Qana heats up ceasefire diplomacy

Since 12th July, excluding Qana, almost 400 people have been killed in Lebanon. That’s more than a 20-a-day habit.

Then Qana, 60 in one place.

Before Qana, Blair saw no need for an immediate ceasefire.

After Qana, and suddenly…

What’s the threshold? Why is 400 spread over a couple of weeks and a wide area OK, but 60 huddled together not OK?

I guesss Bliar et al have some special morality calculator that gives them the vital info: input deaths over time, subtract public opinion, divide by racial bias, factor for kiddies, add air miles, account for special relationship and BINGO!

2 Israeli captives: morality level HIMMLER

20 Lebanese deaths/day: morality level JUDY GARLAND

60 Lebanese deaths; 50% ‘kiddies’ + huddle factor: morality level: BERLUSCONI

Young men who father children outside marriage may be compelled to put their names on the birth certificate under Government plans unveiled yesterday to reform the chaotic system for child support.
Those who refuse to pay, or build up huge arrears, could be “named and shamed”, as well as having their passports taken away, fitted with a electronic “tag” and subjected to a night-time and weekend curfew.
[…]
Announcing the effective scrapping of the much-criticised Child Support Agency, Mr Hutton admitted that it had built up a backlog of 300,000 cases and debts of more than £3 billion, but thousands of lone parents would not receive the money because there were “limited prospects of recovery”.

An overreaction to the ‘problem’ on a Middle Eastern scale, but this sort of talk is intended to dull the public sensibility to the point at which such measures seem the only ones that will be effective, and thus the Authoritarian Left will get their desire of absolute state control.

But it will not work.

—

BP reported a record replacement cost net profit of $6.1 billion (3.3 billion pounds) for the second quarter of its financial year, as high oil prices and strong refining margins more than made up for a drop in output.

The Register reports that the cost of passports will increase considerably yet again – this october – to £66(6) making it look increasingly likely that a stand alone pasport will be near the £93 mark by the ID card system is dumped upon the nation i.e. the government will crow that the ID card is in effect gratis. So where will the money go? Either to pump-prime the NIR system or for the closing down of UK borders that Reid seems hell bent on. You need a lot of money for watch towers and barbed wire around a whole island.

Either way it makes even more sense to renew your passport before NIR information auditing/stockpiling is a matter of course at the IPS.

I’ve just noticed the price rise is covered in the guardian too and they include a statement from NO2ID etc, hats off and may it continue.

Incidentally I have good word that travelling within the EU only UK immigration officials can actually be bothered to use machine readers, it would be nice to verify this.

There’s a lot to dislike about Chris Matthews and especially Pat Buchanan, but they have never been for the Iraq war and the neocons.

Video-QT

MATTHEWS:

We’ve killed 50,000 Iraqis in a war that was supposed to be a two-day wonder. When are we going to notice that the neocons don’t know what they’re talking about? They’re not looking at this country’s long term interest. They’re bound up in regional and global ideology and they have had no experience, I’ll say it again, in even a schoolyard fight. They don’t know what physical fighting is all about. They went to school and were intellectuals but they want our government to be their big brother. I don’t get it. I don’t know why we keep falling for it. And the President, you say, is he free of these guys or not?

BUCHANAN: Well, the President, he fell for it after 9/11 when they put that little pre-cooked meal in front of him, after they knocked down Afghanistan. And so they said, “Let’s do Iraq now.” And Wolfowitz and all the rest of them. But let me say this, Chris. I think the president realizes now that we went into Iraq to pursue weapons that did not exist, a country that did not attack us, did not threaten us, and now we have created a great base camp for terrorism in the Anbar province that did not exist. In response to Mr Shrum, you attack Iran, Hezbollah will retaliate against the 25,000 Americans in Lebanon. You will have massive hostage taking and killings. Are these people nuts? You’ve got to ask yourself. I certainly hope the president is not listening to them because I really question whether they’ve got America’s national interest at heart. They’re calling for wars against people that never attacked us. I don’t care how bad they are. There are wicked people all over this world but you don’t go after people unless they come after you. […]

http://www.crooksandliars.com/posts/2006/07/22/neocon-saturday/

BBQ staffers are not feeling the love:

The thing I find strange about all this is that often people who write blogs, or contribute to them, somehow think that they are involved in a private forum.

