Dadblog

This guy applied for the Middlesboro manager job based on his achievements on Premiership Manager. And he got a reply. From Steve Gibson personally. As he says “Steve Gibson is ace.” Hear hear.

Whatever your stand on abortion is, it is fundamentally dishonest not to acknowledge the role religion - or at least morality with a religious source - plays in your position. Anti-abortion campaigners are overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, dominated by those who believe in the primacy of the soul and planes of existence beyond the one we see and taste every day. In other words, Christians.

So we shouldn’t be surprised to see the head of the Catholic church in the UK seeking to re-open the abortion debate:

Abortion laws are back on the agenda with the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales urging a change in legislation.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor is holding a private meeting with Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt.

It is understood he will ask her to lower the current 24-week time limit for abortions.

What’s particularly asinine about this story, though, is the way this call is being made - the justification is based on the fact that advances in technology mean the survival chances of a 24-week foetus are far higher than when the current limits were applied, in 1990.

So what? Intellectually, what difference does that make? The anti-abortionists will use any means to bring down the abortion limit with an endgame of shutting down the procedure altogether. Are we saying now that somehow a 24-week foetus is more “lifelike” because of advances in technology? I’d be interested in a theological debate on this one.

On the Today programme’s coverage this morning - in which all the interviewees were middle-aged men, incidentally - there was an interview conducted with an MP who chairs some committee or other who made the case for at least examining the limit. Not once was he asked what his religion was. If we’re going to have a debate, let’s have the real debate - over whether or not we’re going to allow spiritual or religious beliefs govern the state’s ability to regulate a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body. Don’t fiddle round the edges.

Although (cheap shot alert) the Catholic primate presumably knows a lot about fiddling.

A work colleague just introduced me to the sheer adulteratedd elights of Amazon.com’s reviews for The Very Best of David Hasselhoff. I’m sure they’re fake, but I oh so want them to be real. Here’s the highlight:

This recording should have a government warning on it as it is one deadly party that’s waiting to explode! I played it in my hotel room and almost finished the contents of the mini bar… His choice (well producer’s choice) of chords are incredible and he just proves that black leather will never go out of fashion - The man is timeless. Dream duo would be with Bonnie Tyler or Alison Moyet - power women who are not afraid to wear black leather. Maybe David could do a duo with himself - now that would be the ultimate trip!

File under If Chris Morris Wrote Amazon Reviews.

Now, call me naive, but I kind of thought that the assertion that Bush “stole” the 2004 election was at best controversial, at worst decidedly crackpot. So reading Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen? was a short, sharp shock, to say the least. In it, Robert F Kennedy Jnr basically accuses the Republicans of enormous, breathtaking electoral fraud:

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes. In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

It’s got citations and footnotes and everything. So, either he gets sued into the heavens, or Bush and his cronies actually staged a coup d’etat in the most powerful nation on earth. And nobody noticed.