Wednesday, December 30, 2009

My new address is www.liberalburblings.co.uk


If you are not redirected in a few seconds, please click here to go my new address.

Many thanks
Paul

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Well done Ireland!

While being somewhat dubious about "second stab" referendums, I am delighted by the result of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. 67% yes! Wooh-hoo! Well done Ireland!

Iain Dale, presaging this result, said this would be a "Sad Day for Democracy", mumbling about "vested interests" issuing "dire warnings". What total cobblers!

How can the majority of those who bother to vote, making up their minds to vote a certain way be a "Sad Day for Democracy"?

As the BBC correspondent in Dublin said the change of heart is mostly down to the dramatic change in the economic fortunes of Ireland over the last year or so.

David Letterman's bombshell

There's been a quite extraordinary episode regarding David Letterman in the US, summarised beautifully by the Guardian today on page 11 of their print edition (but I am danged if I can find it on the internet, so here is an earlier summary they published).

There's footage of Letterman's stunning confession and revelation on air below.

Once again, for my money, Letterman demonstrates why is the Master of the Talkshow. One slight worry though, Ed Pilkington in the Guardian suggests that Letterman's future now lies in the hands of, amongst others, (oh dear) Sarah Palin.

Peter Kaplan, a former editor of the New York Observer and an essayist on Letterman, said the comic's future now rested in the hands of advertisers, CBS affiliate stations that have the power to cut off the show - and Sarah Palin. Letterman was recently forced to apologise to last year's Republican vice-Presidential candidate over a sexual joke he made about her daughter. "If ever the Palin crew had the chance of exacting revenge, this is it," Kaplan said.

Well whatever happens on that score will depend, I suspect, on whether the promoters of Sarah Palin's new book reckon there is any publicity mileage in this. There probably is.

Big Brother Mandelson?

Congratulations to Frank Riley of Hexham for this fantastic letter in the Guardian today:

Compare and contrast: "The Labour party has finally learned to love Peter Mandelson. It took a long time but we finally got there" (Chris Mullin MP, How deep is your love, 29 September). "Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache … But it was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother" (George Orwell, 1984).

Changing places

I don't like writing these sorts of admin posts but I ought to do this one. (So far, in over 3 years of blogging, I have managed to avoid the dreaded "Blogging ** l***t" post, so be thankful for small mercies).

It's been a whirlwind couple of days. For reasons which will eventually become apparent, I have been shifting around domains. Suffice it to say, I am now more familiar with terms like "CNET" and "DNS" than I ever wanted to be.

I am now the proud owner of a new domain called www.liberalburblings.org and that is what I am publishing Liberal Burblings on now and in the future.

I have stuck a couple of, admittedly cack-handed and amateurish, redirection codes for this new domain on my previous domains, paulwalter.blogspot.com and www.liberalburblings.com.

Apologies for any disruption this has caused.

As part of preparations for a formatting refinement I have deleted most of the history of this blog. Sorry about that. If I had thought it through properly I would have avoided that. But now my history is residing on a massive xml file on my hard drive which I am finding it difficult to use in anyway.

"Que sera sera" as Doris Von Kappelhoff once said.

Article on LibDem Voice

Many thanks to LibDem Voice for publishing an article I submitted to them on the Tory party: "A frightening party of selfishness and reactionism".

Liberal Burblings has moved

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