Reader Tips

Reader Tips 33 Comments

David Frost’s groundbreaking TV show The Frost Report was on-air for only two seasons in the mid 1960s, but the writers and performers he brought in – Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Antony Jay (the co-writer of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister), the Two Ronnies (Barker and Corbett), Marty Feldman, and others – would go on to influence British comedy for decades to come.
Harvard-spawned American musical satirist Tom Lehrer was another Frost Report regular; his current events-oriented songs were perfectly suited to the topical nature of the show, and the light-hearted form of his black humour was always good for a laugh. Tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips sees Lehrer on a later British TV show performing a jaunty ditty about, erm, interconnectedness called I Got It From Agnes.
You are invited to deposit your Reader Tips in the comments.

33 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. Alan Caruba, “The First Un-American President”:
    “’As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.’ – Barack Hussein Obama, spoken at a White House dinner to celebrate the beginning of Ramadan.
    “Well, of course, he does. Why wouldn’t someone who thinks the sound of the call to evening prayers from a nearby minaret is one of the sweetest sounds in the world? Why wouldn’t someone who spent his formative years, age six to twelve, in Indonesia, the step-son of a Muslim father and the son of a Muslim father who had deserted his wife and child?
    “But, I hear you say, he spent twenty years in a Christian church in Chicago. Yes, with a preacher who said of 9/11 that ‘the chickens had come home to roost’; a preacher who embraced Black Liberation theology and maintained close friendships with Nation of Islam leaders in Chicago…”
    The rest here.

  2. i met eric idle once…bought a book from him i did….a book about Rutland and the Ruttles…
    they were great man!

  8. The CBC.Ca headline (Aug 14-10) reads: “Ignatieff postpones Liberal tour for Funeral”
    They refer to the accidental death of Liberal communications director Mario Laguë.
    “Do you know anyone in Ottawa who would not postpone a PR tour for the funeral of his chief of communications??” That’s all I wrote. Needless to say, it wasn’t published.

  10. Lehrer again? Vίtruvius had him very well pegged. I think he’s a self-absorbed jap. (No offense, EBD.)

  11. “I lived in Sackville for 3 yrs growing up and never knew all this and the Hicks kids across the street had their Dad working at the place.“

  13. Has this been posted already? Probably; but just in case, here’s a two-part BBC(?!) documentary about tyrants:
    “In part one John Sweeney looks at Stalin’s Western apologists.
    In part two he explores how present day stories of human rights abuses across the world are still rewritten.”
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2010/07/100624_doc_useful_idiots_lenin.shtml
    I haven’t listened to it but it seems like it’s probably good. Apparently it’s very mean about Walter Duranty, which can’t be a bad thing.
    Stolen from Ace of Spades HQ (not original, me).

  16. ‘Deconstructivism’ needs to be redefined.
    There’s a whole bunch of words/terms that need to be taken back.
    For example: ‘Social Engineering’ now means tricking people into a scam, which dilutes its earlier, more sinister implications.
    Gayly Yours,
    Paul
    PS Not actually gay, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

  17. WalterF 10:06 Mulroney lied Oh No say it ain’t so. I lyin Brian couldn’t lie he would he would stutter.

  18. EBD – exactly right.
    Obama is trying to back off from his open support for building the mosque on the 9-11 site, by the fallacy of declaring that all he was talking about was constitutional religious freedom.
    Not true. If that were the case, he could have stopped his speech with ‘everyone has the right to practice their religion’. But Obama didn’t stop there. He continued with ‘and that includes the right to build a place of
    worship and community centre on private property in the lower Manhatten”.
    Therefore he merged the famous dichotomy of ‘is’ and ‘ought’. Because something IS legal does not mean that it OUGHT to be done.
    The decisions one makes about what one ought to do use different evaluative criteria than the decisions about ‘what is’.
    And as you point out, Obama’s formative phase, which is also the time when I suggest he moved into his pathological narcissism, was spent within Islam. His 20 years with the Rev. Wright had nothing to do with Christianity for Wright’s focus is on anti-americanism, anti-white and Black Liberation theology. These are the focus of Michelle Obama, and Obama is dominated by her.

  21. “Video: Obama Repeatedly Called a “N*gger” and “Coon” by Black Participants in 2009 Rally Organized by NAACP Official…
    I really hope this story gains some traction. If these people were white it would be a dead-ringer for a Klan rally…”
    “The full-length audio from the event is available here. But, to provide a taste of the nature of the event that Gatewood (publicly using his NAACP credentials) helped organize, here are a few choice snippets:
    The crowd was led in a stirring chant of “Israel ain’t no friend of mine…black is back, free Palestine!,” over and over again.
    Racial Slurs Hurled at Obama
    Rapper Head-Roc referred to President Obama as a “nigger” and a “coon” in a rap he performed for the crowd. In reference to Obama inviting the police officer who arrested Professor Henry Gates to the White House ”beer summit” (the rapper mistakenly calls Henry Gates “Bill Gates”), Head-Roc says of “the Prez:” “Man, I tuned out when that nigger went the ‘coon’ route.” Longtime radical activist Pam Africa, president of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal (she had also been part of the MOVE black power cult) repeatedly called Obama a “nigger” as well, to the applause and cheers of the audience (she also exhorts the crowd to “whup his ass”).
    More details here…”
    http://weaselzippers.us/2010/08/12/video-obama-repeatedly-called-a-ngger-and-coon-by-black-participants-in-2009-rally-organized-by-naacp-official/

