Teenage Pregnancy – It’s the economy, stupid!
Last week, I looked at the some of the evidence for the apparent relationship between socio-economic deprivation and conception/abortion rates for English local authorities and arrived at two main conclusions:
1) There is a strong positive correlation between deprivation and conception rates in under 18’s – the more deprived the area, the higher the conception rate.
2) There is, when you exclude London, a solid negative correlation between deprivation and abortion rates – the less deprived the are, the more likely a pregnant teenager is to terminate their pregnancy.
One question that came up several times in comments was, inevitably, that of why England has the highest conception and abortion rates in Europe.
Part of the answer lies in the fact that one follows the other, if you measure both in rates per 1,000 teenagers but that’s only part of the story.
Relative to much of Europe, England has a fairly modest rate of abortions relative to the annual number of conceptions amongst teenagers.
continue reading… »
16, pregnant and middle class – What the papers don’t say
Do the Tories really want to pick a fight over the issue of teenage pregnancies?
The reason I ask is not just because of the Tory’s latest statistical debacle; although it has to be said that their inability to get a decimal point in the right place hardly inspires confidence in a party that has aspirations of becoming the next government and taking over the running of the economy.
Last year, I put together a (popular) article that sifted some of the facts about teenage pregnancy from the media-driven fiction.
With an election in the offing, and the Tories already threatening to turn this issue into a political Aunt Sally, yet again, its seems to me to be about the right time to revisit this issue again and look at what the evidence has to say rather than what the Daily Mail would like you to believe.
continue reading… »
Liberals/Media to blame for Catholic child abuse
A senior German Bishop has responded to the latest child abuse scandal to hit the Catholic Church by suggesting to a local daily newspaper that the ’sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 70s was at fault for abuse by priests.
According to German news website ‘The Local‘, Walter Mixa, the Bishop of Augsberg, told the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung that “The so-called sexual revolution, in which some especially progressive moral critics supported the legalisation of sexual contact between adults and children, is certainly not innocent,” before adding that the media was also at fault.
The article from which these comments are taken can be viewed in slightly mangled English via Google Translate, which gives this version of the Bishop’s remarks
Bishop Mixa emphasized in these “heinous crime” was the “so-called sexual revolution, certainly not innocent.”We have seen in recent decades, especially in the media, an increasing sexualisation of the public, which also promotes abnormal sexual preference rather than limited,” said Mixa.”Especially progressive morality critics had” even the legalization of sexual contact between adults and minors required.
If anyone come up with better translation then the original German language version of this article is here and please do feel free to post your efforts in comments.
The Bishop was commenting on a scandal that engulfed an elite Catholic school in Berlin at the beginning of the year, which kicked off, in January after a former priest who’d taught at the school between 1975 and 1983 admitted to forcing boys into having sex.
Canisius College, which is operated by the Jesuits, has since admitted that systematic sexual abuse did take place during this period and that it undertaken by at least two priests, although one is reported to have denied having had any part in such activities.
In keeping with previous scandals of this kind, these admissions have opened up a sizeable can of worms for the Catholic Church. It’s now thought that more than a hundred former pupils of Canisius have either contacted lawyers, or the school itself, with complaints of sexual abuse, while the Jesuits have issued an apology and admitted to covering up case of abuse at schools in Berlin, Hamburg, St. Blasien, Goettingen and Hildesheim.
The worldwide Jesuit order has also confirmed the existence of similar cases in Spain and Chile.
Earlier this month, Der Spiegel published a report which suggested that at least 10 church employees in Germany are currently facing accusations of sexual abuse and that at least 94 clerics and church laymen have been suspected of abuse since 1995, only 30 of which were prosecuted due to legal time constraints on pursuing cases.
Clearly, the Bishop is hoping that the timing of these cases, which date from the mid to late 1970s and early eighties, will lend some credibility to his efforts to blame clerical involvement in acts of schoolboy buggery on the media and on the liberalisation of wider society.
This is, however, entirely at odds with the evidence of abuse that emerged as a result of similar scandals in both the US and Irish Republic.
