Politicians Category
Politicans and world leaders making news and in the news, and spouting hot air
Job done: Nick Griffin wants ‘hate preachers’ out of Britain – BNP leader heads to Syria
NICK Griffin, the monocular BNP leader, does read his own placards, and has responded to his own demands. This hate preacher’s gone to Syria…
BNP leader Nick Griffin during a demonstration in Westminster in central London on June 1.
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Posted: 11th, June 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
Mexico elects cat as mayor
MEXICO is a weird and wonderful country, but surely no-one could’ve ever expected that, within its borders, a cat would be elected to run for mayor.
Morris has been put forward as the citizens’ candidate for elections taking place on July 7th and cat-lovers are probably chortling to themselves as they say “Well! He can’t do any worse than the humans! HAR HAR!” Obviously, you’d need to say that in a Mexican accent for it to work.
If Morris were to win, he would become the mayor of Veracruz state capital Xalapa.
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Posted: 7th, June 2013 | In: Politicians, Strange But True | Comment
Press pack abandon Australian MP Scott Morrison to chase a bigger beast
YOU know you’re the proverbial dead donkey when you’re Liberal Australian MP Scott Morrison. Until Labor whip Joel Fitzgibbon passed by, Morrison had been holding court at the very centre of the Press pack.
One moment you’re news, the next moment you’re stood around with your hands in his pockets, and your press secretary, Julian Leembruggen, is wondering where his life is heading.
Posted: 6th, June 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
Hilarious and hypcritical highlights from Nick Clegg and James Caan’s Opening Doors social mobility plan
JAMES CAAN, star of BBC Dragon’s Den and would-be baby buyer is working as Nick Clegg’s “social mobility czar”. The pair hooked up to lunch an initiative called of Opening Doors. On page one of his manifesto, Clegg writes:
Fairness is a fundamental value of the Coalition. Government. A fair society is an open society. A society in which everyone is free to flourish and rise. Where birth is never destiny. In Britain today, life chances are narrowed for too many by the circumstances of their birth: the home they’re born into, the neighbourhood they grow up in or the jobs their parents do. Patterns of inequality are imprinted from one generation to the next.
The true test of fairness is the distribution of opportunities. That is why improving social mobility is the principal goal of the Coalition Government’s social policy.
By definition this is a long-term undertaking. There is no magic wand we can wave to see immediate effects. Nor is there a single moment, or particular age, when the cycles of disadvantage can be broken for everyone. The opportunity gap has to be addressed at every stage in the life cycle, from the Foundation Years through to the world of work. And Government cannot do it alone. Employers, parents, communities and voluntary organisations all have a part to play.
Tackling the financial deficit is the Coalition’s most immediate task. But tackling the opportunity deficit – creating an open, socially mobile society – is our guiding purpose.
Nick Clegg MP
Deputy Prime Minister
Good stuff. And then we all noticed that Caan had employed one of his daughters in three separate roles and another worked for a company he had invested in.
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Posted: 5th, June 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
Lord Hylton says through his beard that homosexuals and ‘poofs’ stole the word ‘gay’
Lord Hylton and his beard
LORD Hylton, a parliamentary crossbencher is upset that homosexuals “stole” the word gay. Says he to the House of Lords:
“I regret very much that the fine old English and French word ‘gay’ has, in my lifetime, been appropriated by a small but vocal minority of the population.”
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Posted: 4th, June 2013 | In: Key Posts, Politicians | Comments (2)
In photos: the changing face, hair and statues of Lenin
THEY erected statues to Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov Lenin, In all of them he looks aged and sporting a noble brow. But how do you remember the great leader? Is that image what he would have wanted?
Born 22 April 1870, this is Lenin in aged 3 or 4.
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Posted: 3rd, June 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Politicians | Comment
Photos: BNP and Unite Against Fascism fight against hate in Westminster
IN a bid to remind us that the BNP still exists, around 100 supporters of the far-right group massed outside the Palace of Westminster to shout about their opposition to – irony of ironies – hate preachers. They wanted to meet outside Woolwich Barracks, where Lee Rigby was murdered. Scotland Yard thought that was a bad idea. So. It was Westminster and a march to the Cenotaph, the monument to the ‘Glorious Dead’, many of whom fought – still more irony – Nazis. There, they clashed with Unite Against Fascism. Elsewhere, members of the EDL clashed with anti-fascist supporters after a march in Leeds, West Yorkshire. And representatives from all Islam, Jewish, Anglican, Catholic and Sikh faiths laid a wreath spelling “Peace” at Woolwich barracks.
