Here’s my message for Obama

Mike over at Troubled Diva gives the rules of the latest cool meme:

Got a message for the US President Elect?

Got a Flickr account?

If so, then might I suggest that you add your message to this brand new and fast-growing pool?

I wrote a day or two ago about the “needs of the offenders” vs the needs of the victims.

Today, I’m pointed at an excellent piece in the Graundian about dads in prison recording bed-time stories for their kids at home – a project that has since been extended for serving servicemen and women.

No doubt some on the right will see this as disgraceful. More evidence that those on the inside are gifted hi-tech equipment that the innocent unconvicted on the outside can ill-afford. And no doubt those mouth-frothing swiveleyes are only a hop-skip and a jump from those bemoaning single families.

It’s an excellent initiative, keeping fathers close to their children and keeping offenders grounded in family life. Strong support mechanisms, and a reason not to re-offend are all helped by this project. Inmates are also learning useful skills they can put to work when they complete their sentences.

Sometimes towards the end of a hard-fought campaign a blog post emerges that changes you how you think about the whole election. A posting so inspiring, or with such a new perspective that you cannot fail to sit up and take notice, and maybe – just maybe – change your view about the whole shebang. Such a posting emerged tonight. I was just minding my own business, cooking chilli and rice-pudding, sitting down to watch Dead Set on E4, then idly checking my twitter and blog feeds on my phone, when BAM – the following dropped onto my consciousness. Suddenly, life will never be the same again.

Read the top 10 redonk things said in the election – as retold by kittens. Awww! How cute.

A slightly more substantial video has also dropped through my feedreader via JoeMyGod about how the candidates have re-used the same words and phrases in each of the debates. And not just the same words and phrases, but exactly the same intonation each time.

It’s not that surprising. A radio programme I was half listening to last week pointed out almost the same – one secret to fluency in public speaking is to have a whole series of words and phrases that you can build your argument around. A sort of verbal thinking space. In the time it takes you say, “Good evening, my fellow Americans,” your brain can be a long way down the synaptic paths it needs to be in order to string together the words and phrases of the new stuff you wanted to say. And it’s partly why ministers and clergy men can speak fluently. After years of reading the liturgy, there are whole groups of words that will just flow off the tongue. Slot a few into a sermon, add a few more words, and with all the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, you’re halfway there already.

(Something a little screwy happens if I try and embed the video, so you will have to make do with a link to it instead.)

Strange Maps has the cover of the New Yorker, satirizing Palin’s grasp on geography.

Someone on Cix posted a passage from Garrison Keillor, who summed up the credit crises and the Republican responsibility in these words in the International Herald Tribune:

Confident men took leave of common sense and bet on the idea of perpetual profit in the real estate market and crashed. But it wasn’t their money. It was your money they were messing with. And that’s why we need government regulators. Gimlet-eyed men with steel-rim glasses and crepe-soled shoes who check the numbers and have the power to say, “This is a scam and a hustle and either you cease and desist or you spend a few years in a minimum-security federal facility playing backgammon.”

The Republican Party used to specialize in gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense and then it was taken over by crooked preachers who demand Americans trust them because they’re packing a Bible and God sent them on a mission to enact lower taxes, less government. Except when things crash, and then government has to pick up the pieces.

Find the whole article here. And because of US syndication, if you google any of the key, well-honed phrases, you’ll find the same piece in a dozen US subregionals.

An interesting post from Norfolk Blogger as he goes off on one assuming that Lib Dem Blogs hates him.

I thought that this was fairly unlikely (although, to be fair, if I was going to ban anyone…) so dropped LibDemBlogs key genius Ryan a line to see if he knew about the issue and the allegation.

And got a fairly robust response.

Somehow, it seems quite a lot of people expect sites like this to be omniscient. It’s not that dissimilar from some of my casework, where people wail “Why hasn’t the Council done something about problem X?” First step is to make sure that the Council know about the problem in the first place. There have been plenty of times when the reason the Council hasn’t done anything is that it didn’t know there was a problem. Everyone assumes Council omniscience, or Council indifference, and few people pick up a phone and ask.

There are, of course, plenty more cases where the Council bloody has been told, and still hasn’t fixed it. These can be for a number of reasons.

Some problems can’t be fixed. No, really.

Sometimes it’s a communication issue, and just because Department A has been told of a problem doesn’t necessarily mean that Dept B knows. This shouldn’t happen, but inevitably does in organisations the size of councils. With 20,000 employees, things will occasionally fall between cracks.

Quite often, the problem is “It’s more complicated than it looks!” EG: why hasn’t the Council mown this bit of grass? Actually, the Council is not responsible for that bit of estate. The developer who built it is, even though they left town ten years ago and went bust shortly after. The Council will eventually be responsible, but first has to adopt the estate – and it’s not going to do that until its standards have been met, otherwise it will end up responsible for shoddy roads and bad workmanship and have to spend a small fortune putting it right.

Sometimes, the problem is that the requested fix is too expensive. More accurately, since the Council’s annual budget was £1.4billion last year, apparently, which technically means we could afford almost anything, the problem is usually allocation of money. Quite a lot of that money is tied up, so the £350million for schools is not going to be spent repairing fences. And the repairing fences budget, like the fixing pavements budget, is finite, and both ran out ages ago this financial year, and already have significant calls on them for the following year.