In the US, the John Jay report found evidence of sexual abuse within the American Catholic Church dating back as far as 1950, whiles Ireland’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), which published its finding only last year, uncovered evidence of systematic abuse in Ireland’s state funded but church-run reformatory and industrial schools stretching back to the 1930s. CICA found that sexual abuse, ranging from improper touching and fondling to rape with violence, was endemic in boys’ institutions through the entire period covered by the inquiry, although not so in girls’ schools, where the main risks of sexual abuse came from predatory male employees/visitors and from outside placements.
More importantly, in terms of Bishop Mixa’s comments, much of the evidence, from Ireland in particular, dates from a time long before the ’swinging sixties’ and the so-called ’sexual revolution’, leaving him- and other members of his church – desperately short of a cop out.
The Spectator’s Brown Shirt Poster Gaffe
It’s not just Conservative Central Office who’re having a few graphic design problems at the moment.
This is the actual poster that The Spectator are using to promote an upcoming education conference called ‘The Schools Revolution’ at which the Tories Education spokesman, Michael Gove, is the headline act:
Does it remind you of anything? Like, say, this…?
Or perhaps this…?
Maybe this makes things a bit more explicit…?
Memo to the Spectator’s design department… not the best choice of colour scheme there guys, D’oh!
Sunday Times promotes climate change denier
A couple of weeks ago, Ben Goldacre bashed out a quick piece for the Guardian’s news desk on the subject of the General Medical Council’s damning verdict on the conduct of Andrew Wakefield, in which he said:
As the years passed by, media coverage deteriorated further. Claims by researchers who never published scientific papers to back up their claims were reported in the newspapers as important new scientific breakthroughs, while at the very same time, evidence showing no link between MMR and autism, fully published in peer reviewed academic journals, was simply ignored. This was cynical, and unforgivable.
That last paragraph is particularly important because it shows one of the more common ways in which mainstream media outlets consistently distorts the truth by selectively highlighting particular claims and/or research on the basis of whether it conforms to an established narrative. Take, for example, yesterday’s Sunday Times, which devoted several hundred words to the uncritical promotion of the latest effluvial outpourings of TV weatherman and all-round climate crock, Anthony Watts.
continue reading… »
ConHome get dire over MyToryTombstone
This one comes straight from the file marked ‘It’s our willy and we’ll wave it if we want to’…
If they can mess with our posters, shouldn’t we have fun with theirs?
On Monday Labour launched this poster and Tory Rascal hit back with this…
Fun???
Having given it a bit of thought, I’ve decided to spare Tory Rascal the humiliation of reposting their desperately unfunny attempt to spoof this Labour poster…
…but if you do happen to have a bit of masochistic streak then the links are already there, so you can go see for yourself.
Not that’s a recommendation, of course.
We are talking here about a party that considers Guido’s nose-picking video to be the height of comedic sophistication, so…
…if you’ve got a strong stomach and can manage to picture Barry Chuckle reciting the contents of Stan Boardman’s Big Book of German Knob Gags then you’ll have already got a clear idea of the level that ConHome are operating at and can safely save yourself a few minutes of your life that you might otherwise have wasted.
Seriously, if you are going to try and take the piss out of a poster then at least make the effort to do it properly…
UPDATE
This is fantastic…
Trevor Phillips chastised by Select Committee
I have to say that this is the first time I have ever seen a parliamentary committee publish anything like this…
1 Allegation of Contempt: Mr Trevor Phillips
We met on 9 February to discuss a draft Report on the Equality and Human Rights Commission. It emerged at the start of the meeting that Trevor Phillips, the Chair of the EHRC, had recently spoken to at least three Members of the Committee about the Committee’s consideration of the draft Report and the publication of written evidence with the Report. In our view these discussions could constitute a contempt of both Houses in that they may be an attempt to influence the views of certain Members of the Committee shortly before it considered a draft Report directly relevant to Mr Phillips in his role as Chair of the EHRC. We recommend that the matter should be subject to investigation by the Privileges Committees of both Houses.
This allegation relates to a investigation by the Human Rights Joint Committee into the circumstances that led to several resignations from the EHRC last year.
Quote-mining is never a good idea
One of the more common, and thoroughly, dislikeable practices associated with climate change ’skepticism’, creationism/intelligent design and with the peddling of pseudoscience, is that of quote-mining.