Don’t be stupid. No one thinks this. What they fear is someone from that festering nest of lies and nepotism looking at their blog. They fear it beceause they know that it is possible that BBQ will read the words and take the ideas from their blog, link to them ro print them out of context, and then blatantly misrepresent them in one of their unauthored, unnatributed pay for insertion PR pieces. There is no avenue of redress; BBQ is the face of power, and since everyone (almost everyone) blindly trusts it, it is more dangerous than FOX news since they have ‘back door access‘ to shape opinion in the UK. This is changing however.

If you and your blog are attacked by BBQ, you are the victim. Bloggers are ‘the little guy’. You are the guys putting advertisements that threaten the public on TV. You are the guys calling Bittorrent a tool for perverts and criminals. The fact that you cannot sense this or understand it perfectly, and pretend to be ‘just another voice’ speaks volumes about you and the problem. That is why people think its ‘spooky’ that BBQ is reading their blog, and lets not forget that you are in the pocket of spooks, which in and of itself is ‘spooky’.

It wasn’t the confidentiality issue that bugged me, but that anyone would think that we as programme makers don’t have as much right as everyone else to read what you’re all writing, especially if you are writing about us. So, what do you think? Stick it on your blog and I’ll respond.

Once again, we are not journalists. We understand from the beginning that freedom of speech and freedom of the press is everyone’s right, and not just the right of journalists in the pay of the state. We feel the same level of pain no matter who is killed in a conflict; we don’t reserver our best words feelings and airtime just for people in our profession.

You go on TV every night and with foreknowledge, lie, spin and distort, knowing full well that you are doing so. ({insert Pre-Emption} this is the part where they say, “you pointed to a set of BBQ comments telling us of our error, see? we are unbiased!”. This is the logic of a villain. You deliberately lie, and then say sorry we were wrong, and think thats absolves you.) This is what ‘buggs’ us. You are unnacountable, and even when you are pulled up on your shenanigans, you are utterly unrepentant.

It has to be said that we find it astonishing that you can use Technorati to find all the blog posts about you ‘in seconds’, but you cannot use it or Google to find out the truth about any subject. Actually, we suspect that you can do this, but that when you do, you deliberately distort what you find anyway.

So spare us your ‘we have feelings too’ whining about porr wittle jewemy ‘slumped over his computer’; if you are not doing somehting right, you deserve to be roasted, and that is what you are getting, because you are habitually and deliberately perveyors of lies, distortion and spin, and to add insult to injury, everyone in the UK is forced to pay for the ‘service’.

Thankfully we have Technorati, Digg and the blogosphere in general to act as a vaccination to your lie virii. You can never again lie without being instantly caught, countered and castigated, and the only thing you can do about it is slump in front of your computers. It is going to get worse for you. As more people become computer literate (there is a person in your comments that doesn’t know what a blog is. An increasingly rare creature surely), your ability to spread lies will be curtailed to the point where you will either give up the lie game entirely or start to report only the facts, as you are meant to, but often actually fail to do.

The best part of this is that we are now seeing the end of the role of Editors. We do not need editors. We also don’t need moderators censoring out comments that go against the BBQ line. We have our own massively powerful network of free writers in a self correcting environment where the truth always comes out quickly and efficiently; all you have to do is look. Compared to the very small numbers of people who read the comments on your site this is a force you cannot possibly compete with or overcome. Speaking of the comments, this one hit the nail right on the head:

I think the amount of time you spend thinking about yourselves is totally grotesque and seriously unhealthy for you and for us. […]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/

Amen to that. The amount of stories decrying the lack or attacks on freedom of the press is amazing. Whenever ‘ordinary people’ are killed in a conflict, one tone, (similar to the one used when recounting the rainfall for the day) is taken, but when a journalist is killed, all of a sudden, the level of tragedty is 1000 times greater. It’s sickening, but now tolerable because you are on the wane, you know it, we know it, and we will all benefit from your permanent elimination.

