Politicians Category
Politicans and world leaders making news and in the news, and spouting hot air
UKIP welcome you to Clacton-on-Sea:
Spotter: David Schneider
Anorak
Posted: 10th, October 2014 | In: Politicians | Comment
FACES of the day:
Douglas Carswell, chats with members of the Monster Raving Looney party after winning the Clacton constituency parliamentary by-election held at Clacton town hall in Essex. Date: 10/10/2014.
For more bigotry and intolerance, vote UKIP.
Anorak
Posted: 10th, October 2014 | In: Politicians | Comment
WALES online journalist Aled Jones has news of a Muslim Ghandi:
‘Nuff said.
Anorak
Posted: 9th, October 2014 | In: Politicians | Comment
A man watches a TV news program showing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2014. North Korea’s top government Thursday proposed the rival Koreas stop slandering each other from later this month, halt hostile military acts and work toward preventing a nuclear disaster on the divided peninsula. The letters read “Stop slandering and joint military exercise”. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
EVEN though Kim Jong Un is the Sexiest Man Alive, has a weakness for cheese and was probably born in a lotus flower while scoring a hole in one as a sperm before emerging as a flying baby, let us not forget that he’s completely mental.
North Korea’s premier is a man who likes to keep his people under his waddling, hypnotic spell, while plotting constant war. You see, when you have everything and everyone is cow-eyed in your presence, the threat of nuclear war is probably the only thing you’ve got that gets the blood pumping around your regal underpants.
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Mof Gimmers
Posted: 7th, October 2014 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comments (3)
Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart of The Eurythmics.
Date: 24/04/1984
ONE of the big problems with feminism is that women like to spend great chunks of the debate, attacking each other. Of course, any movement needs criticism to adapt and sharpen the mind for future debates, but isn’t it a bit sad to see women trying to pull other women down, when ostensibly, their aims are the same?
And so to Annie Lennox, who said that she isn’t very impressed with Beyonce calling herself a feminist.
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Mof Gimmers
Posted: 2nd, October 2014 | In: Celebrities, Politicians | Comment
PHOTOSHOP this:
Prime Minister David Cameron prepares his keynote speech in his hotel room before his speech at tomorrow’s Conservative Party’s annual conference at the ICC in Birmingham. Picture date: Tuesday September 30, 2014. Photo credit should read: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
Anorak
Posted: 30th, September 2014 | In: Politicians | Comment
If the cap(le) fits
DO you think Ed Miliband is bit of a weirdo because he’s a Jew? Rachel Sylvester writes in the Times:
Privately, he suspects that anti-semitism may be behind some of the hostility towards him – he talks about how as the child of Jewish immigrants, he cannot say his family has “sat under the same oak tree for 500 years”. The sense that he is an “outsider” may, he believes explain in part the descriptions by some people of him as “weird”.
Privately? Does he do anything privately?
James Kirkup:
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Anorak
Posted: 26th, September 2014 | In: Politicians | Comments (5)
AND lo it came to pass: Trinity Mirror has admitted that some of its staff were involved in ilegal phone hacking.
The righteous Daily Mirror – the self-styled “intelligent tabloid” – will compensate Shane Richie, Shobna Gulati, Lucy Benjamin and Alan Yentob for listening into their private phone calls.
The company publishes titles including the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People.
And you know who writes for the tusty Mirror? Yep, it’s mullet-thumping, secretary-shagging, love-cheat John Prescott, champion of the surveillance-happy Government that watched us via ubiquitous CCTV, thought ID cards a good idea and brought about the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
Prezza hates sooping.
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Anorak
Posted: 24th, September 2014 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, adjusts his translation ear piece during a U.N. Security Council meeting, Friday, Sept. 19, 2014, at the United Nations headquarters. The Security Council met Friday to discuss the situation of the Islamic State group in Iraq. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)
HOW’S that pledge not to be like Mitt Romney going?
Two months before the 2012 presidential election, Vice President Biden warned on the campaign trail that Mitt Romney wanted to go to war with Syria…
“He said it was a mistake to set an end date for our warriors in Afghanistan and bring them home. He implies by the speech that he’s ready to go to war in Syria and Iran,” Biden said in his speech.
