The man IS for turning

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Gordon Brown's election strategy is doomed, but you have to admire the cheek of it - Telegraph
Labour is nowhere in the political battle over the deficit, as it deserves to be. It is both responsible for that horrific debt and has no plausible strategy to deal with it. True, Alistair Darling and Lord Mandelson have prevailed in their battle to make Gordon mention "cuts" occasionally, and now talk with freedom themselves about the need for budget savings. But it is much too little, much too late. Labour will not win this argument at the election. If it really is all about the economy, stupid, then the party is already sunk.

So Brown must rely on raw politics, rather than economics; on suspicion rather than statistics; on cultivating fear of the Tories rather than parading Labour's record. And one cannot fault the sheer cheek of his chosen attack. What could be more counter-intuitive than to present the Tories as the enemies of the middle class? The party of Thatcherism, the blue rinse, Essex Man, the "property-owning democracy" and the "middling sort", suddenly turning on its own? Ludicrous, surely? But that is precisely what Gordon is claiming.

Cloud, silver lining...

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LENIN'S TOMB: Haiti: opportunity knocks
You want to hear about chutzpah? You want to hear about sheer gravity-defying audacity? Well, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, prepare to catch your lower jaw. Forget Limbaugh's racist anxieties. Forget about Pat Robertson drooling about Haiti's 'pact with the devil'. He's a senile old bigot, and his sick provocations are familiar by now. This is the Heritage Foundation on the Haiti earthquake, which is estimated to have killed 100,000 people...Read the post here

Another time, another theory

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Michael Chrichton: Why Politicized Science is Dangerous
Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.

This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.

I don't mean global warming. I'm talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago...
Read the essay here   And when you've finished take a peek at this

Remember, remember...

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We must turn Blair’s life into Groundhog Day - Matthew Parris
So dream on, my fellow critics of the Iraq war. But if we think that, even now, a searchlight into the past is likely to catch any of these people red-handed, we distract ourselves from the achievable.What’s achievable is that those who led us into that grisly blunder are never allowed to move on; that they never regain the respect they enjoyed before it; that their public careers never climb back towards the eminence they once enjoyed; that, forever justifying themselves, forever repeating their denials and slipping through their frustrated accusers’ fingers, they never escape the flashlight beamed at this single episode in their lives.

And that each new inquiry, each new interview, becomes for them another Groundhog Day, an endless circle; while on to their monuments is chiselled “Iraq”, and into their obituaries one central, unforgiven fact.

Nothing funy about him either

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There was nothing edgy about Wossy - spiked
The staggering conceit of the metropolitan elite is to imagine that while they are broadminded, sophisticated and edgy, the Middle England masses are easily offended simpletons who can’t handle anything beyond The X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing. This elite believes that creeping censorship and intolerance towards anything sweary on TV is slowly gaining the upper hand. It is therefore the job of metropolitans to save the TV schedules from the uptight, narrow-minded masses.

Yet a recent poll on what were the best TV shows of the Noughties suggests that this is actually not the case. At the start of the decade, there was no Daily Mail-inspired campaign to get The Sopranos off our screens for its graphic sex and violence and endless stream of profanities. Instead it was praised across the board for raising the bar of quality TV drama. One of the most lauded comedies in living memory, The Office, is universally adored (it remains the BBCs biggest-selling DVD ever) despite featuring sexual references (‘Five minutes with her and I’d be up to my nuts in guts’, as Finchy memorably said) that apparently only liberal journalists and celebrities can tolerate. Elsewhere, ultra-rude (but ultra-funny) and swearingly offensive hit comedies such as The Thick of It and Peep Show don’t register complaints from the middlebrow tabloids either. Audiences are far more broadminded than the self-congratulating snobs suggest.

The right to speak your mind

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Can we have our Voltaire back please? - spiked
The most striking thing about the trial in Luton, England, of seven radical Muslim men accused of ‘being abusive’ during a military homecoming parade is that one of the men’s lawyers quoted Voltaire.

It is revealing that an Islamist who by definition feels agitated by the modern traditions and liberties of Western society should feel able and willing to call Voltaire to his defence. This demonstrates how confused and fluid the legacy of the Enlightenment has become. Abandoned by mainstream society, and only cited opportunistically and unconvincingly by the contemporary liberal left, the values of the Enlightenment can now be co-opted by some of the most backward religious elements in modern society. Indeed, the Islamists in Luton can be seen as taunting the rulers and thinkers of Western society, holding up Voltaire as a way of upbraiding us over our failure to adhere to the principles and attitude of the Enlightenment.

Haiti - the backstory

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Help Haiti: The Unforgiven Country Cries Out
The relentlessly maintained, deliberately inflicted political and economic ruin of Haiti has a direct bearing on the amount of death and devastation that the country is suffering today after the earthquake. It will also greatly cripple any recovery from this natural disaster. As detailed below, Washington's rapacious economic policies have destroyed all attempts to build a sustainable economy in Haiti, driving people off the land and from small communities into packed, dangerous, unhealthy shantytowns, to try to eke out a meager existence in the sweatshops owned by Western elites and their local cronies. All attempts at changing a manifestly unjust society have been ruthlessly suppressed by the direct or collateral hand of Western elites.

The result? Millions of people -- weakened by hunger, deprivation, malnutrition, disease -- living jammed together in precarious, substandard housing. A lack of the physical, financial and civic infrastructure needed to support a decent life in ordinary times -- and to provide proper assistance, and a strong framework for rebuilding, when disaster strikes. Even a far lesser earthquake than the one that struck this week would have caused an unconscionable amount of unnecessary suffering in a nation that has been as ruthlessly and deliberately throttled as Haiti.
Read the whole piece by Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque


See also:

Stand with the people of Haiti! – What the U.S. government isn’t telling you

The Truth about Haiti’s Suffering By Finian Cunningham

What war?

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Turse and Engelhardt, Shooting Gnats with a Machine Gun
The current president, like the last one, claims that we are “at war.” If so, it’s a war of one, since al-Qaeda and the U.S. military are essentially not in the same war-fighting universe, which helps explain why repeatedly knocking off significant punortions of al-Qaeda’s leadership (even if never finding bin Laden and Zawahiri) doesn’t seem to end the threat.

But let’s stop here and try, for a moment, to imagine these two enemies side by side in the same universe of war. What, in that case, would the line-up of forces look like?
Read the whole article

They still won't listen

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It’s time to pass the baton to the next generation
In last week's issue of this magazine, we lamented the trivial bickering and crude electioneering of the party leaders as the election approaches and asked: "Where are the ideas? Where is the vision? Where are the policies to create a fairer and more democratic society?"

Despite three consecutive and historic general election victories for the Labour Party over the past 13 years, the triangulations of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson have left mainstream progressive politics in the UK intellectually hollowed out, bereft of an animating or compelling vision of "the good society".
Not a quote from some Tory rag or right-wing blogger but from the leader in the New Statesman.