Palau

Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, washed the t-shirt 23 times, threw the t-shirt in the ragbag, now I'm polishing furniture with it.

How They Suffer

Sleaze, UK politics
Published on

Only the principle that it’s only fair we should see what we paid for, the new shiny technological Telegraph has published a Google Earth gallery of what MP’s bought with their expenses.

Totnes MP Anthony Steen, for example, claimed more than £80,000 from the taxpayer over four years for work on his Devon estate:

Anthony Steen sought help from the taxpayer to inspect 500 trees on his land

To well-off Tories like Steen the allowances scheme must’ve seemed like just another wizard tax wheeze, just like all those other little wizard tax wheezes Tories’d been using from time immemorial to avoid their full tax obligation and maximise their income stream; just business as usual.

But it’s getting quite hot for some MPs now That we know exactly what kind of lavish lifestyles the taxpayers have been funding all this time, and less well-off Tory Nadine Dorries, whose expenses are also being questioned, has been expressing concern that the media pressure and invasion of privacy may lead to a suicide in Westminster:

“People are constantly checking to see if others are OK. Everyone fears a suicide. If someone isn’t seen, offices are called and checked.”

If MPs want to kill themselves, well, that’s their choice – but far from being suicidal, Steen’s openly defiant. We’re all “Just jealous” (I’m sure he meant envious, but whatever) he says, a view I suspect is shared by many MPs of both parties.

One thing I don’t understand. MPs are just as subject to envy as anyone and Labour members are better at it at than most, so why did none of them ever publicly question the lifestyle their colleagues were suddenly living? MPs are acutely status conscious, always checking out their colleagues to see they aren’t one-upped in some way. Why did no-one object to the sudden acquisition of wealth?

I can only conclude that Labour regarded expenses as the licensed union scheme to beat all licensed union schemes, all the Christmases and birthdays of a lifetime rolled into one. At last former civil servants, union officers and junior lecturers could have the lifestyle they always felt they deserved. Qualms? What qualms? The public voted for them, the public must have wanted them to have the money, QED. Besides, the public would probably never know. As usual few Labour MPs considered the long-term effect of their own legislation.

Now their greed’s been exposed, MPs are threatening suicide. I certainly don’t want anyone to die, for heaven’s sake, but I find it hard to have any sympathy for the poor suffering members. They must have known the voters would think what they were doing was greedy and wrong, but they still chose to do it; and those colleagues who said nothing about the suddenly comfortable lifestyles of formerly cash-strapped MPs condoned the wrongdoing by their silence. What else do they expect? Applause?

It’s no use Dorries trying to blame the media for the pressure MPs are under either. She may have some justification; journalists have always known the allowances scheme was a cover, she says, and for the media to be whipping up outrage now is hypocritical, which is true, and it has been common knowledge that MPs were on the make, witness Alan Duncan’s complicit smirk to camera and response of “Great, isn’t it?’ when tackled by Ian Hislop about excessive MPs expenses on Have I Got News For You.

But ‘everyone knew’ is no excuse: journalists couldn’t publish such wide-rangingly explosive accusations without the actual evidence to back it up and MPs fought tooth and nail not to be forced to reveal that evidence to journalists. So rumour was not substantiated. Nowthe evidence is beginning to be revealed and we all know now, not just a coterie of Westminster insiders.That’s where the pressure coming from, not the media, the voters. No complicit smirks from the voters.

MPs have only themselves to blame: they chose to claim what they did because they thought they wouldn’t be found out. What MPs choose to do now is their choice too: they should stop theatrically threatening suicide like a spoiled teenager who’s had their allowance stopped, and act like responsible adults for once, vote no confidence in the current government and force a general election. Maybe then we might let them leave this discredited parliament with a tiny little bit of respect left.

I Almost Wish I Had A Bloodsucker Too

Blogs, Meta
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biteme

Following Josh Marshall’s exposure of New York Times’ high profile columnistMaureen Dowd’s copying of his blogpost (and her subsequent ‘apology for her error’: where have we heard that one recently?), Salon’s Glenn Greenwald describes how mainstream papers and unscrupulous paid journalists prey on the work of mostly unpaid bloggers:

…now that online traffic is such an important part of the business model of newspapers and print magazines, traffic generated by links from online venues and bloggers is of great value to them. That’s why they engage in substantial promotional activities to encourage bloggers to link to and write about what they produce. Beyond that, it is also very common — as the Dowd/Marshall episode illustrates — for traditional media outlets and establishment journalists to use and even copy content produced online and then present it as their own, typically without credit. Many, many reporters, television news producers and the like read online political commentary and blogs and routinely take things they find there.

