Liberal Burblings

Archive for September, 2009

There’s been an interesting debate about Gordon Brown and the flimsily supported allegation that he may take anti-depressants. This is worrying, say protagonists of the “Is Brown bonkers?” school of thought. Actually, it would be more worrying if, assuming that he may have a problem, he were not taking anti-depressants, if prescribed by his doctor.

“Could his judgment be impaired?” ask some.

Well, I would say that virtually every PM may have had her or his judgment impaired by something going on his private life. Just go back to John Major. In 1997 he had to decide when to have a general election. It was up in the air as to whether it would be early in year or on May 1st (as it was in the end). Edwina Currie, then an MP, came on the telly, I remember, and said that it would be awful if the election was early in the year because it would mean that retiring MPs, such as her, would miss a cut-off to do with their retirement package.

It later transpired that Major and Currie had earlier had a four-year affair. It seems valid to ask: Was John Major’s judgment on the date of the election in any way influenced by the strident views of his former mistress on the subject?

Some wonderful language from the legislative world of the US. I have bolded the relevant passage below, but it’s worth reading the whole piece on the labyrnthine machinations of the US Congress on First Read:

During the 20 hours of debate when the bill is on the floor, the senator stands and says, “I’d like to raise a budget point of order” against a section of the bill. If the parliamentarian sustains or agrees with the objection, that section is removed from the bill or amendment. (More on the parliamentarian’s critical role below.) There is no limit to how many objections can be raised.
However, the parliamentarian’s decision can be appealed, with 60 votes. So if the parliamentarian rules against the senator, that senator could ask for a vote to override the decision. If there are 60 votes, the questionable item can stay in the bill. While it may take only 51 votes to pass the final bill, but there may be 60-vote hurdles en route to final passage.
The most well-known point of order is referred to as “the Byrd Rule.” Named after its creator, West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, the rule generally allows sections of the bill to be struck if they do not have a direct impact on deficit reduction.
Provisions can also be challenged where the impact on spending is “merely incidental.” (Simple question: Would a financially self-sustaining public option or co-op have a “merely incidental” impact on the deficit?)
So popular is the Byrd Rule that it has its own lexicon. If someone thinks he/she can strike a section of the bill, that section is considered “Byrdable.” Once it is struck from the bill, it’s called a “Byrd Dropping.” A bill that has been riddled by the Byrd Rule has gone through a “Byrd Bath.”
(Bonus phrase: The Byrd Bath leaves the bill looking like “Swiss Cheese” for all the holes created within the original legislation.)

…So says a survey by Lloyds Pharmacy. 2.8 million people. That’s quite a lot. You can find out how many indirect partners you’ve had here on Lloyds’ web site.. It’s all based on a ‘six degrees of separation’ type theory.

I’ve been missing out. I’ve only had 52,601 indirect and direct sexual partners in my lifetime. People in my age group have had an average of 3,036,185 partners. So I have clearly led a very sheltered life with my 52,601 partners – but, then again, that incidentally works out at four partners a day since I was 14 years old.

My! I have been active! What a super-stud I am!

As a Republican and an avowed hater of men who go anywhere near a bottle of hair dye, I suppose I could have been nasty and written a title like “McCartney the Royal Toady”. But that would have been uncalled for. Paul McCartney, when all’s said and dyed, has, it seems, retained a wide-eyed innocence from his childhood. A laudatory essay on the Queen which he wrote when he was 10 years old has been unearthed.

It has interesting echoes with a tiny track on Abbey Road. Abbey Road has got a few interesting, very short tracks on it. One is “The End” which is part of a Medley just before the er….end of the album. It is interesting to reflect that if you listen to all the Beatles albums in the order they were recorded, “The End” is fittingly the last thing you will hear (it would be interesting to know if it was the last track they actually recorded), except for the tiny and simple track stuck on the end of “The End” called “Her Majesty”. It’s a wonderful little end to the album, complete with rather abrupt ending:

Her Majesty

(Lennon/McCartney)

Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl,
but she doesn’t have a lot to say
Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
but she changes from day to day

I want to tell her that I love her a lot
But I gotta get a belly full of wine
Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
Someday I’m going to make her mine, oh yeah,
Someday I’m going to make her mine.

That track is so short and, I suppose, odd, that it is hardly ever played on the radio. In fact, I have only heard it played on the radio once. That was last week by the (now he’s stop being silly like he was on Radio 1) excellent Chris Evans. Well done Mr Evans.

