Hiding their light under a bushel

The fight for the Republican nomination for next year's US Presidential election is hotting up. Current darling of the GOP faithful is the batty pizza chef Herman Cain. His brand of quick fix, easy answer, low tax, ignore the rest of the world mentalness reminds them fondly of their previous slow-witted hero Dubya.

Cain's lack of interest in countries to the east or west of his country is best articulated with his pre-emptive tirade against journalists earlier this year;

"When they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I'm going to say, you know, I don't know. Do you know?"


I don't know Herman.


However the rantings of Herman aren't my main concern at the minute. I was wondering if there was some way of finding out how the wing-nuts at the Mail feel about a second term for Obama. Unfortunately they're keeping their position on the matter quiet. I'll keep digging and if I find a chink in their armour and a glint of what their opinion might be come the election I'll let you know.

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My cousin's dog's aunt says

Richard Dawkins has been making some seemingly controversial remarks about blinkered religious Muslim beliefs in the Times Educational Supplement.

In his opinion of all the faith schools he's come across the Muslim ones are the worst for passing off their creation myths as hard fact. This is then carried onto university where the poor under-graduates are so shaken by evolutionary theory that they have to walk out of lectures.

Strong stuff, and worthy of a story. What would make a worthwhile article would be perhaps contacting the professor and asking him if he'd like to expand on his thoughts for the wider, and less niche, audience provided by the Mail.

Unless you're lazy arsed reporter Hugo Gye. In this case you'll copy and paste the raciest phrases from the TES and then quote the Daily Telegraph as either their take on the issue is key, or it happened to be nailed to the back of the door while he was ruminating in trap number three.

World class reporting that allows him to get his required copy in in-full whilst leaving plenty of time for buttock scratching and bacon sarnies. Keep up the good work Hugo.

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Holiday

Off on holiday for a couple of weeks. I'm pretty sure you'll cope admirably without my inane rants for a fortnight.

While I'm away can I recommend you try the properly researched and well written blogs on the left. It'll be a refreshing change from the barely thought-out stuff I usually offer.
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J'accuse Peter

In his Sunday Mail column this week 50's Teddy-boy fan Peter Hitchens dares people to accuse him of 'moral panic'. Why - in this specific case - would you want to accuse the perennially grumpy old sod of moral panic you may ask? Well Peter does his best to regale us of a horrible case of persecution, bullying and intimidation that were heaped upon the undeserving Fiona Pilkington and her daughter.

These horrendous events are a clear demonstration that the world has slid into a mire of lefty lawlessness with benefit baddies running amok. His main stab at a point revolves around the fact that these heinous type of events did not occur when there was fear of the law. He seems to think that the past was a country bereft of evil, although if you do a quick search you'll find plenty of cases of people coming forward with their horror stories of abuse and harm inflicted on the vulnerable by people in positions of power; nuns & priests for instance.

Perhaps Peter pines for an age where there seems to be much less vicious crime purely because it's reported less. Hear no evil, speak no evil so there can't be any evil?

That's not Peter's view of course he believes that it's a fear or reluctance of intervention by authorities that allows offenders to get away with their actions. As he paraphrases them "We can do anything we want..." Why can they do anything they want? Surely because no one is stopping them.

A little further down his rant - past a piece whimsically praising stay at home mothers and pinafores - he tells a tale of a stroll through modern Britain, presumably taken by himself. In this stroll he comes across a "Menacing young man" who looks like he's going to attack a group of young women with pushchairs. Does Peter - a man in a position of authority, a respectable pillar of the community, a guiding light and example to millions of readers - intervene and try to protect these young women vulnerable to attack. Well you'd imagine he would, he spent a few hundred words not far up the page criticising a lack of intervention, but of course he doesn't. Apparently there's no sign of authority and he's not interested in helping. He's not interested in making the country better, he's not interested in looking out for the weak, he's not interested in challenging offenders.

He is interested in spying on a scene of potential violent crime, writing about this as an increasing amount of evidence of 'moral panic' in modern Britain and pocketing a big fat cheque for the privilege though.

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A beautiful mind (set)

Over at Angrymob Uponnothing welcomed the unveiling of the Mail's collection of Bloggers grouped together under the heading "Rightminds" - I did wonder what you called a group of reactionary drama queens and now we know. I thought a 'Horror' or maybe a 'Lynching' were more likely candidates, apparently not.

