That Olbermann slap-down of McCain

From last week, but…

random thoughts

[thought]

If you really want to convince people that the Tories haven’t changed a bit, and that they remain a thoroughly hateful bunch of bastards. Simply introduce them to the Tory blogosphere.

[/thought]

To be European

I have started to wonder if we’d be better off outside of Europe, and to be honest, whether Europe would be better off without us.

Our rightwing press, as seen here, will continue to poison the rank and file against the European project - and with progressives utterly unable to construct an attractive pro-European argument, it’s all looking rather doomed. The Brits will continue indefinitely to crow about every federalist proposal and pull in the opposite direction, in effect holding the rest of Europe back.

Yeah, I know many other countries have their growing anti-EU movements, but it’s us that exported Euroscepticism, and like a virus it has spread outwards, eating away at the idea of a united (small ‘u’) Europe.

So maybe everyone would be better served by us just slipping away in the night? Maybe Europe would actually begin to function if we just buggered off? And finally, if we did leave the EU, maybe the amount of EU-related absolute fucking bullshit (in the media) would decline? But then, maybe not.

Police State. Seriously

*This* is why liberals fight against the government’s illiberalism. Full stop.

via.

This blog has one simple agenda. Liberty. Everything else is supplementary.

Obama Biden ‘08

This Week in US Politics ::

Huffington Post - Obama choo-choo-chooses the Senator from Delaware as his running mate. Joe Biden, a foreign-policy heavyweight (he’s chair of the mighty Senate Foreign Relations Committee), should boost the ticket in preparation for a long and dirty fight with McCain.

Politico - Hillary Stiffed! Apparently, the New York senator was never even vetted by Obama. You have to wonder what he could hope to find out that he doesn’t already know, but this might further spice-up the convention, where rumours of a coup still hang in the air.

Daily Kos - If you hadn’t heard, this week McCain dropped the mother of all clangers when he couldn’t answer the question: “how many houses do you own?” With America suffering economically, the GOP wingnuts are doing monkey-flips trying to spin this one.

the blue voice - After consistently ruling out any possibility of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the Bush administration adopts a timetable for withdrawal.

The rest of today’s blog review is up at LC.

Beware, this November

Brad Friedman has an excellent article over at CiF, outlining the extent that the Republicans will go to disenfranchise votes unlikely to vote for them.

Of course we saw exactly this in 2000 and 2004 - including genuine voter fraud - so this really shouldn’t surprise us.

Recommended.

*sighs*

This innocuous, and some might say genius (I wouldn’t), video response - to a time-wasting Clarkson for PM petition - has caused plenty of faux-outrage from the rightwing blogosphere. Get a life you desperate twats.

Me elsewhere

I have just posted a bumper Netcast over at LC. Highlights include a couple of posts from OurKingdom ::

OurKingdom - Anthony Barnett wittily unravels some vacuous Newspeak from minister Liam Byrne, who delicately writes with one foot in the Brown camp, and the other in Miliband’s.

OurKingdom - Another cracking piece from OK, this time from Geoffrey Bindman, who warns those looking to define post-Brown Labour, about the vacuity of big strategies. Bindman takes one single issue, Legal Aid, and constructs a policy concept that would improve the lives of the poor and middle class, and foster a more equal society. It’s an intelligent step towards putting some purpose back into Labour. Highly recommended.

More.

Are things really this bad at No. 10?

That they can’t even launch a blog without being taken for £100k, being sold a rehashed open-source template, breaking the terms of its creator, and then getting caught out by pesky Tory bloggers.

For fucks sake!

More insight on Russia’s aggression in Georgia

A comment on Buchanan’s piece in the conservative site, Human Events ::

Buchanan is right (as usual).

I am a Russian linguist (or should I say ‘linguist of Russian’, being of British ancestry) and a student of Georgian. I know many on both sides of the conflict and read a wide variety of news sources. The fighting started on AUGUST SEVENTH, you can verify this EASILY by reading world media or at this point just google news searching by date. It began with a vicious Georgian encirclement of Tskhinvali with tanks and heavy air raids. This was disproportionate force against a small local militia (supported, nonetheless by the MAJORITY ethnic group). Russia invaded with tanks the next day, welcomed by the MAJORITY ethnic group.

