Mr Deputy Speaker:
Stability the foundation.
Investment not cuts.
Every child the best start in life.

I think I missed something early on in Mr Brown’s speech… What’s the new tax rate on verbs? Must be pretty high if even the government’s having trouble affording them.

There’s little in the speech itself to disagree with – there rarely is in a pre-election budget, I expect. I just wonder how he can manage to announce tax cuts, borrowing cuts, and yet massive spending increases. I’m no expert on the economy, but to me that says ‘tax rises after the election’.

The main message that I took away from today’s events was how much better Mr Brown would be as Labour’s leader: Tony Blair’s fake emotion and anger versus Mr Brown’s real commandeering and forceful delivery, appearing to actually believe what he says? I know who I’d choose.

Overall, not a fantastic day for Labour, but not a bad one either. A couple of days of positive reports in the newspapers might give them a bit of a boost, but I think lots of the tabloid press will instead concentrate on picking holes and making Labour look bad.

So all-in-all it’s probably been a pretty neutral day. Not exactly what Labour needed right now, but not so bad that it makes Mr Brown look bad… probably a reasonably good day for him personally.

At first, it seems strange that the Vatican would get it’s knickers in a twist over this. But then, I guess the Vatican has some considerable history of launching battles on the basis of literary works of fiction.

Looks like Charles and Camilla aren’t fans, then, since they failed to take my advice. Still, it would really be rather more surprising if they were.

I can’t believe this battle is still raging. I’ve extensively commented on my views in the past, so I won’t rake over old ground again. Suffice to say, what ever happened to tolerance and living in peace with your fellow man? Especially when your fellow man is actually standing up for your values, albeit in a comic way, borrowing imagery from your religion.

Frankly, The Passion of Christ should be much more offensive as far as I can see, what with that elevating Mel Gibson to the level of God, and actually portraying the Biblical characters – unlike The Opera, which only portrays a corrupt individual’s disturbed imagination of the characters.

In what may be a first for this site, I’m actually agreeing with Tony Blair. Don’t worry, I’m not going to be making a habit of it, but if abortion is to become an election issue, then I’ll have to support him on it.

Michael Howard’s position:

I think that what we have now is tantamount to abortion on demand. I believe abortion should be available to everyone, but the law should be changed. In the past I voted for a restriction to 22 weeks, and I would be prepared to go down to 20.

I don’t see what good would be done by reducing the age at which abortion can take place, and I see no scientific evidence for doing so. Mr Howard is responding to the pro-life propaganda pictures of foetuses that look like people. Jelly babies also look a bit like people, but I have no ethical dilemmas when it comes to munching my way through a packet.

Charles Kennedy:

I don’t know what I would do now

That’s not what one would call a well argued thought out position on the issue. And if he doesn’t know his position, how am I supposed to know it? And, indeed, if I don’t know his position on key election issues, how am I supposed to vote for him? Come on Charlie, you can do better than this…

Tony Blair:

However much I might dislike the idea of abortion, you should not criminalise a woman who, in very difficult circumstances, makes that choice. Obviously there is a time beyond which you can’t have an abortion, and we have no plans to change that, although the debate will continue.

I know that this will come as a surprise, but – finally – I agree with Mr Blair on this. I’d perhaps go slightly further than him, because he’s left himself open to attack over women who aren’t in ‘very difficult circumstances’ but still obtain abortions, but he’s in a pretty solid position. For the first time in this not-quite-an-election-campaign, I can say: Well done, Mr Blair!

This weekend has become something of a catch-up weekend, it being the final one I’m spending at uni before the Easter break. Today, I’ve been catching up on my filing for the last five or six weeks. I just thought I’d share that, so far (and I’m by no means nearing completion), I’ve filed over 1,000 pages of notes. By the time I’ve finished, I’ll probably have doubled that. Won’t somebody please think of the rainforest? And, more importantly, won’t somebody please think of the limited capacity of my brain?!

A tractor-trailer hauling chickens collided with a Krispy Kreme doughnuts truck, killing some of the poultry and causing the highway to close for a time as crews tried to round up the escaped fowl, police said…

“It’s a junk food eater’s worst nightmare,” Dhaene said.

Well, it made me smile.

easyMobile has launched – the price of text messages seems excellent, at 5p, but I’m not hugely impressed by the call price, at 15p per minute. It’s not bad, but it’s not excellent.