Quote-mining is the practice of scouring scientific papers and reports for quotes that can be readily presented out of context in support of the quote-miners preferred position or argument irrespective of whether those quotes provide a fair reflection of the actual contents of the paper. It’s actually a practice that recognised as a logic fallacy, not to mention a form of false attribution and it’s neither a clever nor a particularly honest practice for anyone to engage in.
Sadly, there’s currently a perfect illustration of the fallacious use of quote mining to be found at Devil’s Kitchen; one that relates – unsurprisingly – to one of the key chapters in the IPCC’s AR4 report on Climate Change. continue reading… »
LC Investigation: Dorries claimed £70K for PR company services in 2½ Years
A detailed examination of expenses claims submitted by Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, indicates that she submitted almost £70,000 in expenses claims for services provided by two public relations companies in the 2½ years from November 2006 to June 2009.
These claims include more £20,000 for services provided by a PR company, set-up by a former Tory spin doctor in 2004, relating to Dorries’ controversial anti-abortion campaign, which failed to secure a change in the law cutting the upper-time limit for abortions from 24 to 20 weeks.
Dorries has also claimed more than £30,000 for services provided by two other ‘research’ companies with close ties to the Conservative party since becoming an MP in 2005.
Dorries’ official MPs website has also been found to have cost the taxpayer almost £9,000 since 2005 despite it not having been updated at all in the last twelve months.
Responding to reports that his company, Media Intelligence Partners, had received more than £66,000 in payments claimed against MPs expenses, ex Tory spin doctor Nick Wood told the Telegraph that MPs would typically pay for research, and then received PR advice from his company free of charge.
There should be, at least, a full investigation into the use of these companies, on expenses, by Conservative MPs.
continue reading… »
People’s Peers? You’ve got to be kidding!
If proof were ever needed of the utter political bankruptcy of the current system of appointing new members to the House of Lords, then this BBC report is it:
Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson nominated as ‘people’s peer’
Paralympic gold medalist Tanni Grey-Thompson is set to become a “people’s peer” after a recommendation from the House of Lords Appointments Commission.
We can skip the next couple of paragraphs, which are just the usual puff about Grey-Thompson’s personal achievments, and move straight on to the punchline:
She will be one of four new non-party-political peers recommended to the Prime Minister by the commission.
The others are Design Council chair and former Whitehall mandarin Sir Michael Bichard, Royal Opera House chief executive and former BBC journalist Tony Hall, and eminent surgeon Professor Ajay Kakkar.
So, our other three ‘people’s peers’ are:-
- A career civil servant and Companion of the Order of the Bath.
- The Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House who’s role and achievements at the BBC are being woefully underplayed to give him a bit of the common touch.
Hall was not just a BBC journalist. He’s a former editor of the Nine O’Clock News, Director of News and Current Affairs Television, Director of News and, in 1999, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the job of Director General. Not uncoincidentally, the achievements section of his CV includes both the launch of Radio 5 Live and, somewhat more relevantly, the launch of BBC Parliament.
As for Professor Ajay Kakkar, my first reaction was ‘who?’, but on looking him up, he’s:-
Professor and Chairman of the Centre for Surgical Sciences at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary College University of London. Surgeon St Bartholomews Hospital and The Royal London Hospital and Director-Designate Thrombosis Research Institute, London, UK.
Its an impressive looking CV and it appears to come (although its not mentioned) with the obligatory Harley Street practice.
In all, this sheds a bit of interesting light on the appointments process undertaken by the House of Lord Appointments Commission.
On this evidence that appears one of picking a name that people will have heard of, for the sake of a nice headline, and then shoving three other well-stuffed members of the establishment in the behind in the hope that no one will notice just how obvious a piece of utter bullshit this whole ‘people’s peers’ business has been from start to finish.
On ‘Judicial Activism’ and the Common Law
There’s something I’ve been meaning to have a bit of a rant about for a while, and after listening George Galloway’s verbal excrescences on tonight’s Question Time I can hold back no longer.
If you live in England and you genuinely think that there is something deeply and desperately wrong with the idea of judges making law then you are, without question, an ignorant, mouth-breathing moron who knows nothing of this country’s history and even less about its legal and judicial system.
There, I’ve said it. That feels so much better.
I am thoroughly sick and tired of listening to people whining about so-called ‘judicial activism’, especially when their ritual whining incorporates a shit-load of banal maundering about how Parliament hasn’t done this, or said that or passed a law to the effect of the other as if this somehow invalidates anything and everything the judiciary does that they just don’t like.
