UK New Era Keystone Cops trip on own e-mails in pathetic case v Michael Savage

• Gordon Brown and David Miliband shamed:

Executive Editor, Radio Free Europe, John O'Sullivan: "THE latest twist in the saga of how the

• British government banned talk-radio host Michael Savage from entering Britain is straight out of the sitcom "Yes, Prime Minister,"

in which a Machiavellian civil servant, Sir Humphrey, repeatedly manipulates PM Jim Hacker into foolish decisions with subtle arguments that Jim never quite grasps.

Jim: "So we're banning this fellow Savage from Britain because he's a dangerous Islamic terrorist, are we?"

Sir H: "Not quite, PM. We're banning him because he isn't a dangerous Islamic terrorist."

Jim: "I see -- No, I don't."

Sir H: "Well, there are a lot of dangerous Islamic terrorists on the list already. It might give the impression we don't approve of them. So we're adding other names to, well, balance them out and, er, reassure them."

Jim: "Balance, eh? So this Savage is dangerous in other ways."

Sir H: "Indubitably, PM. He's a conservative shock-jock radio broadcaster."

Jim: "I don't know what that is, but it doesn't sound especially dangerous. Why do we say we're keeping him out?"

• Sir H (consults document): "I think the phrase is 'likely to cause community tension,' PM."

• Jim: "Is Savage likely to cause community tension?"

• Sir H: "Not really, sir. Nobody in the community has ever heard of him." (Both laugh.)

• Jim: "Well, they'll hear of him once we ban him." (They laugh again.)
  

• Sir H: "But it will be for the one and only time." (They fall over laughing.)

So it would've been if a shrewd old mandarin like Sir Humphrey were still running the Home Office in Whitehall.

• He'd never have made the elementary error of putting the real reasons for banning Savage in a confidential e-mail. He'd know that the final destination of confidential Labor government mail is the front page of the conservative Daily Mail.

Which is where the internal Home Office e-mails relating to Savage's exclusion from Britain ended up this week.

• Savage himself is owed most of the credit for exposing this latest farce: He decided to fight his exclusion by launching a slander suit against the home secretary (the hapless Jacqui Smith, who has since resigned amid an avalanche of gaffes),
• and then obtained his own list of incriminating e-mails as part of the legal process.

These e-mails are fully as silly -- and damaging -- as anything in "Yes, Prime Minister." One makes it explicit that Savage is being named as an excluded person

• "to ensure that the names disclosed . . . are not all Islamic extremists." Another reveals that the Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the
  
• 
  
• Foreign Secretary David Miliband are "firmly behind" this "naming and shaming."

A third e-mail (from a civil servant who seems a potential Sir Humphrey) prudently warns his bosses that all this sounds too much like "duplicity."

Indeed, it does.

• The list of "named and shamed" included not only Islamic "extremists" but also two Russian skinheads imprisoned for 20 racial murders. What had Savage done to justify including him in such company?

The worst that the cautious Home Office official could cite was that he was "homophobic" -- which isn't a crime even in San Francisco, the birthplace of Savage's show.

• And why proclaim his exclusion when he'd shown absolutely no sign of wanting to enter Britain?
  

The answer is that naming and shaming Savage was a low exercise in cheap politics all too characteristic of the Brown government. Its methodology is similar to the recent scandal wherein a Gordon Brown aide had to resign on being found spreading false rumors (also via e-mail) that opposition Tory leaders and their families were mired in various sexual sins.

• It had another low political motive as well as that of appeasing radical Islamism -- namely,

• attempting to discredit conservatives by associating them with extremists
  

• and political criminals.
  

Exactly the same tactics --

• "guilt by association" and "guilt by exclusion" --
  

were later used against Geert Wilders, the anti-immigration Dutch politician. Whatever flaws of taste or opinion they may have committed, neither man posed any threat to security, the British way of life

• or even community tension.

Home secretaries, either Smith or her successor, would be well advised not even to attempt the "robust" defense their department promises in response to Savage's slander suit.

• They are condemned by their own laptops.

