threegee

I agree with Nick - oops I mean Monsta! The Two Cleggies could probably change places and no one would notice - and they probably will! They're both out of the same mold, and not Nu Labour greaseballs or Lavery/Scargill type anarchists. Can they carry their parties at all times is the only unknown. As it's the only show in town at the moment, then they probably can.

Wow, stand up the guy who made that uncannily accurate prediction! Turns out that Gordon was sitting at the table in Downing Street - when all about him had quit and the engine was running to take him to the palace - desperately making last bid phone calls to the LDs for that extra four months in power. That VAT to 20% prediction is only counting down the days now. How do you close the revenue shortfall without it, and without a stiff rise in direct taxation? It would be nice if it was only for a few years, but I fear it will be near permanent.

Nope, all the really potty LD ideas have been discarded. Trident stays and a replacement will be bought, though carefully costed. Also the daft idea of giving away £16Bn in tax reductions in order to get £1.5Bn to the low paid has been revised to something a lot more cost effective and affordable.

Unemployment up another 53,000, and "the recovery" has been "put at risk" by the need to stop spending more than we earn. Even the chairman of the BoE is spouting about the dangers of not reigning in our chronic overspending right away. He's also revised his forecasts to point up that inflation is a much bigger problem than he formerly forecast. Who would have thought that printing loads of money would cause inflation? Worse: Foreigners are no longer to blame for our woes - we now have to take ownership of our own problems. And... we are no longer able to jet around lecturing other countries on how to run their economies as we're now too busy fixing our own. No one is even out there saving the World! This is tragic! Things were never this bad under Global Gordon!

http://www.metacafe....oon_at_nite.swf If the wind wasn't a Westerly: we've got a problem Houston! http://midimagic.sgc-hosting.com/candbal.htm

Actually it looks like Cleggie is in a quite weak position with his own party - he can't deliver on a deal! And, as I said, the longer this thing goes on.... So... we've not only had secret talks, we've had secret talks which were kept secret from those secret talks! This is what always happens when you abandon FPTP. And... would you adam & eve that Gordon is going to cling on until Septemberish, and that it is starting to look like NONE of the candidates that were paraded before the public at the party leaders debate is going to get to be PM! Worse still, minority Labour is planning to impose yet another unelected PM on the Country! Gordon has only dared to have a proper cabinet meeting AFTER he's preempted the people planning to knife him in the back. "Dignified exit" my foot! What the people who are crowing that we don't have a presidential form of government conveniently fail to mention is, that this sort of thing wouldn't have happened in the past because it WAS ALWAYS an unwritten rule that a PM had to have a mandate to govern and so was obliged to hold an election fairly quickly to maintain authority. Exactly when this rule was sidelined I don't know.

Because you couldn't! One way or another they'd club up - even covertly. With parties at least you know broadly what they support and are agin. Most people don't bother to do their research; how many people voted LibDem just because it was neither Labour nor Tory without checking exactly what they were voting for? The majority I'd wager! I'm Nick and I'm different, without being required to specify how they were different, and with no (modern) record of failure, was the most powerful thing they had going for them. So, difficult even with parties, and near impossible without! The alternative is to get rid of MPs and simply elect a government. That won't at all appeal to the political classes as it means many fewer politicians. The so-called constituency work could be done by an expansion of the ombudsman, possibly merging it all into the local CAB. Combine that with some on-line opinion canvasing with teeth, and mandatory e-referendums on major matters, and you'd likely get a stronger democracy at a much lower price. Can someone explain what happens when you've taken a problem to an MP and it has been progressed a way, then that MP is suddenly removed from office?

Depends on what you mean by... I don't think that politicians hatching deals in secret is very democratic. At least when you put someone in on a firm manifesto you've got some sort of benchmark as to whether they've delivered or not. With this form of horse trading you don't even know exactly what you're voting for, or the character and record of who you are voting for! It all boils down to whether the MPs are representing you or their party. With FPTP they are representing you even if you didn't vote for them, and you can take your problem to them and they are obliged to listen. Who can you take a problem to when there's a hodge podge of various parties who don't necessarily represent your neck of the woods? If they are not there to represent their constituents what exactly are they there for, and in these days of instant communication do we even need them anyway? The MPs themselves will tell you that the days of policy swaying speeches in parliament are long gone. They get up and spout and no one listens. The parliamentary process as was is totally pointless!

