5th May LiveChat for QT and Election Results

As usual on Thursday we'll be bringing you the Question Time LiveChat session. But as it's also Local Election results night we're going to extend the chat to cover that as well.

So we'll start at 10:30pm as usual and finish up whenever the last wibbling drunk can't type any longer.

The AV Referendum count won't be happening until the next day because they haven't yet bought the voting machines that the utterly dishonest Electoral Reform Society claim not to be selling. But there will still be plenty of AV uninformed speculation and pointless rehashing of lies for us to pick over like the dregs of a goat curry.

As we're covering the elections, we'll be spreading the chat live across Biased-BBC, AllSeeingEye, MaxFarquar and a few others to be finalised. Thanks go to Max for the excellent logo designed for the night.

At some time during the night we should be celebrating our very own David Vance's election as a NI Assembly member so keep the champagne chilled for that moment.

See you all here on Thursday night...

MAY DAY OPEN THREAD...

1ST May - be still my beating heart. Yes, it's International Worker's Day and I am sure our comrades in the BBC are celebrating. Want to share in their celebrations? Share it HERE...

A PERFECT DAY....

Wanted to share this with you; "BBC has its ideal guests on this morning's Saturday Live in the form of 1, Mark Thomas. http://www.markthomasinfo.com/ Introduced as an 'activist' who jettisoned Christianity for materialist atheism, he was brought onto the programme to puff his book 'Extreme Rambling' about his walk along the Israeli security fence (called the 'Separation Barrier', natch). The Guardian quote 'From the Back Cover I expect that the The Guardian's summing up ‘John Pilger with laughs’ tells you all you need to know. He's enlightened and balance though - he discovered that some Israelis are human ... 2 Then we have ex-Guantanamo bay guard Brandon Neely, described as 'Brandon Neely was a guard at Guantanamo Bay who spoke out about conditions at the camp after leaving the U.S. military.' He's another BBC favourite, as you can see from the list of invites on this page. http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=3&oq=Brandon+Neely&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GZAZ_enGB348GB348&q=brandon+neely+bbc all because he's an ex-President of Iraq Veterans Against the War and deplores the 'brutal' treatment of detainees at Gitmo. I wonder what he thinks about some of the people he's hooked up with now http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8451797.stm whose REAL reasons for being arrested are chronicled at Harry's Place here http://hurryupharry.org/2010/01/12/bbc-publishes-tipton-three-lies/ (The BBC's refusal to engage in real journalism - again.) 3 Then there's a poet named Luke Wright whose snide poem about the Royal Wedding contained these immortal lines: Why yes, my dear your daughter Kate, we made her in the eighties the year you did that deal with those dubious Kuwaitis. Of course, the red-cheeked fellow barked, the answer dear’s a sinch we’ll peddle Monty’s sister to a emerald-laden prince! So Kate was fetched and telegrams sent forth into the world and soon a queue of inbred boys arrived to see the girl. A deal was struck and cards were swiped, a son-in-law was gained and after that the Middletons were never squeezed again. Then there was KD Lang. And Madhur Jaffrey. (I love her recipes)"

CONFLICTS FORUM ON THE BBC...

This brought to my attention;


"The BBC excelled here on the Today programme this morning bringing in a commentator that they must know is a Hamas and Hizbollah apologist and champion of the Islamist cause.

Alastair Crooke, the one time MI6 spymaster who converted to Islamism and is now director of the pro-Hizbollah outfit called Conflicts Forum and who proudly boasts that it is "Listening to political Islam, recognising resistance....Conflicts Forum wants to challenge the prevailing western orthodoxy that perceives Islamism as an ideology that is hostile to the agenda for global democracy and good governance."

Crooke believes Islamist terrorists are not in fact terrorists but resisters and freedom fighters.

Why would the BBC think that he was the right man to ask to comment on the events in Syria when 2 weeks ago he quite clearly stated that he supported the Syrian government's position......and funnily enough this is what he did today...stating that the protestors were just a small group of Salafists and alienated exiles and it was their propaganda that was exaggerating the death toll of civilians. In fact he said, it was the police who were being killed in large numbers and only a few demonstrators.....the Syrian people do not want UN intervention and do not want peace with Israel.

Syria supports Hamas and Hizbollah...Hamas and Hizbollah seek to destroy Israel....why would the BBC give a platform to a man who clearly and openly supports such groups? 


But then why would the BBC have on Mark Thomas to tell us that the real purpose of the Israeli security barrier was to steal Palestinian land and water...a land grab....and of the 'incredibly brutalising effect' ofhaving to go through check points....'The Israeli occupation is creating a mortal sin.' and that the Israelis were running a campaign to 'cleanse' an area of Palestinians....and then John McCarthy who told us...'Palestinian lives are fractured by check points and deliberately so......every one traumatised by these horrible walls and barriers that are put up.'

So traumatised in fact that the Palestinians have to resort to running literary festivals in the West Bank to cope...which was the reason for McCarthy to go there. Life is hard....and the check points are mostly run by, er, the Palestinian Authority not the IDF!"

OPEN BORDERS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH!

Rejoice - immigration is driving our economic growth. Or so it is alleged in this report on the ever reliable BBC.

"Immigrants from eastern Europe have added almost £5bn to Britain's economy since 2004, according to a new report. The National Institute for Economic and Social Research says 700,000 people moved to the UK after their former communist homelands joined the EU. It believes they drove up British GDP by 0.38% in the years to 2009, the equivalent of £4.91bn."

If only we had allowed even more to come in - just think of the rich economic benefits we could have enjoyed. Thank goodness for the totally impartial NIESR and the BBC for sharing this good news.

HOLIDAY TOSH...

Strident eco-camapigner Sarah Mukherjee may have left the BBC, but Richard Black is carrying on her propaganda work, even over the holiday weekend. Here's his latest offering - a largely uncritical re-cycling of a paper paid for by taxpayers' money - that purports to show that 250 people living in the Himlayas somehow know the truth about global warming.

I was taught years ago - during my training as a journalist - that if you ask ten people about the weather, you get at least twenty different stories. But no matter, this is a cutting edge investigation by our top minds into our future, so anything goes.

The background to this nonsense, of course, is that the IPCC was caught making hugely exaggerated claims about the impact of climate change on the Himalayas. They alleged that glaciers were melting so fast that they would be gone in a matter of decades, putting the millions who depend on their annual release of meltwater in peril of drought.

Unabashed, and incapable of accepting that they were wrong, the Royal Society (grant from the UK taxpayer last year £46m) sanctioned two climate change zealots from the US - including a prominent member of one of India's main greenie think-tanks - to ask the local farmers what they thought was going on. Rubbish in, rubbish out. I am not aware how it could possibly be imagined that a sample so small from a tiny micro-area of the Himalayas (most of whom have probably already been bombarded with climate change propaganda) could remotely have a meaningful or reliable grasp of the huge mixture of forces involved. I concede that it could be interesting sociology and testimony to human suggestibility - but reliable data about climate variability? What utter tosh.

That said, climate zealots increasingly believe that scientific truth is based on "consensus", so perhaps this fits the new methodology. Let's in future decide scientific validity on the basis of opinion polls.

In that vein, the farmers told the "researchers" that it's getting warmer and drier, there are more mosquitoes and the glaciers are definitely melting more. So it's been published and pushed round the world as a valid piece of climate change investigation, and evidence that despite the IPCC cock-up there is still much to be alarmed about.

And Richard Black has faithfully recycled it. You can tell by his tone that he knows that the so-called research has all the validity of the claims of a three-card-trick huckster, but hey-ho, this is climate activism, it's been sanctioned by the Royal Society, and this is BBC science reporting, so it must be true, and it deserves bank holiday weekend prominence.