They have brought together some of the oddest minds in journalism to eek out bilge, fear, uncertainty and doubt into an undeserving world, but - believe it or not - this isn't the A-team they're fielding.

I've been lucky enough to get hold of a early draft of Simon Heffer's wanted list that he dropped onto Paul Dacre's desk. Unfortunately in these days of extravagant transfer fees and ill-timed deaths he couldn't quite pull together the Championship winning team that could compete with Fox news - but his fantasy team is below, imagine what we could have won.

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Is it raining?

Tax is a kick in the teeth, most people think this. You work your fingers to the bone, sat on your fat arse in an office, then pay day comes around and some of your hard-earned is creamed off to spend on killing God-bothering-nut jobs in Afghanistan. Of course most of the tax actually gets spent keeping the street lights on or having an ambulance on stand-by for when I decide Ice Hockey is actually the sport for me. So based on this you suck it in, write off your losses and get on with your life.

Canadian Can-Can

Unless you can afford a PR company. In which case you get them to round up a few tame academics - who will do anything for a sniff of cash and almost anything for an undergraduate with a nice smile and a lack of morals - and get them to tell the world that the 50p tax rate is making the country unbearable to live in and repelling free floating wads of cash from landing here. Making the rich pay this high rate of taxation on their well deserved pay-packets is driving them out of the country and raising a barrier to stinking rich foreigners coming over and building business empires here.

To be honest who cares if they leave and who cares if they don't come, neither will really happen. The real driving force of the economy in this country is the small & medium sized businesses and it's rare their owners and employees would come close to earning the £150,000 pa required to be taxed so heavily. The people who take home this sort of size pay packet tend to be working in the Service / Finance sector and so don't add much to the real economy - but keep the coke dealers in The City busy (I'm looking at you Chancellor...)

Hookers & Coke - not an upper class
department store

 The few people actually paying the estimated £2.7bn this tax raises feel hard done by and so, after getting very angry and beating their Au Pairs with an ivory golf club, came up with the brilliant idea to tell us peasants that if they continue to have to suffer this inhuman taxation regime it'll actually be worse for us in the long run. The economy will continue to fall because of it and the only jobs available will be part-time trainee floor moppers at Kansas Fried Chicken.

This is known as pissing down your back and telling you it's raining.

As a youth I used to work behind the bar in a working men's club - the working part is ironic I think - during the tombola (Not bingo, tombola) I used to contemplate how many pints of lager I'd earned so far that night. It worked out about a pint an hour so I used to count down the minutes till another Carling Black Label had been earned. This impressed on me the importance of how much per hour you're paid and therefore I wondered how much these hard done by folk take home per hour after the tax man's had his cut, for all the fuss they've kicked up it must be a significant drop, a real belly blow to the take home, when they hit the magic number. So I did a smashing graph showing how much people take home per hour after tax & NI compared to their gross annual income. What I was expecting was a huge kink in the curve at £150,000 justifying their cry baby antics. What I got was a straight line and proof that they're just greedy bastards.

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He's banking on it

Uncle Vince has started the day off telling the world and their wife that when the Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) makes its recommendation on ways to stop Mr Barclays taking the country to the cleaners again the government should jump on it like a footballer on a Page 3 model.

That's fine for a Lib Dem to say that, they need to keep vegans onside not bankers, but it seems he's wound up the money lenders anyway and they've released the big dogs.

John pleasures a tiny
invisible man

The head of the CBI - John Cridland says it's madness to ask the banks to change their ways. After all they've learnt their lessons and promise to not do it again, fair enough should we leave them on the naughty step? The British Bankers association said it would be better for all (their members) if the reforms were put off - at least until everybody had forgotten about them. It also seems David Cameron has been given a prod in the right direction as it seems any suggestions will be implemented after he's had the funding to fight the next election.











Of course big DC - when he's worrying about putting jobs at risk - is thinking about his own and not about your shelf-stacking get-rich-quick-scheme.

The Telegraph, home of tax dodging slave owning bankers since 1979 - has pre-empted the ICB's report by publishing it's own top ten banking bugbears. The ten things that anger the Telegraph and its readers about banks, bankers and other financial shenanigans  are shown in the screenshot here...

Yep nothing to see here. The bankers are all right, now give them your money.



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