Rupert Murdoch and Fox News: ‘imperialism’
Media Matters in America has published a video showing a behind-the-scenes scene from the anti-Obama 9/12 protest, where a Fox News producer is caught on camera coaching the crowd.
The story also hit the the Huffington Post, which has more.
In response, the artist at Beau B D’Or created this image below.
More imagery at at Beau B D’Or.
Ad campaign: ‘Labour old news in Brighton’
The Greens have unveiled an ad campaign aimed at the Labour Party’s annual conference in Brighton.
The area is one of the Green Party’s strongest areas in the country.
The ads will state: “Labour is old news in Brighton” – illustrating a tired-looking Gordon Brown made out of newsprint. Other versions of the ad show Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson.
The advert points out that twice as many people in Brighton (31%) voted Green in the recent European elections as voted Labour (15%) – and that the Conservatives also finished far behind the Greens, on 22%.
The Greens’ campaign director for Brighton Pavilion, Paul Steedman, said there were “going all out to win”.
Caroline Lucas, candidate for Brighton Pavilion, said:
I will be putting forward rigorous policies for more jobs, and better pay for nurses, cleaners and shopworkers, not just City slickers; for an NHS that doesn’t leave people in Brighton – or anywhere else – without healthcare because they can’t afford prescription charges or dental fees; for a rail network that works – and that people can actually afford to use.
I will stand up for all of Brighton’s communities, and we’re going to show that politics can be about a fair deal for everyone.
The ads will be displayed on 14 massive billboards in Brighton.
Greens are moving forward on science
As regular readers of Liberal Conspiracy will be aware there has been an ongoing discussion over the Green Party’s attitude to science. While the Greens may have been ahead of the curve on climate change, writers like Martin Robbins have highlighted the fact that “in spite of their sparkling climate and environmental credentials” in many areas “their policies are far out of step with the scientific community”.
He’s right. Whether it’s the pledge, stem cells or alternative therapies there’s plenty of gut churningly embarrassing policy to choose from. What’s been interesting, as a Green Party member, is that the majority of those I’ve spoken to have been equally shocked at these revelations.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that the key task ahead is not to persuade party members of the need for evidence based policy, most of them are there already, but to actually crack on with the work of a serious review of our science, technology and health policies.
continue reading… »
Libdems attack Labour & Tories on freedoms
Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference today backed a series of radical proposals to reverse the huge erosion of civil liberties that has taken place under the Labour Government.
Conference today passed a motion calling for a number of proposals, including:
· The maximum period for pre-charge detention should be reduced back to 14 days
· The flawed control orders regime to be abolished
· The unfair extradition treaty with the US to be renegotiated
· ID cards to be scrapped, including for foreign nationals
· Surveillance powers to be restricted for use only for the investigation of serious crimes and to require a warrant from a magistrate
· All innocent people to be removed from the DNA database immediately
Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Huhne said:
Labour, and the Tories before them, have taken part in a fire sale of freedoms that have been a cherished part of British life for centuries.
We now live in a country where you can be imprisoned for a month without charge, have your DNA stored on a database regardless of your innocence, have your phone calls and emails intercepted by council busy-bodies and be captured on camera everywhere you go.
The surveillance state has gone too far and it is time to take back power.
Only the Liberal Democrats can be trusted to protect the liberties that generations of Britons have prided themselves on. Our Freedom Bill will begin to restore what’s been lost.
From a press release
Labour spends (nearly) 25.2 TRILLION on quangos!
The cost of taxpayer funded quangos – the shadowy, oddly named things that you don’t really understand but we use to scare you – has hit an incredible £170 billion, or 25.2 TRILLION yen.
An analysis that involved picking numbers from a hat, discarding the small ones, adding the big ones together, then multiplying the answer by the speed of light in a vacuum (C), has revealed they are swallowing up, let’s say, 160 times more money than a certain amount of time ago, or something roughly approximate to that anyway.
In 1997/8, quangos cost a very reasonable £24.1bn, but thanks to Labour cronies given free reign to set up millions more since then, their number and spending have sky rocketed. A guess by our work experience boy puts the number of quangos at 994, while the tea lady says the number of staff employed by them has jumped from 1m a decade ago, to 1.5m today.
The spending on quangos is almost five times the Ministry of Defence’s £35.4billion budget, and billions of times more than my wife spends on the weekly shop.
continue reading… »
Tottenham Tory attacks on ‘Christian values’
The Conservative candidate for the London constituency of Tottenham, Sean Sullivan, has been distributing a leaflet in the area attacking sitting Labour MP David Lammy for not being Christian enough.
A copy of the leaflet was passed on LC. Click on the image below for a larger version.