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Posted: 1st, June 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
Julia Gillard hit by Salamist sandwich tossers
AUSTRALIAN Prime Minister Julia Gillard is the target for Salamist sandwich tossers. In early May, Amy Remeikis reported:
There was one student holding a handwritten “Kevin Rudd 2013” sign. There were a few more who spoke about Mr Rudd … Somewhere in there, half a Vegemite sandwich was thrown, allegedly by a student.
The culprit was dealt with:
PRIME Minister Julia Gillard says she’s treating a sandwich attack at a Queensland school as a laughing matter – but won’t be offering a Prime Ministerial pardon. Kyle Thomson, 16, has been suspended for 15 days after being blamed for throwing the sandwich as an otherwise friendly group of students mobbed the PM.
She said:
“I didn’t see a sandwich in the air. I did see half a sandwich on the ground.”
An investigation was demanded:
Kyle’s mother believes her son is being unfairly blamed for the incident and has demanded all footage from the visit be reviewed to find the real culprit.
And then in happened again in Canberra:
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has had a sandwich thrown at her during a school visit for the second time this month.
Ms Gillard was walking in a crowded foyer at Lyneham High School – where she was announcing the ACT had signed up to her Gonski reforms – when the salami sandwich was thrown.
It was lobbed from behind, over the top of her head, and landed at her feet.
Stephanie Peatling told us:
The PM was not hit. I repeat the PM was not hit by the sandwich.
But:
The bread-based missile, which appeared to contain salami and what was possibly a slice of cheese, was lobbed by an as-yet unidentified culprit in a crowd of students. It is reported to have hit her arm before falling to the ground …
File under: Sandwich monkeys…
Spotter: Tim Blair
Posted: 1st, June 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
George Galloway says ‘we’ are just like the barbaric Woolwich murderers
THE murder in Woolwich has all the hallmarks of a religiously motivated attack. One of the two murderers said to camera:
We swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. The only reason we have killed this man this is because Muslims are dying daily. This British soldier is an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth …
An eyewitness says the killers screamed “god is Great” in Arabic before murdering:
“I saw a guy with no head lying on the ground. He had been decapitated. There were two black guys walking around his body saying ‘This is what God would’ve wanted’.
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Posted: 23rd, May 2013 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comments (6)
Obama’s AP swoop ‘redefines investigative reporting as criminal behaviour’
Eugne Robinson on Obama and the seizure of AP journalists’ records:
The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists’ phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn’t chilling, it’s just plain cold. . . .The unwarranted snooping, which was revealed last week, would be troubling enough if it were an isolated incident. But it is part of a pattern that threatens to redefine investigative reporting as criminal behavior.
The AP story that has so infuriated the government described the breakup of an al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula plot to place an underwear bomber on board a U.S.-bound airliner. Published on the afternoon of May 7, 2012, the story patted itself on the back for having heeded the White House and CIA requests to not publish the previous week, when the AP first learned of the operation. The AP states in the article that it published only after being told by “officials” that the original “concerns were allayed.” In a chronology published in today’s Washington Post, we’re told that the CIA was no longer resisting publication of the AP story on the day it hit the wire (Monday) and that the White House was planning to “announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.”
That may be the case, but the government was still incensed by the leak. In fact, it appears that officials were livid. As my Reuters colleagues Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria reportedlast night, the government found the leak so threatening that it opened a leak investigation beforethe AP ran its story…
…the perpetrators of a successful double-agent operation against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would not want to brag about their coup for years. Presumably, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula will now use the press reports to walk the dog back to determine whose misplaced trust allowed the agent to penetrate it. That will make the next operation more difficult. Other intelligence operations — and we can assume they are up and running — may also become compromised as the press reports give al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula new clues.
Likewise, the next time the CIA or foreign intelligence agency tries to recruit a double agent, the candidate will judge his handlers wretched secret keepers, regard the assignment a death mission and seek employment elsewhere.