All the same, it would be fun to see Savage being cross-examined by one of those clever British barristers." "Condemned by Their Own Laptops," NY Post, 7/29/09

• "John O'Sullivan, a former Post editorial- page editor, is executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague."

The Right is gaining by default. Think what it could do with a leader.

WSJ.com: "In the past, there was a clear fault line between Europe's left-wing and right-wing parties. The left called for more social welfare programs and public spending. The right wanted the state not to interfere in market forces.

• Globalization helped change that. With nations and companies vying on a global scale, it has become difficult for a country to separate the effects of public spending and budget deficits from its labor costs and capacity to compete in export markets. The key moment came as far back as 1994, some political analysts say, when the World Trade Organization was created and much of the world began shifting to a more free-market economy.

"The WTO marked the triumph of the market economy," says Dominique Reynié, head of Paris-based Foundation for Political Innovation. "Since then, the left has been unable to propose another route."

• The U.K.'s Labour Party stood as an exception when, under Tony Blair, it tried to shape a middle road. But Mr. Blair had inherited a deeply deregulated economy from the hands of previous conservative leaders, state coffers swelled during an economic boom, and he "had room to increase public spending and hire state workers," Mr. Reynié said. His successor, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has struggled to find a similar compromise way amid Europe's falling financial fortunes.

In some European countries, left-wing parties have failed to maintain a broad electoral base and ended up fractured and battling with one another. In Germany, the Social Democrats have suffered from a long-term decline that's linked to the decline in their unionized, working-class base, says Manfred Göllner, head of opinion-polling institute Forsa in Berlin.

• Under former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005, the party tried to win new, middle-class voters by marrying social justice with economic efficiency. But that fell apart when Mr. Schröder was forced to cut social spending to bring budget deficits under control at a time of record unemployment. The result: The party split, with dissidents defecting to help form a new, anti-capitalist party called "The Left" in 2007.

In some countries, the left has disintegrated into a myriad of groups. There have been so many defections from France's Socialist Party that the country now has half-a-dozen left-leaning movements. They include the New Anti-Capitalist Party, a Trotskyite movement, and the Left Front, an alliance of Communists and Communist-leaning politicians.

• The Socialist Party is divided over whether it should tie up with the Greens or with the MoDem, a center-right movement.

Italy's left has never quite recovered from the fall, in early 2008, of a government supported by a tenuous coalition of nine separate left-leaning movements ranging from Catholics to hard-core communists. Now, most don't believe the left will be a credible alternative to scandal-plagued Silvio Berlusconi's center-right coalition for years to come.

Some fear" (fear? Suffering is to fear, not this.)ed. "... that the inability of many European left-wing parties to attract voters is a cause -- not just a symptom -- of a rise among parties on the far right. "

• When people fear that they are
  
• not protected by their governments,
  
• they go back to nationalism,"

said Anthony Wedgwood Benn, a retired U.K. Socialist lawmaker."

• Exactly. sm via Lucianne.com
  

EU is worst example in history of arrogant and wasteful bureacracy, time to leave Evil Empire of Europe, Warner, 3/31/2009

3/31/09: "Now is the time to leave evil empire of Europe," Gerald Warner, Scotsman

"ON THURSDAY voters go to the polls to elect members of the European Parliament. The bizarre nature of this exercise can best be illustrated by recalling that from its inception until now the EU parliament has enjoyed neither the authority to initiate laws nor to repeal them. That is in keeping with the ethos of the European Union an organisation that believes power is too important to be entrusted to the masses.

The European Union is an enclosed tyranny, addicted to micromanagement of its subjects' lives and devoid of any kind of cultural coherence. It is the worst example in world history of the arrogance and wastefulness of an untrammelled bureaucracy. The greatest single step Britain could take towards freedom and self-fulfilment would be to remove itself from the control of this behemoth.