The reporting we are seeing from the BBC and the other broadcasters is racist; there is no other word to describe it. The journalists’ working assumption is that Israeli lives are more precious, more valuable than Lebanese lives. A few dead Israelis justify massive retaliation; many Lebanese dead barely merit a mention. The subtext seems to be that all the Lebanese, even the tiny bleeding children I see on Arab TV, are terrorists. It is just the way Arabs are.

That is why the capture of two Israeli soldiers is more newsworthy to our broadcasters than the dozens of Lebanese civilians dying from the Israeli bombing runs that have followed. The eight Israelis killed on Sunday are worth far more than the 130-plus Lebanese lives taken so far and the hundreds more we can expect to die in the coming days.

There is no excuse for this asymmetry of coverage. BBC reporters are in Lebanon just as they are in Israel. They can find spokespeople in Lebanon just as easily as they can find them in Israel. They can show the far vaster scale of devastation in Beirut as easily as the wreckage in Haifa. They can speak to the Lebanese casualties just as easily as they can to those in Israel.

But they don’t – and as a fellow journalist I have to ask myself why.

My previous criticisms of British reporters over their distorted coverage of Israel’s military assaults in Gaza a few weeks back appear to have struck a raw nerve. Certainly they provoked a series of e-mails – some defensive, others angry – from a few of the reporters I named. All tried to defend their own coverage, unable to accept my criticisms because they are sure that they personally do not take sides. They are not “campaigning” journalists after all, they are “professionals” doing a job.

But the problem is not with them, it is with the job they have to do – and the nature of the professionalism they so prize. I am sure the BBC’s Wyre Davies cares as much about Lebanese deaths as he does about Israeli ones. But he also knows his career at the BBC demands that he not ask his bosses questions when told to give valuable minutes of air time to an Israeli police spokesman who offers us only platitudes.

Similarly, we see James Reynolds use his broadcast from Haifa at noon to show emotive footage of him and his colleagues running for shelter as Israeli air raid sirens go off, only to tell us that in fact no rockets landed in Haifa. That nonevent was shown by the BBC every hour on the hour all afternoon and evening. Was it more significant than the images of death we never saw taking place just over the border? These images from Lebanon exist, because the Arab channels spent all day showing them.

Matthew Price knows too that in the BBC’s view it is his job as he stands in Haifa, after we have repeatedly heard Israeli spokespeople giving their version of events, to repeat their message, dropping even the quotes marks as he passionately tells us how tough Israel must now be, how it must “retaliate” to protect its citizens, how it must “punish” Hezbollah This is not journalism; it’s reporting as a propaganda arm of a foreign power.

Can we imagine Ben Brown doing the same from Beirut, standing in front of the BBC cameras telling us how Hezbollah has no choice faced with Israel’s military onslaught but to start hitting Haifa harder, blowing up its oil refineries and targeting civilian infrastructure to “pressure” Israel to negotiate?

Would the BBC bother to show prerecorded footage of Brown fleeing for his safety in Beirut in what later turned out to be a false alarm? Of course not. Doubtless Brown and his colleagues are forced to take cover on a regular basis for fear of being hurt by Israeli air strikes, but his fear – or more precisely, the fear of the Lebanese he stands alongside – is not part of the story for the BBC. Only Israeli fears are newsworthy.

These reporters are working in a framework of news priorities laid down by faceless news executives far away from the frontline who understand only too well the institutional pressures on the BBC – and the institutional biases that are the result.

They know that the Israel lobby is too powerful and well resourced to take on without suffering flak; that the charge of anti-Semitism might be terminally damaging to the BBC’s reputation; that the BBC is expected broadly to reflect the positions of the British governmment if it wants an easy ride with its regulators; that to remain credible it should not stray too far from the line of its mainly American rivals, who have their own more intense domestic pressures to side with Israel.

This distortion of news priorities has real costs that can be measured in lives – in the days and weeks to come, hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives in both Israel and Lebanon. As long as Israel is portrayed by our major broadcasters as the one under attack, its deaths alone as significant, then the slide to a regional war – a war of choice being waged by the Israeli government and army – is likely to become inevitable.

