Is Michael Jackson still alive?
The answer is here. (via @tygerland). Sorry, couldn’t resist – this is all over my Twitter and Facebook feeds. As Leon said, at least Iranian leaders will rest easy from the media glare.
Funny Twitters as I get them below:
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Today programme gives Dorries free ride over plot
The Today programme was accused of giving Tory MP Nadine Dorries a free ride on Tuesday regarding the new speaker John Bercow.
A reader wrote in to Liberal Conspiracy to say she had sent a complaint to the programme after John Humphrys interviewed Dorries on Tuesday. In his preamble to Vernon Bogdanor interview, just after his Nadine Dorries interview at the 8.10am slot, he said that there was talk of MPs wanting to unseat the new Speaker, but Nadine Dorries was “not part of that”.
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What homelessness crisis? BBC take note
by the blogger A Homelessness Officers Point of View
I recently received an email pointing out an article on the BBC website by Mark Easton. The article is titled “Map of the Week: Homelessness crisis? What homelessness crisis?”.
It appears that Mr Easton has seen the government statistics (our old friends the infamous P1e’s) and on the basis of these has not questioned the truth behind them but has just followed them blindly. I hope to correct some of his observations here. Homelessness is not falling, what is happening is that councils are doing all they can to prevent people from making homelessness applications thats all.
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Three interesting stories today
1. Axed Boris Johnson aide lied over lover
“A deputy mayor sacked by Boris Johnson lied about expenses claims he made over meals with his lover, it was revealed today. Ian Clement, 44, was forced out of office yesterday over charges made on his City Hall credit card. Today an Evening Standard investigation confirms that on at least three occasions Mr Clement claimed for lunch and dinner with “guests” who now say they were not present.”
And yet the national media continues to ignore the London Mayor’s stupidity and earlier attempts to defend Clement.
Update: Adam Bienkov has done more digging to find that Bexley Cllrs did not declare meals with Ian Clement until they were caught out. There are good grounds for Clements to be charged for fraud now. He may also have used the credit card for party political purposes.
2. Nadine Dorries continues her campaign to undermine new speaker John Bercow.
Bercow ‘only got three Tory votes’
New Speaker to move young family into rent-free flat at Commons
3. BNP dismisses legal action threat over membership
This, I believe, should have been pushed through earlier. But anything that highlight’s the BNP’s racism has got to be a good thing.
Journalism vs Truth
Here are four items:
1. Fraser Nelson says “The internet is the perfect medium for lie-detecting”, whereas much of the MSM has allowed Gordon Brown’s lies about spending to go unchecked.
2. PZ Myers complains about a BBC report that doesn’t question creationists sufficiently. He says:
Every article about creationism needs to eschew the subtleties and pound hard on the obvious, that creationism is bunk and its proponents are ignorant.
3. In last week’s Radio 4 Feedback (5′30″ in), Roger Bolton asked why the BBC hadn’t checked whether UKIP’s claim that three-quarters of our laws start in Europe. The Beeb’s Rick Bailey replies that this claim isn’t a matter of fact but of political dispute.
4. Gaby Charing complains that the Guardian is not taking a stand on whether Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children is anti-semitic or not.
There’s a common theme here, about the nature of journalism. In all four cases we have a complaint that journalists are not reporting the truth, but merely putting both sides of the story, and leaving their audience to make up their mind.
Is the Russian buying the Indy?
Brand Republic is reporting that Evening Standard owner Alexander Lebedev is in talks to buy The Independent.
Moderate Muslims fight back
Bizarrely, from the Daily Fail, comes good news for British moderate muslims. One of the straw men often presented to the moderate muslim community (apart from “There is no moderate muslim community!”) is that if they existed, and cared, and were not tacit fascists, they’d be out in the streets protesting against or confronting the militants in their own community.
Where are the moderate muslims shouting down Omar Bakri? Where are the muslim Britons defending our troops from the insults of extremists?
