The Yorkshire Ranter

Link “In the daily reports of conflict, the British have become the forgotten army. And news of the Americans unleashing their ferocious firepower on the cities is greeted with raised eyebrows. Washington, twice, asked for British soldiers, paratroopers to be sent to Baghdad, and twice has been refused. One young British soldier said yesterday: “Look,…

Link It seems a report prepared by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies has revealed that the Americans in Iraq think that guerrilla activity will go on up to the day they leave the country. Dr Anthony Cordesman went to Iraq and spoke to – as well as assorted generals and spooks – Paul…

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | US babies get global brand names Well, if I worked for the Al-Qa’ida Joint Centre for Propaganda and Corporate Communications, this is the sort of thing I might have made up – barbarian infidels, mindless materialism, decadence and the like. But I wouldn’t have had to. “There are…

..for putting us on to that last post.

An Anti-Labor Line in the Sand: LA Times “In plants and factories all over Iraq, workers are quickly organizing unions. They want better wages. They want shorter hours (workers at the refinery and elsewhere often work 11- and 13-hour shifts without additional pay). They want safety shoes, goggles, masks and other protective gear. Most of…

There’s a great idea! The US Army has launched an offensive around Baghdad called Operation IRON HAMMER in an effort to nail some of those inconvenient guerrillas. Apparently, this is a “Get Tough” policy involving a “hard line on terrorism” and various other examples of the rhetoric of false strength. What this boils down to…

Two new blogs have recently started linking to us, neither of which I’d ever seen before. Those are the ReachM High Ranch at , a simpatico and well designed US political blog, and About Pip, an idiosyncratic personal blog by a British expat in Sweden: . Fortunately, it’s nothing at all to do with the…

The Service Employees International Union in New York is going to do this: “As part of the anti-Bush campaign, union President Dennis Rivera has recruited 1,000 rank-and-file members and staff to fan out across the country beginning next month to get an early start organizing get-out-the-vote operations in more than a dozen “battleground” states. Those…

In the Democratic primaries, it’s getting to look certain that Howard Dean – former governor of Vermont, toast of the Left and supposed “Bloggers’ Candidate” – is going to win. Blogs are spilling a lot of ink over him at the moment, but Nathan Newman has some of the best stuff on him here. “one…

Somebody has invented a test to classify your political opinions, The Political Compass. It defines your politics as your position on two axes, an economic one running from extreme communism on the left of the graph to total free market capitalism on the right, and a liberal/authoritarian one running from fascism at the top of…