Typically, the uncredited use of online commentary doesn’t rise to the level of blatant copying — plagiarism — that Maureen Dowd engaged in. It’s often not even an ethical breach at all. Instead, traditional media outlets simply take stories, ideas and research they find online and pass it off as their own. In other words — to use their phraseology — they act parasitically on blogs by taking content and exploiting it for their benefit.

Exactly. A number of times I’ve thought I’ve seen ideas or things from this blog pop up in altered form in the Guardian’s comment pieces. But any similarity is usually too slight to pin down and most probably coincidental, anyhow. Think of the sheer volume of words that are written and published in English online just in the course of one day. There must be constant concurrences of ideas and the subject itself often suggests the tone and words used, so similarities are inevitable. ]

But I did notice it was usually dated in the vicinity of a visit by a particular IP address – we have few enough readers that I do notice that – but again it means little, if anything at all. Though they’re few, we get visits from all over. For all I know the journalist is based in Moldova or Yorkshire, not using a particular network in the City.

Though an unscrupulous hack looking for story ideas to vampire might well trawl low traffic blogs rather than popular ones – because there’s less chance of anyone spotting likenesses, there’s no real way to ever really pin something so slight down.

It’s probably sheer chance, a zeitgeistian thing and the sensible voice in my head tells me I’m being egotistical and paranoid. I should stop being so silly. It’s all very nebulous, and as nice as it would be to think anybody actually read this blog rather than came across it accidentally looking for dancing kitten .gifs, who on earth would want to copy my stuff? It’s just me ranting and there are millions of better bloggers to steal ideas from.

What could I do about it, anyhow? Complain? It’s hardly plagiarism, it’s impossible to prove and probably just my ego anyway.

So there I’ve left it.

However, one TPM blogger was inspired by Maureen Dowd’s plagiarism to go further. Unexpectedly he found he too had a vampire – so he dragged him smoking into the sunlight.

… I started using teh Google on some of my older blog titles. About five minutes later, I found a case of out-and-out, wholesale plagiarism of one of my own pieces.

I wrote the blog entry “Michele Bachmann – Unstable AND Unable” here on TPM on February 20, 2009.

A writer on Salem-News.com, Dorsett Bennett, wrote this article on February 27. To conserve space, I won’t quote it here.

The first half of Bennett’s article is, well, my blog.

More…

You know I really run some of my text or post headers through google too. I wonder what would turn up?

Nothing at all, most likely.

There’s my problem. Any similarity’s entirely in my head. That’s why I haven’t googled and I won’t google any of my writing. I couldn’t take the disappointment. I’ll stick with my nebulous suspicions while leaving the possibility that someone actually read something and liked it enough to steal it it still that, a possibility.

UPDATE:

Soopercali’s comment to Glenn’s post hits the target I was circling around spot-on:

What I’ve seen happen again and again is that the corporate media rips off the context in which bloggers place a story.

Bloggers will take a mainstream story and contrast it with something the original author missed. That’s when the rest of the media (most often, cable news talk shows) lifts the story and acts as if they thought of it themselves. It happens far too often to count.

That’s exactly it.

June General Election?

Uncategorized
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Twitter:

@AMitchellMP

The new speaker will only have a few weeks to get settled in before the election is called.

about 1 hour ago from web in reply to AMitchellMP

nickbrownmp
Nick Brown

We’re Not Having It, Either

Sleaze, UK politics
Published on

noifsnobuts-1

If anyone’s looking for tips on how to move ahead investigating our MPs and their expenses, this old post of mine from 2008 has some good ideas:

I now want the Action Squad to co-ordinate a new drive against the hard core of ‘hard nut’ cases.

That car of theirs? is the tax up to date? Is it insured? Let’s find out.

And have they a TV licence for their plasma screen? As the advert says, ‘it’s all on the database.’

As for their council tax, it shouldn’t be difficult to see if that’s been paid

And what about benefit fraud? Can we run a check?

How could any MP object to such investigation? Those aren’t my words, those are Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s in a speech by to the 2008 ‘Anti-Social Behaviour: We’re not Having It‘ conference.

Of course she was admitting to using the power of the state to harass individuals because they behave in ways the government disapproves of or finds politically inconvenient, not because they’re committing any crime.

But we’re told that if you have nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear, so I’m sure Honourable Members, especially Labour Members , won’t mind such close scrutiny at all.