 |
Breaking Media, Politicians & Celebrities Since 1995Tabloid news for broadsheet readers |
Politicans and world leaders making news and in the news, and spouting hot air
GORDON Brown’s big tent has a soundtrack. It’s the Arctic Monkeys on his iPod. It’s the theme song to Ben 10.
Or is it the last post? Watching Gordon Brown is painful. You just hope the tears hurry up and come and we can all move on.
IT’S Hillary Clinton on line 2. Tell her..:
It’s 2:31 AM. The Democratic Party is sleeping peacefully when it hears its phone buzz on the night stand. It rolls over and sees “Hillary” on the caller ID. It pauses briefly, considering pushing “END” and not dealing with this shit tonight. The thought is appealing but the Democratic Party knows that if it doesn’t take this call, another one is only minutes away.
GET your clogs and giant sausage out for Europe Day:
Meanwhile, the 9th of May is Europe Day. Apparently. And this is what the EU website has to say about it:
“On the 9th of May 1950, Robert Schuman presented his proposal on the creation of an organised Europe, indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations.
This proposal, known as the “Schuman declaration”, is considered to be the beginning of the creation of what is now the European Union.
“Today, the 9th of May has become a European symbol (Europe Day) which, along with the flag, the anthem, the motto and the single currency (the euro), identifies the political entity of the European Union. Europe Day is the occasion for activities and festivities that bring Europe closer to its citizens and peoples of the Union closer to one another“. How delightful.
Europe is not alone in having a day of fervour named for a continent, as it will be Africa Day on the 25th.
SAYS AL Gore, leader of the Al Goreans to the peoples of Ohio: “The planet has a fever.
“If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, ‘well, I read a science fiction novel that tells me it’s not a problem.’ ”
The Wall Street Journal’s readers hear the words, and respond:
Fevers can be a symptom of either a bacterial or viral issue. A doctor can attempt a solution to a bacterial issue, but not a viral one. A virus has to run its course while the body fights it–and a fever is a sign of the struggle to eliminate the virus. Let’s see a scientific consensus that the Earth’s fever is bacteria-related.
And:
Overreacting is common among parents. I remember one morning when my first child was still an infant. Imagine my horror when I discovered that her temperature had risen to 99.5 degrees, almost a whole degree in just under 12 hours. Naturally, I immediately sat down and built a computer model, which clearly projected that by age 30, her temperature was going to be a staggering 19,710 degrees!
Says Gore: “I am Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States of America.
JEFF Zeleny’s memo to the Superdelegates - Obama is taller:
We played by the rules, set by you, the D.N.C. members, and campaigned as hard as we could, in as many places as we could, to acquire delegates. Essentially, the popular vote is not much better as a metric than basing the nominee on which candidate raised more money, has more volunteers, contacted more voters, or is taller.
And he’s first alphabetically…
BORIS Johnson is the new mayor of London, Ken Livingstone is free to spend more time with his newts, sorry, his children, and the Independent’s Johan Hari is making some snese of it all.
“At last – a solution to my Boris blues! I have just forced myself to read the detailed election stats from last Thursday. It seems the media cliché is true: it’s the angry, whiter outer suburbs that elected Boris, out of rage with the congestion charge and council tax. Boris will forever be the mayor of Zones Four to Six, the chief executive of Watford and Bromley and Amersham”.
Watford and Amersham are not in zones 1-6. Residents of those locales were afforded no vote in the election. And you can’t have a democratically elected leader who you didn’t vote for, at least not outside the US and Zimbabwe.
SAYS political nodding head Steve Richards Independet column on Labour’s drubbing in the local elections:
It can be summarised in three words: “Brown is a disaster”
There’s only one word for that: magic darts…
CARLA Bruni, wife to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, La Belle France’s answer to Lempit Opik and his Cheeky Girl, is in conversation with Paris Match magazine.
The Mail listens in and hears Carla mention her trip to Britain.