If that’s you – and I do appreciate that such a view is not one that widely held by our regular visitors – then just this once I want you to listen up, numb-nuts.
‘Judicial activism’, the whole business of judges making law, is not flaw or a fault in our legal system. It is a feature of that system. continue reading… »
Nadine Dorries – Latest expenses raise more questions
Today’s publication of the Legg report has, naturally, pushed the whole expenses issue back to the top of the news agenda.
We have, of course, had a bit of look for ourselves. And given past history you won’t be surprised that our attention naturally gravitated towards the expenses claims made by our old ‘friend’, sparring partner and Conservative MP for Mid-Narnia, Nadine Dorries…
…and, also unsurprisingly, we’ve got a few questions for Nadine for which we’d really like some answers.
Dorries’ Website/Blog
You may, for example, recall that some time ago – May 2008, in fact – we raised a few issues with the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner about her personal website and blog.
At the time, the blog appeared to be funded from her parliamentary expenses and breached several of the rules governing the use of MPs websites when funded from the public purse.
continue reading… »
US giant sues Tory blogger over domain
This one comes firmly from the the files marked ‘you couldn’t make this up if you tried’, ‘WTF?’ and ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding!’
British Tory blogger, Tory Politico, has received a cease and decist nastygram from lawyers acting for a major US Political news site, Politico.com, which gives them ten days to shut down their blog and turn over the domain name to Politico on the utterly spurious grounds that it claims that the use of the term ‘politico’ will create ‘consumer confusion’ and ‘injure the image and valuable goodwill’ associated with the Politico name.
Seriously, the company behind the US site, Capitol News, genuinely seems to think that its audience is so thick that it won’t be able to tell the difference between a big fuck-off American political news site ranked 246th in the United States in terms of web traffic and a tiny and relatively inconsequential British political blog (no offence intended, BTW, scale is a relative thing).
And this is all seemingly based on ‘evidence’ taken from Alexa’s somewhat dodgy webstats which shows that our Tory Politco gets about 30% of their webtraffic from outside the UK, which Capitol News presumes to mean America.
In that limited sense, they’re probably right – I don’t know how long Tory Politico has been going but 30% foreign traffic is about right for the amount you’d expect to be driven to your site via random Google search, most of which will bounce straight off because the site doesn’t have what they’re looking for.
However, when you consider that Alexa ranks Tory Politico at 1,755,000 or so compared to Politico.com’s overall ranking of 1,221, then I’m guessing that that net impact of Tory Politico scoring a bit of US traffic off Google search could reasonably be classed as ‘the next best thing to fuck all!’
To compound the epic fail that’s already well in progress, it all appears that the President and CEO of Politico.com is Frederick J. Ryan Jr., former Assistant to Ronald Reagan during his time as US President, who also happens to be current chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation.
Jeez, I thought you guys were supposed to be on the same side?
Needless to say, if its the image and goodwill associated with the Politico brand that Capitol News are so concerned about then we should make sure that as many people as possible get to know just how much they care, shouldn’t we?
—-
Couple of pointers for anyone using Twitter.
The short URL for Tory Politico’s own post is http://bit.ly/9D2916 and the #politico hashtag is being used for this issue, so please use it and let’s see if we can get this story trending.
Libel costs Mirror £15k damages, £380k in costs
Reports of this kind seem fairly commonplace in today’s media:
Model Matt Peacock yesterday accepted £15,000 in damages from the Sunday Mirror over an article that claimed he was violent towards his ex-wife, Jodie Marsh.
The piece, which appeared in its Celebs on Sunday magazine on 13 April last year, claimed the couple’s relationship ended soon afterwards as a result of his violence.
It’s just your bog standard ‘newspaper prints minor celeb gossip and gets nailed for inconsequential sum in damages’ that seems to crop up every few weeks with banal regularity.
The Mirror, of course, also had to pick up the tab for costs, the exact figure for which is rarely disclosed… unless Private Eye get in on the act.
According to sources on Twitter, this week’s copy of the Eye reveals that he got £15,000 in damages after being wrongly accused of being a wife-beater, a law firm who’s name we all know very well – Carter Ruck – got £380,000 in legal costs out of this one case.
