The Circus Maximus of the Presidential Election has begun.  There are a 100 Republicans running, some serious, some for future cred, and then some that just enjoy watching the eyes spin in peoples heads.  The following woman falls into that category. No matter what she teases, she’s not really running. She does revel though in making the establishment of both sides foam at the mouth.

Palin says she’s ‘seriously interested’ in 2016 campaign

DES MOINES — Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin told The Washington Post in an interview Friday that she is “seriously interested” in running for the White House in 2016.

“You can absolutely say that I am seriously interested,” Palin said, when asked to clarify her thinking about a possible presidential bid.

Palin, the GOP’s 2008 vice-presidential nominee, said she stood by comments she made Thursday in Las Vegas to ABC News, where she first expressed enthusiasm about potentially competing for the Republican presidential nomination.

“I am. As I said yesterday, I’m really interested in the opportunity to serve at some point,” Palin said Friday, as former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, a potential 2016 rival, looked on.

Palin’s comments, made in an interview in the lobby of the Marriott hotel here, came hours before she is scheduled to address a group of conservative activists at the Iowa Freedom Summit, a gathering hosted by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), an immigration hard-liner.

Palin said, “It is a significant step, of course, for anyone to publicly announce that they’re interested. Who wouldn’t be interested? Who wouldn’t be interested when they have been blessed with opportunities to speak about what is important to this country and for this country?”

Still, Palin said that she is not yet ramping up a national political operation. Instead, Palin said, she is contemplating her political future and does not feel rushed to make a final decision.

Palin arrived in Iowa Friday alongside Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), one of her closest political allies, and Jason Recher, one of Palin’s longtime political advisers. In the lobby, she signed autographs for some hotel guests and mingled with the dozens of GOP figures congregated near the lobby bar, including former House speaker Newt Gingrich.

Palin previously mulled a presidential run ahead of the 2012 election cycle, but declined to enter the contest. During the run-up to the GOP primaries, her supporters built an expansive political network in Iowa on her behalf, in case she jumped in.

On the campaign trail last year, Palin traveled extensively to bolster her handpicked candidates, including stops in Iowa with Republican Joni Ernst, who won a Senate seat. Her political-action committee, SarahPAC, donated to several tea-party favorites.

If we believe what the media tells us, there has been a substantial surge in electoral support for the Green Party. We can debate from whence this support is coming (Disaffected Libdems, I suspect) but it’s probably more important to understand what the Green Party stands for. This is a pretty decent summary of there policy ideas;

• Top-ups [will be] given for people with children or disabilities, or to pay rent and mortgages. No-one will see a reduction in benefits, and most will see a substantial increase. Parents will be entitled to two years’ paid leave from work.
• The policy will enable people to “choose their own types and patterns of work”, and will allow people to take up “personally satisfying and socially useful work”. It will cost somewhere between £240-280 billion a year – more than double the current health budget, and ten times the defence budget.
• Under Green plans, inheritance tax – “to prevent the accumulation of wealth and power by a privileged class” – will no longer just tax the dead.
• Under radical reforms, it will cover gifts made while the giver is still alive – raising the prospect of levies on cars, jewellery or furniture given by parents to their children.
• New resource taxes would apply to wood, metal and minerals, and steeper levies imposed on cars.
• Crucially, import taxes will be levied on goods brought to Britain reflecting the “ecological impact” of making them – with tariffs reintroduced for trade between Britain and the rest of Europe, ending the free trade bloc.
• All elements of the sex industry will be decriminalised, and prostitutes could no longer be discriminated against in child custody cases.
• The Greens also want to see “significantly reduced” levels of imprisonment, with jail only used when there is a “substantial risk of a further grave crime” or in cases where offences are so horrific that offenders would be at risk of vigilantes. Prisoners will be given the vote.
• SATS, early years tests and league tables will be abolished, and “creative” subjects given equal parity to the “academic”.
• Independent schools will lose their charitable status and pay corporation tax, while church schools will be stripped of taxpayer funding. Religious instruction will be banned in school hours.
• Tuition fees will be abolished – but state research funding for universities will increase to reduce a reliance on “biased” commercial research.
• The “overall volume” of advertising on TV and newspapers will be controlled and cut, as part of a war on the “materialist and consumption driven culture which is not sustainable”.
• The England football, rugby and cricket teams would no longer play against countries where “normal, friendly, respectful or diplomatic relations are not possible.” Football clubs would be owned by co-operatives and not traded on the stock markets.
• No more new airports or runways will be built, and existing ones nationalised. All new homes and businesses must by law provide bicycle parking. Helicopter travel would be regulated “more strictly”. The sale of alcohol on planes and airports will be tightly restricted to prevent air-rage, and the air on inbound flights tested for disease.
• Advertising of holiday flights will be controlled by law to halt the “promotion of a high-carbon lifestyle”. New taxes would be imposed on carriers to reduce passenger numbers.
• Assisted dying will be legalised, and the law on abortion liberalised to allow nurses to carry it out. “Alternative” medicine will be promoted. Private healthcare will be more heavily taxed, with special levies on private hospitals that employ staff who were trained on the NHS.
• It will be a criminal offence, with “significant fines”, to stop a woman from breastfeeding in a restaurant or shop, and formula milk will be more tightly regulated.
• In order to prevent “overpopulation” burdening the earth, the state will provide free condoms and fund research for new contraceptives.
• Merely being a member of al-Qaeda, the IRA and other currently proscribed terrorist groups will no longer be a criminal offence under Green plans, and instead a Green Government should seek to “address desperate motivations that lie behind many atrocities labelled ‘terrorist’,” the policy book states.
• Terrorism, it adds, “is an extremely loaded term. Sometimes governments justify their own terrorist acts by labelling any groups that resist their monopoly of violence ‘terrorist’.”
• Britain will leave NATO, end the special relationship with the US, and unilaterally abandon nuclear weapons. A standing army, navy and airforce is “unnecessary”. Bases will be turned into nature reserves and the arms industry “converted” to producing windturbines.
• “Richer regions do not have the right to use migration controls to protect their privileges from others in the long term,” the party’s policy book states.
• A Green Government will “progressively reduce” border controls, including an amnesty for illegal immigrants after five years.
• Access to benefits, the right to vote and tax obligations will apply to everyone living on British soil, regardless of passport. The policy book states: “We will work to create a world of global inter-responsibility in which the concept of a ‘British national’ is irrelevant and outdated.”
• Political parties will be funded by the state, and the electoral system changed. The monarchy will be abolished.