The bombing of Gori and Poti and of airbases OUTSIDE OF Tbilisi were all aimed at military targets. Some missed and a number of civilians were killed. However deplorable this is, about 100 Georgian civilians is probably 10 times (Russia claims 20 times) fewer than Ossetian civilian casualties, about 22 times fewer than Serb civilian casualties to NATO bombing in 1999, and God only knows how many times fewer than civilian casualties of US armed forces (ahem, ‘coalition forces’) in Iraq.

Any slamming of Russia being an aggressor by those of you who support the far less justifiable acts of the USA in Iraq is laughable. The whole world is laughing, in fact…or crying, maybe.

Also, the US policy is hypocritical insofar as it lied about Serb ‘genocide’ while secretly funding and supplying the KLA in Albania to launch a virtual war on serbia, force it to sign a document agreeing to an occupation force in part of its country, and then, against all previous agreements, support its secession. Apparently, this is only alright when it is a NATO client state. This only supports the Russian view that NATO is not a defensive, but rather an AGGRESSIVE alliance, aimed only to create/support EU/US client states!!!!

Lastly, Georgia is not a democracy, not that that matters to most of you except for propagandistic purposes (since you oppose democracy in USA but support overthrowing people because they are ‘dictators’ if the president has an R next to his name). Have you heard of television company Imedi? It showed pictures of Georgian police brutally suppressing an opposition rally in late November. Saakashvili immediately sent riot police thugs without a warrant or anything to ransack the studio and destroy it. You can see youtube video of this, some translated into English. The director of the studio even ran up when the police arrived and took over the microphone to explain what was happening before the police turned off the camera. Right after this, Saakashvili declared martial law, then called a snap election, when only STATE media were operational. All the same, oppositionist exit polls showed a 20-something point discrepancy between the official results and their data, less than the discrepancy between US funded NGO exit polls and Shevardnadze’s data in 2003.

Stop fooling yourselves! America doesn’t want ‘democracies’, it wants client states. Perhaps Russia wants the same, but it is not but a fraction as capable of establishing this.

Some of you really want war, you love war, you don’t want peace. You don’t know about world politics, you just watch one channel and look at two or three websites over and over. You don’t know foreign languages, you don’t read or trust any world press. You are ready for any reason someone can give you to waive the flag and go fight and call everyone with a brain a traitor or a liberal. Buchanan is more conservative than most all of you, all he is spouting in foreign policy is Catholic just war doctrine! Is that too liberal for you?

No direct link, but the comment was by Thomas, Bergen, NORWAY@ Aug 15, 2008 @ 01:07 PM

Obviously it was derided by the mob…

Recommended reading: Re-thinking Obama (pt1): Why Democrats matter

Sunny over at LC ::

This is why I said earlier that the Republican Party is scum. They had a president who sucked up to Christian fundamentalists, who was financially reckless and ran a foreign policy so bad his only supporters now are nutjobs like Melanie Phillips and her counterparts in the USA (Mark Steyn, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Bill O Reilly etc).

My thoughts can be found in the comments.

Airports crippled. Again

From The Guardian ::

Baggage handlers and check-in staff at Gatwick and Stansted will stage 24-hour strikes on bank holiday Monday on August 25, and August 29, after rejecting a 3% pay rise offer.

Most people, with the economy the way it is, would be glad of a 3% increase in their pay. Luckily, Mrs. tyger travels back to the UK on the 24th.

The Obama fightback

Rightwing sense

How would we have reacted if Moscow had brought Western Europe into the Warsaw Pact, established bases in Mexico and Panama, put missile defense radars and rockets in Cuba, and joined with China to build pipelines to transfer Mexican and Venezuelan oil to Pacific ports for shipment to Asia? And cut us out? If there were Russian and Chinese advisers training Latin American armies, the way we are in the former Soviet republics, how would we react? Would we look with bemusement on such Russian behavior?

Pat Buchanan’s piece over at the US conservative site, Human Events, is worthy of your time. The comments, from the rabid “nuke now” readership, are much more scary…

Fox attacks on Obama

via. LC