So to Jeremy Bowen, James Reynolds, Ben Brown, Wyre Davies, Matthew Price, and all the other BBC journalists reporting from the frontline of the Middle East, and the faceless news executives who sent them there, I say: you may be nice people with the best of intentions, but shame on you.

[…]

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=9320

The fact of the matter is we don’t need BBC, FOX or anyone else to tell us that the artic is cold. As soon as you understand this, then you won’t care about wether or not the BBC is spinning ID cards on the behalf of contractors, uncritically spreading lies about ‘the middle east’ or any other despicable shenanigans that they are getting up to.

I wish Aljazeera had english subtitles….then we could actually get some perspective.

Britons face 11 ID checks a year

Passports are commonly used to prove identity

UK adults are asked to prove their identity (ID) 11 times on average each year, research from Manchester Business School has found. Laws meant to combat money-laundering and terrorism mean Britons are increasingly being asked to produce ID.

Buying an airline ticket, leasing a property, opening a savings account and registering with a doctor require ID.

And according to the research, by 2010 Britons will be asked to produce ID an average of 17 times a year.

Consumer burden

Most [consumers] are frustrated to be asked to produce documents such as passports and driving licences, often a number of times by different departments of the same business Rob Laurence, GB Group

Technology firm GB Group, which commissioned Manchester Business School to undertake the research, said UK firms and government agencies were making up to half a billion identity checks on customers each year.

This could place a great burden on individual consumers who had to produce passports or driving licences to prove who they were, the group said.

For example, those moving house may have their identity checked more than five times throughout the process by different organisations such as estate agents, solicitors, financial advisers, lenders and the Land Registry.

“Most [consumers] are frustrated to be asked to produce documents such as passports and driving licences, often a number of times by different departments of the same business,” Rob Laurence, GB Group spokesman, said. […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5193986.stm 

A vigilant BLOGDIAL lurker points us to this flagrant piece of PR being hosted free of charge at the BBQ (free of charge apart from the fistful of fivers it took to get it published.)

This story has no author. That is the most telling thing about it. It is a pure regurgitation of a press release from GB Group, who used the cover of Manchester Business School to produce this thinly veiled call for an ID Card to ‘make peoples lives easier’. You will note that there is no link to N02ID in the ‘related links’ sidebar.

The BBC should always be forced to divulge how these ‘stories’ or ‘pieces’ have come to be published in a ‘story audit trail’ so that we can see who the biased writers are, and identify the PR companies that have priveledged access to the BBC.

In fact, if they won’t do it, we can do it ourselvs in a Web 2.0 mashup style, where people can report PR injected BBC URLS in a database, so that we can correlate the authors, businesses and PR firms who are squirting stories into BBQ. Hmmm, “Will someone do it” is the question we ask aloud.

Egyptian newspaper Al-Masri al-Yawm has quoted Mamduh Ismail as saying he met al-Muhajir, also known as Sharif Hazaa, or Abu Ayub al-Masri, in Tura prison in Cairo, where he has been held for seven years.

“Sharif Hazaa [al-Muhajir] is in Tura prison, and I met him two days ago while I was visiting some of my clients,” Ismail, a lawyer known for defending Islamist groups, told the newspaper.

Al-Muhajir is on the “most wanted” list issued by the Iraqi government last week. The US military in Iraq has put a $5million price on his head.

The US army media centre in Iraq said: “We cannot comment on the news that … al-Masri is in an Egyptian prison and not in Iraq, we have to clarify that from the Egyptian government.”

The US military had announced after the death of al-Zarqawi that al-Masri had been appointed the leader of al-Qaeda’s organisation in Iraq.

The military said al-Masri was born and brought up in Egypt. He then went to Afghanistan, where he trained in bomb-making before going to Iraq in 2002. […]

http://english.aljazeera.net/

They obviously have a list of ‘bad guy assets’ and didn’t check to see if this name was on the action list.

Pathetic lapse!

Who is the aggressor?

What aggressive, militarist regime recently held war maneuvers in the Pacific and tested intercontinental missiles that could carry nuclear warheads for 4,800 miles?

