Category: Politics

These two stories explain my real problem with American society. Obviously the death penalty is really working in Texas, with 295 executions since 1976, and six already this year to date (excluding this one), yet it still ranks as the 14th most dangerous State in the US.

Interesting piece by Michael Cockerill in advance of a programme to be shown on Saturday looking at the ways the media treats politicians, and in turn the way politicians answer their questions. Is it any wonder that people are becoming less and less involved in political debate?

Interesting leader in The Guardian today, pointing out that North Korea may rapidly attain more importance than the Iraqi situation, despite that not being the order the Dubya wants to take them in. I guess the US isn’t exactly keen to get into Korea again.

I rushed home this evening to catch the interview. No not yesterday’s fascinating Jacko documentary with Martin Bashir, but today’s showing of an interview that Tony Benn conducted with Saddam Hussein at the weekend. I can’t pretend it was the most involving interview ever, with sometimes easy questions being lobbed at Saddam, and his ponderous…

There were a couple of fascinating articles in today’s Guardian. Firstly, the cover story of G2 looked at the amount of coverage given to the Space Shuttle explosion in comparison with other stories about peoples’ deaths. All the US networks carried lots of live stories about the story on Saturday, pre-empting usual programming. I must…

Finally the Stop the War March is allowed to use Hyde Park as a meeting point.

Now this really isn’t clever. The planned march in London in February 15, against war in Iraq, has been told that it can’t end in Hyde Park where a rally was planned. Upwards of 500,000 are expected, and so obviously it will need to end somewhere. The reason given is that the park is not…

Thank goodness that at political times like these we have journalists such as Robert Fisk to provide a counter-argument. Today in The Independent he has an article pouring scorn on the feeble parallels that are being made between Saddam Hussein and Hitler. As if this war is nothing to do with oil? Yeah, right. Yesterday,…

I got a bog-standard reply from my MP this morning regarding the Stand campaign against ID cards. Still at least it got registered, so power to the people. There also seems to be some indication that there might be a little backing down on the part of the Home Office, with Lord Falconer not quite…

Tony Blair has been facing the Commons Liaison Committee this morning, and is quoted as saying that it was “inevitable” that Al-Qaeda would attack Britain at some point. I don’t doubt that to be honest. But we can help ourselves by not blithely following Bush into a pointless war that’s certain to create more problems…

Resistance to the impending war on Iraq seems to be growing at about the same rate as the British Army is arriving in the Middle East. Yesterday more troop movements were announced, with one quarter of the British Army now in the process of being sent into the area. This makes it the biggest buildup…

Good to see that the weekend’s protests against going to war are beginning to be recognised in the media. The NY Times had this, while I noticed it high on CNN’s scope. In Britain, it seems as though February 15 could still be quite a big deal.

Maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but Blair is sticking to his guns over taking us into war. He told the press conference today that Saddam should disarm, and seems certain the UN Arms Inspectors will find something. Whether Hans Blix finds anything or not, I don’t know, but it seems that something or…