The Yorkshire Ranter

It’s just a pity when the Torygraph gets the dirt about the lead-up to war with Iraq before the rest of us. A cache of documents leaked to the rag show that, as early as March, 2003, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning (a performer in the Hutton inquiry, if you recall) was…

Is this worrying, or am I just feeling a tad paranoid? Simbaud quotes this, referring to a CBS news report on the 17th: “FBI field offices and Homeland Security agencies will be advised of “extraordinary measures” that will go into place “beginning the first week of October through the elections” . . . . Specifically,…

William Faulkner once said (note – I may be misquoting) “The past is never forgotten – it is not even past”. Who could disagree with that after this week? I could vaguely recall, back at the start of the week, caring about fox hunting (or in fact *not* fox hunting) in about 1998. But, what…

Looking at the news lately, you might think there was a degree of discontent in the air – first of all, the chap with the sledgehammer outside Downing Street, then Fathers4Justice climbing Buckingham Palace, now foxhunters invading the House of Commons chamber while their comrades fought it out with the cops outside. Not that I…

Link “I think it is plain and simple. Bush didn’t think that he had to go by the rules that others did,” says Knox.

Phil Carter has an excellent post on the radical changes to the US National Guard that have seen it go from an organisation you might join to avoid going to war – to one that certainly will send you to war. The US now has 168,915 reservists on operations overseas, largely due to reforms that…

“ATTN: PRESIDENT /CEO, > TRANPARENT ENTERPRISE. > LIBERIA. > I am ENG.VIKTOR BOUT, former special adviser on Diamond matters to the > former head of state of government of liberia President Charles Taylor. > Because of my strategic position in the former government and also being > a close confidant of the former head of…

An esteemed colleague, My Way of Thinking, has blogged reasons why, in his view, the Left should not support John Kerry. Oh God, are we on to this again? It’s a trope that some people on the left always argue that we should stand aside and let the latest bunch of bastards do as they…

All righty then, get a dose of this! “Bouffard, the Ohio document specialist, said that he had dismissed the Bush documents in an interview with The New York Times because the letters and formatting of the Bush memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Bouffard yesterday said that he…

The New York Times is reporting that the US Govt is increasingly concerned by the apparently increased possibility of a North Korean nuclear test. However, they are also very keen to play down the gigantic explosion reported in NK on Thursday. Of course, there is no possible way a bang that created a mushroom cloud…