Guns don’t kill people, daycare kills people

Kevin Drum in the Washington Monthly remembers the soon-to-be-ex Congressman Tom DeLay, specifically his reaction to the Columbine High School shootings. In a piece of coruscating analysis, DeLay said:

Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.

What can you say when a man like that leaves office? For some reason I think of the famous (possibly apocryphal) comment by one colleague in John Birt’s leaving card from LWT: “Piss off Birt, and don’t come back.”

(via The Well)

Ali Campbell’s World Cup Adventure

Alastair Campbell has a blog on the Labour party’s website, relating his experiences following the World Cup. OK first entry, but what really makes it worthy of note is the bile and vitriol spewed across the comments. I’m sure it’s just an online thing – and there’s one in the eye for the ‘internet will revive political debate’ meme – but sitting behind a keyboard seems to be like sitting behind a steering wheel for Brits: something that makes you lose all manners, common decency and sense of proportion.

I’d say “who’d be an MP”, but in Campbell’s case it’s “who’d be a former head of communications”? I know I wouldn’t.

Update: The BBC have picked up the story and are treating the comments as serious political analysis! For crying out loud! What is this country coming to where some faceless shit-flinger (one Dave Smith, allegedly) can be quoted on the BBC saying that the Government is “the most corrupt the country has ever seen”, for all the world as if he were a serious person, or the allegation were rational.