The EU, like its partner in corruption the United Nations, is a totally artificial construct. It has no roots in any real society and exists only as a vehicle for the power-hungry and the greedy to indulge their unhealthy appetites. Guarantor of European peace? Get real: who seriously believes we would have spent any part of the past 40 years at war with Germany, but for the benevolent interposition of Brussels? Metternich's Concert of Europe it is not.

At every stage in its growth, the EU has advanced by stealth, subterfuge and downright lies. Remember the dishonest agenda with which Edward Heath sold it to Britain? Purely a trading partnership, blah, blah… In reality, from the first moment of its conception, it was intended to be a political union, a major power bloc. With increasing power it has grown more dictatorial, as witness the way in which the wayward Irish were forced to vote twice, after they gave the "wrong" answer in a referendum, an experience that may be replicated this year. Ditto the Danes.

After the Lisbon Treaty had been rejected and thus automatically fell into desuetude, bureaucrats in Brussels continued to prepare its implementation, in the sure confidence that nothing so trivial as democracy or legality would be allowed to impede the development of the European project. Nor is it even culturally European, as the drive to incorporate Turkey, an Asian, Islamic nation, demonstrates.

The latest ploy among Europhiles is audaciously to conscript some Eurofolly of absurd regulation into their own argument and characterise it as the "caricature" case advanced by Eurosceptics. In reality, the demented banana-straighteners of Brussels are still in business; a recent example is the ridiculous directive that obliges all British buses travelling more than 30 miles to decant their passengers half-way through their journey, take them back on board and change the number of the bus.

Yet such buffoonery masks an infinitely more sinister agenda. The EU is a socialist institution, with all the rampant intolerance that implies. It is the embodiment of Marxism of the Frankfurt School, whose programme is political correctness, trampling down all traditional morality and every last vestige of the Judaeo-Christian ethic with ruthless determination. The author Vladimir Bukovsky identified this threat when he denounced the EU's "intellectual gulag known as political correctness" and warned: "This is the beginning of the gulag. The beginning of your loss of freedom."

Bukovsky knows what he is talking about: he was a prisoner for 12 years in the Soviet gulag and recognises the marks of the beast. In the building of our own prison camp, Britain has made a net contribution of £22 billion since 2002. In return, we have been rewarded with the loss of our sovereignty and the reduction of our voice to a representation of 78 out of 785 MEPs. Yet, for the eunuch parliamentarians of Brussels and Strasbourg, life is good.

From tomorrow, their basic salary will rise to £83,282 a year, plus up to £363,000 in expenses (receipts not required). They also receive £41,573 "transition payments" as golden handshakes on leaving office, with pension rights of up to £30,000 for one five-year term. As at Westminster, our MEPs have not been backward in employing family members on expenses: 30 of them do so.

No wonder MEPs are Europhiles. For the rest of us, there is no conceivable reason to love this evil empire. None of the major political parties offers any remedy. David Cameron's pledge to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty is worthless, because he will not commit himself to doing so even if the treaty is already in operation, as it almost certainly will be by the time he is in a position to organise a plebiscite. The time for tinkering is past: the EU is unreformable. It is time to make our excuses and leave." by Gerald Warner, Scotsman on Sunday, Scotsman.com,





via Lucianne.com

BELTWAY GOP out of touch with most voters--Rasmussen

5/1/09: "Just 21% of GOP voters believe Republicans in Congress have done a good job representing their own party’s values, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) say congressional Republicans have lost touch with GOP voters throughout the nation. These findings are virtually unchanged from a survey just after Election Day.

Among all voters, 73% say Republicans in Congress have lost touch with the GOP base.

Seventy-two percent (72%) of Republicans say it is more important for the GOP to stand for what it believes in than for the party to work with President Obama. Twenty-two percent (22%) want their party to work with the President more.

Not surprisingly 72% of Democrats say it is more important for the Republican Party to work with Obama, but 54% of unaffiliated voters hold the opposite view.

“To be relevant in politics, you need either formal power or a lot of people willing to follow your lead. The governing Republicans in the nation’s capital have lost both on their continuing path to irrelevance,” Scott Rasmussen says in an analysis this week.

