Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has suffered a major setback in her legal battle with American 'shock jock' Michael Savage after her officials were accused of banning him from the country on racial grounds.
Emails written by Home Office officials privately acknowledged the ban on Mr Savage would provide 'balance' to a list dominated by Muslims - and linked the decision to Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
This is one of the outcomes of playing politically-correct games with the security of a country; worry more(apparently) about how you 'look' than whether you're actually doing something. A lot like many of the gun bigots in this country.
The Right-wing radio presenter, whose hardline views on Islam, rape and autism have caused outrage in the US but whose show, The Savage Nation, has eight million listeners, was identified in May by Ms Smith as one of 16 people barred due to their political views.
Kind of like that Dutch legislator being banned from the country because his views weren't politically correct toward islam.
Mr Savage, who had not even applied for entry to Britain, claimed his name had been 'plucked out of a hat' because he was 'controversial and white'. He has since served a £100,000 libel writ on Ms Smith, who announced his ban on television.
Looks like he was right.
Now, correspondence released under Freedom of Information legislation suggests the banning of Mr Savage, whose real name is Michael Weiner, was based on a party political calculation made at the highest level of Government.
And why would the 'highest levels' be interested in doing this?
One message, sent by an unidentified Home Office official on November 27 last year, said that 'with Weiner, I can understand that disclosure of the decision would help provide a balance of types of exclusion cases'.
The documents include a draft recommendation, marked 'Restricted', saying: 'We will want to ensure that the names disclosed reflect the broad range of cases and are not all Islamic extremists.'
"We have to look like we're even-handed, so lets crap on somebody just to spread things out." Only one of the people they decided on actually made noise and trouble about it, so now there's a problem.
The Obama went on tv to tell people to stop causing him problems and be happy about their health care being taken over; didn't work real well:
I’ve been covering Barack Obama for a few years, and it’s usually crystal clear what he is up to. Not last night. This is the first time I’ve asked myself: What was THAT all about?
His prime time press conference was worse than a waste of time. He spent an hour (with the aide of a soporific White House press corps) pouring sand (one grain at a time) into the already-slowing gears of the machinery of health-care reform.
He made no real news on health care, but DID make news on race relations with his discussion of the Skip Gates case — thereby obscuring the topic he supposedly wanted to feature.
And that's from MSNBC; really didn't go over well.
Over in China, yeah, they own a lot of T-bills, and could cause problems for us; and screw themselves, too. Interesting article.
The Iranian people haven't given up; I haven't seen much the last few days about what's going on, fighting against a thug government like that is nasty.
Speaking of thug governments, we have a true piece of idiocy coming out of the White House:
President Obama announced today, a cut $16.5 million in military aid to Honduras and threatened to slash economic aid also.
Yesterday Secretary of State Clinton said she was looking "to restore democracy and constitutional order in the Honduras crisis."
So the Honduran government following their Constitution and kicking out of office a president who knowingly and repeatedly violated the law is against constitutional order and democracy? Takes a real piece of twisting to come up with that. You'd think The Obama has some kind of real problem with someone actually standing for 'nobody is above the law', wouldn't you? And he does this in favor of a clown who likes his picture taken with Raul Castro and Chavez, two dictators he wants to imitate. Wonderful.
India, again, says "Take your global warming hysteria and shove it; we're not wrecking our economy to make you happy."
The former military captain says it was in the early 1990s, that he watched his then commander wrestle with giving up his 12-year-old daughter who was mentally ill. The commander, he says, initially resisted, but after mounting pressure from his military superiors, he gave in. Im watched as the girl was taken away. She was never seen again.
One of Im’s own men later gave him an eyewitness account of human-testing. Asked to guard a secret facility on an island off North Korea’s west coast, Im says the soldier saw a number of people forced into a glass chamber.
“Poisonous gas was injected in,” Im says. “He watched doctors time how long it took for them to die.”
Considering what all else we know the Norks do to their own people, it would not surprise me in the least for this to be true.
Note to industry: if you throw an event for moms who blog, and decide to have it at a place where babies are not welcome, it might cause you a problem. That's kind of like having an event for gunbloggers and deciding on a restaurant with pictures of Che on the wall and where firearms are not allowed; it won't go over well.
Tam points to Marko dealing with the 'health care is a RIGHT!' noise. Starting with
Let’s get the most obvious point out of the way first. You cannot have a right to something that necessitates a financial obligation on someone else’s part.
There is a part of it that is as simple as self protection. As was my Dad, my Mom was a Law Enforcement Officer and I heard firsthand the abuses she saw against other women in the course of her work, women for whom their only crime was to be small and timid against a raging bully. Women who had yet to learn that evil does not go away by submitting, but by fighting back. So she taught me to shoot and the reasons for which she did needed no voice. Individually, collectively I believe it's a right of mine, as a law abiding citizen, whether I am a LEO or not, male or female, large or small. That being the right to protect my body and my interests for which I've toiled. And I would defend with each breath, against any interference with that liberty on which our country was founded.
Government health care. Where the doctor can screw up and cripple you for life, and you can't do a damn thing about it.
Jessica Read says around 10 a.m., about an hour into the procedure, "A nurse runs out, 'We need blood now,' and she rounds the corner and my gut feelings is, 'Oh my God, is that my husband?'"
She says his Air Force general surgeon mistakenly cut her husband's aortic artery, but waited hours to transport him to a state hospital which has a vascular surgeon. "It took them until 5:30 to get him to UC Davis. I don't understand."
Because Read lost so much blood during that time, doctors had to amputate both legs. His mother sobbed, "I watched him take his first steps, and now his legs are gone."
"Disfigures"? Disfigures? If they'd left a scar on his face, that would be "disfiguring." THEY TOOK HIS LEGS.
But that's not the worst part:Read's wife says the doctor admitted it was human error. "All my husband ever wanted to do was to deploy, all my husband ever wanted to do was serve his country. He used to tell me when we had flyovers and they played the national anthem, the chills he would get from the pride that he felt from being an American airman, and this is something an Air Force doctor has taken from him."Now, when the .gov takes over the $2.3 trillion in annual health expenditures, what do you want to bet one way they'll eventually attempt to limit costs will be by limiting patient's right to sue for malpractice?
But because of an old federal law called the Feres Doctrine, Read, his wife, and his family members can't sue the military over what happened to him.
Because 'The government is in control of your health care, and cannot be troubled by your problems with the treatment."
You know, I understand 'people make mistakes', but I have to admit thinking this doctor ought to be used for bayonet practice.
And last, especially if you're going to be travelling out of the US, go here and read. It's worth it.
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