The Coalition has been telling us for a year or more now that they have all their costed election policies in the can.

''By the end of next week we'll have the policies for an election campaign,'' the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, said last June on the ABC's Q&A.

As a major winter storm made its way up the Atlantic Coast on Thursday, local authorities from New York City to Maine began to make preparations for what forecasters said could be the heaviest snowfall for some cities in the Northeast in a century.

Over the past four decades, of all the reasons people over a certain age have given for their becoming radicalized against US foreign policy, the Vietnam War has easily been the one most often cited. And I myself am the best example of this that you could find. I sometimes think that if the war lovers who run the United States had known of this in advance they might have had serious second thoughts about starting that great historical folly and war crime.

by my friend, Dr Vacy Vlazna

Given the NSW Shennagans being uncovered by their ICAC last week, you have to wonder how many similar situations across the country exist. In South Australia we don't have an ICAC yet, and when we do we probably won't be allowed to hear what happens.

Over recent years I've been a proud supporter of a group of locals trying to save their community-bequeathed park from being bulldozed for housing in a dodgy land-swap.  In that time I've seen the leader of the protesters become elected as the Council's Mayor!

Like most, I believe in democracy. But I also believe in capitalism, and though the two have usually been seen in the West as a good fit, of late I'm having doubts.

Every society has to use some system for organising production and consumption, and I know of none better than leaving it largely to private enterprise.

Civil liberties groups have slammed the legal reasoning behind the Justice Department "white paper" by pointing out that it redefines the meaning of "imminent" threat.

Obama Administration Claims Power To Authorize Pre-emptive Cyberwar Strikes

If it does nothing else, the election year of 2013 will vindicate some political careers and end quite a few others. Among them, of course, will be those of the party leaders: we will learn whether Julia Gillard can recover from an apparently terminal decline in the opinion polls and whether Tony Abbott can translate his initial blitzkrieg into a win where it counts.

Coalition frontbencher Christopher Pyne :

This is not the election campaign. Right?

With Julia Gillard on the back foot, Tony Abbott makes a foolish ministry pledge, writes MICHELLE GRATTAN.