Newt Gingrich
Newt Gingrich says he is pro-life with respect to abortion.
Does that mean that he is against the death penalty?
I doubt it!
He has one of those special mirrors so he can shave both of his faces at the same time.
The Americanisation of the FA Cup
I hope the idiot, who thought it would be a good idea to ask Budweiser to sponsor the FA Cup, has done the right thing and gone to repent for the rest of his life in a monastery in Nepal or on Mount Assos.
The FA Cup is a British institution and although, it has been sponsored for some time now, all of the sponsors, hsve either been British or come from countries, where football is the national game.
Budweiser is an American company and luckily I’ve never ever sampled any of its products. In fact as a coeliac, I can’t unless I want to be ill.
Just imagine what would happen if British Airways say, wanted to sponsor a major sporting event in the United States.
Yet again, the FA has shown that the fans don’t count.
One of the outcomes of this deal or perhaps the fact that the television rights have gone to ITV and ESPN, was that the BBC weren’t able to broadcast a radio commentary of the game this afternoon.
Amanda Knox and the US Justice System
I have no idea if Amanda Knox was guilty of murder or not.
The Americans put a lot of support behind her in an effort to persuade the Italians to free her, from a possible miscarriage of justice.
But then so many of the people in US jails have been failed by their own justice system. Several have been executed lately who didn’t get a trial with the care shown by the Italians.
But then Amanda Knox was white and intelligent, whereas most of those who suffer injustice in the States are black and illiterate and defended by lawyers, who aren’t the best to say the least.
But then the victim in the Amanda Knox case wasn’t American. We also don’t know how much pressure was put on the Italians. After all their economy is rather rocky and if the United States withdrew support, it would have been serious.
The Funeral Expenses of Troy Davis
The execution of Troy Davis in Georgia has been rightly condemned by many.
I have just received an e-mail, which says that his family are responsible for the expenses of his funeral.
The Great Advantage of Rick Perry As US President
He would be able to talk to President Ahmadinejad as an equal as they both have the same views on capital punishment.
This even extends to their views on the execution of juveniles!
The two are made for each other!
Christopher Hitchens
Read his article in the Sunday Times today. Superb!
A previous version of the article is here.
The Second Tragedy of September 11, 2011
The attacks on this day were awful and no words can express the damage done to individual and collective lives.
The second tragedy of this event, is that Bush and Blair pursued such a misguided strategy afterwards that they made a second serious attack more likely to happen.
To show how badly they performed, you just have to look at how many people think the attacks didn’t happen and were an event staged by the CIA and the Israelis to get at Muslims. Or something else equally false and bizarre!
We should probably have gone into Afghanistan, but Iraq now looks in the eyes of nearly everybody to be a colossal mistake. Although saying that, Saddam was a cruel tyrant and had to go, if only to protect his own people. But the Arab world seems to specialise in people like him. Just look at Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Egypt. And don’t get me going on places like Saudi Arabia and a few others. How many women would like to live in those countries?
The attacks gave us a chance to deal with the real problems of the world. But we just made it worse, by our vengeful actions and our complete disregard for human rights at Guantanamo and other places we are just starting to know about.
Those That Buy The Gun Live Will With The Consequences
The Times today has a story about one child of a couple in Alaska, who accidentally shot a sibling with a pistol, leaving the child a paraplegic. So they are doing what all good American’s do and reach for their lawyer and suing the manufacturer of the gun.
It would have been so much easier and less stressful, if they hadn’t bought the gun in the first place.
After all guns are designed to kill people and when they do, it’s more likely that the victim will be the owner of the gun or one of his friends or family.
The Untold Story of Hurricane Irene
I do find it strange to hear of a hurricane with the same name as my mother, who was a rather placid woman. In fact, I suspect too much so. On the other hand, I think she was rather calm under pressure!
I have just been reading a piece about how New York will be treating the city’s prisoners during the hurricane.
“We are not evacuating Rikers Island,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference this afternoon. Bloomberg annouced a host of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas.
But in response to a reporter’s question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with more than a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put.
New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city’s evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.
According to the New York City Department of Corrections’ own website, more than three-quarters of Rikers Island’s 400 acres are built on landfill–which is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters. Its ten jails have a capacity of close to 17,000 inmates, and normally house at least 12,000, including juveniles and large numbers of prisoners with mental illness.
We were not able to reach anyone at the NYC DOC for comment–but the New York Times’s City Room blog reported: “According to the city’s Department of Correction, no hypothetical evacuation plan for the roughly 12,000 inmates that the facility may house on a given day even exists. Contingencies do exist for smaller-scale relocations from one facility to another.”
So hard luck guys and gals!
Hopefully, they won’t have to endure the horrors of when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. This report is from the ACLU.
A culture of neglect was evident in the days before Katrina, when the sheriff declared that the prisoners would remain “where they belong,” despite the mayor’s decision to declare the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation. OPP even accepted prisoners, including juveniles as young as 10, from other facilities to ride out the storm.
As floodwaters rose in the OPP buildings, power was lost, and entire buildings were plunged into darkness. Deputies left their posts wholesale, leaving behind prisoners in locked cells, some standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests …
Prisoners went days without food, water and ventilation, and deputies admit that they received no emergency training and were entirely unaware of any evacuation plan. Even some prison guards were left locked in at their posts to fend for themselves, unable to provide assistance to prisoners in need.
When is the United States justice system going to raise its standards to the level of the civilised world?
I suspect we’d be hearing more of this if Dominique Strauss-Kahn was still in prison on Rikers Island.
The Anonymous Widower 