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.

Dead Party Walking

Corruption, New Labour, UK politics
Published on

:
After so many crushing blows, so much self-immolation and such blatant, unbridled corruption you’d think that surely by now it has to be all over for New Labour.

But the battered and bloodied corpses of the cabinet just keep twitching. Nothing seems to kill them off. What’ll it take? Do we have to get out the flamethrowers?

The latest news from Guido Fawkes, who did the digging, is that the party’s spin doctor, epitome of arrogance and ‘psychotherapist’ , and now blogger Derek Draper (he’s author of New Labour’s pisspoor attempt at copying Kos or Obama’s netroots campaign, LabourList) is an unprincipled quack who may well have lied by omisssion about his credentials, pretending to have received a U.Berkeley MA when he actually got it part-time from a weekend school in Berkeley…

How does that song* go?

Aneurin Bevan,
Your Party is dead
And the time for a new one is nye.
Would the last person left
Please turn out the light
New Labour, just fuck-off and die.

*Chorus of ‘Guy Fawkes’ Table’, by Atilla The Stockbroker

from his LPBarnstormer on Eastside Records

UPDATE

Draper replies on his personal blog to Guido’s allegations :

To clarify this I attended the Doctoral programme at the Wright Institute that lasts, on average, five to six years. Within that programme students qualifying receive an M.A. at the end of the third year. At that point I had completed a training that was very intense compared to UK psychotherapy trainings, and had undertaken many hundreds of supervised clinical hours, so returned to the UK to set up my practice. I always describe myself as a psychotherapist, have never claimed to be a clinical psychologist, although my degree is, in fact, an M.A. in Clinical Psychology.

[…]

However, it now seems clear that this episode was a clumsy attempt to smear me, concocted by Guido Fawkes and fed by him to David Hencke at the Guardian. A journalist I have hitherto always admired and respected. I think he was led astray by Guido Fawkes and made a genuine mistake. I did, however, as the Independent reports today, give him a bit of a rollocking when I saw him yesterday.

To recap: I have never said to anyone or written anywhere that I attended U.C. (University of California) Berkeley. The fact that Hencke himself wrote a “fact box” stating I had, which I never saw, was his mistake not mine. I attended the Wright Institute, a well respected graduate school for clinical psychology where after 3 years of full time study, I received an M.A. in Clinical Psychology. I have always said I studied in Berkeley not at Berkele

Guido in his turn claims more evidence of Draper’s mendacity is forthcoming.

This one will run and run: too many people loathe Draper to let it go. He is New Labour in a nutshell and his current trials are giving anyone who loathes them and him a great deal of justified satisfaction.

Tories and IT, A Match Made in Hell

Funny, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust, UK elections
Published on 2 Comments on Tories and IT, A Match Made in Hell

“Ah, but is is she one of us”?*

This story about London Tories shooting themselves in both feet from Recess Monkey will drive anyone who’s still hoping the Conservatives under Cameron will one day step up, get rid of the current incumbents and just bloody fix things to hair pulling despair:

Carla Jones had a couple of hundred “friends” on Facebook. She’s a self-declared Conservative and was a member of various Conservative supporting Facebook groups.

That was until http://www.londonspinnews.com outed her as an under cover Mirror journalist looking for “dirt” on Conservatives’ Facebook pages.

Mass defriending, much twittering, then ritual denunciation on Tory blogs led to Carla Jones being subjected to a deluge of abuse and threats of that special, conservative kind:

This weekend a flood of CCHQ Press Office emails and text messages warned Tory politicians and activists nationwide of the sedition of Carla Jones and called on them to “de-friend” her or on Facebook.

Tory blogger of record Iain Dale posted a warning to readers, as did the usually level headed Shane Greer. A number of Tories changed their Facebook statuses to messages like, “…warns all CF members that “Carla Jones” is not a Tory at all, but an underhand hack from the Daily Mirror!”

Oooh, those pesky meedja whores, they get everywhere. Hurrah for London Spin News, fearlessly exposing the Evil MSM’s minions! Ah, but wait … fancy that, London Spin News turns out to be… a Tory PR guy’s fake news site, which he writes using a pseudonym from the ‘dole scum’ comedy Shameless. So droll! How they must’ve chortled at the Conservative Club bar!

But fair enough, no one likes a spy in their party and surely it’s reasonable enough to warn your fellow party members, isn’t it, even if you are a lying git yourself? Ah, but it gets worse…

Recess Monkey actually knows Carla Jones. We met at a Conservative Way Forward event at Tory Conference last year. And amusingly, she’s not only nothing to do with the Daily Mirror, but she’s a former CCHQ staffer…

Steven describes himself as a “former Vice Chairman at Exeter University CF where he quadrupled the membership and ran the 2005 election campaign across campus. He is an experienced PR consultant specialising in technology, business and financial services.”

So “experienced PR consultant” Steven George is using a fake ID to trigger the bullying and ostracism of a young woman on the grounds that she is using a fake ID – and in the process accusing the Daily Mirror of using underhand tactics to gain access to Tory facebook profiles…

A young woman who’s actually a colleague. Oops. It takes a perverse kind of PR talent to shoot both feet with both barrels at the same time.

Go read the whole thing; what I’ve quoted gives only the merest flavour of the bumbling incompetence. I’d laugh if it weren’t so bloody tragic; this shower of useless hoorays and failed bankers may just get elected, not because of but in spite of their lack of policies. We’re past caring, just get rid of Labour, enough already.

But if the Tories can manage to attack and destroy one of their own best activists with Facebook alone, can you imagine what they could do in power someone they don’t like, given control of RIPA or Contact Point? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

[*Explanation for those not quite so ancient as me]

Is This Really All They’ve Got Left?

'08/12 Election, Uh? WTF?, Wingnuts
Published on

There’s a desperate sound of barrel-scraping coming from Don R. Melquist at American Thinker :

Pigeons, Rats, and Democrats

[…]

Take a countywide distribution map of the common pigeon whose freeloading habits I have detailed. Superimpose that distribution map over a map of the United States that shows (also color-coded) the counties of this country that voted for Al Gore in the election of 2000 and for John Kerry in 2004 and for Barack Obama. The maps overlap. They are almost an identical match.

I don’t think that it is necessary to enlarge on this, but will add a bonus: The Norway Rat, also non-native to the United States, is also a disease spreading, filthy animal that thrives only in large metropolitan areas. The distribution map of the Norway rat is almost identical to that of the pigeon and, hence, that of the counties that voted for Gore, Kerry, and Obama. This is not one of those interesting coincidences that just happen to be. There is a direct relationship between those birds and animals that are freeloading parasites and those parts of the country that overwhelmingly vote Democrat.

More..