The wrong answer to this question is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The right answer is the United States.

On June 14 [2006], the U.S. Air Force held what it called “a quality control test” for its fleet of 500 Minuteman III missiles. One missile traveled 4,800 miles towards the central Pacific, and three test warheads landed near the Marshall Islands. According to the Air Force, that was where they were supposed to land. The Pentagon is supposed to have almost 10,000 nuclear warheads available.

[…]

One Star!

AND

For the first time, a Japanese destroyer will participate in a U.S. anti-ballistic missile test off Kauai’s Barking Sands facility today.

The Navy said the Japanese guided-missile destroyer Kirishima will be stationed off the Pacific Missile Range Facility, “performing long-range surveillance and tracking.”

Today, the San Diego-based cruiser USS Shiloh will fire a Standard Missile 3 and try to intercept a drone missile midcourse in its flight northeast of Kauai fired from the facility.

[…]

Two Stars!

–

Ha! yeah I should have dugg it too!

Technorati Tags: missile test, korea, united states

Take a look at the long promo for this film:

http://www.freedomtofascism.com/index.html

Control orders are part of the anti-terrorism effort

The UK faces an emerging constitutional crisis after a judge quashed a key plank of the government’s anti-terror laws, a leading Labour MP has said. John Denham, chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, said judges were engaged in a battle with the elected Parliament.

It comes after the High Court said control orders, used to restrain terror suspects, broke human rights laws.

Ministers will challenge the ruling in the Court of Appeal next week.[…]

Home Office Minister Tony McNulty said the government would try to overturn the ruling in the Court of Appeal.

“We do really seriously feel that the interest of public safety far outweighs the rights of particular individuals who are incredibly dangerous but there’s not that evidential base there.” […]

We watched Sin City recently, and I am reminded of something from that film, a quote from ‘Senator Raorke’: Power comes from lying. Lying big, and gettin’ the whole damn world to play along with you. Once you got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain’t true, you’ve got ’em by the balls.

At least some of our judges are doing what they can.
Someone clever said:
‘Don’t concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all the heavenly glory!’

Sub Sub anyone?

A woman who refused to pay her council tax in protest at the condition of her neighbourhood has been jailed. Josephine Rooney, 69, who lives in Hartington Street, Derby, has the £800 to pay, but said the city council has failed to clean up her area.

The council has denied Miss Rooney’s claims, saying measures were already in place to improve her district.

Rooney, who described herself as a “conscientious objector”, was jailed for three months by Derby magistrates. […]

A 69-year-old Derby woman facing jail after refusing to pay her council tax has won a national award for looking after her community.

Josephine Rooney owes Derby City Council nearly £800 and refuses to pay because, in her view, the council has failed in its duty of care to her.

Miss Rooney has now won a Taking a Stand award from the Government’s Respect campaign. […]

“I planned this nearly two years ago when I read about that pensioner down in the West Country, and I wanted to find a way of committing civil disobedience – in the way conscientious objectors do so in South American dictatorships and other parts of the world.

“So, that’s what I really am, a conscientious objector,” she said.

[…]

What a beautiful person. And now she is suffering at the hands of those employed to SERVE her, because THEY have failed in their duties.

If only everyone else on her street had stood with her…

Know what I mean?

How Murder Inc does business in Baghdad

Oliver Balch reports on the US government’s plan to make downtown Baghdad a profitable place

Friday June 23, 2006

The camera zooms in on a derelict mosque. Originally earmarked for a community school, Murder Inc has chosen to pocket the oil funds instead. “Combat and corruption, it will conquer Baghdad,” reads the tagline.

This is an advert which will appear on millions of Corporate US television screens over the coming weeks, marking the start of a nationwide quango-led drive to aid the ‘country of corruption’.

Over 200 private companies and leading governmental associations have put their name to the “pact for inscrutability in corruption”.

Signatories, including multinationals such as Haliburton and Prime Projects International, pledge to adopt a “zero tolerance” approach to bribe refusing and honest practices.