Difficult as it is to have much sympathy for the Mirror here, there is something desperately wrong with a system in which the lawyers are making just over 25 times as much out of a lawsuit than the injured party.
#kerryout Tory PPC’s £325,000 CCJ
What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to the idiotic #kerryout campaign?
How about this story from today’s Daily Mirror…
Tory star Adeela Shafi has £325,000 CCJ ‘debt’
A key member of David Cameron’s new generation of women MPs has had three county court judgments against her since 2007 – including one for almost £325,000.
And her husband Ijaz Shafi was declared bankrupt in 2000.
Muslim lecturer Adeela Shafi was hand-picked by Cameron to open for him at the 2008 Tory Conference.
He then endorsed her as a Parliamentary candidate and campaigned in her Bristol East constituency along with his shadow cabinet team.
CCJs of £400 and £1,048 have been settled but £324,272 is outstanding – despite her being ordered to repay it nearly three years ago in July 2007 – five months before she became a prospective Tory MP.
Hat Tip – Political Scrapbook
As Political Scrapbook correctly notes, an undischarged bankrupt cannot stand for election to Westminster, and an MP who goes bankrupt while at Westminster is out of a job, a fate that Jeffrey Archer narrowly avoided in 1974 by standing down at the October election before the shit really hit the fan.
Strangely enough, this seems to have been a minor detail that self-styled campaigner for political transparency Harry Cole/Tory Bear neglected to mention when setting up the #kerryout campaign to raise money for Shafi’s election campaign in Bristol East.
Still, we shouldn’t be too hard on young Harry.
Mistakes like this are bound to happen when you’re the unfortunate outcome of a failed cloning experiment involving Susan Boyle and Archie the Inventor, as demonstrated by his weekly appearances on ‘Guy TV News’.
FFS, Guido, can’t you do everyone a favour and put Harry in a burqa…
…every week.
UPDATE
A quick check has revealed that, to date, the #kerryout campaign has raised the princely sum of £1,681 for Shafi’s campaign.
Using the same fundraising system, Boris Johnson’s brother, Jo, has raised £11,956.
Labour cuts NHS Waiting List by 970,000
After falling flat on his face as a result of his last foray into the realm of statistics you might think that a certain Tory blogger would have learned a valuable lesson. But, no, he’s back again and making yet another raft of daft mistakes:
Burying Bad News on NHS Waiting Times
Whenever there’s a major political event, you always need to watch what government press office put out. And true to form, today the Department of Health is trying to bury bad news. At 10.06am an email dropped into my Inbox with the alluring headline
STATISTICAL PRESS NOTICE – NHS INPATIENT AND OUTPATIENT WAITING TIMES FIGURES – 31st December 2009
I nearly didn’t bother to look, but suspicion got the better of me. It turns out that patient waiting times have increased dramatically in 2009.The number of inpatients, for whom English commissioners are responsible, waiting over 13 weeks at the end of December 2009 was 57,600, an increase of 12,300 (27.3%) from November 2009, and a rise of 18,000 (45.3%) from December 2008.
The number of outpatients, for whom English commissioners are responsible, waiting over 8 weeks at the end of December 2009 was 74,100, an increase of 11,700 (18.8%) from November 2009, but a rise of 26,900 (57.0%) from December 2008.
Shouldn’t the press release have been headlined…
Labour Increases NHS Waiting Times by 50%?
UPDATE: The Dept of Health has been in touch to deny this is burying bad news. They say that these figures always come out on the last Friday of the month.
Credit where its due, Iain’s already sort of acknowledged his first mistake – had he checked the DoH’s website, he might have noticed that this is nothing more than a routine statistical release that the DoH does issue at the same time every month.
As for his suggestion for an alternative headline, Iain’s got that badly wrong as well because he’s forgotten – or more likely never learned – one of the cardinal rules of statistics.
One statistic does not make a trend. continue reading… »
Home Office gives £10k to fight crime with prayers
Of all the imbecilic things that the Home Office has ever spent public money on, this one truly takes the biscuit…
The Christian Police Association (CPA) was handed the one-off cash payment to help publicise its message, which includes encouraging members of the public to pray that criminals are swiftly brought to justice.
