So, Heinz releases an ad they must have known would cause a controversy, in which two men kiss.

Not of course, because they’re in love or anything like – my reading of the ad is one where the family are so far into taking their mum for granted that she can entirely be replaced by some strange American guy in a chef outfit and none of them even notice.

So, Heinz releases a controversial ad, and then, surprise surprise, there’s a storm of complaints from the fundies.

So they pull the ad.

Then there’s a storm of complaint from the gayers.

In this process they have annoyed a tiny minority of religionists at one end of the spectrum, and a tiny minority of gays at the other, and the vast majority of unaffected people in the middle of the two who don’t care either way get subjected to weeks and weeks of free coverage in newspapers, media and blogs.  The gays and the fundies will be boycotting the brand, but now everyone else will have heard of it.

Now even Nick Clegg is weighing in with more free advertising for Heinz.

Bah.

Iain is getting uppity about a person putting a Lib Dem stakeboard on her flat in Thame.

I hope he’s getting similarly uppity about the countless dozens of Tory boards erected in grass verges around the constituency.

Putting them in farmers’ fields, with the farmers’ permission, is one thing.  But putting them on the grass verges, which are Council or highways land, is quite another, in my view.

PS, isn’t it interesting the shopkeeper is prepared to nail their colours to the mast one way or another? A clear sign the constituency is teetering on a knife-edge and could go either way.

Hello, it’s me.  I’m prevaricating again. I’m supposed to be writing a letter about why guns and drugs and war are bad, but the Lib Dems won’t be banning any of them. Thank you, Lib Dem extranet!

Two links about US politics:  imvotingrepublican.com – a helpful video full of the sort of people who will be voting Republican in November, and the reasons they will choose for doing so.  Now’s the time to register to vote, if you’re in the US and you want to take part in the general election later this year.

And Barack Obama helpfully twittered me a message the other day about the radical, shock decision he’d taken, so I rushed to his website to see if he’d decided his Veep nomination.  He hasn’t.  Or he hasn’t told anyone if he has.  He’s taking a stand on campaign finance and saying “no” to $80m of public money in protest at how the campaign finance system in the US works. Instead of block grants, he wants to encourage millions of real Americans to make small donations towards his campaign.

When he first sent the link, the video wouldn’t play very well, presumably because millions of Americans were all trying to watch it at the same time, credit cards clutched in their hot little hands, so I read the transcript instead.

And what do I think?  Building a grassroots finance campaign is a good idea, good luck to him.  The imvotingrepublican.com campaign?  Well, it’s slick, well put together, and overwhelmingly negative.  But if it helps move the dividing lines on policy into a debate on real things, rather than huge proxy decisions like abortion and gay rights, which seem to dominate American policy in a way completely disproportionate to their real importance, then so much the better.

Guido reports that Mad Nad is saying:

The frenzied attack against Conservative MPs and MEPs, orchestrated by and emanating from the left wing BBC and press has equalled that of an animal in its death throes. The more terminal the position looks for Labour, the more desperate the BBC and left wing press become. The incoming Conservative government has many big dragons to slay, the BBC has to be the biggest.

I suppose we all have a view on the bias of the press and for many of us it’s related to our own positions.  If we’re left wing, we lament the right bias of the press and vice versa.

I am racking my brain trying to remember where I heard or read the following which I now paraphrase:

The right-wing press have given David Cameron’s policy vacuum an easy ride.  One gets the impression that if the Tories announced a new policy in favour of the slaughter of the first born, the Daily Mail would headline it “Excellent news for second children”

I can’t find it by googling, but I do keep coming across this beaut of a quote from Nottingham South MP Alan Simpson’s resignation letter.  I really ought to put this on an election leaflet at some point.

There are good people in the Parliamentary Labour Party; just not enough of them. Many MPs complain of a government that no longer listens to the party, but they dutifully walk through the division lobbies to vote for whatever regressive measures Downing Street asks for. At times I feel that colleagues would vote for the slaughter of the first-born if asked to.

The dishwasher is sitting there, and for the last few days it has been smugly concealing all the teaspoons we have.  Side plates ran out this morning, and bowls are nearly out, and yet the dishwasher is still not ready to run.

This is because I have had one of those bad, bad weeks where I have eaten out or had takeaway food nearly every night.

I’ve had a series of run-on meetings, where you start in the Council House at 10 or 12 (I’m back to nocturnal again this week, so there is no time to do anything before a noon meeting) meet, have maybe an hour off before another 4 or 5, followed by a resident or local party meeting in the evening starting at 7 or 7.30.  There isn’t time to get home before meetings, and certainly not time to cook.

So, I’ve been taking the easy way out.  I know I can sit in the carpark of a residents meeting, phone the chinese takeaway round the corner from me, and they will have delicious unhealthy food all ready for me to swing by the shop on the way home.  There is no waiting, no Nigel Slater syle 30 minute fast food, it’s just ready, and tasty, and convenient.

And expensive of course, comparatively. Although in a city like ours, there’s enough competition to make sure there isn’t too much in it.

And because I’ve not been using pots and pans, it’s taking forever to fill the dishwasher and we’re running out of the important things.  So there is yet another appliance sitting there telling me I am not running my life quite the way I planned to.

From Jonathan Calder’s Lib Dem News column, Housepoints, which he kindly duplicates on his blog each week, thus helpfully removing the need to open the envelope with Lib Dem News in it:

But Kenneth Horne was not without a puritan streak too. He once said: “I am all for censorship. If ever I see a double entendre I whip it out.”

Last night, a link from Alex Wilcock reminded me to look up a speech by Jeremy Browne in which he hammered both the Labour party and the Conservatives, largely about the 10p tax rate.  I wrote about it for Lib Dem Voice here – giving some edited highlights and a link to the full speech in Hansard.

But one jibe stuck with me and this afternoon I’ve been checking the figures:

If the Conservatives cannot stand the relative heat of being a smaller Opposition than Michael Foot was able to muster, they are obviously not quite the Government in waiting, as they have come to style themselves in recent weeks.

So I checked on Wikipedia.  1979 general election: 269 Labour MPs; 2005 general election: 198 Tory MPs.  David Cameron went on to inherit the 2005 cohort, which he still has, give or take the odd defection; Michael Foot inherited the 269 members from the 1979 election, give or take a few by-elections.

Michael Foot went on to write “the longest suicide note in history”, but still won more MPs in 1983 than the Tories have now – 194 according to Wikipedia.

In fact, the Labour party have not had fewer than 200 MPs since 1935 – the Tories have, however, been under 200 before 1997, in 1945.