It's a Cracker
3 hours ago
"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold" - W.B. Yeats. "We're doomed !" - Private Frazer. "Like scrolling through a decade's worth of Daily Mail editorials in 20 minutes" - TheLoonyFromCatford
A 17-year-old jailed after a crash on the A47 in Norfolk which killed an unborn baby has been given legal aid to try to keep his name out of the media. King's Lynn Magistrates ruled the youth, from the Wisbech area of Cambs, should be named so the public could call police if he was behind a wheel.
But they said he should remain anonymous until his lawyers tried to challenge the ruling in a higher court. On Friday it emerged he was given legal aid to go to the High Court.
The key goals for criminal justice are to help reduce crime by bringing more offences to justice, and to raise public confidence that the system is fair and will deliver for the law-abiding citizen.
The Legal Services Commission, which assesses legal aid claims, said the Commission was obliged to look at every case objectively and base a decision on financial eligibility and a case's legal merits.
"We cannot differentiate between applicants for legal aid on the grounds that a decision to grant funding may be unpopular in a particular case," a spokesperson said.
It is only recently that I have begun to reflect on the small band of determined friends and relatives of Officer Daniel Faulkner, with their terrible, stupid-looking flyers -- people who would most likely never live in Marin County, send their children to the nation's top-rated public schools, or rub shoulders with Sean Penn; people who would wear black socks with brown shoes and sport Farrah Fawcett hairdos years before the newly married Duchess of Cornwall would make them fashionable again.
I remember the future Ben-and-Chloes (or Kyle-and-Jens!) of Northern California wildly cheering Mumia's speech, just before they left university forever, and went on to graduate school at Berkeley or UCLA, or to their stock options, their professional partnerships, their plain wooden frame-houses in Marin which will probably fetch far more than $1.5 million apiece by the time they are able to afford them. I think of them, and what the friends and relatives of Officer Daniel Faulkner must have felt when they heard those cheers, and I blush, embarassed, warm-of-face, remembering how I was afraid to be seen reading those awful, amateurish flyers describing how Mumia had murdered their loved one, one Officer Daniel Faulkner, a working class man who gave his life to clean up some of the mess left behind in a Philadelphia urban ghetto by Ben- and-Chloe (or Kyle-and-Jen!)
The SNP claimed a delay in the distribution of information leaflets was designed to prevent Labour losing votes as a result of the Iraq conflict.
In January, minister for veterans Ivor Caplin told the Commons that 100,000 advisory leaflets would be distributed to bases in order that serving personnel could be included on the electoral rolls in their home constituencies.
The Electoral Commission confirmed the leaflets were dispatched to the MoD on February 4.
But Jeff Duncan, campaign manager of Save the Scottish Regiments, claimed they did not start arriving at British bases until March 1 – 10 days before the deadline.
Given that it can take more than two weeks for post to arrive from bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Duncan claims many troops were given little or no chance to exercise their democratic right.
Mr Duncan said: “It is a travesty.
“What is going on when we are sending men out to defend the Iraqis’ right to vote but we are not defending their own right to vote?
“We have a situation where the MoD have, at least for five weeks, sat on a bunch of forms.
“It raises the suspicion that someone is trying to disenfranchise people who could unseat Labour MPs.
As Julie Bindel, feminist and Dworkin's friend of 10 years, says: "She was the most maligned feminist on the planet; she never hated men."
Some of it might have been that I got burgled for the first time and that changed my attitude to all that tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime rhetoric that I'd hated as glib and meaningless.
Then I began to see the reasons that had stopped people voting Labour weren't as selfish as I'd thought. A strong economy means being able to afford your home, means not losing your job, means being able to give your family a pretty decent start in life.
"institutions today lose their mainstream legitimacy unless white guilt defines their approach to racial matters"
"White guilt is best understood as a vacuum of moral authority. Whites live with this vacuum despite the fact that they may not feel a trace of personal guilt over past oppression of blacks. Whites simply come to a place with blacks where they feel no authority to speak or judge and where they sense a great risk of being seen as racist. It is a simple thing, this lack of authority, but it has changed everything.
One terrible feature is that it means whites lack the authority to say what they see when looking at blacks and black problems. Political correctness is what whites have the authority to say about blacks, no matter what they see. It is a language of severely limited authority, of euphemisms that steer whites around associations with racism."
DRIPPING HONEYCOMB (Favus distillans)
A dripping honeycomb
was Ursula, virgin,
who yearned to lie with
God's lamb,
honey and milk beneath her tongue.
For she gathered around her
a flock of virgins,
a fruit-bearing orchard,
a garden in bloom.
Rejoice, daughter of Zion,
in the exalted dawn!
For she gathered around her
a flock of virgins,
a fruit-bearing orchard,
a garden in bloom.
Glorify the Father,
the Spirit and the Son.
For she gathered around her
a flock of virgins,
a fruit-bearing orchard,
a garden in bloom.