Since he has previously been elected in Glasgow and London, I don't know if it is so astonishing that George Galloway won a by-election in Bradford. Anyway, if you have a couple of hours to spare ou might enjoy this debate between Galloway and Christopher Hitchens. As Christopher put it: "The man's hunt for a tyrannical fatherland never ends. The Soviet Union let him down, Albania's gone. Saddam's been overthrown. But on to the next, in Damascus." Quite.
The man who was probably the greatest banjo player in history has died, aged 88. Steve Martin says everything that needs to be said here. Here he and Earl are performing the immortal Foggy Mountain Breakdown.
...
Should you receive a jail sentence for being an idiot on Twitter? Apparently so! Liam Stacey, the 21 year old who tweeted "LOL, Fuck Muamba. He's dead" after the Bolton Wanderers' collapse at White Hart Lane is off to spend 56 days in prison for this and other (unpleasant) "racially offensive" tweets. Cue much outrage everywhere.
The boy appears to be a moron, but should that be an imprisonable offence? I cannot see what crime has been committed here, save the trumped-up charge of causing needless and witless offence. Tedious as this may be it ought not to...
Hats-off to Dick Puddlecote and Chris Snowdon for being quick to notice the latest absurdity being considered by the Commons health select committee: plain packaging for alcohol. Yes, really. The committee is holding a consultation on the government's "alcohol strategy" (and how depressing it is to contemplate the very existence of such a thing) as part of which they are soliciting views on a number of control-measures. These include:
Raising the legal drinking age; and
Plain packaging and marketing bans.Come now, you may say, this is only a "listening exercise" conducted by a committee...
A truly repellent piece by Cristina Odone in the Telegraph in which she argues for NHS-rationing by liefestyle and wealth. That's not quite how she puts it, for sure, but her suggestion that (middle-class) pensioners are losing out to (lower-class) fat people and that something should be bloody done about this is the kind of classist call for healthcare rationing that well, let her make her case herself...
[A]ge comes to us all, and is not the result of lifestyle choices. There are plenty of conditions, though, that are the direct result of bad habits, poor diet, and...
Briefly: not content with producing the worst kit in British Olympic history Stella McCartney returns to the well of drivel to tell us that:
..."I was aware of the fact that it's [the Union Flag] something that might be overused in the build-up to the Olympics, in taxis, on cushions and mugs, so I wanted to do something different with it - but that was still respectful of its beauty," McCartney said. "Actually, the colours of the Union Jack are similar to a lot of other flags and the athletes really wanted to feel identifiable as
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1 The unions versus the Department for Education — continued - Peter Hoskin
2 Why reason doesn’t apply to the Eurozone - Fraser Nelson
3 Cameron can no longer laugh off Ed - James Forsyth
4 The unions' lazy opposition to schools reform - Peter Hoskin
5 The strains on the Cameron-Hilton relationship - James Forsyth
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