Maybe he can't fix your toilet, but his new website suggests he can secure your dream. Thank goodness for Joe The Plumber, still watching out for the little guy, and any merchandising and endorsement opportunities that happen to materialise along the way. Join the website for free - OR! Get a FREEDOM MEMBERSHIP, which includes a FREE SIGNED COPY of Joe's forthcoming book, for just $14.95!
Joe doesn't plan on going away any time soon. "it will be a loud voice," says Joe, "so good luck trying to ignore it." Thanks for the encouragement, Mr Wurzelbacher. We'll give it our best shot.
If Barack Obama wins tomorrow, there won't be many Republicans more mortified than those here in Virginia, a state that hasn't voted for a Democrat at a general election since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In a rally in the Richmond suburb of Glen Allen on Saturday night, the wild enthusiasm of the party faithful for Sarah Palin was tinged with the underdog's perception of unfairness that has been more familiar to Democrats in recent years.
"We know what the mainstream media thinks," said Lee Anne Thompson, a 43-year-old housewife who brandished one of many "Keep Virginia Red" signs as the Republican vice-presidential candidate urged the rapt crowd to make the case for John McCain to their friends and neighbours. "We know Barack Obama already thinks he's won. But the people of Virginia haven't had their say yet."
Sky News is now putting the tally at over 10,000. Who feels the need to complain at this stage? It's not like OFCOM's going to forget about it, after all. It'll be interesting to see, in the fullness of time, whether any of those complaints were part of a coordinated campaign, in the same vein as the Christian Voice campaign against Jerry Springer: The Opera: if not, people really must be furious about this.
No more updates on the count here, or there won't be any space for anything else on the blog.
Whatever one's views of the foulness of Russell Brand's mouth, and whether it really warrants an OFCOM enquiry or can really reasonably be used as a starting point for the kind of systematic assault on the BBC that it seems to have engendered, it's worth noting two facts.
First, that Andrew Sachs does not seem to have heard the (undoubtedly offensive) remarks in question until a Mail on Sunday journalist called him to alert him to their existence, at which point he and his agent listened to an online broadcast of the show, and were understandably upset. And second, there have now been 4,772 complaints about the episode. Of those, 3,187 have been received in the last twenty-four hours. And precisely two were received in the week between the show being broadcast to two million listeners and the Mail on Sunday story a week later.
At Coffee House, Stephen Pollard, ever lively, has called this blog a modern-day Der Stürmer - a violently bigoted rag published in Germany in the 1930s that did a huge amount to whip up anti-semitic feeling, and a crucial part of the Nazi propoganda machine. Here are some choice selections from its screed. Pollard takes issue with our decision not to delete four comments that were posted on Andy McSmith's blog yesterday - a blog which, incidentally, voiced the sort of concern about anti-semitism that one assumes Der Stürmer would be unlikely to have included in its pages.
In Pollard's view, those comments were anti-semitic, and should have been removed; in ours, they fell some way short of the standard of prejudiced virulence that would warrant their deletion. (In contrast, other comments that crossed that line did get taken down.) Doubtless others besides Pollard will disagree with our judgement on this, and they are, of course, perfectly entitled to do so. But if you're going to make the case that points of view that transgress the ordinary limits of free speech should be censored, it's probably wise to refrain from casting about such extraordinary and unwarranted aspersions yourself. 'A modern-day Der Stürmer'? Come on, Stephen. You surely can't really mean that. No one who reads this blog - or even glances at it - could think that such a characterisation was anything but ridiculous.
Foreign Policy has produced an excellent map based on a Gallup poll it conducted asking people around the world which US political candidate they support. 60 per cent of Britons are behind Obama - but that's nothing on Kenya, where he can count on the backing of 89 per cent of the public. The country where McCain has the biggest lead outside of the US? Georgia, where he commands 23 per cent of the vote, an 8 point advantage over his Democratic rival.Lots more to get stuck in to here.
In speaking out against the government's proposed database of telephone and internet records last night, Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald joined a remarkable cast of critics of Labour's most draconian instincts.
It's not so much criticism from the likes of Lord Carlile of Berriew, the independent reviewer of terrorism laws, that makes the casual observer raise an eyebrow; it's not the voices of principled civil libertarians like Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, or political opponents, whose views can easily be dismissed – as Lib Dem Julia Goldsworthy's were by Geoff Hoon on Question Time last week – as giving 'a licence to terrorists to kill people'.
No, the really startling chorus of opposition to the raft of illiberal policies that has characterised this government is that which has emerged from the security establishment.
It never rains but it pours. After Barack Obama's pig-lipstick 'gaffe', which it took real decontextualising acrobatics on the part of the Republican party to turn into a misogynist slight on Sarah Palin, Joe Biden has put his foot well and truly in it. Last time McCain's spinmeister Steve Schmidt really had to earn his salary; but the latest Democratic blunder is such an obvious own goal that he could probably just let an intern handle it and take a long lunch. Here's Joe Biden yesterday afternoon:
A good rule of thumb for politicians everywhere: never admit that someone else could do the job better than you. Expect that quote to get endless play in Republican ads and the news for at least the next few days, and probably beyond.
This week we're speaking to Julia Goldsworthy, Liberal Democrat spokeswoman for Communities and Local Government, ahead of the Lib Dem party conference. Goldsworthy was elected for Falmouth and Camborne in 2005 as the youngest MP in parliament. She's also a keen rower, and was runner-up in Channel Four celebreality athletics extravaganze The Games in 2006. Email your questions.
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