The group believes that praying can help police to solve crimes, protect officers from injury on duty and reduce anti-social behaviour.
If that weren’t bad enough, the CPA believe that they have circumstantial evidence to support their contention that prayer really does help in the fight against crime:
“In one particular area, an officer was investigating an incident but he had not been able to apprehend a suspect.”He encouraged a church to pray for him and within days a suspect had been arrested and charged.
“In another area, an officer encouraged churches to pray about domestic burglary and over the year it came down by 30 per cent.
“We do not discount good police work, which is why we call it circumstantial evidence.”
We don’t discount good police work either, which is why we call that bullshit!
Thanks to the Home Office grant, the CPA have been able to issue this artist’s impression of an individual they’re looking for in connection with a extensive series of break-ins, in the London area, in which children’s bedrooms were targeted by the offender.
Iraq – a foreign policy perspective…
Much as I’ve enjoyed Flying Rodent’s wittily insouciant commentary on the Chilcott Inquiry, you’ll see from the comments that it hasn’t persuaded anyone to stop raking over the various theories and conjecture about the whys and wherefores of the Iraq War.
The problem here, as with almost everything else that’s been written on the subject in the last six years, is that the majority of people expressing opinions on this issue don’t really understand how foreign policy actually ‘works’ and how it different it is from domestic politics. What they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, is try their best to make sense what they see in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, Zimbabwe and anywhere else you’d care to mention, by applying their understanding of domestic politics and policy-making to the situation.
This, as you might imagine, often results in them misreading or misinterpreting what actually going on and, more importantly, why?
Take the Vietnam War, for example.
If you ask most people for their view of the Vietnam War, they’d agree with the proposition that it was America’s most significant foreign policy setback of the post-World War II era…
…and they’d be wrong! continue reading… »
Liberty: Defenders of Free Speech or Free Publicity?
It’s often said that pride comes/goes before a fall.
In the case of public figures, it’s always struck me that the thing that most often seems lead to their downfall is that, over time, they come to believe in their own publicity. Margaret Thatcher is, perhaps, a case in point. Could the obvious inflexibility and intransigence she demonstrated during the latter part of her period of office, even with her own Cabinet ministers, have arisen simply because she had come to believe in her own public image as the ‘Iron Lady’.
That’s really a question for historians and future biographers to speculate on. For our purposes its enough to take the view that such things are possible and that the effort it takes to live up to a carefully constructed public image may well have untended and unfortunate consequences and side-effects.
Bearing that in mind, I’m becoming just a little worried that Liberty is starting to head down that same route and that its increasingly trying just a little bit too hard to live up to a public image that has, for the most part, been built up simply by picking the bushels of low-hanging fruit created for it by New Labour. continue reading… »
Constituent harassed by Telegraph readers after sending email to Tory PPC
Let’s try a bit of word association… James Delingpole..?
I’m guessing that ‘climate change denier’ was probably the first thing that came to mind, although having read George Monbiot’s latest missive on CiF, ‘vicious douchebag’ seems rather more apt.
On Sunday, Delingpole posted this on his blog at the Telegraph:
The Warmists are looking increasingly foolish and wrong. But they aren’t going to go down without a fight. Consider, Exhibit A, this nauseating email currently being sent out to Conservative candidates. It seems that in the last week a couple of hundred Tory candidates have received variations on the theme below. Note that these emails do not come from a named organisation but from individual voters in each of the different prospective parliamentary candidates’ constituencies.
The text of the email in question, which he also posted, goes like this:
Dear Edwin Northover
I was concerned to note the results of a survey of 140 Conservative candidates for parliament that suggested that climate change came right at the bottom of their priorities for government action.
I hope you can reassure me that you recognise the importance and success of climate change action by the UK government at home and internationally.
Can you clarify that:
You accept that climate change is caused by human activity?
Do you support the target to achieve 15% renewable energy by 2020?
Do you support the EU imposing tougher regulation to combat climate change?
Kind Regards, *** ***”.
Not only does that look to be a perfectly polite and reasonable enquiry but it looks, to me at least, very much like the kind of simple fill-in-the-blanks form email that’s pretty much a staple tool of internet-based campaigning.
In other words, it about as far from ’stalking’ – the term Delingpole used in the title of his post – as its possible to get. continue reading… »
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» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
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» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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