Biden also went after the Republican presidential nominee when Romney called Russia America’s “number one geopolitical foe.”
“He wants to move from cooperation to confrontation with Putin’s Russia,” Biden said. “And these guys say the president’s out of touch? Out of touch? Swiss bank account, untold millions in the Cayman Islands. Who’s out of touch, man?”
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Anorak
Posted: 23rd, September 2014 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment
She’s been forced to eat the Labradoodle by grinding poverty
THIS advert for Americans for Shared Prosperity is great.
The woman is trying to get back on her feet, trapped, as she seems to be, in an airy, stylish apartment of the type most Britishers recognise from magazines about fine living, home decer and Jennifer Aniston’s womb.
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Anorak
Posted: 22nd, September 2014 | In: Money, Politicians | Comment
THIS will come as a surprise to some and as a simple confirmation of reality to others. For it appears that our Prime Minister is simply ignorant of the constraints which the law puts around him.
The SWA, whose 56 members employ 35,000 people in Britain, argues that minimum unit pricing would be illegal under EU trade rules as it would amount to a domestic barrier to free trade.
In the letter, the trade organisation stresses that efforts in the past by other countries such as the Netherlands to introduce minimum pricing have been rebuffed by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
This is all about that idea of having minimum pricing for alcohol. We who actually understand that much of our law is now made in Brussels, not London, have been pointing this out for years. All those people arguing for that minimum pricing are simply being ignorant as well as stupid.
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Tim Worstall
Posted: 15th, September 2014 | In: Money, Politicians | Comment
SIR Gerald Howath, a former defence minister and current Tory MP fo Aldershot, who said Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech was spot on, has turned his eye to Joanna Lumley, the actress who campaigned for Gurkhas’ rights.
Lumley was part of a succesful camapaign calling for Gurkhas who retired before 1997 the right to settle in the UK.
Sir Gerald Howarth wonders:
“Many of my constituents feel extremely aggrieved that Joanna Lumley ran this campaign, this very emotional campaign. She has been nowhere near Aldershot since, as far as I am aware. The problem does not lie with the younger, recently retired veterans, who speak good English…
“The problem arises with the older former Gurkhas … generally unable to speak English, virtually no job prospects, unfamiliar with our customs and often with failing health, inevitably because they are elderly.”
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Anorak
Posted: 15th, September 2014 | In: Politicians | Comment
ARE respective SNP and UKIP leaders Alex Salmond and Nigel Farage two peas in the same pod?
Dominic Lawson:
In his book Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud wrote: “It is clearly not easy for man to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it . . . I once discussed the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other — like the Spaniards and the Portuguese, for instance, the north Germans and the south Germans, the English and the Scots. I gave this phenomenon the name of ‘the narcissism of minor differences’.”
What Freud meant is that we often hate most intensely those who most resemble us..
So, for example, the “English” political movement that the Scottish nationalists most affect to hate is Ukip: its leader, Nigel Farage, was at severe risk of being beaten to a pulp by demonstrators when he ventured to Edinburgh last year, eventually seeking sanctuary in a pub (not for the first time). Yet Salmond and Farage use exactly the same arguments about “an out-of-touch Westminster elite” — and the rising tide of support for both men rests on that common method of rhetorical appeal.
Far from being polar opposites, they are two political peas in a pod. The most noticeable difference, perhaps, is only that the thuggish element of Scottish nationalism more closely resembles the English Defence League than it does the beery bourgeois burghers of Ukip.
Patrick West:
They are great foes, these men, and it’s not difficult to see why. While Farage seeks to reduce immigration, thwart the EU and claw back powers for the United Kingdom, Salmond wants Scotland to leave the UK and join the EU as an independent country. Farage is superficially every bit the SNP caricature: a southern Englander with a background in London’s financial sector. He is seemingly the opposite of everything the SNP likes to think of itself as: progressive, tolerant, open-minded, and with a profound concern for the welfare state.
Yet the more you hear them, the more you realise that they are part of the same phenomenon, the same populist wave that has swept Europe this year: the revolt of the dispossessed against the elites.
Michael Crick:
Two charismatic, street-fighters shunned by the London establishment – astute, populist campaigners who have grasped and exploited the growing disillusionment with the political system, and old-style ways associated with the centuries-old House of Commons.
