Nothing to see here!

There’s a bit of a feeling of ‘the same old same old’ about this week. Nothing bad happening, but nothing particularly blog-worthy going on in my life either. To avoid too much Dead Air, I thought I might point you in the direction of some people who have more of interest to say than me.

The first one is a story which doesn’t seem to have hit the British press at all, but is making big waves in the more liberal groups in the US. Apparently the Congress recently passed a big funding bill for their military in Iraq. This was considered a ‘must-pass’ bill because, whatever the rights or wrongs of the war itself, it would be unpatriotic not to support ‘our boys’ who have been sent off to do the fighting. However it appears that a couple of items were attached to this bill and were passed with no debate at all, because of the nature of the main bill. One of them was the de facto introduction of a national identity card (something which Americans, like the Brits, have been resisting for sometime.) Secondly, there is a clause which gives the head of Homeland Security the right (in certain very limited circumstances) to arbitrarily set aside laws which get in his way, without any apparent right of appeal against the decision. You can imagine how civil liberties groups are reacting to that.

Now I do have to hold up my hands a little bit and admit I haven’t done any fact checking on this myself. Normally I would search a few conservative sources to get the other side of the story. Maybe I’ll do that this weekend – or maybe one of my readers can do it for me. Perhaps point me at some sources which make clear how this is all just left-wing scaremongering and how the Bill of Rights hasn’t just been nudged onto the slippery slope down to irrelevance? Please?

The next link I’m going to offer you is a new blog that appeared recently talking about life in a Call Centre. I’ve added it to my RSS aggregator and, provided he keeps posting, I’ll probably link to it from my sidebar too. You can find the Call Centre Guru here.

Finally an article from The Spectator magazine by former Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, about the difficulties faced by prisons in trying to do what is ‘right’ for their inmates. A copy of the article can be found here.