Pass the sick bucket, Alice…..

Letters from two senior back benchers published in today’s Daily Telegraph lay bare the growing sense of frustration among MPs of all parties with the work of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority.
They were written in response to an article Andrew McDonald, the chief executive of IPSA, and a speech by Sir Ian Kennedy, its chairman, who both defended the new system and accused MPs of failing to accept the “cultural change” needed following the expenses scandal.

MPs are frustrated and angry about the new expenses system, claiming it is bureaucratic and slow.

Tough.

It might well be bureaucratic and slow – just like the taxation and pension claim systems the political class have foisted on us for years so they are getting a taste of their own medicine.

The chief moaners are Labour MP Denis MacShane and Tory Michael Fabricant, both well established windbags and classic examples of the rentier class who inhabit the lower reaches of political life.

At a time when hundreds of thousands of people are either unemployed or on short time or reduced wages, when small businesses everywhere are struggling to survive the sight of MacShane, Fabricant and other assorted blowhard MPs whingeing about their expenses is about as welcome as a fee limit proposal at a lawyers convention.

Get over it – or, even better, get out of Parliament and find yourselves a real job….

Actually her State Dept officials said it but who is going to check the fingerprints?

We have received isolated reports that racial prejudice may have contributed to the arrest or detention of some African-Americans travelling in Spain. Recently, two African-American U.S. Government employees were questioned by police in Barcelona for no apparent reason. One was detained and suffered physical injuries in the process.

The US State Dept’s advice to Americans visiting Spain had until recently included the above warning about racism in Spain. But, in an amazing overnight turnaround, as a result of Michelle Obama’s arrival in Marbella, the people of Spain have sloughed off their racism.

The evidence for this Damascene conversion?

The racism warning has been removed from the State Dept’s website. Clearly Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has decreed that Spain can now no longer be regarded in the same way as the Tea Party.

Which means that the First Lady’s discreet and understated visit to Marbella (4 days, 40 friends, 60 rooms at about $300 per room per night) can go ahead with the NAACP seal of approval.

Until recently Marbella and the surrounding area was known as the Costa del Crime because it appeared to be very popular with members of Britain’s criminal fraternity. As a result it developed a reputation for tackiness and tasteless displays of newfound wealth. Clearly the town hopes Michelle Obama’s visit will transform that image although not every local is convinced….

Click here to see pictures of the understated visit.

Click here to gush with HuffPo.

Click here to see another famous American woman’s idea of a holiday…….(a clue – she is in the Time 2010 top ten of people who most affect our world)

And click here to discover Allahpundit’s take on it at Hot Air…

BTW, perhaps Mrs O and her bodyguards could look out for these chaps while they are sipping their cocktails……

Since April 20th – Animals found dead but not covered in oil: 1,675 birds, 82 turtles, 53 dolphins

the oil will destroy fewer marshes than the airboats deployed to clean up the oil.

the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean

Media hacks eager to send back pictures of suffering wildlife are complaining about having nothing to photograph and/or report. Clean up personnel are spending more time looking for something to clean than actual cleaning.  It was known right from the start that this was light crude oil and, since the Gulf has experienced many natural oil seepages over several millennia, it is teeming with oil eating microbes.

This spill is the equivalent of less than a drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. For all but a tiny bit of the Gulf, it will be back to normal within a year.
The beaches will be normal before Christmas, fishing will be back in two months and the shellfish industry in two years. It’s not that the oysters and clams are poisonous, it’s just that they won’t taste very nice.

Could it be that the dangers of the spill were exaggerated by both politicians and the media?
Surely that cannot be true.
Why on earth would they want to do that?

Also – why isn’t the US company  running and operating the rig that was crippled by an explosion that killed eleven men receiving as much heat from Obama and his Democrat dominated Congress?

Could it be that there is more political mileage in grandstanding against a British company whose HQ is in England than publicly humiliating an American company based in Switzerland?

I think we should be told……..

Only joking….we have enough to do sorting out our own deficit…..

On the surface just a regular business-as-usual contribution to the ongoing Clinton hagiography at the BBC.

In a gushing, slobbering, sycophantic piece of Hello style candyfloss on the BBC website Katie Connolly goes all Sylvie Krin over the Clintons and their daughter’s wedding.

Moreover, the Clintons are icons of a different, seemingly more youthful time in America’s history – a pre 9/11 era when the country wasn’t weighed down with wars, bulging deficits and billowing oil leaks.
Chelsea is a reminder of that time, and people feel invested in the life of that young girl who held her parents hands through their darkest personal days

Darkest personal days? Great therapy codespeak for this, methinks….