What makes the DOJ’s actions so stunning here is its breadth. It’s the opposite of a narrowly tailored and limited scope. It’s a massive, sweeping, boundless invasion which enables the US government to learn the identity of every person whom multiple AP journalists and editors have called for a two-month period. Some of the AP journalists involved in the Yemen/CIA story and whose phone records were presumably obtained – including Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo – are among the nation’s best and most serious investigative journalists; those two won the Pulitzer Prize last year for their superb work exposing the NYPD’s surveillance program aimed at American Muslim communities. For the DOJ to obtain all of their phone records and those of their editors for a period of two months is just staggering.
When the Supreme Court set the legal precedent back in 1979, phone records contained much less information. Nowadays, a phone record’s metadataincludes not just the phone number, but the time the call took place, the call origin, the call duration, and the carrier.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the protection of digital rights, said in a statement released [Monday] that it “no longer makes sense to treat calling records and other metadata related to our communications as if they aren’t fully protected by the Constitution.”
Electronic communications have improved drastically since the legal precedent was set, and the amount of revealing data now transferred with a phone call is far greater than just a telephone number. But the law has yet to catch up with technology—which means the Justice Department has access to a lot more than just the numbers dialed by the AP’s journalists.
Massimo Calabresi nails Obama:
Obama came into office offering Americans a deal on secrecy. On the one hand, he promised to shrink the number of secrets created by the government, ending the problem of “overclassification” which produces so many secrets that few are well protected. At the same time, he said he would aggressively defend the secrets the government did need to keep by going after leakers and making them pay. Obama has delivered on the crackdown–he’s prosecuted twice as many leakers as all his predecessors combined–but he hasn’t delivered on the secrecy reduction.
Why the secrecy..?
Posted: 21st, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
Man jailed for calling Robert Mugabe a dirty donkey – Animal Rights activists outraged
LEADING foreign dictator Robert Mugabe – some say he’s the best in his field – has seen to it that a lecturer who called him “a rotten old donkey” has been jailed for three months.
Chenjerai Pamhiri, 38, a lecturer at Great Zimbabwe State University in Masvingo city, was convicted in a Zimbabwe court for standing in a supermarket and shouting “dirt which should be discarded, a rotten old donkey” in reference to the country’s President. He was swiftly arrested.
Posted: 20th, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
Can a person’s physical strength dictate their politics? Yes
CAN a person’s muscles dictate their politics?
Men who are physically strong are more likely to take a right wing political stance, while weaker men are inclined to support the welfare state, according to a new study.
Researchers discovered political motivations may have evolutionary links to physical strength.
Men’s upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution, according to the research.
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Posted: 18th, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
UKIP leader Nigel Farage looks like Joe E. Brown
LOOK ALIKE of the date: UKIP leader Nigel Farage looks like…Joe E. Brown…
Posted: 17th, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comments (2)
Scottish Nationalists attack Nigel Farage for being too much like them
NIGEL Farage, the UKIP leader, was shouted and screamed at in Edinburgh. The MEP was forced to escape the crowd in a police riot van. The gaggle of self-declared anti-racists and Scottish nationalists joined forces to create an illiberal mob.
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Posted: 17th, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comments (3)
Eric Holder does not know about IRS but does secretive Obama? Abuse of power round-up and great video
US Attorney General Eric Holder sat before the House Judiciary Committee and told them all the things he does not know. Does he know about the politicising of the Internal Revenue Service? Organisations with “Tea-Party” and “Patriot” in their names were vetted more than others. The IRS asked groups to identify their donors and provide print outs of their tweets and Facebook posts.
Does he know why the State subpoenaed phone records of Associated Press reporters? He just doesn’t know.
“In a sense, the two topics that dogged Holder most on Wednesday — the AP phone records and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups — were one and the same. In both cases, Americans are being punished and intimidated for exercising their right of free expression — by the taxing authorities, in the conservatives’ case, and by federal prosecutors, in the reporters’ case.”
“I stopped watching The Daily Show the day after the ’04 election, because Jon Stewart’s open grief was too much to bear. (I was a different person then.) Plus, once I saw through his Clown Nose Off/Clown Nose On routine — ‘You should listen to me because what I’m saying is important, but I’ll brush off your rebuttal by insisting I’m just a comedian’ — it was like the optical illusion with the cows. It might take you a minute to see it, but once you do, you can’t unsee it. Which just makes this all the more delicious.”
NFL player Evan Mathis, of the Philadelphia Eagles posted a picure of himself pissing on the IRS building.