Vote now and vote often…
Anorak
Posted: 14th, September 2014 | In: Politicians | Comment
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry prepares to meet with Secretary-General of the Arab League Nabil Elaraby in Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, Sept. 13, 2014. Kerry arrived in Cairo for a short visit of less than a day to discuss how Egypt can help in the fight against the Islamic State group. He has been on a regional trip to garner support for President Barack ObamaÂs initiative to go assemble a coalition of nations willing to go after the militant group. Kerry heads to Paris next for a meeting on how to support Iraq in its fight against the Islamic State group, which holds large parts of Iraq and Syria. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)
THIS New York Times op-ed about Iraq by candidate Barck Obama in 2008 is worthy of mention:
MCCAIN: “The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep. Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown.”
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Anorak
Posted: 13th, September 2014 | In: Politicians | Comment
KATE Bush once sang a song about Ken Livingstone, former leader of the GLC, Member of Parliament and the first democratically-elected Mayor of London.
Mr Ken Livingstone, former leader of the GLC, and labour parliamentary candidate for the Brent East constituency, outside his campaign office. 1987.
Ken is the man that we all need,
Ken is the leader of the GLC.
Who is the man we all need? KEN!
Who is the funky sex machine? KEN!
Who is the leader of the GLC? KEN!
Who is the man we all need? KEN!
The Comic Strip revisited the tune:
Anorak
Posted: 27th, August 2014 | In: Music, Politicians | Comment (1)
KITTY Cat kitsch takes on political idologies with these fine scratching posts and litter boxes by The Pussycat Riot.
The voodoo doll-style posts are £4,500.00 a totem; but the poo trays are just £3.00.
Look on as your sweeti pie-foo-foo rips out Putin’s eyes and craps on Kim Jong Un, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
From the very heart of the Internet we raise our banner with #ThePussycatRiot: a new protest movement to unite the cats of the world and their owners in opposition to cyber censorship. We aim to raise awareness of the oppressive regime Preventing people from freely enjoying the boundless wealth of mankind’s innovation and creativity … And cat videos. […]
[The Putin- and Kim Jong Un Cat Scratching Posts are] one-of-a-kind product protest and the ultimate feline satirical statement. An incredibly lifelike cat scratching post Modelled on Kim Jong-un and Putin for your censorship-hating cat to scratch.
Spotter: The Pussycat Riot website, DM
Anorak
Posted: 26th, August 2014 | In: Key Posts, Politicians, The Consumer | Comment
WILL you vote for an independent Scotland? Are you a Scots Braveheart rejecting Britain and all the fusty Middle Englanders? Are you just bored with the UK and think separation is something to do, a move that will enliven the moribund political debate?
Do you just want to declare your Scottishness?
Do you see the vote as chance for the Left to reject Tories?
And what is Scottish? The Scottish National Party keeps producing images of the past. But why would anyone vote for a retuen to a monoculture? The BBC talks about the “formula for Scottishness“. It’s not about blood and lineage, says the BBC; being Scottish is about “my accent, vocabulary and appetite for cholesterol-rich foodstuffs still mark me out as a Scot”.
Is that it? If you like deep-fired Mars bars, can understand Rab C Nesbitt without subtitles and can do an impression of Mike Myers’ Fat Bastard (the same voice he did for proud Scot Shrek), you are Scottish. Tick those boxes and you can get our own country and be ruled exclusively by others just like you. Unless the leaders do as promised an swiftly join the EU.
So. It’s not really an indepedent Scotland the YES campaigners want. It’s a bigger recognition of what Scots are.
But what is that? Or is it best defined by what it isn;’?
WORLDbytes hosted a debate about the referndum. Watch it below.
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Anorak
Posted: 26th, August 2014 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comments (5)
Liberal Democrat Party Leader Nick Clegg (centre), and PPC David Ward meet members of the public during a visit to Printing Roller Services in Bradford, Yorkshire.
THE Liberal Democrats has excerpted influence on the Government. The UK will suspend some of its arms exports to Israel if the current ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is broken.
The business department said a review of UK exports to Israel had identified the 12 licences for “components which could be part of equipment used by the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza”. They include equipment for military radar, combat aircraft and tanks.
