Friday morning catch-up (part 2)

Even more Firefox tabs that need closing.

1) The Spectator thinks that David Cameron is heading towards a 'crunch with Europe':

'No contraceptive is 100 per cent effective: not even if it’s called Oliver Letwin. For that degree of assurance, you need the snip. That is to say: an end to Brussels diktats once and for all. Either out of the EU; or inside it, operating under the original 1975 free trade deal alone. That, I suspect, will be the end result. A crunch is coming. The only question is how long we have to wait.'

I wish I shared their hope but I have severe woriies about David Cameron's soundness on this as on many policies.


2) ABC News decided to look at Barack Obama's two year record on Egypt, a fact-checking exercise. There's a lot, here's one part:

'As ably covered by the Washington Post’s Fact Checker – and former State Department reporter – Glenn Kessler, the Obama administration was far more quiet on the need for Egypt to engage in serious political reform, at least publicly, than the Bush administration.

Perhaps more glaringly, while the Bush administration tried to directly fund civil society in Egypt – pro-democracy groups and the like – the Obama administration changed that policy and cut funding significantly, ending an effort to provide direct funding to democracy groups not “approved” by the Egyptian government, and reduced funding in the budget for programs to promote civil society groups.

As Kessler writes: Bush’s final budget “proposed spending $45 million on democracy and good-governance programs in Egypt, including more than $20 million on promoting civil society…But that nascent effort was largely shelved when the Obama administration took office. For fiscal year 2009, the administration immediately halved the money for democracy promotion in Egypt; the civil society funds were slashed 70 percent, to $7 million. Meanwhile, money that was to be given directly to civil society groups was eliminated and the administration agreed to once again fund only those institutions that had Mubarak's seal of approval.”'

3) The Israel Project printed some photos that we in the West are never normally shown - of Israelis injured by rockets fired at them from Gaza. Here's one of' Five-year-old Lior Ben Shimmel who was seriously wounded when a rocket directly hit her neighbor’s home, where she was playing Jan. 16, 2008'

4) The Liberal Media's hate figure, Sarah Palin, Tweeted:

'Media: ask “Will Obama Admin exert as much ‘constructive’ pressure on Iranian govt to change & allow freedom ~ as they just did for Egypt?”'

The BBC and US Media appeared not to notice or ask the perfectly sensible question.


5) Working Class Tory doesn't think that the UK is a shining example of multiculturalism working in the past:

'British history has not been a successful one - if you're looking to find harmonious relations between the countries of the British Isles. We haven't a history of multi-culturalism, we've a history of ethnic and religious war. To pretend otherwise would have very few points of contact with reality. '

He even explains why Enoch Powell felt he had to speak out about immigration, of course quoting enoch Powell immediately removes your right to be listened to (according to the British 'left') but I am not of the left:

'Many, many conservatives oppose multi-culturalism and mass immigration precisely because when you have (or in the case of immigration, import) lots of different, and competing, communities, they will inevitably clash. Enoch Powell was motivated to speak out on immigration because he saw the atrocities that took place during the partition of India and feared something similar could happen in this country. '

6) The centre for Security Policy thinks that Barack Obama keeps bad company:

'President Obama’s trusted circle has been, if anything, even more problematic. For example, Mr. Obama has consorted with people who are revolutionaries, communists, liberation theologians and Islamists. Some have even been appointed “czars” in his administration.

At the moment, though, we must be concerned not only with who Barack Obama considers his friends, but with those who deem him to be one of theirs: The record suggests he must be seen as a “Friend of Shariah.”

How else can we explain the seeming inconsistency between, on the one hand, the president’s indifference to demonstrations in Iran last year that were vastly larger and more sustained than those to date in Egypt, and, on the other, his insistence after a week’s worth of protests in the latter that there be nothing less than complete “regime change,” starting immediately?

The only obvious common denominator is that, in both cases, Mr. Obama is pursuing policies favored by those who adhere to the repressive, supremacist and virulently anti-American Islamic political-military-legal program its adherents call shariah. In Iran, shariah is already the law of the land, ruthlessly enforced by the Shiite theocrats of Tehran. In Egypt, the Mubarak regime’s failure faithfully to enforce shariah is one of the principal impetuses behind the Iranian mullahs’ Sunni wannabe counterparts, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB or, in Arabic, Ikhwan).'

7) Someone, and I forget who, has got very excited by a court decision on Council Tax.


8) The Mail reported that

'Axing speed cameras has caused road deaths to FALL

Road deaths dropped 14 per cent in three months while speed cameras were being axed or switched off.

Fatalities over a year fell 21 per cent to a record low, Department for Transport figures show.'

Why is anyone surprised? I have predicted this for a while.


9) Terry Smith thinks that ex-Labour Minister and friend of Gordon Brown, Baroness Shriti Vadera, doesn't really understand what inflation is:

'When the panel was asked about inflation Shriti Vadera replied:

‘If you strip out the inflation that is being driven by essentially emerging markets, the scramble for resources, whether its food, water and commodities, and any other type of one off event like VAT increases, that the underlying inflation levels are not yet at any point that we should be worrying about.’

To which I retorted: 'I find that if you strip out the bad stuff, things are always quite good!'. The idea that there is no inflation if you ignore the things where the price is going up has a rather obvious flaw.'

10) PC World magazine explained

'Get Internet Access When Your Government Shuts It Down
Does your government have an Internet kill-switch? Read our guide to Guerrilla Networking and be prepared for when the lines get cut.'