Wonders never cease.

I hesitate to say Baroness Scotland should resign. What do they think in Scotland? – I wonder. I have enormous admiration for the lady.

However. The Mail says that she allegedly did not ask her Tongan employee to show her passport during a ten minute employment interview. As Attorney-General, you would have thought Baroness Scotland would have more sense.

However, reading the Mail story (someone has to, I suppose) one wonders whether the housekeeper is the villain of the piece. She’d been allegedly working illegally here for four years and there is an alleged forged second passport at the heart of the investigations into her.

Scotland (the Baroness not the country) has been fined £5,000 for not carrying out the right checks. Fair dues. But come off it, is an employee, even the Attorney General, meant to be a one person investigation unit in addition to their legal requirements (for the non-performance of which, the Baroness has already fessed up and paid her fine)?

And does this really impact on Baroness Scotland’s discharge of her governmental duties? If someone can come up with some evidence of incompetance in her role, that would be different. Perhaps she was too busy concentrating on her governmental role to faff about with paperwork.

Having said that, there appears to have been shocking ignorance of the law shown by the Attorney-General and for that I have great sympathy with the calls for her to resign. But the housekeeper has presumably been paid by the Mail and they are using her story as knocking copy with which to beat Scotland. This seems to be a very unusual, some might say uncomfortable, position for the the Mail. Just read the Mail story and its rosy picture of the housekeeper. It’s an extraordinary turnaround for the Mail.

No, actually. But seeing his determined face and his “I do not roll over” statement on the Beeb, one wonders if he might just do a John Major “soapbox” trick and get people’s admiration for staying power. You never know, he could just snatch twenty seats for Labour at the next election.

At least, from his Beeb photo, he seems to have finally realised that it is a mistake for him to try to “smile”. For that we can all be grateful, whatever our political persuasion.

Yesterday I was walking along the street and a rather dodgy looking man walked up to some teenagers and, holding out his mobile phone, said, in tones of some desperation, “Lasses and lad, could you phone this number please?” One of the teenagers duly rang the number he gave them.

My first thought was that it would be insane for anyone to respond to the man’s request because he would then have your number on his phone and could phone you whenever he likes.

But quite frankly, I was baffled by the incident. What bona fide reason would the man have for asking someone to phone his mobile? It is utterly perplexing. Any ideas from my reader?

As a Republican and an avowed hater of men who go anywhere near a bottle of hair dye, I suppose I could have been nasty and written a title like “McCartney the Royal Toady”. But that would have been uncalled for. Paul McCartney, when all’s said and dyed, has, it seems, retained a wide-eyed innocence from his childhood. A laudatory essay on the Queen which he wrote when he was 10 years old has been unearthed.

It has interesting echoes with a tiny track on Abbey Road. Abbey Road has got a few interesting, very short tracks on it. One is “The End” which is part of a Medley just before the er….end of the album. It is interesting to reflect that if you listen to all the Beatles albums in the order they were recorded, “The End” is fittingly the last thing you will hear (it would be interesting to know if it was the last track they actually recorded), except for the tiny and simple track stuck on the end of “The End” called “Her Majesty”. It’s a wonderful little end to the album, complete with rather abrupt ending:

Her Majesty

(Lennon/McCartney)

Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl,
but she doesn’t have a lot to say
Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
but she changes from day to day

I want to tell her that I love her a lot
But I gotta get a belly full of wine
Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
Someday I’m going to make her mine, oh yeah,
Someday I’m going to make her mine.

That track is so short and, I suppose, odd, that it is hardly ever played on the radio. In fact, I have only heard it played on the radio once. That was last week by the (now he’s stop being silly like he was on Radio 1) excellent Chris Evans. Well done Mr Evans.

Not wishing to ride a complete coach and horses through copyright law, here’s a great video by a young American lady featuring “Her Majesty” on the Ukulele (twice) plus some interesting nonsense in the middle. It’s received 655,010 hits on You Tube so it must be relatively good:

(And yes – I couldn’t sleep)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgHoY_IOp_s&hl=en&fs=1&]

As a Republican and an avowed hater of men who go anywhere near a bottle of hair dye, I suppose I could have been nasty and written a title like “McCartney the Royal Toady”. But that would have been uncalled for. Paul McCartney, when all’s said and dyed, has, it seems, retained a wide-eyed innocence from his childhood. A laudatory essay on the Queen which he wrote when he was 10 years old has been unearthed.