Still, if you sign up now, you get texts for 3p and calls for 9p per minute until June, and that’s pretty damn good. Hopefully, the low text price will force other operators to respond with equally low prices. We’ll see.

I hadn’t heard about this frankly ridiculous story from across the pond until the excellent The Friday Project pointed it out in The Friday Thing yesterday. Since I think their analysis is fairly spot-on, and I can’t link to the article, I’ve quoted it in full below. Read it, be appalled, and then run off and subscribe to The Friday Project.

THE FUTURE IS JUMPSUIT ORANGE

They stood at the yard carrying bags full of weapons and tools. They yelled kill them. All of soldiers of zone two started shooting. They are dropping every one of them. After five minutes all the people were laying on the ground dead.’

If the above excerpt from an 18-year-old American high school student’s short story about zombie mayhem had ever made it into the hands of a diligent Kentuckian English teacher, it would be positively chipper with censorious red ink. But it didn’t. And the key-word here is ‘American’. They read things differently there. This is the country remember, where the film title ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ was deemed prohibitively highbrow. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that William Poole’s juvenile fiction has been taken rather more seriously than it oughta.

It all began three weeks ago, when William Poole’s grandmother was nosing around her grandson’s room. Suddenly she happened upon the boy’s personal journal and in a moment of surprised panic, read it cover to cover. So shaken was she by what she read and so loyal to her own flesh and blood that she immediately called the police. The police were equally shaken. And rightly so, for described in William Poole’s journal were a sinister gang called the Brotherhood of the No Limited Soldiers. (We think he probably meant Unlimited, as in Soldiers Without Limits. But we’re nit-picking.) The NLS are a large terrorific organisation spanning three states. They hold bizarre, loyalty-testing initiation ceremonies, and use sinister nicknames like ‘Nappy Boy’. At one stage they take over an unnamed high school in Poole’s Clark County. It’s terrifying stuff all right

Poole himself claims the journal is fiction – stories about zombies he was writing for high school. His high school teachers on the other hand, say they asked him to write no such thing. Detective Steven Caudill smells a threat. On February 22nd William Poole was arrested and charged with ‘terroristic threatening’, narrowly escaping another count of ‘aggravated terroristicism’. As his grandmother has refused to post the bail, Poole has been in jail ever since.

Sadly, as the whole world knows, when America takes coke, England gets a nosebleed. At the time of writing, Tony Blair has just rejected the idea of a ‘sunset clause’ in his brand new human-rights-friendly Prevention of Terrorism Bill. This clause would limit the powers of the legislation to just one year. That, says Blair, would be sending the wrong message to the evil-doers. Read his lips. And to anyone who doubts the wisdom of a law which will enable police to take away just about everything but the soul from anyone who is deemed – by a judge – to arouse ‘reasonable suspicion’ of actions, words or gestures with a terroresque motif, Blair says simply that this is a ‘time to be strong’. Oh. Right-o. Apparently, if the Prevention of Terrorism Bill is defeated, the old emergency measures – the post-TTEOSE ones which are due to expire on Monday – the ones which were recently deemed to contravene human rights laws – well, they’ll just be extended for a while, till Blair gets his own way again.

Meanwhile back in Kentucky, District Court Judge Brandy O. Brown was so totally awash with reasonable suspicion that the writings of William Poole betrayed unpatriotic intentions, that she sent the case to the Clark County Grand Jury. William Poole is still in jail.

Of course it is perfectly possible that Poole was in fact just days away from creating his own Columbine when he was arrested. We can’t judge what terrifying giveaways lay hidden in his juvenile zombie fantasy because we haven’t read the entire story. We can’t read the entire story because Brandy O. Brown has ordered the document sealed. However, if it were the case that foul deeds were only days away, determining the salient facts and foiling those foul deeds would surely not take long. Judging by the sophistication of the journal extract above, William Poole is no master-criminal. There would therefore, be evidence. It wouldn’t be hard. Jack Bauer could probably crack the case in less than a minute. And yet – we feel this bears repeating – William Poole has been in prison since February 22nd.

Surely the point here is that even if Poole had written a sickening bloodbath of a tale in which a character called William Poole single-handedly destroys America one picket fence at a time, then *so* *fucking* *what*?

It’s a free country.

Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett will be reunited as The Two Ronnies for the first time in 18 years this week, providing further proof that much-loved television shows of the past never die but are simply reborn for a new audience.

This is excellent news, and I can’t wait!