Got that?  These are RADICAL communists masquerading as touchy feeling ecoloons. The scary thing is that some 11% of the elecortate may decide to cast their vote in FAVOUR of the above. More surprising again is the insistence of the Prime Minister, David Cameron, that the Greens be provided with a National TV platform from which they ca preach their gospel of insanity!

In recent days, there has been a hilarious debate in the UK. In essence, The Sun newspaper rather wonderfully trolled the entire left wing feminista sisterhood. For decades, The Sun has printed an image of a topless woman on Page Three. These girls became famous as Page Three Girls, some achieving considerable fame and fortune. Now then, it is NOT for me to judge what other people choose to look at and read so all I will say is that I am not a Sun reader – my choice. But millions are  – and they enjoy the daily dose of the female form. Naturally the feministas were cheering from the rooftops a few days ago when the The Sun had gone as few days without publishing any Page Three images. The #saynotopage3 sisters danced with joy as exemplified in this tweet from the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman

Unfortunately for Harman, she spoke too soon and The Sun started publishing more Page Three images on the 21st January. Egg all over her face for Ms Harman.

However equally interesting was the statement from our “Equalities” Minister Jo Swinson that she also wanted to see images of Bikini clad women also bann  A superb insight into the totalitarian mindset of these flimsy feministas. I wonder, therefore, what she must make of these magazines – ALL aimed at the FEMALE audience?

Shall we ban these too, Jo?

WHY is it that the feminazi fringe have such a hatred of attractive women who choose to model? WHY is it that the feminazi fringe seek to deny people the CHOICE to look at whatever they wish? This neo-Puritanism is surely an affront to all confident balanced women?

If you run with the idea that all cultures are equally valid, and that one is not superior to another, then you can surely sympathise with the confusion of this man;

“Married father Zia Maroof Khail, 29, carefully groomed the 13 year old victim and fooled her into believing they were “boyfriend and girlfriend”. After spotting her in a park, he made repeated approaches and the first time they spoke he told her he loved her, Preston Crown Court heard. Khail, originally from Afghanistan, persuaded her to meet him at his home twice a week, said Mark Lamberty, prosecuting.

He sexually abused her there, and had sex with her in an alleyway and at her own home. “He was abusive to her if she refused to co-operate in sexual conduct,” Mr Lamberty added. His sex crime came to light when the girl made a complaint about other men she said had abused her. Police tracked Khail down using DNA evidence which matched his on a database at Colnbrook Immigration Centre, Heathrow, where he was waiting to be deported. 

He told officers he did not think he had done anything wrong because he was not aware of the “cultural norms” in Britain.”

And there it is. He was “not aware” that in the UK we do not tolerate this sort of abuse.