The Clintons, of course, are part of a select few that belong to the BBC’s Royal Family (Arafat, Castro, Nehru, Tony Benn etc) who are always treated with reverence and their transgressions initially minimised then airbrushed out of the “narrative”.

If it was a Palin or a Bush daughter getting married you can be guaranteed there would be plenty of veiled (and not so veiled) sneers and quotes from vitriolic haters (think Thatcher) and not so much of this.

But perhaps another part of this puffball is more sigificant….

But mostly, the wedding details have been overshadowed by debates over the guest list – specifically which of Bill and Hillary’s celebrity pals will make the cut.

President Obama ended speculation that he would attend by telling the ladies of US talk show The View that he didn’t receive an invitation.

Famous friends like Oprah Winfrey or Barbra Streisand may appear, but the Clintons have carefully clarified that each of the 400 guests must have a personal connection to the bride and groom.

Remember how the Romans tried to discover the will of the gods by slicing up a chicken and the Vikings did it by reading stones?  And Kremlinologists looked at a man’s placement on a podium overlooking Red Square?  Well, the American left elite sends it’s signals via the media elite (WaPo, NYT etc) and sometimes, oddly enough, this is bounced through the UK’s BBC because, as any fule kno, there is a symbiotic relationship between the great and the good of both nations.

The BBC was always heavily into the Clintons so it must have been with a heavy heart that, alongside the US MSM, it entered into Obama’s styrofoam temple but, of course, the magnetism of the symbolism was too powerful to resist. However, now the columns of hopenchange are beginning to crack and the President is  revealed as the Daley machine hack he really is,  the Beeb is perhaps getting the message from certain salons in New York and Washington that the flirting needs to end and it’s time to return to true love – and what better way to convey the  black spot  than by an oblique comment by the BBC upon not being allowed to rub shoulders with Oprah Winfrey at the wedding of the century……

The plot thickens……..

Just like everyone else in these hard times the Clintons and the Kerrys are keeping things lean and mean….

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Greg Sargent at The Washington Post berated The Daily Caller for implying that Journolist might have been a left wing platform for message coordination. Nonsense says he – founder Ezra Klein emphasised to members that it was a discussion list and any idea about message coordination was just not kosher.

No doubt that is what Klein said and there is no reason to doubt his sincerity when he said it.

But Klein also said that he felt that the list should only contain journalists, not political operatives and he took great pains to exclude such people though “it’s possible I missed one”

The Daily Caller made a discovery…

In fact, he did. Jeff Hauser wrote scores of posts on Journolist during the time he was managing the New Jersey congressional campaign of Democrat Dennis Shulman. Hauser didn’t do much to hide his affiliation. Indeed, his posts on Journolist were signed, “Campaign Manager, Shulman for Congress,” followed by the campaign’s web address. After the election, Hauser took positions at a 527 group and a political action committee. He never left Journolist.

One of his posts arrived just before a McCain/Obama debate

The single biggest thing journolist can do is to lay the analytical framework within the media elite necessary for an actual Obama debate win to be viewed as such by a sufficient proportion of media elites that voters know it was a win.
Of course, this only works if Obama does as we expect (and McCain is a terrible debater, btw).
………
Journolist’s greatest challenge is to make sure an actual win by Obama translates into winning the battle for political impact.

Fairly explicit, wouldn’t you say? Yet The Caller discovered that no journolist questioned the nature of that post – not even Greg Sargent.

In the conversation that followed Hauser’s post, not one Journolister expressed surprise or disapproval. No one rebuked Hauser for telling journalists how to carry water for a politician. Despite the group’s supposedly “very strict” ban on political operatives and explicit partisan coordination, Hauser remained a member of Journolist for almost two more years.

Not a single dog barked.

Time to call in Sherlock Holmes – or Ed Morrisey?

It’s official – the British government has officially endorsed the body of actress Christina Hendricks, who plays foxy secretary Joan Harris in the Madison Avenue 1960s ad agency saga Mad Men as the ideal for every woman.

“Christina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous,” says Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone, who held up Hendricks’ outline as an ideal shape for women.

Highlighting the “overexposure” of skinny models and the impact they have on body image among young people, Ms Featherstone went on: “We need more of these role models. There is such a sensation when there is a curvy role model. It shouldn’t be so unusual.”