It has interesting echoes with a tiny track on Abbey Road. Abbey Road has got a few interesting, very short tracks on it. One is “The End” which is part of a Medley just before the er….end of the album. It is interesting to reflect that if you listen to all the Beatles albums in the order they were recorded, “The End” is fittingly the last thing you will hear (it would be interesting to know if it was the last track they actually recorded), except for the tiny and simple track stuck on the end of “The End” called “Her Majesty”. It’s a wonderful little end to the album, complete with rather abrupt ending:

Her Majesty

(Lennon/McCartney)

Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl,
but she doesn’t have a lot to say
Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
but she changes from day to day

I want to tell her that I love her a lot
But I gotta get a belly full of wine
Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
Someday I’m going to make her mine, oh yeah,
Someday I’m going to make her mine.

That track is so short and, I suppose, odd, that it is hardly ever played on the radio. In fact, I have only heard it played on the radio once. That was last week by the (now he’s stop being silly like he was on Radio 1) excellent Chris Evans. Well done Mr Evans.

Not wishing to ride a complete coach and horses through copyright law, here’s a great video by a young American lady featuring “Her Majesty” on the Ukulele (twice) plus some interesting nonsense in the middle. It’s received 655,010 hits on You Tube so it must be relatively good:

(And yes – I couldn’t sleep)

Well if you track back to the original story about Brown’s health it seems to be based on a “long list of foods” which he is supposedly not meant to be served. Strangely, this “long list of foods” is so far, in the public domain, a short list of foods. In fact it is just two foods. “Cheese and chianti“.

(The story also demands to know where Brown “runs daily” as if to suggest that such an assertion by his spokesperson is made up. Would suggesting that he runs in a private gym be terribly earth-shattering? A treadmill in the Number 11 flat? He doesn’t need to go out in Hyde Park to actually run, stupid.)

I have a confession to make. I love cheese, but on two occasions in fifty years when I have gone over the top on the old fromage consumption I have had a headache the following day. On one of these occasions I had to lie down for an hour. So I have to be careful with my beloved cheese.

Once I had to avoid red wine for six months because I appeared to develop a temporary allergy to it. Happily, I can consume it freely these days.

At some stage in the past, if someone could be bothered to draw up a list of foods I should avoid, there might have been “cheese and red wine” on such a list.

When I was much younger (like 40 years ago) I used to throw tantrums when I was losing at “Risk” (a game involving the quest for world domination – it brought out the meglomaniac in me and when I was left owning just Australia I used to flip) and used to throw the board across the room. It was a running family joke for a long time.

I occasionally pick my nose. I do use my handkerchief though (mostly).

So this would put me in the Gordon Brown category it would seem, according to John Ward and Guido. I am one step away from the funny farm. Bring on the strait jacket.

This “cheese and chianti” “long list of foods” has been used to suggest that Brown may be on some very strong anti-depressants, except that “Dr John Crippen“ (which is a nom de plume of an actual GP) says that such claims are nonsense.

So that rules out those strong anti-depressants. So what if Brown is on Prozac? As Stephen Tall points out in a comprehensive and typically sensible post, it’s reckoned that 15% of the population will face a sever bout of depression at some point in their lives. Prozac is apparently so commonly used that it shows up as a trace element in the water supply.

We really shouldn’t get so jumpy about mental health problems. People need to take care of their mental health. Making them jumpy about it will not help the situation.

Guido says Brown is clearly “on the edge” because he picked his nose once and was reported to have thrown a tantrum in the office etc etc. Well come on, he’s Prime Minister. He’s dealt reasonably well (in the sense of surviving) one of the greatest economic emergencies of our times. His poll ratings are in the toilet. He has every right to be “on the edge”.

All this has made me feel: “Well, full marks to Brown for keeping going while all this manure is flying around”.

As for Andrew Marr – should he have asked Brown about his health? Of course. It is a free country. But questions are not answers. As is the practice with some American office holders and potential office-holders, I do think that regular health reports for our leaders should be in the public domain. But often they are so edited that they ask more questions than they answer. On balance, I think we should know if our Prime Minister is on medication. However, it shouldn’t be problem if he or she is on Prozac, that’s for sure.