MITCH HAS BEEN TRYING TO POST THIS FOR A WHILE AND ASKED FOR HELP. ALTHOUGH MY NAME IS AT THE TOP, THESE ARE ROCKINGMITCH’S FIRST EOTWQ’S…
1. The Con-Dem mob who are currently our government are keen on reviving the “Blitz” spirit and justifying their ludicrous “all in it together” mantra.
Bearing in mind that the war years brought hardship and rationing, what luxury could you live without and what would you buy on the black market?
2. Thinking about the joke “politics is show-biz for ugly people”, has there ever been (or currently) an MP you could have fancied? (UK only edit: nominations from anywhere in the world are welcome)
3. Following on from 2, which politician (if any) have you despised and why?
4. Come up with a song/instrumental which best describes the coalition.
5. And finally,….. how about a song for the opposition?
1- I’d live without decent food (grow my own potatoes) and sell everything for Vinyl.
2 – If you desire to be a politician you become ugly (however pretty/handsome your facade is)
3 – Blair – for pretending to be human, but becoming the evil lying, money grabbing, vile, idiotic, suck up, murdering shit. Did I mention lying?
or any Conservative Politician… for being spawn of Thatcher.
4 - Sucker The Wolfgang Press
5 – Communist Daughter - Neutral Milk Hotel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLLk06FJ2wA
I’d like to thank my Mom, the milkman and Mr. Maki for making this possible
1. I could live without the car, the dishwasher and cake. My black market purchase would be weed as it is now.
2. I can’t think of anyone. I disagree with shane’s comment above because Caroline Lucas and actually many other politicians actually want to change the world. It doesn’t make them ugly, but like many things in life, they do have to compromise, which is not always a bad thing. Oona King isn’t bad, and Baroness Warsi would probably engage one for a few hours…
3. Blair. Pure violent hatred. Without forgiveness.
4. …This Town by Elvis Costello for Nick Clegg particularly.
“you’re nobody in this town
you’re nobody in this crowd
you’re nobody til everybody in this town thinks you’re poison,
got your number, knows you must be avoided
You’re nobody til everybody in this town
Thinks You’re A Bastard”
5. Going Back To My Roots – Odyssey (if they ever want power again)
1) Could do without the TV. Load of shite mostly. Don’t smoke now and haven’t had a spliff for a long time, but the occasional bottle of Chateau Margaux is always worth the money.
2) NO, NO, NO.
3) Without doubt, Thatcher. I would need more space than is allowed here to justify. I’ll just say I’ll open a bottle of the above on news of her passing.
4) Coalition song. Hmmm. “Happy Together” by the Turtles.
5) For the oppo. “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” Walker Bros.
As the only one here that lived the reality of the blitz I can’t even think in terms of ‘what luxuries could I live without and what would I buy on the black market?’
We didn’t have any luxuries except maybe a Cadbury’s bar, they cost 3d and having 3d was a luxury that didn’t happen very often. The black market was something you read about in the papers, it was for Londoners , it wasn’t available in Yorkshire. From what I remember petrol was the big deal on the black market, like everything else it was severely rationed, I never knew anyone with a car nor did I ever ride in a car ’til the 50′s. Today I could easily live without TV and if push came to shove I’d pay some bloke to get me an illegal internet connection. [And to tap the electrical wires whilst he's at it]
Can’t comment on current UK MP’s, there were a few decent blokes right after the war in the Labour government, similarly can’t equate music and current politics.
I’ll only answer 1 and 2, since i have my hands full with my own country, and i don’t live, work, or pay taxes in the UK so my opinion on politics there is not informed enough to be accurate. It’s one thing to read about it in the Guardian, but that’s not at all the same as having to actually live with it.
1 – Well, i live pretty stripped down to the bone anyway, so i can have the freedom to not work very much. No tv, no phone, very few clothes, pay rent and don’t own, but i do have a good camera and computer. Not giving them up either. So what else i could give up is take away and prepared food, and cook more. (not an appealing prospect.)
2 – (in a very small voice, waiting for jeers and red arrows, but being honest here) –
(clears throat) -
ok, i think George Osborne and Alistair Campbell are handsome. So shoot me.
(Mitch – have you tried opening a new account?)
I forgot about what i’d buy on the black market. I don’t drive so not gas, weed days are over except for occasional donations, can live without alcohol, but i’m still a slave to cigarettes.
3. If i’m allowed to include non-UK politicians now, I’d have to say Reagan.
Non-UK politicians fancied – Gavin Newsom. With no shame whatsoever.