Party officials and pundits have been debating for months what direction Republicans should take following Obama’s election and sizable Democratic gains in both houses of Congress. Some argue that the party should move in the direction of the Democrats on issues, while others say the GOP has been hurt by abandoning its core conservative economic and social positions. "

• (BUT RASMUSSEN'S RECENT POLLS SHOW THE DEBATE IS OVER. GET RID OF THE ELITES).
  

"The debate flared up again this week with longtime Republican Senator Arlen Specter’s decision to become a Democrat out of fear he would lose his own party’s primary to a conservative challenger next year. Fifty-one percent (51%) of Republican voters say the Pennsylvania senator’s switch will have a significant impact on the laws passed by the Senate.

Voters for the first time since the election now say congressional Republicans are as partisan as their Democratic counterparts. Up till now, Democrats in Congress have been seen as governing in a more partisan fashion than Republicans. Fifty-five percent (55%) now expect politics in Washington, D.C., to be more partisan over the next year.

At the end of April, for just the second time in more than five years of tracking, Republicans led Democrats in the Generic Congressional Ballot. Forty-one percent (41%) said they would vote for their district’s Republican candidate while 38% would choose the Democrat.

In January, 56% of all voters said the Republican Party should return to the views and values of President Ronald Reagan to be successful. Eighty-five percent (85%) of Republican voters agreed." "69% of GOP Voters say Republicans in Congress out of touch with the party base" via Phil Hendrie

Climate Change extremists

UK Telegraph, Christopher Booker: "How would you cope if faced with a GCSE physics paper? Have no fear. You don’t need to know anything about physics. As can be seen from the adjacent question from last year’s paper on physics and electricity, so long as you’ve listened to enough environmentalist propaganda to know what answers are expected (eg that most of the sources of the electricity we use are creating global warming), you could get 100 per cent. But if, of course, you don’t agree with the Government on these matters, you will fail.

Doubtless one of the teaching aids which might have guided you to the right answers would have been Al Gore’s famous Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth, which in 2007 our then environment secretary, David Miliband, ordered to be sent to every secondary school in the country. It was obviously inconvenient that in October that year a High Court judge should have ruled that nine of the claims made in that film were so scientifically absurd that the Government would be in breach of the law against teaching propaganda in schools unless the film was accompanied by material correcting its errors. But when last week I asked the Department for Children, Skills and Lifelong Learning (or whatever they now call the old ministry of education) for sight of that corrective material they never came back with an answer.

Does one not get the feeling that all this propaganda over the terrifying threat of global warming is beginning ever so slightly to turn people’s minds? Caroline Lucas MEP, the leader of the Green Party, last week agreed on television that flying to Spain was “as bad as knifing a person in the street”, because air travel like this is causing people to die “from climate change”.

Dr Richard Dixon, director of the Scottish WWF, was at the same time claiming that failing to ensure one’s home is “energy efficient” was a “moral crime”, as “anti-social as drink driving”, and “we should be having a discussion as to whether it should become an actual crime”.

This echoed the recent observation of Ed Miliband, our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, that opposing wind farms should be as “socially unacceptable” as not wearing a seatbelt. Meanwhile, no doubt encouraged by this kind of talk from ministers, 100 “climate campaigners” were arrested by the police, who feared they were planning to put out of action a coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire, to stop it continuously contributing to the National Grid 1,000 megawatts of electricity – considerably more than the average output of all the 2,400 wind turbines in the country.

This is the same grid, of course, 75 per cent powered by nasty, dirty, CO2 emitting fossil fuels, which Gordon Brown hopes will secretly power the electric cars he proposes to give customers £5,000 each to buy in order to help save the planet – even though his grants won’t be available until 2012. Meanwhile, as 17 of our major power stations are likely to close within six years, thanks to obsolescence and EU rules, Mr Brown shows remarkably little interest in how we are going to keep Britain’s lights on (although certainly no less, to be fair, than does Mr Cameron).

Truly these days, in more ways than one, are we moving towards a new dark age. Fortunately, however, the latest available data show the downward trend in global temperatures continuing, At least the one thing we don’t need to worry about, it seems, is global warming.