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Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
Chicago gangsters agree with Joe Biden: more chocolate guns!
BARACK Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden has news on guns:
“If we had guns that shot chocolate, not only would our country be safer, it would be happier.”
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Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
ObamaGate: How Obama became Tricky Dicky Nixon
EMBROILED in scandal over Benghazi. Hilary Chabot writes in the Boston Herald:
President Obama’s angry dismissal of the growing outcry over the handling of last year’s Benghazi terrorist attack that left a U.S. ambassador dead shows all the signs of a White House in “damage control” mode, critics say.
“They are in damage control, and this story is now gaining traction because people are now talking about it even more,” said Richard Benedetto, an American University political science professor and former White House correspondent for USA Today. “This story to me has all the makings of a Watergate kind of story. What did they know and when did they know it, and what did people in the White House do to cover it up?”
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Posted: 14th, May 2013 | In: Key Posts, Politicians | Comment
Cheney calls Bengahzi a ‘failure of leadership’ – after 9/11 he should know what that looks like
HILARY Clinton is in the crosshairs over her role in the murderous attack on the US Benghazi consulate that left four Americans dead, including the ambassador. She says it was a violent reaction to the film the Innocence of Muslims. The Obama administration said it was a demonstration against that film that got out of hand. The attack was on Sept. 11. Clinton and Obama’s foe says that is significant. They say it was terrorism and that Obama and Clinton should have been better prepared and protected their staff.
Dick Cheney has this to say:
“When we were there, on our watch, we were always ready on 9/11, on the anniversary. We always anticipated they were coming for us, especially in that part of the world. I cannot understand why [members of the Obama administration] weren’t ready to go. … [It was] a failure of leadership.”
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Posted: 8th, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
What difference does it make? Hillary Clinton’s Banghazi balls
HILARY Clinton stood by the caskets of four Americans murdered (but not raped) in Benghazi and said:
“This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing do to with.”
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Posted: 8th, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
Nigel Evans comes out the police station’s ‘rear entrance’
NIGEL Evans, Tory MP and Deputy Speaker in the House of Commons, denies raping a man and sexually assaulting another.
It’s the gay element that’s making the story swing in some tabloids. Some readers have accused me of overreacting. Maybe I have. But then I read how the Daily Mirror ends its report:
Officers specialising in sex offences quizzed the former Tory Party vice-chairman at Preston police station. He was freed last night after about 12 hours and was driven away through the police station’s rear entrance.
That can’t be accidental?
Posted: 7th, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment (1)
Nigel Evans: Deputy speakers arrest laced with whiff of homophobia
NEWSPAPERS lead with news that Nigel Evans has been arrested on suspicion of rape. Mr Evans is the deputy Speaker of the House of Commons and the Conservative MP for Ribble Valley. He is accsued of raping two men in their 20s between July 2009 and March 2013 in Pendleton, Lancashire. So. How do you report the news?
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Posted: 5th, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comments (5)
David Cameron on UKIP and the BNP: we must respect racists who win votes
DAVID Cameron is for turning:
“Ukip is sort of a bunch of … fruit cakes and loonies and closet racists mostly” – April 4, 2006.
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Posted: 4th, May 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment (1)
Zombie Thatcher – the book of Maggie in the afterlife
BOOK of the day: Zombie Thatcher by Bronwen Winter Phoenix (Author), Al Terry (Illustrator):
Posted: 3rd, May 2013 | In: Books, Politicians | Comment
In 1995 Margaret Thatcher refused to jump (video)
MARGARET Thatcher refuses to jump. In 1995, Swedish host Stina Lundberg Dabrowski asked Maggie to jump. Margaret Thatcher said no.
Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Ed Miliband all reply in one voice: “How high do you want us? And when can we come down?”
Posted: 2nd, May 2013 | In: Flashback, Politicians | Comment
UN bozo poses with fake Bono
POLITICIANS love hanging around with pop stars don’t they? It gives them the chance to feel vaguely important and they hope that a little cred will rub off on them so they can impress their bosses or voters.
Well, one United Nations dignitary was left trying to prise his foot from his mouth after he tweeted a picture of himself with U2 frontman, Bono (Mr G8). Oh wait. It wasn’t Bono. It was a man dressed up like Bono.
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Posted: 1st, May 2013 | In: Celebrities, Politicians | Comment