Included on the list of commitments are generous grants for corporate hospitality, gift giving and other areas where corruption is life.

Most importantly, the participating companies agree to disclose their financial contributions to political parties. The move comes less than two years after a “cash for votes” scam stocked up President Bush’s ruling Republican Party.

The president of covert investors the Carlyle Group, admits the pact is just a “first step” in consolidating Baghdad’s endemic problems.

[…]

Corruption has economic impacts beyond the obvious financial costs of bribe paying and other illicit activities, a spokesperson maintained. Businesses operating in corrupt environments unfortunately face higher interest and insurance rates, greater risk to corporate reputation and an increased probability of employee sabotage.

“There are a lot of companies with codes of ethics, but we won’t have any businesses with anti-corruption procedures here” he says.

On the “to-do” list for the pact’s signatories are exploiting employees and suppliers, establishing internal laundering mechanisms and ultimately submitting themselves to excessive ‘incentives’.

Such processes take time, warns a board member who wished not to be identified. Under the terms of the low profile scheme, companies have until 2008 to claw back oil funds they have needlessly used for bribery. The initiative was launched in January 2004.

“Still, it is much easier for business people to pocket change than for politicians,” he argued.

The lack of political momentum in Baghdad to counter corruption remains all too clear. With national elections looming every other month, none of the politicians implicated in last year’s “cash for votes” scandal have so far been interested. In fact, most are hoping for backhanders.

As such, the organisers of Baghdad’s corruption pact are looking outside the interim Iraqi government to galvanise companies in the battle for subsidy. Consumers, they argue, are ultimately the ones to pay for corporate behaviour.

“People as a whole are thick and deserving of this situation,” argues a director of a Bahrain-based oil firm.

“If consumers are informed that they may be a factor in stamping out corruption, and they will act.”

To give them a hedge, companies will be able to anonymise themselves through a “clean company”. The firm will act as a corruption portal, with news and articles on any incident of subsidy involving a company operating in Iraq.

[…]

“Civil society wasn’t aware of how much power it had until it started acting collectively,” observes Oded Gralew, founder of the World Social Forum and now chairman of Instituto Ethos.

He is optimistic that public pressure on corruption can eventually influence public policy. One major step towards combating corruption, he argues, would be to make it a statutory requirement for political parties to reveal the names of their corporate donors.

No such measure is in the immediate offing. For the meantime, therefore, the onus is on the public to shine the light on Murder Inc and associates.

Thank You!
David and I would like to thank everyone for the huge outpouring of support we have received these last few days. We’re working very hard to bring the new site online and start the very important work of this party.
We look forward to working with you. – Joshua Cowles

The Pirate Party of the United States is this country’s version of the Piratpartiet, a Swedish political party that wants to “fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected.” As a fraternal party, the PPUS shares similar goals while working within the political context of U.S. to achieve them.

For far too long, Big Media copyright cartels like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have held back technological progress and individual freedom. They have done so through cutthroat litigation against ordinary Americans, interfering with peer-to-peer networks by flooding them with bogus files, and corrupting the political system with unscrupulous lobbying and political donations.

Similarly, the pharmaceutical firms of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America have, through the power of their medicine patents, denied lifesaving medical treatment to the world’s poorest people suffering on a horrific scale just to raise their profit margins. Doctors and scientists are beholden to Big Pharma’s grant money, extorted through patents, to devote research efforts on what makes the most money, not always on what saves the most lives or reduces suffering. The New England Journal of Medicine can no longer find unbiased reviewers of medical studies because of Big Pharma’s long patent-granted reach.

Preceding and following the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government has had a longstanding antipathy towards protecting the privacy of ordinary Americans when it conflicts with their interests in state control. The NSA’s phone-tapping, the FBI’s Carnivore email spying program, and Congress’s two so-called “PATRIOT Acts” are symptoms of a rampant disregard in law enforcement and the legislative branch for the private lives of U.S. citizens.

