Politics | Jonathan Rothwell

Don’t vote for Rick Perry

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Rebecca Watson makes one mistake (Galileo wasn’t executed, although he was tortured by the Church) but nails Rick Perry’s nuttiness on the head.

Something I’ve noticed about the US presidential race as stands is that all the Republican candidates seem to be absolute cranks. The only exception is Jon Huntsman, who has relatively sensible ideas on science and a serviceable position on civil rights that one could agree to respectfully disagree with.

Huntsman, however, is barely registering in the early opinion polls, so it’s highly likely the Republican Party (let’s not call it the GOP: it’s metamorphasised into a Soviet propaganda writer’s parody of its former self) will have a genuine wingnut in the running for the next election. Given that the majority of Americans identify as political independents, I’d say that despite the general dissatisfaction with his work thus far, Obama has the next term in the bag.

We stopped dreaming

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Neil Tyson on NASA’s ever-decreasing budget, and how, somewhere along the line, the money dried up and we stopped dreaming.

I have faith: I can’t wait to see the sequel to Cosmos he’s working on.

Cameron outs self as clueless on non-nuclear family matters

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Anna Hedge, on why David Cameron’s comments about absentee fathers are opportunistically vile.

Cameron in his anthematising of wilfully absentee dads, and his ‘analysis’ of the effects thereof upon kids & our wider society, also manages to to roundly ignore the role that the attitude of successive governments towards the families left behind has had. Being a single parent is hard. Financially, (whatever Mail commentators may think, there is a very strong correlation between single parenthood & poverty, only a madwoman would do it from choice), emotionally, intellectually, socially, hard work. Is his government supporting these abandoned families, about whom he cares so much? Is it bollocks. Cuts to childcare credits, cuts to Surestart, cuts to WTC, where there’s a cut there’s a single parent getting less help. From his government.

Why am I so angry, about Cameron’s rhetoric, his comparison, his use of this day to castigate wilfully absentee fathers as being as irresponsible as drunk drivers? Because I am a single parent. I am a single parent because a drunk man climbed into the cab of of his lorry and killed my partner. And that damage to our son, to me, the loss of a good man from society really is irretrievable.

Cameron really has dug himself into the shit with this one. It’s a thoroughly horrible set of remarks made by a man who has seemingly never experienced the crushing disappointment of being a single parent, or having someone close to them killed by a drunk driver.

And this is before we even consider situations where the father might be unfairly victimised What about a woman trying to stop a father seeing his kids? There’s no way of meaningfully codifying a fuck-and-run father into law.

Ultimate conclusion: Cameron a complete and utter arse.