Ours for £1bn: some pictures of a big aeroplane

Fifteen years after John Major (in his wish to be “at the heart of Europe”) signed Britain up to what was called the Future Large Aircraft project, the EU’s bid to build a replacement for the US Hercules transport aircraft appears on the brink of collapse. Despite last week’s plea from Airbus’s chief executive that the A400M project must be kept going to save “40,000 European jobs”, all we have got so far for our £1.2 billion investment has been

28 computerised photographs of an aircraft so beset with technical problems it seems unlikely ever to fly.

But with Britain’s ageing Hercules fleet due to fall out of the sky by 2012, we have now missed our place in the queue for replacements. Due to Tony Blair’s Euro-besotted decision in 2000 to buy the A400M, it seems our Armed Forces will soon be incapable of fighting overseas, even if a prime minister of the day wished them to do so.

Explorers on the rocks

Thanks to sharp-eyed observers on the US science blog Watts Up With That, we see how Pen Hadow’s much-touted Catlin expedition to measure that disappearing Arctic ice is degenerating into farce. Despite claims by Prince Charles and a galaxy of warmist sponsors that Hadow and his two colleagues would provide “vital scientific data” to show how the ice could soon vanish, the loss of equipment through intense cold has reduced them to measuring the ice with an old feet-and-inches tape measure, Last week their website had to post an apology for providing misleading data, It seems increasingly unlikely the gallant trio will reach the Pole, despite rather more efficient satellite data confirming that the ice is considerably thicker than last year." "'Save the Planet' Rhetoric Soars to Crazy New Heights,"via Lucianne.com

Antarctic ozone hole healing. Memo to Al Gore: Grab the Digitalis.

(Christian Science Monitor): "Just when it looks as though people could breathe a sigh of relief over the hole in stratospheric ozone over Antarctica —

• it’s expected to heal by 2050 —

scientists are raising a new ozone-related concern: rocket launches.

That’s right. Rocket launches.

• The idea is not as wiggy as it may sound. As early as 1974, some scientists had noted that the space shuttle — still a gleam in NASA’s eye at the time — would be a source of chlorine emissions as it climbed through the atmosphere and passed through the stratosphere.

Chlorine-based compounds called chlorflorocarbons have been the main driver behind the loss of ozone in a high-altitude layer of the atmosphere called the stratosphere. They’ve been banned via the 1987 Montreal Protocol, along with other ozone-trashing compounds.

Indeed, some people have argued — wrongly — that the space shuttles have been responsible for the ozone hole....

• Down the road, however, the picture could change, especially if aerospace-industry launch projections pan out.

The team’s pitch: Don’t wait until then to figure out if this will be an issue. That could lead to a mishmash of regulations that could choke off the launch business. Instead, gather the data now in a rigorous, transparent way so that if emissions regulations are required in the future, they won’t be cobbled together at the last minute with little scientific basis for designing them....

• The US once ponied up millions of dollars to study the environmental effects if hundreds of high-flying supersonic-transport airliners took to the skies.
  

• The number of SST airliners never topped 20.
  

Here, the team argues, the rocket fleet is real, clearly growing, and yet few are taking as serious a look at the environmental effects from rocket emissions — a task that could be accomplished far less cost." (ie "climate" hysteria for profit)

Hundreds Protest Carbon Trading-will not help climate change-UK

"Hundreds of people today set up a "climate camp" in the City of London to protest against

• economic measures which they say

• will not tackle climate change.

Protesters who had gathered in small groups around the City descended on carbon trading body the European Climate Exchange on Bishopsgate, shutting off a stretch of road and pitching tents in a matter of minutes.

The climate campers are protesting against carbon trading, which they say is

• not an effective way to reduce greenhouse gases as
  

• it allows rich countries to carry on polluting while "offsetting" their emissions elsewhere....

"Carbon trading has been the false solution that has been thrown at us when we've held previous camps and we want to tackle that head-on today."...