1) TV, definitely. But then, since I’ve been living without one for years – and a million times happier for it – it wont make that much difference to go without.
What’s that you say? What would I buy on the what?
Shhh..
2) I recall Glenda Jackson had a sort of Hamstead mystique to her for a lad in his growing years..way before she went into politics though.. and anyway, I was too young to know what I was doing..(blush)
3) Im glad you said ‘have you despised?’ and not ‘do you despise?’. As ive said before on here, a long time ago, I used to hate Thatch with a purple passion and blame her for 1001 things (along with her cohort and heart-string tugger Ronnie Roll-back). But then I started to ‘get’ that the stage had been set long before I was born and that Thatch was just the best foil they could find to cheerlead the coming worldwide revolution at the right pitch for the times. Blair too, I see as just another tragi-comic foil with the best PR frontage (at least at first) for ‘the great plan’ to forge ahead.
More recently, I have decided not to ‘despise’ anyone, since I have worked out (duh!) that it doesnt help me or anyone else whenever I do.
4) ‘Opportunities’ by The Pet Shop Boys seems apposite for almost every coming together of political forces.
5) How about ‘I’ll be back’ by The Beatles? Or maybe ‘Ping Pong’ by Stereolab..same difference.
1. I could live without booze I reckon……I did 6 months without it at the start of the year and it’s put me off it a bit….the taste for it is coming back though!
Black market vinyl sounds good to me.
2. Oh no.
3. I don’t share the hatred for Blair, but i’ve been out of the country since 2002…so I missed his ultimate downfall. I’m too young to despise Thatcher on a personal level but I recognise her legacy and all she did to fuck up the country and increase the gap between rich and poor.
4. Bearing in mind the imminent dismantling of the state apparatus which took hundreds of years to develop and was about the only GREAT thing left about Great Britain, i’ll go for:
Atari Teenage Riot – Destroy 200 Years Of Culture
(only for the brave to listen to!)
5. Chris Farlowe – Out Of Time
“you’re out of touch my baby…
you’re obsolete my baby….”
and one more for the lot of ‘em:
SMASH – (I Want To) Kill Somebody
“I want to chop their fucking heads off and stick them on a stake..
…Margaret Thatcher, Jeffrey Archer, Michael Heseltine, John Major, Virginia Bottomley especially…..”
sorry that should be “Destroy 2000 Years of Culture”!
1. I’m already well on the way to self-sufficiency as regards vegetables, beer, cider and eggs, so get your black market garlic here! Could live without car, television and probably wine; would be desperately seeking to trade cider for chocolate and olive oil.
2. Why UK only? Presumably because they have much more attractive female politicians on the continent… Really can’t think of any remotely attractive UK politician – not that I reject the possibility outright as Shane does, I just can’t think of any.
3. There’s a significant distinction to be drawn here between ‘despise’ and ‘loathe’. I loathe Thatcher and most of her ghastly society-wrecking crew, plus Blair; I despise most members of the Labour cabinet over the last fifteen years for selling their souls to Blair in return for power, hence their failure to stand against the Iraq War or against his grovelling to big business. I honestly believe that many people do go into politics for the best of reasons, and that compromise is often necessary in order to get anything done, but far too many of them seem to convince themselves that they’re still fighting for their principles and making necessary compromises long after it’s clear that they’ve lost their way entirely.
4. Godspeed You Black Emperor, Dead Flag Blues
5. Godspeed You Black Emperor, Dead Flag Blues
And donds to Japanther’s Smash suggestion as well.
Thinking about it, I don’t really know why I restricted it to UK only – probably to stop people feeling they had to put Hitler and Mussolini in the despise section.
I agree that foreign politicians are generally better looking than ours. I used to have a high regard for Illona Stalle, the ex-porn actress who became a left wing MP in Italy and for Segelene Royale who unsuccessfully led the French “Socialists” at their last election.
I meant to add – OK THROW IT OPEN TO THE WORLD!
Illona Stalle? A Hungarian, but also a bit of a grand-standing fake on the political front. Dont get me wrong, im all for porn star politicians, but maybe not this one..
1. Yup – the TV every time. I was on the same lines about vinyl etc., but thought as long as there is decent live music I’ll go out & dance!
2. That way lies madness …
3. There’ll aways be a place in my bile for Dame Shirley Porter, the Tesco heiress & leader of the Tory Westminister Council during those mad bad ’80s; who when not gerrymandering by selling council housing stock to tory supporters or embezzling millions of taxpayers money for which she had to flee to Israel, sold cemeteries to developers for 15p a pop. Therefore I won’t shop at fucking Tesco’s! (It helps that the food there is shite anyway).
4. ‘Hard Times’ – Curtis Mayfield
5. ‘Where Is The Love’ – Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway
I hope its not considered too self-aggrandising to give my answers at this point.
1. Like most people here, TV would be no loss (except for Newsnight (when Kirsty does it!) or BBC4). I know, given recent occurrences, I should be the last person to still be smoking, but I still have about 7-8 a day and would get those on the black market. I don’t drink booze these days, so that would be no loss.
2. Seeing Caroline Lucas on the tailboard of a truck speaking to people at Menwith Hill a few years back, I developed a certain regard for her. Especially as her bottom was about 2 feet away from my eyeline. And she cahnged her top in my car. Mark Thomas used to say he had a fancy for Virginia Bottomley and “would shag her then kill her afterwards”.
3. Many fit here – Moseley, Colin Jordan, Enoch Powell, John Tyndall, Nick Griffin for fairly obvious reasons. There used to be a worry in the 80s that Labour was being infiltrated by the far left and I feel they missed supporters of the far right doing the same thing. Step forward Mike O’Brien, Blair’s first “Immigration” Minister.
4. Either “I Got You Babe” by Sonny & Cher or “Tea For Two Cha Cha” – Tommy Dorsey. Or even “We’re A Couple Of Swells” (for the title, not the lyrics)
5. A hopeful one – Sam Cooke “Change Gonna Come” (For Diane Abbott)
Apart from “cahnging” her top, Caroline Lucas changed it too!
1. Like several others, I don’t indulge in many luxuries these days. I rarely drink or eat out, have given up air travel and use my car as little as possible. I’d like to keep my TV (sorry but I like both comedy and documentaries) and I doubt you’d get that on the black market. I’ll continue my current illegal purchasing until some government finally realises that it makes no sense for (all but two of the most harmful) drugs to be illegal, ie. until the end of time….
2. magic’s about right, I think. There is something attractive about a person who puts themselves on the line to improve the lot of others. Given the fuss about Women In Love (and the inevitable impression that she was ‘well up for it’!), Glenda Jackson held a certain attraction when she first went into politics with an apparent belief in a better world. But I’ve never actually lusted after a politician. Berlusconi seems to have decided to reverse the paradigm: make sexy women into politicians. You’d think that would be quite distracting… oh, that’s the idea? I see.
3. It has to be Thatcher. Blair became a huge disappointment but at least there were some lines he could never cross under the Labour flag. Thatch did anything Milton Friedman told her to do. As well as destroying the country’s ability to actually make things and degrading the working class, she destroyed its moral fabric by making an awful lot of us believe that greed is good. That, ultimately, allowed clever criminals in the finance industry to fleece the country and then ask for more.
4. “I Remember It Well”. A couple staying together for some reason or other, each with different views of why that is.
5. Ditto.
Cheers, Mitch and Maki.
Well in that case I’ll start with a quote:
” I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered; I don’t have a friend who feels at ease; I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees, but it’s all right, it’s all right for we lived so well so long. Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on, I wonder what’s gone wrong; I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong.”
When it comes to crooked and disgusting you lot are in the minor leagues, we’ve got the Republican party for starters, a gold-mine of corruption, and then of course right behind them there’s the Democrats, another huge resource.
If you want to start at the top how about Nixon, Agnew, Reagan, and Bush, all certified criminal Presidents, not all went to jail. Then there’s Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and
Palin and Tom DeLay, all reasonably current and this has been going on for 200 years.
And then there’s their mouthpieces: Fox ‘news’, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage et al, ours is an entire system founded and perpetuated in corruption and hypocrisy.
Sorry, the ‘home of the brave’ wins by a mile!
In response to your earlier comment, GF, my mum lived in Leeds and Blackpool during the first few years of the war, and from what she told me, black market thrived up there!
1. Like many others, we’re pretty bare-bones as it is. No TV, one car, hand-me-down clothes. I suppose wine would be hard to give up, and fresh fruit and vegetables, even in the winter.
2. Have you seen our president?
3. I’ve wasted a lot of energy hating Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld. BUt I think I hate Sarah Palin more. I despise and loathe her. I hate Glenn Beck, too. I’m angry right now, even thinking about them.
4 & 5…I’ll have to have a think about these…
Must admit, you Americans do have a rich pool of bastards to choose from.
We’re number 1! We’re number 1!
Yeah, right on, we’re number one!
Mitch: I might have been too young to recognise it, all I remember is reading about it in the Daily Herald.
1 Luxuries? What they? Oh, malt whisky, you say? Well yes, once there’s none left in the loft I believe I might go looking for that shady bloke in the 1940s hat.
2 I’m glad you extended it, because I’d have been stuck for a UK one. But Jerry Rawlings is the most attractive military dictator there has ever been.
3 Once it was Thatcher, but now…I love how he cancelled the London book-signing because people threw eggs at him in Dublin. You know who I mean.
4 Richard Thompson – For Shame Of Doing Wrong
5 Richard Thompson – Two Left Feet
1) Most luxuries that I feel I could live without I already do. Don’t drive, don’t smoke. don’t buy expensive clothes.
Do drink wine and would probably be a lot healthier without it so maybe that’s the one to give up and spend all my money on black market chocolate.
2) Dare I admit to having a soft spot for that Sarah Teather?
Please don’t tell me what exactly she’s done in government since the coalition took power. I’ve studiously avoided finding out in case it upsets me.
3) Thatch seems almost too obvious. Ditto Blair. Didn’t like that Bonar Law much.
4 @ 5 need more thought on these ones……
1. Having lived for years without a television that wouldn’t hurt, and doesn’t count. I’d be miserable without my computer but life would be even worse without the occasional bottle of Mauro, a fine red wine from Valladolid!
2. Add me to the list of Glenda Jackson aficionados.
3.Ooh, this list could be endless. Now that it’s been opened up to cover the world I’ll go for Esperanza Aguirre, our regional president. A truly nasty piece of work, although just about anyone from the Spanish PP (why do the right think they can fool us with that People’s/Popular Party moniker?) would do. Special mention must go to the truly loathsome and despicable José María Aznar (the shifty mustachioed one in that awful Azores photo alongside Bush and Blair). His son was once in one of my classes when I worked for The British Council and I derived enormous – admittedly puerile – satisfaction when ordering him to “Shut up, Aznar!”
4. 4.33 by John Cage. That’s all I have to say to them and all they’ll ever have to say that could sway me.
5. “Better Decide Which Side You’re On” by TRB. I mean, they have let us all down with their pandering to big business and seem to have forgotten that “When Left is right, then Right is wrong.”
1 a. Cashmere socks
b. Bananas
2. Clare Short
3. Tony Blair
4. The Bullingdon Circus – Robb Johnson
5. Win Lose Or Draw – Robb Johnson & The Irregulars
1. I’ll join everyone else in chucking the TV. I view music as one of life’s necessities but not ebveryone does so if the blackmarket was the place to get it I would.
2. No.
3. As an American I am dubiously flush with candidates as Amy & Steen have pointed out but I would have to go with Nixon ’cause I still find myself yelling st the TV if they use one of his clips. His pursuit of the mountains of racist horseshit Wallace strewed across our country (the southern strategy) in 1968 to guarantee his reelection in 72 seriously marred Lincoln’s party & turned it into a refuge for the southern democrats who had turned on Johnsoon after the civil rights act was passed. Without that major party cloak they would have been seen for regional gathering of loonie haters they are. & that doesn’t even cover pursuing the Vietnam war for another 6 years.
4. Career Opportunities The Clash
5. Long As I See The Light Creedence Clearwater Revival
I’m hoping that the current crop of nutjobs is going to end up being nothing more than a fart in the wind, that’s why i didn’t even mention them. Guess we’ll find out in few weeks.
1. I’ve already scrapped my car and sold my vinyl so it would have to be my Guardian subscription (assuming I could still read it on line). I’d buy decent beer on the Black Market.
2. NO, absolutely NO. A thousand times NO.
3. Don’t know about despise but there are many I don’t like, mostly (but not exclusively) Conservative.
4. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (for all the wrong reasons)
5. Sorry is the Hardest Word
Good questions, thanks Mitch and Maki.
Looking forward to reading others’ answers, but must post my own first so as not to be influenced . . .
1. I couldn’t live without my world-class bed. The older I get the more I need to sleep in comfort. You can take away anything except bed, food, drink and music. As for the black market, I’d buy . . . a short-wave radio.
2. No, no, no, no . . . gimps, geeks, nerds and squares. Wouldn’t want to have to kick one out of bed. Yeuk!!
When I was young and single I wasn’t interested in good-looking girls if they weren’t wearing the right clothes. Which isn’t as shallow as it might appear at first glance because the right clobber gave an indication of the right mindset. Twin-set and pearls! Fuck off!
3. Almost all, but particularly Thatcher, Bush, Bush, Blair, Mugabe, Hitler, Amin, Verwoerd, Pavelic, Milosevic, Mao etc., etc.,. When I was a teenager I recall pronouncing, “The desire to become a politician must automatically disqualify that person from public office.” Ah, the certainties of youth.
4. We Are All Prostitutes – The Pop Group.
5. Hang Down Your Head – Tom Waits.
Shit!!! Forgot Ronnie! The traitor to his own union.
Well, I’ve read ‘em all. All I can say is . . . WHAT A GREAT GANG!
Interesting questions. Since my politics are libertarian (in a Thoreau sort of way – the government that governs best governs least), my views probably differ from a lot of those here. That said, here is a stab at answering the questions.
1. Oddly, since I work in television broadcasting and it is my bread and butter, I could probably live without television, but never without books. I would buy books on the black market – and sell them too!
2. Since I favour less government rather than more (sometimes bordering on anarchy or no government at all), I dislike most politicians. However I very much do like libertarian marijuana activist Marc Emery, recently sentenced to five years in jail in the US for selling marijuana seeds over the Internet after being shamefully extradited from Canada by the Conservative government. Check out his website: http://www.cannabisculture.com/ Marc is a brilliant actvisit, orchestrating worldwide protests against his incarceration from his jail cell through his beautiful wife Jodie. I had the honour of sharing a joint with Marc many years ago.
3. I particularly dislike religious conservatives. Our current Conservative government in Canada is being heavily influenced by the religious right as discussed in a recent book called The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada – a scary-ass book. There is the odd Conservative who actually believes in limited government, but most are hypocritical supporters of government meddling in people’s lives.
4. Song for the Conservative government in Canada: Lies
5. Song for the opposition: Fools Rush In
1. Central heating (I know, I’m a wimp). Used sparingly in this household, but I delight in turning a tap on and having a bathful of hot water at my command. When the kids were small our boiler broke down regularly every winter and the amount of time and energy spent heating enough water in kettles, pots and pans to bathe was ludicrous.
I would, of course, be buying wool on the black market to keep us in thick socks and blankets just in case…
2. The Revd Jesse Jackson in his younger day – no wonder there were woman queuing to have his babies! Take a quick peek at him in the Wattstax footage
3. My old mate Tanya introduces me to her friends as ‘the woman who left Britain rather than live under Thatcher’. What she forgets to mention is that I ended up in Helmut Kohl’s Germany, not a lot of kudos in that.
4. Can’t hear you cos your mouth’s full of shit
5. Shake, rattle & roll ?
P.S. I’ve posted links in answers 2 & 4 – why are they so hard to see on here? Can we turn the colour up?
Hi Debby – I’ve just put them inside bold tags. That better?
Loving the themed EOTWQs!
1] Like others, I’m pretty stripped to the bone but something that’s become a staple of modern living that, when you give it any thought, is a luxury is mult-channel TV, and I’d not have too many night-sweats after having given that up (and was particularly grateful not to have Sky Sports to witness Tottenham’s extra-time penalty-crammed cave-in to the Ashburton Devils).
2] After the election and until I moved to a different constituency, my MP has been Lucinda Berger, who’s considered quite a sort, though I couldn’t say she exactly floats my boat (and certainly not my peaceful aid flotilla under attack from Israeli troops). Without attempting to annex the sexual territory of our gay comrades, I could imagine fostering a thing for Tony Benn back in the day – not a fellow-travelling politico man-crush, you understand, but a full-blown appreciation of his physical combination of a compassionate socialist interior beneath an aristocratic shell. And I’ve spent plenty of time, while on chauffering duties for my true unelected love lately during her work assignments in the Wirral, and regularly pass the New Ferry / Port Sunlight office of Alison McGovern, MP for Wirral South. She’s awfully young, judging by her photograph on the shop-front, and were she, say, a hectoring Marketing and Communications professional, you probably wouldn’t be transported towards lustful visions, but, dammit, those two little letters after her name just do it for me!
3] So, so many. OK, here’s a personal one, because political reasons would have us here for days: Kim Howells, the straight-talking Welshman who was and still may be a Labour MP, once sat next to me in a library where I was on a free course teaching people how to use the internet (back when it wasn’t suckled from birth). It was a bloody great scheme but when he turned to me and, without introductions or any other preface, said, “This is bloody great, isn’t it?” I just recoiled at the calculation that seemed to have gone into the “bloody” and chose to despise him ever since.
