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Archive for the ‘US politics’ Category

This is a video featuring Google’s chief giving away ice cream to snoop on children which was shown on a giant screen in Times Square yesterday by a privacy group hounding Google – brill.

The snippet was displayed as an advertisement in Times Square and was from a video clip posted online at insidegoogle.com, a website run by Watchdog.

On the fifth anniversary of the destruction of Nawleans by hurricane Katrina last night we saw the first two parts of Spike Lee’s documentary on the city of New Orleans and its citizens and the  destruction in the wake of Katrina – the second two parts are being shown on BBC4 Wednesday at 11am.  I am sure you can still catch the first two parts on BBC iPlayer.

I recommend this film to everyone, no matter from which side of the political divide you come from, as this disaster was sadly caused by politics as much as by the  weather conditions.

What really pissed people off is that Canadian Mounties and other humanitarian forces from all over the world showed up before the federal government!

I got an email a few days ago from Tony in California saying that he was surprised that I had not posted on this blog anything about the UK government doing a deal with Libya on a prisoner transfer programme which would pave the way for BP to deep drill in Libyan waters.

I responded that the Scottish government had released Megrahi on compassionate grounds and that, in this instance, I did not believe in any conspiracy theories.

Well, well well… it now transpires the US was up to their necks in intrigue and stated that they would prefer a release on compassionate grounds rather than under a prisoner release scheme.

Now that the Senate Congressional committee are demanding all the papers from the Scottish government but the Scots can’t release more papers because the US government has put a block on them – please read further Tony…

Sunday Times 25/07/2010 (protected by a pay wall) but you can read it here:

Read the rest of this entry »

The former head of MI5′s evidence to the Chilcot panel is a savage indictment of the Blair administration and its advisers

A Twitter posting on Sunday from Sarah Palin, in which she claimed common ground with Shakespeare, started the blogosphere’s week in rollicking fashion.

Palin tweeted that "peaceful Muslims" should "refudiate" the New York mosque being built near Ground Zero. This prompted plenty of retweets at her expense – "refudiate," of course, is not a word.

After deleting the offending tweet, Palin replaced it with another, calling on "peaceful New Yorkers" to "refute the Ground Zero mosque plan" – although the word she was apparently looking for was "repudiate."

Then came the kicker: To quell the ribbing she was receiving on Twitter, Palin posted another tweet: " ‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!"

This spawned plenty of scorn Monday in liberal blogs, as well as a new meme on Twitter, #ShakesPalin, in which participants revamped classic Shakespeare quotes, Palin-style. Perhaps the best came from the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez (a.k.a. @Normative): "To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous liberals, or to quit halfterm, and by opposing, rake in speaking fees."

Tip hat to a beauty, singer, actress and a politician at the forefront of the civil rights movement

On the 20 year anniversary of his masterpiece "Roger & Me" Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story comes home to the issue he’s been examining throughout his career: the disastrous impact of corporate dominance on the everyday lives of Americans. But this time the culprit is much bigger than GM, and the crime scene is far wider than Flint, Michigan.

Obama is an amazing communicator but he had a tough job here and even he couldn’t get health care reforms through against greedy right wing forces –  again I say thank God for the NHS.