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PM’s allies accuse Guardian of plotting
The Prime Minister’s allies are accusing the Guardian of plotting to oust Gordon Brown. That is, according to a report in the Daily Mail today. It says:
The Prime Minister’s allies accuse the left-wing Guardian – long seen as Labour’s house journal – of promoting and even orchestrating the plot.
It demanded Mr Brown’s resignation in a scathing editorial on Wednesday in which it insisted there was ‘no vision from him, no plan, no argument for the future and no support’. Downing Street was incandescent with rage that it was given no forewarning of the savage article. The Prime Minister’s allies suspected it had been written in active collaboration with Labour rebels.
The article goes on to blame its news coverage and even Polly Toynbee.
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Obama’s secret plan to convert America revealed!
You may know that Barack Obama gave a speech today in Cairo, addressed to the ‘Muslim world’.
In an earlier statement he said:
And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.
Guess what Spectator Magazine’s Melanie Phillips had to say?
Just what planet is this US President on? Or is this not a statement but an aspiration?
Oh yeah, whoops! Barack Hussein Obama mistakenly blurts out his plan to convert America to Islam by stealth! Phillips is so absurd that even fellow blogger Alex Massie couldn’t help but mock her:
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There are worse things than fiddling expenses…
Thinking back over the last 18 months, few, if any, of the stories and issues I’ve written about either here or over at the Ministry have been prompted by a genuine and deep-seated sense of anger.
There was one story that I did cover, over at the Ministry, that did put me in just that kind of mood, a story that’s resurfaced over the last few days in several newspapers as what Charlotte Gore has dubbed “Too Stupid to Look After Baby” case – a headline that directly echoes The Sunday Times’ “Mother ‘too stupid’ to keep child” headline, which appears to have got the media’s ball rolling again.
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Mocking the Greens and the ‘protest’ vote
by David Birchall
In her Monday Guardian column Madeleine Bunting wrote: “The most useful vote this week would be for the Greens – a protest vote that will help push the environment up the agenda.”
Her mention of a protest vote for the Greens was merely an aside in another aside about the probability of a Labour wipeout, but it represents a common subliminal attack on the small parties for whom a vote is an attack on the larger parties, rather than a true belief.
This is a demonstrably fallacious idea.
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Guardian endorses Libdems at election
I somewhat predicted this only a month ago, and today a Guardian editorial endorses the Libdems in the coming elections. Given that the Greens are not yet effective opposition to the Tories, I think this is an inevitable and wise move. Endorsing a Labour party headed by Gordon Brown now is like trying to convince the electorate that contracting herpes is a good idea. Even in 2004, despite Iraq, the Guardian did not go the whole hog.
So this is quite an impressive turn of events. Most surprisingly of all, it follows Polly Toynbee’s endorsement. Does this mean the Libdems will now break through as the real opposition? Interesting analysis of this was offered by both Sunder and MatGB in the previous thread.
But I think the Libdems are missing a key constituency: The Economist readers, as suggested by Amol Rajan at the Indy. I think Nick Clegg’s lot should aggressively pursue the Economist and convince it’s editors of their progressive economic ideas. If they get some traction, then the Libdems would enter the conciousness of the commentariat much faster. Endorsement from the Indy and the Guardian alone isn’t going to swing it for them.
An attack on all of us
post by ‘Don’t get mad‘.
How do you feel about gay and lesbian adoption? It’s probably OK, isn’t it? I mean, we’re all human, how much difference will gender make? But what if I told you that the research into the outcomes for children adopted by gay and lesbian couples showed that these adoptions were harmful – that there were ‘repeated studies’, an ‘increasing weight of academic research’ showing this harm and that studies showing positive outcomes for children were ‘thin on the ground’, ‘almost non-existent’ and ‘too methodically flawed to be valid’?
That changes things, doesn’t it? We don’t want to discriminate on the basis of sexuality, but when we’re talking about the lives of children in care, discrimination looks like the lesser of two evils. It’s not prejudice, it’s unfortunate common sense.