Back in downtown Jihadistan, it is clear that all sort of barbaric and savage practises are “the norm” and when trek the thousands of miles and pas through dozens of other countries to arrive in the UK, they bring the stone age mindset with them. Our own cultural czars, replete with their armoury of “equality” and “diversity” are scared to tell these savages that we do NOT accept their culture and that we have a higher level of civilisation which they must conform to. If we don’t then we can expect to see many more such cases as this as we uncivilised ourselves in the name of multicultulturalism.

Most of those on the political left here in the UK seek to impose a further additional tax on property owners and in true crypto-communist form they call it “the Mansion Tax”.

Ed Miliband’s plans for a mansion tax are like something out of ‘Soviet Russia’, one of the party’s own peers declared last night. Leading fertility doctor Professor Robert Winston said the policy was unfair because it would not affect people in similar-sized properties in other cities in the UK.

The IVF pioneer warned the plan, which levies an annual tax worth thousands of pounds on homes worth more than £2million, could result in homeowners being forced to move out – a prospect he compared to the Marxism inflicted on Russia after the revolution. Asked about the tax in a radio interview, the 74-year-old said he joined the Labour Party ‘because I believed Labour was after fairness’. Lord Winston, who also found fame for presenting BBC documentaries such as Child of Our Time and the Human Body series and lives in a terraced property in Hampstead Garden Suburb, one of the most affluent parts of London, added: ‘My terraced house in London is probably just close to that band.   If I had the same identical house on the outskirts of Birmingham, it would be half that amount and I would never pay this kind of tax. That doesn’t seem right to me.’

Lord Winston is deluded beyond words. For starters, the Labour Party has no interest in “fairness”. It is driven by a desire to grow the State, to tax to the hilt, to restrict freedom and to remove liberty. It’s THAT simple. The “Mansion Tax” is more of the same; it’s driven by envy and spite. Soak “the rich” regardless of how their property asset has bubbled up.  And yes, it IS like something Soviet Russia would have dreamed up but then again Soviet Labour would see little problem with that.

Perhaps more interestingly, the “Mansion Tax” will almost exclusively hit those people living in the south of England. The leader of Labour in Scotland, Jim Murphy, has already BOASTED how this iniquitous tax on the people of southern England will raise revenues that will SPENT recruiting SCOTTISH nurses! This boast caused problems for Labour candidates in the south of England but in truth it reveals a deeper truth and it is this; The current Labour leadership appear to despise ENGLAND, and in particular those parts of it that prosper. It is this which I think will ensure they do not regain power in May. You cannot successfully govern a country if you give the clear impression you despise the biggest part of it – ENGLAND.

Because Friday night is Music Night

Rory’s back, and about time too I reckon. It’s an old fav and I’ve heard it many times, and it always reminds me what an unbelievable player Rory Gallagher was. You just don’t get playing any better than this, not anywhere.

As always, dear listener, feel free to link to whatever you like and recommend –

When Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote of the heroes who stopped the attack upon Rome; he wrote:-

Then out spoke brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods.

When the American John Gillespie Magee, Jr joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, he joined because he wanted to fly and fight against the Nazis in England. He got his wish, and after flight training, he flew Spitfires for 412 Squadron, R.C.A.F. He died three days after the United States entered the War. But some three months before his death, he wrote his parents, attempting to describe a test flight up to 30,000 feet, in the words:-

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Fast forward to todays’ 24/7 news cycles, to the ever-expanding Internet, satellites and wrist-watches with the computing power equal to the Apollo Moon capsules, and then concentrate on the images captured by the Hubble Telescope. Somehow, when we read:-

Yet the discovery also relied on supermassive zoom lenses that are built into the structure of the universe. Clusters of galaxies can act as “gravitational lenses” that magnify and brighten background sources of light, including stars and galaxies such as MACS0647-JD.

We have to accept that, somewhere, we have lost the poetry which might have described the illumination of the beginning of Time.

Hardly a surprise here. He was 90 after all.

Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz has died, royal officials have announced, weeks after he was admitted to hospital. Abdullah, who had ruled since 2005 and was said to be aged about 90, had been suffering from a lung infection. His 79-year-old half-brother, Salman, has been confirmed as the new king. Within hours of his accession to the throne of the oil-rich kingdom, King Salman vowed to maintain the same policies as his predecessors.

And what are those policies? Spreading the extreme Islamism manifest in Wahhabism around the world. Suppressing women. Oh, and one other thing that Prince Charles may want to take on board. Let’s pray that  King Abdullah’s funeral isn’t held on a Friday. That’s the day they execute adulterers.