Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

• Craig Bellamy in June 2006, on signing for Liverpool: “The fact that it was Liverpool made it impossible for me to turn them down. As I’m a fan, it doesn’t matter what club I was at. I could never turn Liverpool down.”

• Craig Bellamy in August 2010, on signing for Cardiff: “I’m thrilled to be coming back home to Cardiff and am excited at the prospect of wearing the shirt and playing for the club I’ve supported since I was a boy.”

And they say that footballers are mercenaries who will play for anybody that’s prepared to pay them stupid amounts of money…

I don’t live in Birmingham, and this bit of news won’t affect me personally in the slightest, but for some reason I’ve been trying to keep up with various news stories surrounding the cuts made by the Birmingham City Council.

A few months ago, I wrote about the handsome pay rises that the council’s bosses had awarded themselves, shortly before making some big job cuts for council employees. The hypocrisy of it all amused me.

Amongst those cuts, it was reported that “workers in the children and young people’s department are expected to bear the brunt of the losses”, a total of 2,000 job cuts across the council.

This week saw the release of a report criticising Birmingham City Council’s children’s department, stating that it was failing to protect children, and showed little capacity to improve. The councillor in charge of the department, Len Clark, said he was leading an immediate “re-alignment” of the service.

Yeah, a re-alignment that is going to leave the department much weaker because you’re going to be firing so many people, and yet you’re still going to be collecting a cushy salary that saw an inflation-busting increase recently.

But please excuse most of the media for not covering this story; I hear Kerry Katona has a new boyfriend…

• 24th June: Daily Express front page headline: You can’t ban the burkha, say Eurocrats

• 14th July: Daily Express front page headline: France votes to ban the burkha

There’s nothing like spreading some Europhobia which is in fact entirely false, and then having no shame in completely contradicting yourself a mere three weeks later. Well done, Daily Express!

(Hat-tip to Tabloid Watch)

In an effort to keep track of the absolute rank hypocrisy that the Daily Mail engages in seemingly daily, here’s the latest example:

• 30/06/10: The Mail engages in yet more BBC-bashing, this time pulling a couple of quotes from BBC message boards complaining about some of the crowd shots during this year’s Wimbledon tournament. Images of couples or “young women with iced drinks” are offending at least a couple of viewers, giving the Mail an opportunity to get apoplectic (oh, and to illustrate the article with photos of said “young women with iced drinks”…)

• 24/06/10: Daily Mail publishes ‘Oh those Russians! Sharapova joins cheeky girls of Wimbledon’, illustrated by multiple pictures of Maria Sharapova slightly hoiking up her shorts.

• 24/06/10: Daily Mail publishes ‘Long and short of it: Maria Kirilenko wears suitably skimpy dress on hottest day of Wimbledon so far’, illustrated by multiple pictures of Maria Kirilenko in a dress which isn’t actually that short.

• 22/06/10: Daily Mail publishes ‘Oh I say, the hemlines are shorter than ever at Wimbledon this year’, illustrated by multiple pictures of various players, and you can practically hear the author salivating as they wrote such lines as “who wore particularly skimpy outfits, showing off their toned thighs - and a little more besides”.

But it’s definitely the BBC who is in the wrong for showing a few members of the crowd during the tennis, isn’t it?! Fucking hypocrites.

Compare and contrast the Daily Mail’s changing opinion of a coalition government.

Last Wednesday, the day before the election, a frontpage leader column entitled ‘Vote DECISIVELY to stop Britain walking into disaster’ contained the following:

[The election campaign has seen] the emergence of a widespread belief that a hung parliament, giving nobody a clear victory, would be a desirable outcome. The Mail cannot stress too strongly how wrong-headed and dangerous it believes this view is. […]

A hung parliament, with the probability of a coalition or pact, will result in a weak administration, dependent on back-room deals and shabby compromises. […]

But we stress: any voters still attracted by the idea of a hung parliament should read the account on these pages by historian Dominic Sambrook of the misery and national humiliation we suffered the last time Britain had a hung parliament, with an enfeebled Labour propped up by the Liberals.

Now, with the Tories only able to take the keys to Downing St with the support of the Lib Dems in a coalition, today’s Daily Mail has seen a change of tune. Now the coalition is described as:

ground-breaking coalition deal […]

the most momentous day in modern British political history […]

Mr Cameron agreed a stunning deal that will mean Britain being governed by its first coalition administration since the 1930s.

It seems that it’s not just the political parties that are having to make compromises!

The Conservative party’s latest press release is trying really hard to play up the issue of a hung parliament being bad for the country, and to say that people shouldn’t vote Lib Dem for fear of getting a Labour government once more.

It seems that the politics of fear is alive and well, despite Cameron’s promise to have a positive campaign, highlighting the positives of voting Tory rather than the negatives of voting for anyone else. That didn’t last long…!

Personally, I think a hung parliament could be great for our country, I really do. We need to get used to a new politics that is more than just Labour and Tory, and accept the plurality of views. Consensus politics works in numerous other countries (and in supranational bodies like the UN and EU), so why not here?

Just because it’s different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

I’m just watching last night’s Daily Show, and yet again I’m in awe of the way this programme tears apart the hypocrisies present in the media nowadays.

Jon Stewart destroys Fox News’ midday host Megyn Kelly and her one-sided portrayal of what is supposedly “fair and balanced” news. It was stunning how unfairly the “news” is actually broadcast. Is it really “fair and balanced” to only pick four random members of the public who all (coincidentally!) were against the healthcare bill?

Is it fuck.

There’s a great little montage of talking heads who all use the phrase “cram down the throats” of the American public, in terms of the healthcare bill, and then Stewart just rips apart Fox’s reliance on polls which support its position, whilst handily ignoring those that disagree.

Kelly is particularly in favour, it seems, of quoting poll numbers at those who disagree with her/Fox News. Well, until the final clip, which shows her in October 2008, discussing the latest polls which put Obama well ahead of McCain. Her opinion? To paraphrase, “we shouldn’t trust polls and pollsters anyway.”

The hypocrisy is just mind-blowing, and I don’t see how anyone can not notice it.