The totally not gay in any way Foreign Secretary William Hague is set to urge Israel to renew a moratorium on settlement building in the West Bank amid fears the expiry of the 10-month ban could scupper Middle East peace efforts.

Good. I hope his view will be COMPLETELY ignored and that Israel does commence building on its own land. The moratorium is out of date and Nehanyahu must reflect the will of those who elected him. BUILD.

Almost 1.75 million adults have spent the past five years out of work and relying on benefits, alarming figures reveal. 

In a sign of the depth of Britain’s worklessness crisis, 1,749,770 people have been receiving one of the three main out-of-work handouts since 2005. They have been continuously claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, Incapacity Benefit or Income Support, in some cases while receiving other benefits.

1.75 million people who will not work, or if your name is Ed Miliband, core voters!

I was on the BBC this morning discussing the idea put forward by the government quango N.I.C.E. that the NHS should bribe fat people to eat less.

In essence, I object to this for three main reasons;

1. It rewards the irrresponsible. That’s wrong. People KNOW obesity is bad for you. Yet they keep eating. It is a form of greed and denial that drives this in many cases. I don’t think Stephen Nolan liked it when I said this, and I did not mean to hurt him., But it’s true.

2. It treats adults like kids. Nanny State not only assumes responsibility for the feckless but pays them for it! Adults are responsible for how much they eat, not the State.

3. There is no coherent economic argument in favour of this. This wastes resources and is pure frippery.

N.I.C.E. also currently denies those suffering from certain types of cancer life improving drugs. It sickens me that on the one hand it denies funding to those who through no fault of their own need help and instead offers it to the fat of the land.

I did make the the point that it is a NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE, not a NATIONAL LIFESTYLE SERVICE, but I don’t know if that point was picked up.

I suggested that many of those that are obese are in this position because..gasp…of greed. That didn’t go down well, but I am sure that this is true. Yes, there may be some with other complicating factors but on the whole the maxim remains that you should eat less and exercise more. This might not work for all but it will for most.

You can hear the debate on the Listen Again link here, I think it starts about 35 minutes in.

PS. I loved the nutter who phoned it to complain the BBC had me on. I run a “right wing website” with is nasty to Islam, apparently. Who knew? Fair play to Stephen for cutting him off. Great to see the fan club out so early on a Monday.

John the liar Kerry had this to say:

A testy U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry yesterday blamed clue less voters with short attention spans for the uphill battle beleaguered Democrats are facing against Republicans across the nation.

“We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening,” Kerry told reporters after touring the Boston Medical Center yesterday.

Which if he was describing Democrat and Union Voters would be a true statement. For years the left has produced nothing but Slogans rather than results. The War on poverty by stealing one persons money to give it to another has not changed the percentage of people below the poverty line since it started. The percentage per population are the same as when it started.

Union thugs and Leaders have gotten rich while every Union Industry has been either driven into bankruptcy, or offshore to India and China. Union membership in the US workforce has declined to 7% as false hopes and promises have driven more jobs away than they ever created. Not to mention the stolen retirement funds that must now be paid by the tax payers.

Here is a man that threw someone else’s medals over the White House Fence at the end of Vietnam instead of his own. One he got for shooting himself in the ass. Who then Lied under oath about fellow soldiers chopping the heads off the enemy. And he calls us stupid?

No as Obama who promised change we could believe in, to be delivered by himself and the likes of Kerry and Pelousy, that delivered instead change of everything we believe in.It is their slogans that are not selling.

The outrage that is being directed at them and their upcoming defeat is because the People aren’t Stupid.

Well Senator, do us all a favor and go retire to your yacht that you’ve tried to hide from paying taxes on and allow us the opportunity to fix what you screwed up.

I was reading that  Northern Ireland Health Minister Michael McGimpsey has had to deny any conflict of interest over the fact that a health trust is renting properties from two of his companies.

It came after it was revealed that two companies of which he is a director lease property to the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust, which is funded by his department. There have now been calls for the matter to be investigated by the Assembly Committee on Standards and Privileges.

He holds directorships on three companies — North Down Hotels, North Down Construction and Scrabo Investments — which he has declared on the Stormont Members’ Register of Interest. 

The two properties rented out to the trust are in Church Street and Regent Street, Newtownards. The Church Street property is owned by North Down Construction and the Regent Street property by North Down Hotels. 

In a statement released last night Mr McGimpsey said: “The leases in question commenced many years before I took up the Health portfolio in the Northern Ireland Executive and my involvement with the relevant companies is carefully and accurately recorded in the Members’ Register of Interests.

 “For the record, I have no involvement in the day to day running of the companies.”

That may be the case but it is still clumsy at best and McGimpsey is arrogant at worst. He was a terrible choice for this job, I have no idea why he got it, and he continues to exude the warmth of an ice cube.  

Interesting to read that Obama and his administration have weakened the country’s economy by seeking to foster growth instead of paying down the federal debt, said Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan.”

“Obama did exactly the opposite of what should have been done,” Taleb said yesterday in Montreal in a speech  part of Canada’s Salon Speakers series. “He surrounded himself with people who exacerbated the problem. You have a person who has cancer and instead of removing the cancer, you give him tranquilisers. When you give tranquilizers to a cancer patient, they feel better but the cancer gets worse.”Today, Taleb said, “total debt is higher than it was in 2008 and unemployment is worse.”

Right. Obama and his team have gotten it exactly wrong but their only solution is to keep on doing it wrong. What is it they say about the definition of insanity being….?

Steyn hits the nail on the head, again! 

He was the first Beatle child, born in Liverpool in 1963.  Now at the age of 47, he has outlived his father by seven years.  His godfather was Brian Epstein.  As a child, he was the inspiration for his father’s song ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’,  and the trauma he endured after his mother and father divorced became the centrepiece for Paul McCartney’s ‘Hey Jude’.  He performed the Beatles‘ classic ‘When I’m Sixty Four’ in 2002 on TV for US insurance company Allstate.

This week’s offering featured an uncredited George Harrison on lead guitar.  It was not released as a single in the USA, but topped the Australian charts for 4 weeks. In the UK it plateaued at number 6, having entered the UK charts at a very unfortunate time due to the immovable dominance of Bryan Adams’s ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ at the number one spot (a position that song held for an incredible record-breaking 16 weeks!!).

Ladies and gentlemen, from August 1991, I give you Julian Lennon singing ‘Saltwater’.

A primer for those who need to think about this ahead of the planned referendum next May.