More Daily Mail bollocks on immigration
There are people out there who still refuse to accept the poisonous role played by Britain’s tabloids when it comes to race and immigration.
Many blogs have repeatedly pointed at the most blatant examples of inflammatory red top churnalism. When a concoction of outright falsehoods and half-baked myths is regurgitated and interiorised by millions of readers everyday, it’s not surprising that social cohesion is going out of the window and right-wing extremism is on the rise.
Yesterday came another spectacular example. The Daily Mail features a long piece by Harriet Sargeant titled ‘Feral youths: How a generation of violent, illiterate young men are living outside the boundaries of civilised society‘.
continue reading… »
Clegg spurns ‘conman’ Cameron’s alliance offer
The Tory leader David Cameron has written a bizarre editorial in today’s Observer, titled A Lib Dem-Tory alliance will vanquish Labour.
He says:
I don’t believe in drawing dividing lines where they don’t really exist. Politics works best when instead of hiding behind false divisions we seize opportunities to work together to get things done. That’s what Nick Clegg and I did with the Gurkha issue.
What he should have said is that I jumped on the bandwagon that Nick Clegg had started even though my party had been screwing over the Gurkhas before New Labour got a chance to.
Anyway, he cites examples where the Tories and Libdems have a similar outlook:
Take the environment. Labour talk a big game but time after time they shrink from making the tough decisions. Never was this more evident than when the government approved the third runway at Heathrow.
…
Take another key progressive issue – civil liberties. This Labour government has shown complete contempt for the rights of the individual. And once again it’s been the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats who have been leading the fight against this.
…
And we both want to scrap plans for ID cards.
…
For many years now, we’ve both been arguing for a radical power shift in our country away from big government and to individuals and communities.
…
There’s barely a cigarette paper between us in all these areas. It’s clear: the real enemy of progressive politics is not the Conservatives and I would not claim it is the Liberal Democrats. In truth, it is the bureaucratic, backward-looking, big state government that Labour epitomises.
He wants them to join a “one national movement that can bring real change”.
Perhaps he’s realised his own polling isn’t as strong as it should be at this stage, and that the Tories are frighteningly reliant on his brand.
Nick Clegg though, to his credit, is not touching Cameron with a bargepole.
Responding to the article, Clegg’s chief of staff, Danny Alexander, said: “David Cameron’s claims would be funny if they weren’t such a shameful attempt to mislead the British people.
“They want tax breaks for millionaires: we want the rich to pay more so we can cut taxes for Britain’s least well off.
“On the environment, we are resolutely opposed to nuclear energy, which is dirty, expensive and will not help against climate change. The Tories back nuclear, and for good measure are siding with climate change deniers in the European parliament.”
That’s a firm rejection then.
Third of Tory voters unconvinced by Tories
David Cameron still has not managed to convince a majority of the country that he is the right man to lead the country.
A Populus poll of voters for The Times yesterday found that almost a third of Tory supporters were voting Conservative purely to remove Labour rather than out of enthusiasm for the Conservatives.
It not only illustrates the lack of enthusiasm for David Cameron, but also for Gordon Brown personally. Polls widely show that he remains more unpopular than the party.
A Populus poll from yesterday also showed that Tory emphasis on cutting spending along wasn’t popular with the public.
38% of voters said they preferred that the deficit was dealt with a “roughly equal split between tax increases and cuts in public spending”.
In contrast, just 21% wanted deficit reductions purely through a fall in public spending, with no tax increases.
Watch: CNN slams Fox News ‘you lie’
After promoting the ‘Tea Protests’ on 9/12, as you would expect any balanced news organisation to do, Fox News took out an ad slamming rival news agencies for not covering them.
But Rick Sanchez from CNN is not happy about it – not only accusing Fox News of lying but also questioning why a news organisation would promote anti-President protests.
In another interview, ‘Tea Party’ leader Mark Williams admitted that a few of the signs aimed at Obama were racist.
But CNN’s Anderson Cooper catches him out calling the American President “an Indonesian Muslim and a welfare thug” earlier.
And yet some believe only a minority of the people involved in these protests are motivated by racism.
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» Revealed: govt to restrict abortion counselling despite Nadine Dorries vote
» Would raising the tax threshold actually help the poorest?
» To win London, Ken Livingstone has to step outside his comfort zone
» This trade agreement with India will destroy thousands of lives
» UK debt hasn’t hit £1 trillion – mostly because of QE
» The benefits of being a “burden” on society
» Today’s economic figures will simply confirm UK’s “lost decade”
» Have Labour realised the election is more than three years away?
» Violence in the office
» Want a more responsible capitalism? Reform how pensions work
» The world is entering the third phase of the crisis, warns ILO
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