Of course as a mere male I could not possibly offer an opinion on this matter except to point out that when I first met the lovely Mrs P in the early sixties she was wearing a dress very similar to this and she wore it extremely well….

Perhaps I could call on Little Richard to provide a more rigorous rationale…

If she walks by, the men folks get engrossed
If she winks an eye, the bread slice turn to toast
If she got a lot of what they call the most
The girl can’t help it, she was born to please
And if she’s got a figure made to squeeze

Any suggestion that I am making a feeble attempt to ingratiate myself with Robert Stacy McCain via Rule 5 will be emphatically denied by my therapist…..

Aaron Guerrero, cub reporter at The Daily Caller, gets all wee wee’d up over Governor Palin’s remark to his adult supervisors at the website that the media was “a key reason she decided not to finish out her term as governor.”

Sensing the chance of getting on the Couric Award For Balanced Journolism shortlist he plays his gotcha! moment to perfection.

For someone who relishes the fight in the public arena, this is a rather startling admission. One that seems wildly out of sync with a political exterior that has her somewhere between a pitbull with lipstick and a Mama Grizzly.
By her own admission, Palin let the press play a key role in her decision to pull the plug on her governorship, sparking new questions over her toughness and ability to handle the pressures that come along with elective office. But more importantly she may have raised alarming concerns over a future presidential run.

“By her own admission”….he’s smelling red meat…

The rest of his piece is standard “she can’t take the heat stuff” because she so far she has not “indulged the alphabet networks”. This makes young Aaron question her viability as a potential resident of the White House. You get the feeling he is implying that Barack Obama throughout 2008 was facing hard nosed interrogation from hostile and suspicious TV pundits and thousands of keen-eyed hacks poured into Chicago to do a forensic audit on his background and experience – so why should she complain?

Aaron obviously has ambitions to become a journalist so Palin’s undisguised disdain for the media clearly offends..

From California to Maine, most are aware of her broad based contempt for the journalistic profession, and whether it be on Fox News, or through Twitter and Facebook, she uses every venue at her disposal to remind her supporters of how raw a deal she got, and continues to get, from the “elites” in the media.

Trouble is, young Aaron, your own article is prime evidence that Governor Palin is completely justified in being contemptuous of many “journalists” – indeed some might question your own claim to be a “journalist” because you obviously have failed to exhibit any evidence of a real journalist’s key skill – the use of shoeleather.

A proper hack would have actually gone back to the video of Palin’s resignation speech and watched it. Then said hack would have riffled through the pages of her book and read the pages pertaining to her resignation. Or, even if she or he didn’t have the energy to actually do some investigation they could still have referenced the actual article from which our youthful aspirant culled his “gotcha” quote.

Palin says the feeding frenzy culture of the media galvanized her political opponents in Alaska. “The media incentivized political opponents to file false ethics charges and expensive, wasteful, frivolous lawsuits against me, my family and my staff, in an obvious attempt to destroy us,” Palin said.
When those lawsuits — which Palin said she won, but the media didn’t cover — caused legal costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, Palin had finally had it, she said.
“I said, ‘Enough. Political adversaries and their political friends in the media will not destroy my State, my administration, nor my family. Enough.’ I knew if I didn’t play their game any longer, they could not win. I would not retreat, I would instead reload, and I would fight for what is right from a different plane.”

Sorry, young man, but you still have an awful lot to learn before you can call yourself a journalist. Why not buck the trend and put a few years experience on a local newspaper under your belt? Go to Utah and do some legwork for The Richfield Reaper. There’s not much glamour in digging deep into a story about the Monroe City Sewer Project but it will teach you about the significance of the mundane and the importance of routine investigation at a microcosmic level.

So, Aaron, to paraphrase your own verdict on Palin, one might say this about you

Aaron Guerrero’s press performances in 2010, fairly or unfairly, might lead to his undoing, as perceptions of his being severely underqualified for the position he is pursuing takes hold.

Don’t take it personally, son – we’ve all been adolescents ourselves and messed things up by acting pretentious. Come back to the big league in ten years time and you can then mix it up with the grown ups….

The slightly unbalanced scales of justice….

• They caused the death of an elderly grandfather as he stood in the street with his 3 year old granddaughter so that they could laugh about it later as they replayed the assault on their phones. Though given a nominal sentence of four years they will be out by next year.

• A jobless lorry driver who pulled off an “elaborate and outrageous scam” to sell London’s Ritz Hotel for £250m has been jailed for five years.