Friday forecasts ...
here we go ...
I would advise against putting money on the heavily backed favourite "Dave plugs his blog". It is AFAICS a Typepad dooberry rather than running on the same big iron as timesonline.com and Dave does not want it to collapse under the traffic.
Nick Cohen is a racing certainty to give it some on this Sir Iqbbal Sacranie story I think.
Aaro ... pervert PE teachers. The vulnerability, the fallibility of our children.
place yer bets!
I would advise against putting money on the heavily backed favourite "Dave plugs his blog". It is AFAICS a Typepad dooberry rather than running on the same big iron as timesonline.com and Dave does not want it to collapse under the traffic.
Nick Cohen is a racing certainty to give it some on this Sir Iqbbal Sacranie story I think.
Aaro ... pervert PE teachers. The vulnerability, the fallibility of our children.
place yer bets!
posted by The Rioja Kid at 1/13/2006 04:25:00 PM
16 Comments:
DA or NC to have a go on Blair's 'Respect' agenda; either of them to do a sidebar piece about Galloway on Big Brother (through that may depend on the eviction result)
Failing those, DA to do the LibDem leadership race: (especially in the light of Ming's 'to the left of Labour' claim).
DA has kids, so I think he'd like to go for the Kelly story. Problem is that either she or Kim Howells could resign or be pushed between his writing it and it being published, so he'll give it a miss. I think he'd have gone for the Ruth-Kelly-not-so-bad-really line and we-can-blame-the-hysteria-on-the-Daily-Mail (not Times stablemate, the Sun).
That leaves him with a "clever" play on Respect; half on GG (see Harry's Place for the general idea) and half on Blair's agenda (a good thing, IHO).
NC, I have no idea. He's not in the Staggers this week though, AFAICS.
Second Dave on Dave, so to speak.
I think maybe Iran for Nick, perhaps in the hamper. Actually, that's a long shot but we should have it covered.
If so, I wonder if he'll tyr and get away with using the Worker Communist Party as a stick to bash the wrong kind of leftie with again?
Well one of them, Nick I guess, but maybe Dave too, is going to have a ramble around Gordon Brown's daft ideas about Britishness and reclaiming the flag from the far right.
Chris Bertram
It's often best to go for the favourite, short odds or not, so:
Dave plugs his blog
and
Nick lambasts liberals for something that can't really be there fault.
Ahh. DA has gone for Galloway. Nothing on Respect, though.
I think the British flag stuff will be too late for Nick. He might dredge up Ming Campbell's pre-war "Iraq certainly has WMD" Commons quote in the service of some nebulous point or other in the sidebar. As for the main column, I've had a feeling he might mount an assault on The Left's Silence On China for a while, and Chinese Reliance On Iranian Energy Preventing Effective UN Sanctions (with a side order of The UN Is Rubbish) might provide the excuse.
That's a great point, Simon. You might not be right tomorrow, but you'll be right soon. It's perfect Cohen, he can ignore the real matter and pretend that the urgent point is that people in Islington, with children, use Chinese buggies.
Ah, Nick's gone for a straight lift of a Harry's Place post. And Iqbel.
Yes, but what's with strange rant against Winston sandwiched in the middle?
Are you reading it online? It's pretty small in the print edition, where it is a tucked-away third item. But no I don't understand it either.
on that topic, I really don't like the new Observer (whereas I really liked the Guardian). Cohen's column takes up the entire page, for which it just doesn't have enough words.
Nick should cut back on the bile pills.
What is it with journalists and popular culture? I'd have thought the definitive reality tv text wasn't in books by "[w]riters as diverse as James Hawes and Ben Elton" but "The Truman Show." But ... that was made before BB first aired in Holland.
"The leaders of the anti-war movement should have paid attention." I think Harry's Place (I'm too lazy to find links today) had the SW original review of Big Brother. (Anyway, as Chris Brooke noted, there hasn't been an anti-war *movement* since mid-2003.)
"The rage showed that there were limits to the tolerance of the liberal middle class. We ..." Later liberals only read or watch the Independent and the BBC. Why is it is with Nick and Aaro that liberals only read *other* papers?
Does anyone know what the "disgraceful protest movement" in the 30s was? Was Mosley a protestor?
Chris is right: the attack on Lord Winston is plain odd, and he uses the Aaro trick: "But he doesn’t contradict Debi on air because, I suspect ..." Doesn't the Observer let Nick have a phone? Being a journalist and everything, he might want to test a hunch before leaping into print.
short answer: the election has been a success.
Interesting that DA mentions the Weekly Worker again, thats the second time recently.
I suspect that the Lord Winston thing is just a conversation he had over capuccino with a mate that he thought "that's interesting, I'll put that in the col". It would not exactly be the first time.
Has NC ever acknowleged that the new regime in iraq is not exactly left wing - eg it's islamic, has been found to run torture/assasination squads, maintains saddam's restrictions on union organising still in force etc?
Basically no. Iraq is entirely full of people "trying to build democracy" while bemoaning the fact that the Liberal Democrats haven't sent over two divisions of the King's Own Organic Yoghurt Rifles to help them.
In general I find myself confused about what kind of "support" we on the liberal left should be providing to "Iraqi democrats"; in the sense of being more or less in favour of them we're already doing it and in any other sense what the hell is Nick doing that we aren't? I very much suspect that "supporting Iraqi democracy" means "supporting Tony Blair". If Nick means "supporting leaving troops in Iraq" he should say so and not use these bloody euphemisms.
Surely if Nick "ran into Kanan Makiya" the other day, and Nick isn't in Baghdad, then nor is Kana Makiya? The project with respect to the Baghdad files isn't one of Makiya's by the way; it's the Kadhimiya Human Rights Centre which is a project of some mates of Johann Hari. In any case, can I tell you a story about a man who is also a close friend of Kana Makiya, who has been fighting for democracy in Iraq since day one and who is even now a member of the "fledgling democratic government" (tm). He has been receiving scandalously little support from the pro-war left, even old mates like Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens who used to write about him all the time but who now don't appear to have the time of day. Of course I'm talking about Ahmed Chalabi.
Hitchens does not need to say anything about Chalabi now that the war is won.
http://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/2006/01/so-glad-its-all-over.html
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