  22. Canada / US employment levels chart
    Why the sudden divergence in 2008? About the time Harper looked to be surviving minority status despite the MSM onslaught? And about the time Obama was overtaking Clinton? Just saying.
    “But the Canada of the 1970s and early 1980s—the era of left-wing Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—no longer exists ” wsj

  24. Our Enemy, The State.
    The State is a Criminal.
    …-
    “Jokers gone wild as provinces wager on online gambling
    Calgary Herald – ‎4 minutes ago‎
    Cash-strapped governments are rolling the dice on online gambling, with Ontario joining BC and the Maritimes in setting up government-run online sites.”
    (googlenews)

  26. Over at WUWT, a new, peer reviewed statistical paper appears, on the surface, to provide a devastating statistical blow to AGW.
    About 47 pages, and I’m only partway through reading it, but the authors make it very accessible to the lay person. Highly recommended reading.
    http://tinyurl.com/32x5apd

  28. In this morning’s Seattle newspaper there’s a large story about the Tamil “refugees” that came ashore in B.C. There’s absolutely NO MENTION of the fact that they very deliberately avoided coming ashore in America.
    The title of this article should be: “Our Naive Neighbors, the Canadians aka Suckers Galore!”

  29. Pip-pip:
    “Fewer than a third of schoolchildren in one of Britain’s largest cities speak English as their first language, a report reveals.
    “Yesterday, Manchester city hall chiefs hailed the statistics as an example of its proud tradition of diversity.
    “But experts at MigrationWatch UK warned that it highlighted the growing need to work out a strategy to reduce immigration.
    “The survey by Manchester City Council found more than 70 per cent of pupils in three wards have a mother tongue other than English.”
    (…)
    “The report reveals how the most deprived neighbourhoods have the highest numbers of benefits claimants, worse health and relatively poor school results and attendance.
    “Last year, the Daily Express reported how all 520 pupils at Heybrook Primary in Rochdale are of Asian descent with English as their second language.”

  30. In a post at Ashbrook.org titled “Ignoring a Deluge of Isolated Incidents”, William Voegeli responds to a NYT column by Paul Krugman in which Krugman makes the case that cutbacks to state and local funding are a “drag on the economy, perpetuating devastatingly high unemployment,” and says that “the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn.”
    Voegeli:
    “It’s not just that Krugman, and liberals generally, don’t want to talk about the possibility that public funds are spent badly. They don’t want anyone else to talk about it, either. Thus, Krugman endorses Jonathan Cohn’s argument that ‘public employees are the new welfare queens.’ That is, the problem of over-compensated (and usually unionized) government workers is, in Krugman’s words, ‘a phony issue,’ just like excessive welfare payments to able-bodied adults.
    The phoniness of these phony issues is not self-evident. Phony as in non-existent? It’s not as though examples of government spending money badly are hard to find.
    • New York City teachers, who routinely get lifetime tenure after three years on the job, can spend years receiving six-figure salaries for doing nothing while the school board and union wrangle over complaints that they are unqualified and should be dismissed.
    •The Milwaukee teachers union, which has “one, constant focus – putting children at the center of education,” has also found the time and money to sue the school district for discriminating against male employees by excluding “Viagra and other drugs that treat erectile dysfunction from its health insurance plans.”
    •In California, 12,201 retired civil servants and public educators receive pensions of more than $100,000 per year. “Retired” is an approximate descriptor here, because California laws that allow public employees to retire in their 50s mean that many of them pocket their pensions while going on to work for other government agencies, or get hired as consultants by their former employer.
    •Public officials in Illinois are virtuosos in the art of “pension-spiking,” piling bonuses, overtime and extra assignments onto the paycheck of an employee who is just about to retire, causing his pension to leap dramatically.
    “Isolated incidents? As the ‘isolated’ incidents keep piling up, it’s harder and harder to keep from wondering if there isn’t a deeper problem at work. The plural of ‘anecdote’ is ‘data,’ as the saying goes. Adjusted for inflation and population growth, California’s state and local governments spent 21.7% more in 2006 than in 1992. I’m still waiting to meet the first Californian who thinks the state’s public services and infrastructure are 21% better than they were 18 years ago.”

  32. Muslims are celebrating Ramadan and the Wiz of O’ (LOL) made a big deal about it.
    Today’s the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
    Is he going to mention THAT?
    Even though there are a far greater number of Catholics in the U.S.A. than Muslims, I rather doubt it.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation