Via Dave Hill comes this interesting little snippet:

At the start of Boris’s second week he has been able to deliver two more election promises – making London greener and cutting the Mayor’s publicity budget. The planting of 10,000 street trees will improve the residential streets that need them most with the planting programme directed at deprived areas that often have no trees at all. Had Ken Livingstone been re-elected, Londoners would have spent around £2.9 million this year on the Mayor’s personal newspaper. By using some of the money saved from The Londoner – around £1 million per year – London’s most deprived areas will see an extra 10,000 new trees by 2012.

Allow me to draw out one sentence from there:

Had Ken Livingstone been re-elected, Londoners would have spent around £2.9 million this year on the Mayor’s personal newspaper.

Tories of all sorts have complained vocally since 1st May (with justification in some cases) that lefties are bitter about Boris’ victory, and haven’t let up their campaign against him.

I look forward to hearing the same thing about Boris’ campaign against Ken now. Perhaps they could throw in a complaint about their own triumphalism over the past fortnight. That’d really cheer me up.

Actually, while we’re on this: could the statement be more ridiculous? I imagine it’s just greenwash and agitprop, but there’s a chance he actually believes it.  He believes that planting 10,000 trees will really make the difference to public behaviour needed to challenge climate change. And that planting 10,000 trees will automatically improve the lives of deprived Londoners.

It will, of course, require more than just trees.  If Boris wants to make a difference on environmental issues, he needs to use his power to make green behaviour viable for most Londoners.  If he wants to help the deprived, he needs to use the money saved (and more…) to attack the economic deprivation at the root of their problems. Perhaps he should think of building some decent new social housing? There’s a shortage as it is.  And while he’s at it, he could make sure it was affordable, sustainable and actually worth living in.

As it is - this is a gesture, nothing more.

John Rentoul points out on the Open House blogthat David Cameron voted against the majority of his party on the fertility Bill.  Rentoul elaborates,

He was one of 37 Tories voting in favour; 49 voted against. The rest found something better to do. According to the incomparable Professor Philip Cowley of Revolts.co.uk, this is the fourth time he has been in a minority in his own party in Commons votes recently.

The others were votes cast in favour an 80-per-cent-elected House of Lords (where the Conservatives split 80/103 against); gay adoption (where the Conservatives split 29/85 against); and the abolition of blasphemy (where the Conservatives split 37/51 against). In each case, the party leader found himself in a minority of his party.

The cynic in me wants to argue that he had voted like this to deny Labour the chance of labelling him undemocratic, homophobic, radically religious and anti-scientific.  Indeed, I suspect that he has these concerns at the back of his mind.  But there is one important comment to make: he had the opportunity to skip the votes.  Add these numbers up and you see that his party was not in full attendance - he could easily have made excuses and ducked any of the issues.  He has chosen not no; chosen to be in the minority in his own party.  Good for him.

For what it’s worth, Cameron seems to have been on the right side of each vote apart from the Lords suggestion.  His greatest concern, surely, is that his party are not nearly as progressive as he is.

I suspect that it is a good sign the Republicans have given up on attacking Clinton and are aiming their ire at the de facto. It is a pity, though, that they are not capable of better than this.

To be fair they were picking up on this:

The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions,

which was pretty inane {he should have said pretext} but the response was simply silly. The Republican Jewish Coalition, who seem to specialise in a noxious cocktail of partisan rightism and hard-core Zionism claim that ”Senator Obama manages to excuse the inexcusable actions of anti-American militant jihadists by putting the blame for their actions on America’s foreign policy” apparently. If you will actually read the quote then you’ll see he did nothing of the sort, but why allow the it truth to get between you and a ham-fisted attack on “the only democracy in the Middle East”?

{As it happens that’s a lie, the Palestinians elected Hamas democratically and Israel responded by cutting of their electricity and “Putting the Palestinians on a diet”, as the chap in charge of the starvation programme aimed, as ever, at a population with a large sub-18 population so charmingly put it}.

They go on to rage that:

Yet Senator Obama never says how he will reign in Hamas’ daily onslaught on Israel or Iran’s scurrilous condemnations of Israel.

as if somehow Obama could devise a policy that would cease attacks from a group the IDF {funded heavily by American dollars, of course} failed to fend off and as if it is within his duty and within power to edit the rhetoric of an Iranian figurehead.

They then conclude by asking:

It any wonder Hamas has endorsed him for president?

Which rather supports my long-standing view that smearing all opponents of Zionism and Israel leads to the true anti-Semitism being totally devalued. They can say that Obama’s words somehow makes him Hamas-appropriate and say it with a straight face. Granted Hamas are the one’s who said they had a preference but for them to say that there is any form of resembelence in policy is sheer lunacy. For those alleged by countless conspiracy theorists to be in control of world finance the Jewish Lobby certainly has a very poor grasp of economics. Inflation is rendering such terms as nearly worthless.

As it happens Obama is not even a critic. He supports Israel, he hasn’t said a bad word about it. He simply wants to end the carnage. But that does not save him from this outright lie:

It is truly disappointing that Senator Obama called Israel a ‘constant wound,’ ‘constant sore,’ and that it ‘infect[s] all of our foreign policy.’ These sorts of words and characterizations are the words of a politician with a deep misunderstanding of the Middle East and an innate distrust of Israel.

Was Einstein’s view on Judaism, as well as all other religions.

It seems both more understandable and such a greater pity that the man declined sophomore premiership of Israel, that considered…

The Conservatives are now saying demanding lesbian couples {somehow} acquire a “Male role model” before they are permitted IVF. This is part of their standard reactionary line on such matters, which also includes taxing single parents in order to pay for further tax breaks for married couples. The standard lie first spewed out by Reagan about it being in a couple’s interests not to be married has been floated in defence of this piece of blatant statist social engineering and this is being defended with the standard line about the interests of the child. Because, of course, it is far worse to be raised by a pair of women than to not exist at all.

Rather like their approach to securing more rape convictions {increase the sentence length if found guilty. But of course! Not a total non sequiter at all, that…} it displays the sort of muddled-minded rightist bluster that tends to come from the Conservatives, rendered worrying instead of amusing by the fact that it is a bunch that are actually going to get into power. This is in fact made more likely by this policy, that keeps the Daily Mail and Redwood Lot happy while only getting minimal attention from those outside the minority under attack. A nifty piece of foot-work from a raging rightist opportunist, certainly. At best, in fact.

And to think, some still deem Cameron a social liberal…