Vince Cable, the business secretary, said: “We welcome the current ceasefire in Gaza and hope that it will lead to a peaceful resolution. However, the UK government has not been able to clarify if the export licence criteria are being met. In light of that uncertainty we have taken the decision to suspend these existing export licences in the event of a resumption of significant hostilities.
“No new licences of military equipment have been issued for use by the Israeli Defence Forces during the review period, and as a precautionary measure this approach will continue until hostilities cease.”
The export suspension comes after a long and fierce battle within the coalition over restricting arms sales to Israel. The prime minister, David Cameron, and the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, have been resisting demands from Cable and the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg calling for the immediate suspension of exports.
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Anorak
Posted: 13th, August 2014 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment
WHEN George Galloway called for Bradford to be an “Israel-free zone” – “we don’t want Israeli tourists to come to Bradford” – holidaymakers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv fretted. What to do? Where to go now? But some had either pre-booked the trip or just decided that Galloway was an utter pillock and anywhere he was needed a bit of relief.
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Anorak
Posted: 12th, August 2014 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comments (9)
Olympic and Commonwealth Heavyweight Gold Medalist Lennox Lewis (right) with his promoter Frank Maloney at a press conference at Scribes wine bar in London, to announce Lewis’ upcoming fight with Andy Gerrard. Date: 07/09/1989
FRANK Maloney, 61, the boxing promoter who worked to make Lennox Lewis Britain’s first undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, is now Kellie. Says Ms Maloney:
“I was born in the wrong body and I have always known I was a woman. I can’t keep living in the shadows. That is why I am doing what I am. Living with the burden any longer would have killed me. What was wrong at birth is now being medically corrected.”
She’s been supported by many:
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Anorak
Posted: 11th, August 2014 | In: Politicians, Sports | Comment
DID you hear Barack Obama making statement about Iraq airstrikes? Somewhere Bill Murray is waking up in a hotel room at 6AM to Sonny & Cher’s ‘I Got You Babe’.
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Anorak
Posted: 11th, August 2014 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment
OUR latest little excitement on the political front is that a Labour MP has decided to try to massage the facts about the gender pay gap. You’ll see it all over the papers today, the gender pay gap is 20% or so, that this is appalling and only the Labour party is going to do anything about it. Here’s the Mail as an example:
It will take another 60 years before women earn the same as men at the current pace of change, Labour warned today.
Women still earn just 80p for every pound men take home and the pay gap widened last year.
Shadow women’s minister Gloria De Piero accused the Tories of the ‘turning the clock back’ for female workers by failing to do more to reduce unfairness in the workplace.
Latest figures show that in April 2013, men earned £12.86 per hour and women £10.33, a gap of 19.7 per cent.
It marked an increase on 2012, when the gap was 19.6 per cent, with women paid £10.05 to men’s £12.50.
Since 2010 the pay gap has closed at a rate of only 0.3 per cent per year on average, according to the House of Commons library.
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Tim Worstall
Posted: 11th, August 2014 | In: Money, Politicians | Comment
THESE might well be the sexual preferences of many of us, not just politicians. It’s just that we tend not to expect a politician to say so quite so publicly. But fair dinkum to the Ozzies, they have managed to elect one who actually tells it like it is:
Jacqui Lambie, an Australian MP who shares the balance of power in the upper house, has apologised after declaring in a radio interview that she is looking for a partner who is “well-hung” and loaded with cash.
“They don’t even need to speak,” said Ms Lambie, a 43-year-old single mother of two.
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Tim Worstall
Posted: 25th, July 2014 | In: Money, Politicians | Comment
IT’S taken its time but the basic problem with the UK housing market seems to be seeping into even Labour Party minds. That problem being that there’s not enough housing so it’s too bloody expansive. We should therefore try to build more. As the Labour Party’s head of their investigation into the housing market says:
Sir Michael Lyons told the Guardian he had identified protracted delays in the release of land as the single biggest cause of Britain’s housing crisis.
This is all really very simple. There’s no shortage of land in the UK. Only about 3% of it is houses at the moment: in some counties we have more than that in use as golf courses than we do houses.
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Tim Worstall
Posted: 1st, July 2014 | In: Money, Politicians | Comments (2)