It's win-win for the Tories on this one. If the present negotiations break down they'll say this is what we are heading for IF we were to adopt PR. If they don't and a coalition is patched together then they'll say things would have been much better if we hadn't been compromised, and they'll be plugging that at the next election. As far as Labour is concerned Gordon is quite prepared to put Labour at a huge disadvantage for his own immediate purposes, but senior Labour figures can see past the next few months and how this would be suicidal. I wonder how many of the rent-a-mob demonstrating yesterday - if taken aside and asked to explain how what EXACTLY they were demonstrating for - could give a coherent answer as to how it would work in practise? It's one of the "simple" type of ideas (like communism) which appeal to the sorts of people who don't think through the practical consequences, and how human nature will exploit them. All any form of PR will yield is more politicians, more public expense, more fudges, and more excuses why things don't change! It's a change to less change!

Interesting to scrutinise what Cleggie has just said in his four points. He steered clear of both the Euro and Trident. And he didn't specify PR. A fundamental vertical reform of the political system. Vertical codeword for the house of lords; political system can be made to mean whatever you want it to mean - he didn't actually use the words voting system like some of the media is reporting, It suits the Tories that the electoral boundaries be redrawn. Cameron has already said that compromise is readily possible on education, and tax. So Cleggie reeeeely wants a deal, and so does Dave. But the longer it goes on the more deal-breaking demands will be thought up by those in the wings.

Strictly coffee! But... I've forgotten the brand! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8132122.stm

Stephen, that underestimates the sheer ambition of Cleggie. He's humbled by his poll result but he's also worked out that he can get his hands on the levers of power, and that this could well be his only chance. So I think we're going to see more than a stability pact. That's if he can get the huge compromises past his own party, and I guess that with this bunch he quite probably can. Labour can't offer him anything other than instant unpopularity, and a very shaky coalition. The only bargaining chip Labour has is their eleventh-hour conversion to electoral reform. A bird or two in the hand could be worth a small flock of electorally reformed ones in the bush - especially when it's a Brown bush! On the other hand such is Gordon's "long-termist outlook" that he's going to do, say, or buy (with other people's money) anything to cling on. Even if this means throwing away the built-in advantage Labour has in the present electoral system. Interesting times, but so far all horses are running to form.

"Breaking the mold (sic) of British Politics!" Proving - if proof were needed - that social dependency is a terminal illness. If I were Cleggie I'd be tempted to tell Gordon that a condition of him staying in power was that the ran down Whitehall naked before negotiations were started. Then: "Sorry Gordon you've been Nick Roll'd!" A potty LD policy that the great British public really would buy!

Another vote, from a retiring Labour MP: http://www.austinmitchell.org/ Lots more outbreaks of honesty over the coming weeks and months I predict.

Sorry Monsta that's just plain wrong! I've just seen a Samsung TV advert which now adds the word "backlighting" after the LED. A case of the marketing department being pulled up on their over-enthusiasm of spinning it as an entirely new technology? Yeah, the sound on nearly all sets is crap. If you don't have an audio system to pipe it into, then do what he says - the best use of the money. However there's now much better than LCD and it's now cheaper too. A case of back to the future.... more soon. I'm finding it very difficult to call the 600Hz thing without an A-B comparison. It does sort of work, but you can still see the occasional judder on poor quality material. I think it is going to be more effective on HD material - of which I've got little here. If it's in the price for free then go for it - especially if it's an over 40" screen. What Fourgee says is only partly true: if the different images subtend a largish angle the eye doesn't integrate them so easily and you get a sort of strobing - which I've described as image judder.

Brown has pushed Ted Heath into a very poor second. There have been some pretty poor Labour ones, but that's mostly because they were dealt bad hands by their own party. But no one - not even Adolf - manged to bring the country to a total halt like Ted. However Ted didn't actually bankrupt the country, or have a power-at-any-cost complex, or tell blatant porkies! He was the Tory party's first attempt at selecting a leader democratically, and at the time the party was split down the middle over Europe. The result was someone who was acceptable to all but with no vision and no direction - a hostage to fate. His bad decisions weren't terminally bad and we quickly recovered. Gordon Brown is quite simply a new class of bad! He actually believes the complete garbage he talks, and that he's on a mission to save the World! Probably why he takes in so many people who don't understand economics, or don't know much history.