No matter what excuses or rationalizations Big Businesses and Big Government offer, it all comes down to cold, hard corporate greed and state control at the expense of your freedom and well-being. Most Americans have wished that one of the major parties would have the courage to stand up to these undemocratic conglomerates and policies and win back control of the cultural, scientific, and personal spheres for artists, critics, scientists, patients, and citizens from all walks of life. Both the Republicans and Democrats have instead, as a whole, enthusiastically rolled over for Big Media’s and Big Pharma’s campaign dollars.

While fine groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, and Doctors Without Borders have been fighting these battles for a long time with us, no political party in United States has made the reform of intellectual property and privacy laws their top priority.

Until now.

http://pirate-party.us/

Indeed, Cameron and the Tories should be deeply truly ashamed. This is the time to be fighting for what you believe in, not in what you don’t believe in and making the suffering of the UK immeasurably worse in the process.

What is ironic is that Labour already know they are in massive trouble, an article today in the Guardian entitled ‘Brown aide: we will lose next election’ says it all, and while this is very much Gordon Brown trying to speed up his smooth transition and rally his supporters, it’s also actually true:

“At a fringe meeting during a weekend conference organised by Compass, a leftwing pressure group, Mr Wills claimed that at the last election “every single Labour MP on the doorstep reported profound disillusionment and disengagement. We scraped through. If 14,000 Labour voters had voted Tory in May 2005, we would have been in a hung parliament. That is all it took – that is how narrow it was” ^Guardian

[…]

http://jultra.blogspot.com

I was just about to write about this article. These lines grabbed my attention:

He continued: ” We have got good messages and we are delivering on public services so why is it they don’t listen any more? It is because they don’t trust us. Iraq is an important part of that. The presidential style of the prime minister – which brought us great dividends in the early years and now we are seeing the mirror image of that – is also part of it.”

He added: “Unless we can get people to start listening to us, unless they are prepared to hear the messages we are putting across, we are going to lose next time. There is no question about it.” […]

This is another example of the completely delusional mindset insde fascist labour.

You freakish upside down circus clown; it is not the people who have to listen to these ‘good messages’, it is YOU, neu labour imbeciles, who have to listen to the demands of the electorate, and then OBEY. YOU are the servants; it is for YOU to take heed and do as you we bid you do.

Nothing less than a complete undoing of all the bad legislaton that has been passed, the dismantling of the bogus new adminstrations that have been formed will do. Failing this, it is clear that they (and anyone even tangentially associated with them) should NEVER be trusted again, for ANY reason, and we must (if we are thinking along these lines for the sake of argument) get someone in who will pull everything back to where it should be, removing all the anti-democratic, illiberal shit that bliar and co have spread over this land.

Sadly, for them, there is no way that they can undo the mass murder that they were directly responsible for. The best they can do is humble themselvs before the world, turn over Bliar and his murderous cabinet to Den Hague on war crimes charges as a sacrifice to cleanse the responsibilty of Great Britain and its people for the ongoing atrocities that are being committed in this great nations name.

I found that piece in the Guardian breathtaking in its paralell universe outlook; these people really do inhabit a fantasy world totaly disconected from the real world and real people. They must only associate with their own type, and speak to members of the public only when they are conducting polls, otherwise, how is it possible that they can misunderstand the public mood so profoundly?

Pensioner in anti-US protest to be prosecuted

By Ian Herbert and Nigel MorrisPublished: 20 June 2006

The Government faces a test of its new anti-terror legislation after deciding to proceed with charges against a pensioner arrested while protesting at an American communications base.Seven weeks after becoming one of the first individuals arrested under a little-noticed clause in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, Helen John, 68, of Keighley, west Yorkshire, was charged yesterday with criminal trespass and bailed to appear next week before magistrates in Harrogate, north Yorkshire.Mrs John and a fellow peace campaigner, Sylvia Boyes, 62, were arrested on 2 April while crossing the sentry line at Menwith Hill, the US communications base in the Yorkshire Dales.

Mrs John, who could be jailed for up to 12 months if the case goes to court, said: “I want this case to be heard in a court of law, but that is probably the last place the Government wants it go.”

Mrs Boyes, who was unable to attend a police station yesterday, expects to be charged next week. […]

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article1090871.ece

(CNN) — A man using a fake identification card was able to enter the Homeland Security Department headquarters in Washington, he said, even though the United States government considers the type of Mexican-issued card he used invalid.