4] 4’33′. Words fail.
5] Harold Melvin & The Blues Notes – Wake Up Everybody
Blue Notes
MAY1366 – My trades union work involved a well-known Tory MP. He was well-intentioned towards our cause and was genuinely trying to help. So much so that he triumphantly reduced British Rail’s flak-catcher to tears (a grown man crying), which inadvertantly invoked our socialist sympathies.
In the lift he turned to me and said, in his public school accent, “Don’t you hate it when they talk to you like you’re a c*nt!?”
“Oh,” I thought, as I turned my back to him, “he thinks he speaks my language.”
Yep – I mean, this is a more pronounced version of my Kim Howells example. Howells certainly is no “toff” (think a cruder Kinnock, in the same way that – for those familiar with The Thick Of It – Jamie is a cruder version of Malcolm Tucker) but I think this goes beyond class background and even party affiliation. It’s just that, as British MPs, this lot have crossed a Rubicon and have to accept that they are no longer “us” – do good, if you can, but don’t do “hip”.
I missed out my black market purchase above. I think: healthcare
p.s.
4) No Feelings? Smash It Up? or maybe Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee……
5) on election night I suppose it would have been “You’re Evening of Swing Has Been Cancelled”. Now it’s more likely to be “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”.
aaaggghhh!
“your” not “you’re”
At the risk of various people I respect deeply not speaking to me again… I suffer, as anyone who’s listened to Radio Abahachi will know very well, from the most extreme BBC accent imaginable – to the extent that I was mocked by 90% of the population of Surrey when growing up, let alone anywhere else. This does create a dilemma, which leads me to sympathise with May’s and Webcore’s hapless politicians: do I talk normally, in which case I sound like a typical arrogant upper-middle-class wanker, or do I attempt to disguise this a little bit, in which case I sound like a condescending hypocrite? There isn’t actually a good answer to that one…
ABAHACHI – The swearword contrasted with his fine mode of speech. I don’t care what accent a person has, only the quality of their statements matter.
1. TV. At various times I’ve lived without it and could easily do so again. I don’t have a car so no black market petrol but I might be tempted by really good red wine or Guerlain’s Mitsouko perfume.
2. Not from the UK, but when I saw Julian Bond on American TV back in the early eighties, there was a definite fanciable quality to him.
3. Thatcher, Blair, Michael Howard – need I go on?
I’ll think abou the music ones.
1. Fuck you, we’ve given up enough already. If governments are prepared to give up squandering tax revenue on wars we don’t want or failed financial institutions & businesses we don’t need, then, & only then, they can come back & ask us to give up something else.
The black market would not exist if we had a progressive sales tax instead of income tax. No politician will ever give up the power of the status quo willingly.
Questions 2 & 3 are too close together. Too big a risk to get them mixed up & state that I fancy Thatcher (oops – seem to have thrown up in my mouth a little there). The one I blame most is Clinton. If the most competent world leader we’ve had in some time managed to keep his bent dick in his pants and avoided outraging his puritanical electorate; we could have avoided the Bush Jr. years. The present leader here is looking increasingly like an empty suit – too little experience to be effective. A case of too much too young & it’s going to get a lot harder as the hard right machine continues to pile on.
Incumbents can have All versions of Calvin Party’s Lies, Lies & Government played in a loop until they get it. US opposition can have Todd Snider’s Right Wing Republican White Christian American Male & The Labour Party can have Gary Clail’s These Things Are Worth Fighting For or Mark Stewart’s High Ideals & Crazy Dreams.
Oopsy, F-bomb aimed at politicos, in general, & not at Mitch or his surrogate, Maki.
Did have a friend, who on answering a knock from a candidate would answer:
“Fuck Off, I’m a communist & so is my dog”
Worked like a charm everytime. Never before has the political process moved so quickly.
Rest assured, no offence taken!
I used to use a similar line to Jehovah’s Witnesses when they came knocking.
Not read other people’s answers yet, so apologies if any of these are repeats.
1 a) Danish pastries for breakfast on my way to work
b) What I buy on the black market at the moment…
2) No, never.
3) Too many to choose from: Thatcher; all those ‘family values’ tories with mistresses & young farmers on the side; lefties who sell out their principles for a seat in the lords; I’ve always held a particular loathing for Neil Kinnock, going way back to his back-bench days.
4) Eton Rifles?
5) What now my love?