Articles with the Tag election

Linky Linky Shminky Pinky Heth – eth – eth – eth – eth – eth – eth – eth – eth! Chris Waddle

Linky Linky
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Bono Estente!

Cheers, Simes!

It’s finally election day, I appear to have a semi-reliable (so far) WiFi connection, I’ve rewritten and reposted the post WordPress ate last night and the hospital telly is allegedly fixed, so fingers crossed for the rest of the day – let’s hope the UK electorate is giving the politicoliterati the collective kick up the arse they so richly deserve. But we won’t know that till the results start rolling in when the polls close at 10pm Greenwich time, so until then here’s some interesting stuff to look at.

Ukip’s loudmouth-in-chief Nigel Farage and his pilot are injured while trailing a a campaign banner from a light aircraft

CNN: Sex slave girls face cruel justice in Iraq:
“

When Fatin found out her father was attempting to sell her, she immediately sought help from the law.

“I ran away from Najaf and escaped to Baghdad where I found my mother and asked her if she knew what my father was planning,” says 22-year-old inmate Fatin, “So she took me to court in Baghdad, we got a lawyer and brought a case against my father.”

Months passed and the lawsuit was never heard. While awaiting justice, Fatin says her father raped her. After the attack, she killed him, was tried, and is currently serving the fifth year of a 15 year sentence.

From astronomy blog Starts With A Bang : A Mysterious Light on the Darkest Night “….say hello to the gegenschein…” and some gorgeous time-lapse video of the Milky Way too.


Mr Benn becomes deputy leader of the Labour Party

I am the Isabella Blow of whiny transplant patients. Much obliged to Unfogged (yet again) for turning me on to The Rosa Parks of Blogs

Everybody is the Rosa Parks of something—or at least the Michael Phelps, Cap’n Crunch, Dick Cheney, Elmer Fudd, or Paris Hilton of whatever. This blog collects examples of the adaptable idiom “X is the Y of Z”, which is a snowclone. Feel free to use these descriptions when discussing your beautiful children, longtime companions, sworn enemies, favorite foods, and elected congressvermin. And if you need even more absurd comparisons, then you’re in luck.

Boneless, slithery and sometimes slimy but always fascinating, Circus of the Spineless No. 50 is up at Arthropoda.

Carry on, Master Bates….From the BBC News election campaign liveblog

Ever wondered if it’s OK to dress as a pirate when you head to the polling station to exercise your democratic right? For a list of the things you can’t do in a polling station, have a have a read of this

Apparently it’s OK to vote with bare manboobs, but not bare actual boobs

“Pyjamas are fine, provided they’re not indecent. And so is a builder who’s stripped to the waist. We want people to vote, we don’t want to turn people away,” he says. But a line does have to be drawn somewhere, he says. “A topless woman wouldn’t be appropriate as voters might get distracted.”

I’d’ve thought the returning officers would be more concerned about naked vote-stealing than naked norks. Sexist bastards.

And for my final flourish – from the Fast Show, it’s Channel 9 neus:

Falia helé, Falia hela, Falia helé, and don’t forget to vote.

Comment of The Day: Brown’s Coming Portillo Moment

Comment of the Day, Gordon Brown, UK elections, UK politics
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I can’t wait for Friday. Why? Because I predict on Friday we’ll all be saying ‘Where were you when Gordon Brown realised he’d lost the election for Labour?”

Because lose it he will, and if you want to know why, read this comment by princesschipchops, in response to Brown’s last-ditch yet futile attempt to recover the Guardianista vote:

Mr. Brown – I voted for you in 1997. I cried when Labour won and finally 18 years of horrendous Tory rule were over. I was not alone. At the time I worked in the private sector in Finance and earned good money but I always believed in fair and progressive taxation – even if it hit me personally in the pocket. I believed in a fairer society and re-distribution. My euphoria did not last long.

Many things soured my view of your party. Firstly when you reneged upon your promise to reform the voting system and instead clung onto FPTP for the sake of staying in power. Then smaller things such as the lack of enforcing employer contributions in the supposed fantastic new Stakeholder pensions. Introducing torturous tax credits instead of just upping the tax free amount to something decent. And then spreading those tax credits to the middle classes who did not need them.

Of course there was Iraq. I marched with millions – yes millions – all of whom were ignored. And so hundreds of thousands have died. So Labour lost my vote.

However if you had taken over and shown a change in direction towards something remotely like socialist or even liberal and progressive policies then I would have given you my vote again.

But you did not. You have continued to court the ground just a smidgen to the left of the Tories – which puts your party pretty to the right in my book. You talk of aspiration and you demonise the poorest and most vulnerable.

Instead of tackling the wholesale destruction of communities blighted by Thatcher you ignored them. And then, in a breathtaking display of inhumanity by your party – blamed them. Suddenly those living in areas suffering long term unemployment were to blame – you spoke in the language of the Daily Mail and other right wing rags.

Worse, you then started to target the sick and disabled, bringing in the most sweeping and destructive welfare reforms ever seen.

I know of people who are ill and vulnerable and who are living in daily fear of the letter from the DWP telling them they are finally up for the ESA medical. People with chronic illnesses who are very sick being told they can work. People on dialysis being told they can work the four days a week they do not recieve it. These are the things that are going on. And Atos staff are being pushed by incentives to do this dirty work for your government.

Mr. Brown people are dying. A woman died in Camden recently because she did not have the help she needed to live even a basic existence. The young girl who recently killed herself over her failure to find a job. The poor mother who saw no way out and took her life and the life of her child.

I am terrified of what the Conservatives will mean for me and for this country but I cannot and will not vote for a party that when it had the chance chose to stick with the Ultra Blairite agenda, neo liberalism and demonizing of the poor.

You turned your back on your base, you betrayed us.

Thursday is going to be an electoral bloodbath – vote fraud permitting – but Brown’s still hanging on like grim death. He has said he’ll resign – but only when when he feels ‘he can’t be an effective leader of the Labour Party any more’.

When’s that then?

When one of his own candidates calls him the worst leader in parliamentary history?

“The loss of social values is the basic problem and this is not what the Labour Party is about,” Manish Sood, the Labour candidate for Norfolk Northwest told the local Lynn News. “I believe Gordon Brown has been the worst Prime Minister we have had in this country. It is a disgrace and he owes an apology to the people and the Queen.”

Election 2010’s going to make that 1997 Portillo moment look like a celebration.

As another Guardian commenter put it, “Go back to your constituencies and prepare for obscurity.”