Liberal Burblings

Archive for April, 2009

..for a great brace of goals at Norwich and to the rest of the team for an excellent performance. Fingers, toes and everything crossed for Sunday…

Lynne Featherstone has just tweeted to say the government has been defeated on the Gurkhas vote! Back of the net!! 267 for the Liberal Democrat motion, and 247 against were the scores on the doors.

Sky report the news here:

A Liberal Democrat motion – not binding on the Government – was supported by267 to 246, a majority of 21.
It came only hours after he (Brown) explained ministers’ position that the right of residence should be restricted for Gurkhas who quit the service before 1997.
Sky’s chief political correspondent Jon Craig said: “This is an embarrassing and humiliating defeat for the Government and a great victory for the Gurkhas and those campaigning on their behalf.”

3000th post

Many, many happy returns to Jeremy Thorpe who is the grand age of 80 today.

Here’s a great photo of him in the Sixties with Jimi Hendrix.

I am considerably bouyed up this morning. Indeed, one could say that my hoop is well and truly a-cock. I have received a communication from the Guardian Readers’ Editor (which in itself is cause for celebration) saying that she has checked with the Picture Editor and that they say that Alistair Darling was indeed breakfasting in No 10 Downing Street (not No 11 as printed in the caption) in the photograph on the centre spread in last Saturday’s Guardian. She will print a correction in the next few days – which will be the first time I have had a correction printed in the Guardian at my request!

Excitement, indeed.

Here’s Jon Stewart’s hilarious and very cutting take on the Air Force One photo-shoot over Ground Zero in New York.

With a Homberg-doffment to Media Monkey.

This has been a bit of a “will they? – won’t they?” saga. That is, will the Democrats achieve a veto-proof (technically a “filibuster-proof”) majority in the US Senate and thus have a sweeping hand to implement their laws?

Last time I blogged about this, there was a possibility of a Senate seat vacancy in New Hampshire that might have gone to a Democrat. That possibility was ruled out when the vacancy became a non-vacancy.

Now Senator Arlen Specter has defected to the Democrats, so, if Al Franken finally takes his seat for Minnesota (which seems likely-ish, but the legal process to, hopefully, confirm him is painfully slow), the Democrats will get their 60 seats and veto-proofery.