I'm thinking Merlin, and I think that even apart from the safety issue it's pretty atrocious that the principal road between the capital cities of two separate countries is so poor in our area. It's only 400 miles or so. Where in the "first world" are there two major cities so close together with substantial lengths of single lane highway between them? Those countries must be at war or something! Well they probably are, but it's an economic and political war. Plenty of money can be found to build a politician's palace at the North end of the road, but no money to save lives. Why? Perhaps because there's no desire to help a Scot Nat. led government in England - it doesn't buy any votes. At least the good people of the North East had the common sense to see through the regional assembly con. - even if the politicians then devised a work-around to frustrate the democratic will. One day that sort of stitch-up won't be quite so easy, and that day isn't too far off!

I don't see much improvement with the contrast ratio on LED TVs. That's likely because it's the same basic technology. BUT... I now have one with a 3,000,000:1 contrast ratio which didn't cost an arm and a leg! I think you are taking the p here! I'm watching one of them there latest 600Hz thingies right now, but you'll just have to wait for the verdict! Holographic, surely Mr D.?

We'll someone had to say it, but I hardly thought it would be an official Labour Party parliamentary candidate! Got to at least acknowledge the guy's honesty. So is Wansbeck so dumb it is going to vote in a commie sporting a Labour rosette? Someone who despises the current Labour Party as much as he does the class enemy. Someone who holds completely opposite views from the party he is (currently) a member of. And someone who will once again put the rubber stamp on our being the most "deprived" area with the lowest house prices in the whole of England. We should be packing in employers with all the grants etc. that are on offer, but employers will take one look at our social misfit MP, and all that implies about the people who put him there, and so move on. Is Wansbeck so totally stupid that it can be manipulated by Gordon Brown's jealousy and envy politics? So stupid that it believes that he's anything but a totally incompetent at the top job, and the architect of the current disaster? So stupid that it believes that after 13 years of waste and big-government Labour will somehow transform into a real reforming party that will do anything other than feather its own nest, and completely bankrupt the Country in the process? This is a party that was presented with two opportunities to ditch Brown by people who put the party above their own naked ambitions, and they flunked that twice! They can't even reform themselves! We'll find out in the next 48 hours; but whilst the country will near certainly kick him out, once again it doesn't look good for the image of our poor Town! Let's continue to fight the 1930's class war comrades; those capitalist Russians and Chinese may have abandoned it, but those sunny uplands await our ultimate victory!

Yes, I've had a play with a Samsung 55" one in the last couple of weeks. The 3D was very good on a football match blue-ray recording - the only material available for demo. This was active shutter technology (the same as Sky is intending to introduce) and there were three sets of glasses available to play with, though I don't know how many you get in the basic price. The glasses were fine; almost as light as normal specs, but I found the plastic tube with the cable coming over the right ear a little awkward and restricting. There was a badly placed light overhead which caused a reflection off the rear surface of the lenses which I found annoying, but this wouldn't be a problem in a normal domestic setting. The 3D effect was strong on near shots but hardly noticeable on distant ones, though it did still lend a fair bit of realism to the viewing. With a football match I'm not sure I'd want all the switching of shots which normally goes on in a 2D TV transmission. Another thing to consider is that although the sets are 3D / 2D switchable, watching 3D mode is very hard on those without the glasses if you don't have enough to go around, or the TV doesn't support enough connections. The price though at about £2500 was far too high, and even if they were cheaper there wouldn't be enough material to justify the spend. I did buy a new LG 50" flat screen a few days later, and I will be reviewing that here very soon, as I've now had over a week to play with it. Mr Darn is spot on: LED is LCD! All that is changed is the backlight, so it's a tiny bit of a marketing con. LED backlights are a fair bit brighter though making viewing in brightly lit rooms far easier, but again I'm not sure that the huge difference in price between normal gas-discharge and LED is worth it. They'll surely come down in price if you wait a while. Meanwhile the best value, and by far the best picture, is to be had from... ah, but that's another post!

Wot no Rick Astley!

This is sooooo true! Women wearing veils (with the possible exception of the ugly ones) have no place in our local culture! How does that Islamic chant go again: P.S. Hadn't hough about it before but I bet Carla makes Sarky wear a burka around the house - lucky sod!

Last shot I saw was of him standing on Platform 3 at the Central Station. Likely the last time we'll ever see him visiting North of the Tyne. Likely the very last time he'll be meeting any North East bigots too! Wonder if his flying visits to Iraq and Afghanistan were kept just as secret and stage managed - to avoid encountering hostile locals!

He left Tynemouth about 10 minutes ago after a bit of a mixed reception..