Says she: “It was like arriving on another planet. Never in my life did I think I would meet the Queen of England.”
And what of that meeting in the Windsors’ rarefied air? She recalls how at Windsor Castle, Her Majesty showed Carla around and opened a door with a cheery: “Here’s your bathroom.”
SAYS Kevin Maguire in the Mirror: “Cocky David Cameron has privately conceded that he’s not as popular as he’d like us to think.”
Says the Mirror’s deputy political editor, Jason Beattie one page on:
“Gordon Brown was yesterday warned by Cabinet colleagues his core voters were being won over by David Cameron.
“One senior minister said former Labour supporters were not just ‘flirting’ with the Tory leader but climbing into bed with him.”
NELSON Mandela is on America’s terrorist watch list:
Nobel Peace Prize winner and international symbol of freedom Nelson Mandela is flagged on U.S. terrorist watch lists and needs special permission to visit the USA. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls the situation “embarrassing,” and some members of Congress vow to fix it.
IT looks like being clean fight in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election as Miss Great Britain Gemma Garrett steps into a swimming pool in her immaculate smalls.
“I am really looking forward to meeting all the voters there and to showing them the power of beauty,” says the Beauties for Britain Party representative, who may care to add the caveat: “weather permitting.”
There’s Garrett in the Mail, her tiara-topped bust alongside a picture of Tamsin Dunwoody, daughter to Gwyneth Dunwoody, who held the contested seat until her recent death.
Belfast’s Miss Dunwoody is blonde, so stands comparison with Xanthus Miss Garrett, who went to school in London and lives in Wales.
Up against her is the Tory’s Edward Timpson (brunette), who, as the Mail says, lives 15 miles from Crewe.
The contest is already “dirty”, says the Mail, as accusations fly as to which candidate is the most local.
Anorak has plotted a graph of the agonists localness, taking into account each of their movements since birth and now delivers the mean distance from Town Hall for each contestant.
NEW Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk says of Poland:
We have no oil and gas. We don’t have high tech. Our centers of development, are far, far behind others. We will never be an extraordinary tourist attraction. Poland is quite a mediocre country in some regards. The only natural resource that we have, and with which we can compete, is freedom.
Schrodinger’s Pig - an open letter to the Labout Party:
Perhaps you’ve forgotten us. We are the tax paying, voting people. Remember the folks who put the X in the box in 1997, and waited with you, fingers and toes crossed, for the results to come in? The ones who sang to D:REAM as Michael Portillo was slumping, shell shocked into the background. We are the ones you said you’d listen to, and would work for. The plan was that you’d go in there, make them behave. Take away the power ball, and give it back to us. We made sure you got the job.
THE Daily Mail’s front-page headline says it all: “RUBBISH TAX WILL BE DUMPED.”
It’s a decent pun on Gordon Brown’s tax on household waste. And the pay-as-you-throw tax will be dumped.
The Mail has the scoop.
Or as the BBC puts it:
Trials of a scheme to tax householders who throw away too much rubbish are to forge ahead, Downing Street has said.
The Mail, of course, didn’t say which rubbish tax Brown would dump, only that he will…
RICHARD Littlejohn versue “pet” Polly Tonybee on the BBC.
Is there a third way?
OPRAH Winfrey leaves Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church becasue “There is the Church of Oprah now”…
TO Barack Obama, ‘we’ means ‘me’.
The notion that the Amazing Obama might be just another politician doing what politicians do seems to have affronted the senator more than any of the stuff about America being no different from al-Qaida and the government inventing AIDS to kill black people. In his belated “disowning” of Wright, Obama said, “What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I’m about knows that – that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the – the commonality in all people.”
Funny how tinny and generic the sonorous uplift rings when it’s suddenly juxtaposed against something real and messy and human. As he chugged on, the senator couldn’t find his groove and couldn’t prevent himself from returning to pick at the same old bone: “If what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough. That’s – that’s a show of disrespect to me.”
And we can’t have that, can we?
