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What happened next? 364

Posted on June 11, 2015 by

24 hours in news:

guardianoil2

Oil is good again! Yay!

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The grievance hunters 103

Posted on June 11, 2015 by

We’ve already noted that today is a confusing news day. But when we were listening to the radio this morning we thought we maybe hadn’t woken up properly.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 11 June 2015)
.

The segment concerned a report by the Tory-leaning think tank Reform Scotland, and saw both the organisation and Labour MSP Hugh Henry trying doggedly to find a bad spin on the news in the fact that crime in Scotland is at a 40-year low. So desperate were they to do so that they ended up denying the existence of arithmetic.

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The news is very confusing today 73

Posted on June 11, 2015 by

So first of all there’s this (click pic for full story):

icelandbanks

…in which the figures appear to show that Iceland’s policy of imposing justice and imprisoning the greedy bankers who caused the world financial crash – rather than just shovelling money at them and letting them carry on robbing everyone – actually saw its economy recover at least as well as anywhere else’s.

But then things get more complicated.

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The grinding wheels of justice 80

Posted on June 10, 2015 by

An update for those interested, via an alert cartoonist:

From: Garreth.Lodge

To: Christopher Cairns

Subject: RE: Ian Smart

Date: 9 June 2015 14:25:33 BST

Dear Christopher,

Thank you for your e-mail to Kezia with regards to her exchange with the First Minister in the Scottish Parliament on Thursday 23rd April 2015.

Kezia can confirm that the person mentioned in the exchange has had their membership of the Labour Party put under administrative suspension and an investigation is currently being conducted by the General Secretary of the Scottish Labour Party.

If you have specific questions on the investigation you will need to direct them to the Scottish Labour Party, not Kezia’s Parliamentary office.

If there is anything other issues Kezia can help with as your MSP, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Kind Regards

Garreth

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The Unseen Sturgeon 173

Posted on June 09, 2015 by

We’ve already brought you the First Minister’s appearance on last night’s The Daily Show in the US, but in addition to the seven minutes that were shown on TV there were a further seven minutes of interview which didn’t go out on air, but were shown on the Comedy Central website, region-blocked so only US residents could see them.


When the FM goes abroad to represent Scotland in the outside world, though, we think it’s only fair that Scots get to see what she’s saying and doing on their behalf, so we didn’t let such trifling obstacles get in our way.

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The Sturgeon Show 127

Posted on June 09, 2015 by

The First Minister’s appearance on The Daily Show last night in full:


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If we could turn back time 286

Posted on June 08, 2015 by

The Daily Record’s conscience is evidently still bothering it.

morevowshite

Having sold Scotland a pup back in September, the paper has spent much of the time since then frantically trying to present itself as the doughty and fearless champion of home rule. But it’s hard to see what it’s getting itself so worked up about.

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The impossible fantasy 206

Posted on June 07, 2015 by

The likely next Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale on today’s Sunday Politics:

We’ll try to keep this brief, because we want to go to the seaside.

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The scum of the Earth 271

Posted on June 06, 2015 by

The Daily Mail, having unaccountably failed to notice the slew of Unionists who tried to blame the SNP for Charles Kennedy’s death before the body was cold on Tuesday, suddenly remembered to look at its Twitter timeline again today.

hatemob

There, it conveniently found that vile cybernat hate mobs had hounded the former Lib Dem leader into an early grave (rather than the alcoholism-induced haemorrhage that the post-mortem concluded was responsible).

We suppose they’d know all about that sort of thing, right enough.

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The thickest of it 493

Posted on June 04, 2015 by

There’s an unmissable piece in today’s Guardian about the last days of the general election campaign, as seen from inside the headquarters of the Labour Party.

thethick

The reason it’s fascinating isn’t because (as it claims) it provides an insight into why Labour lost the election, but because it reveals how the party’s most senior staff, by pathologically avoiding any non-stage-managed contact with actual voters, lost all grip of reality and sleepwalked into their most crushing defeat in decades.

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Under rocks and slime 347

Posted on June 02, 2015 by

I had no time for the way that Charles Kennedy conducted himself in the referendum campaign and it would be hypocritical to pretend that I did.

But before that he was one of the main reasons I voted Lib Dem for over 20 years – a compassionate, principled man who took some difficult stands and left his party in a far healthier place, both politically and morally, than it occupies now.

ck3

He deserves better than this.

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Quick fact check 267

Posted on June 01, 2015 by

Because the media in Britain is now basically just a giant gossip circle repeating each other’s stories, pretty much every newspaper today repeats Michelle Mone’s tiresome publicity-seeking whinge about “cybernats” from the Mail On Sunday.

One of them is the Herald, whose piece contains a quote suggesting that Mone – who appeared to think that flitting from Scotland to England somehow got you away from the internet – does have at least some basic understanding of how Twitter works:

“I blocked all the ones who used the C word. All from the same party, surprise, surprise.”

Now, we’re going to assume that by “the C word” she meant the four-letter insult, and by “the same party” we can deduce from context that she must mean the SNP.

So let’s just see if that claim stands up to scrutiny.

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