The Daily Mail tells this to its 1.6 million readers whenever it runs a story about adoption or homosexuality. But there’s a lot it doesn’t say.
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Evening Standard’s shocking new ad
This is an actual Evening Standard ad not a fake, via the Why, That’s Delighful blog, which adds:
But what I really want to know is whether the new editors of the Evening Standard, fresh from a campaign where they (quite rightly) apologised for being shit, are happy to sell newspapers in this way? Even though Ian Tomlinson, one of their own vendors, was fucking KILLED during this trouble?
Shocking, that someone even thought this ad would not be in such poor taste. If you want to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority, click here.
How churnalists become friends to the BNP
The BNP is a repugnant, racist organisation that is somehow able to present itself as a legitimate political party despite having a leader with a conviction for distributing Holocast-denying literature, a London Assembly member who spouts made-up crime stories and a track-record of misogyny that could keep Jim Davidson in material for the rest of his life.
The BNP is detestable, and it knows as much – which is why the party has been making exerted attempts to rebrand itself, dressing up racism as a culture war and claiming to stand up for the white man on the street against political correctness, immigration, and all those other half-lit monsters that loom from the national press.
There’s a commonly-made argument that the BNP thrive on being ostracised, that presenting them as bigots is playing into their hands. This is rubbish, of course.
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Dail Mail admits exec rewrote story to add sexism
The Daily Mail legal team made an extraordinary admission today. The newspaper was today forced to pay out £10,000 to three women because it alleged they rated their careers and figures more highly than having children. That alone is a cause for celebration after it paid out “substantial damages” last week for allegations against Tom Watson MP in an article by blogger Iain Dale.
What’s remarkable about this story is the Daily Mail’s own admission that a senior exec re-wrote the story to make it more sexist.
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A British MoveOn – 38 Degrees – launches today
I’ve hinted in the past that a British version of the progressive campaign group MoveOn.org was in the works. Well, they finally launch today. To explain briefly, MoveOn launched about ten years ago as a petition site and then became an email-based campaigning organisation, counting over 3 million people as its members in the US. It has had huge impact on politics there, and spawned a copycat in Australia called GetUp and a worldwide group called Avaaz.org (from whom Paul Hilder blogs occasionally on LC).
Anyway, the British version is called 38 degrees, not a name I’m particularly fond of, but apparently that’s the tipping-point angle at which an avalanche begins. Unsurprisingly, 38 degrees will launch with a campaign focused on electoral change.
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Defending Jo Swinson against the Telegraph’s misogyny
Yesterday I returned from my recent self-imposed hiatus from blogging (however temporarily) to write about the Daily Telegraph’s recent ‘exposé’ on Jo Swinson MP.
Very briefly, on Thursday, the Telegraph published a carefully worded article about cosmetics and dusters ‘appearing on’ receipts despite acknowledging that items on her receipts which had actually been claimed for tended to be marked by an asterisk. The cosmetics were not, they have no evidence to suggest that they might have been claimed for anyway, and Jo Swinson herself completely denies that she did.
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Hypocrisy
Mick Fealty at Slugger O’Toole today:
Technically, Iain has paid his dues. A court appearance by the Daily Mail in his behalf is enough to satisfy the law. There is no compunction for him to publish a mea culpa on his blog. But I have to say it is poor form for us bloggers to preach openness for the political classes when we are unwilling to admit when we actually get things wrong. At the very least it is ‘old world’ behaviour… Come on Iain, just get it out and over with?
As if by magic… Dale blames lefties again.
Iain Dale costs Mail “substantial damages” for allegations
In April leading blogger Iain Dale wrote an article titled ‘Smears, glowering henchmen-like the Nixon White House’ for the Mail on Sunday – alleging not only that Tom Watson MP was copied into the ’smeargate’ emails to Derek Draper, but that he “encouraged” them.
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You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civil cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
» Is this the end for the socialist left?
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