin Authority to ditch its draft plan aimed at rescuing the rivers and to recalculate the irrigation water cuts it says are needed in every valley.

''This is not a case of negotiation,'' said the president of the NSW Farmers' Association, Charles Armstrong, after the unanimous vote at a Sydney meeting of representatives from across the state.

The authority had done nothing to justify the 37 per cent average water cuts to agriculture across the state and its draft plan was ''a huge black cloud'' hanging over farmers and their communities, he said.

When John Howard sat down to write his memoirs he could have focused on his achievements, given generous acknowledgement to his colleagues, conceded a few failures - including the loss of the 2007 election - and made some observations on the long-term policy challenges for the nation.

It would have been the book of an elder statesman. He could have shown a spirit of generosity. And it would have enhanced his reputation. But it is not the nature of the man.