Retired New York City policeman Bruce DeCell, who had arranged to meet with DHS officials last week to lobby for document security, told CNN he purposely used a forged version of identification that Mexican consulates in the United States issue to their nationals living here illegally.

Undocumented Mexicans can use the cards at banks and other institutions that accept them. The cards are not valid for entry into federal government buildings.

DeCell is a board member of a group called “9/11 Families for a Secure America,” which he formed with others after losing his son-in-law in the 2001 terrorist attacks.

I wrote about these morons previously, but can’t find the link.

They are the imbeciles that believe biometric ID for all in the use will help ‘prevent another 911’. Why are they morons? Firstly, they are proposing something that will not prevent further attacks. Secondly, they are driven by pure pain, and not reason, and this does not give them the right to further ruin america and make everyone in it suffer just because they are suffering. It is very sad that they have lost loved ones, and the world would be a better place had it not happened, but their grief does not give them carte blanche to flush americans and their liberties down the toilet.

If anything what they should be calling for is an immediate cessation of all us imperialist running dog activities in the middle east. That is the ONLY way you can GUARANTEE that america will never be attacked again.

His group advocates stricter controls against illegal immigrants and wants to ban use of the “matricula consular” cards.

This is just total nonsense. Mexcans have nothing to do with americas flying carpet troubles…or maybe these people belive that Mexico ‘had something to do with 911’. You never know, these Fox watchers are amongst the most stupid creatures in the known universe.

“The card is an unsecure document that could facilitate terrorist money and travel,” he said.

I call bullshit. No card can predict your intent. No card can be ‘secure’. But you know this.

DeCell said a friend in California bought him the fake Mexican card for $20.

Cheaper than UKNIRID ay?!

“I sent him a passport-size photo and the spelling of my name, and he had the card made for me on the street,” he said.

Days before his meeting with DHS officials, DeCell was asked to furnish his name, Social Security number and birth date, so they could be compared by security personnel to a valid form of picture identification. The building security accepted his matricula card, even though it listed a false date of birth, he said.

Trained people are better at judging who is a threat and who is not than any computer. What these fools want is for machines to make all the judgements for us. This move is totally against human culture and history, and is actually dangerous. As we all know, bombers use legit ID to move around. When I say ‘all’ obviously I dont mean ‘all’.

He was allowed entry into the building after walking through a metal detector, according to a statement posted on his group’s Web site.

He was not a threat. Even if he was a terrrst with a fake ID (of the kind that did NOT do Madrid or ‘911’), on this occasion the system would have worked because they could see that he was ‘clean’. This proves that ID cards are ‘security theatre’ and are not needed to make government buildings or planes or anywhere safe. Had he carried REALID and been a REALTERRORIST then there would have been an asplosion.

“It’s obscene in a post-9/11 world that they did not match my name against the fake [date of birth],” DeCell fumed. “They’re spending a lot of money [on security] for nothing.”

The only obcenity here is that this group of grieving murderers of the american dream continue to spew their illogic and lies to a brainless press that doesn’t have the wit or nerve (out of misplaced sympathy) to challenge them and thier nonsense. The obcenity is that they are pushing for the ruin of america for no good reason instead of calling for the measures that will solve the real problem once and for all. They are actually doing the work of those who want to eliminate america and american style freedom from the face of the world.

That is the very definition of ‘obscene’.

Jarrod Agen, a Homeland Security spokesman, told CNN, “In response to this incident, we are following up on the allegations, and we seek to ensure that an incident like this does not occur again.

“At no time was there a threat to the DHS building or its personnel,” he said.

DeCell said he has used the card for years in airports and other sensitive locations, but was still astonished that he was able to use it to enter the headquarters of Homeland Security, the federal agency charged with determining secure IDs.

“It’s very frustrating,” he told CNN. “I’m an unpaid citizen who had a loss on 9/11, and they’re not doing what they need to do to prevent another 9/11. It’s very discouraging for me. […]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/06/12/dhs.fakeid/index.html

You are a sad fool.