Okay we don't expect much from our government, but

some semblance of basic accountability for glaring fuck-ups might be nice. For example;

- in the unbelievably stupid, working families tax credit scheme (in which you don't have to be working, a family or to have ever paid tax to get money) more than £1 billion pounds was overpaid last year. That's a thousand million, gone, by way of mistake. If anyone did anything near this in the real (non-government) world, they'd be gone. No-one in the treasury, is even under pressure. And it's the SECOND year in succession this has happened. For god sake !

- then there's the clueless health secretary, who announces it's the NHS best ever year, ata time when around 15,000 nurses face the sack, because they can't effectively financially manange the place, despite record funding. Again, if this happened in my job, I'd be sacked long ago, but Pat Hewitt "is doing a great job" One wonders what would constitute a fuck up ?

- well maybe if you were the Home Secretary, and you accidentally released rapists, murderers, drug dealers and paedophiles, (over 1,000 criminals in all) who were supposed to be deported at the end of their jail term, surely this, the most serious of all possible fuck ups, would constitute rank incompetence?

No. Tony has "full confidence" in Charles.

Truthfully, I am utterly baffled, as to why the PM can't see this for the gross error that it is. Whay are his ministers alone, immune from the sack regardless of how poorly they perform?

Oh what can we do about disinformation

Some tape supposedly from Bin Laden was released today. The "expert" the BBC lined up concluded that it was released to PROVE Bin Laden was still alive. The interviewer didn't have the wit to say, "Well why not video the guy referencing current events to prove it once and for all" but anyway.

Bin Laden is in my view, clearly either dead, or very sick. Either way, you can't video him. But it suits Al Qaida and the various authoritarian governments to pretend he's still around. Hitler after all, was still being reported alive in the 1970's.

Similarly, on a yahoo thread I was reading, some imbecile was expounding the rant, that a missile, not a plane hit the pentagon. Now setting aside the point of impact and various other uber-tech points, why don't these guys simply ask, "well, what happened to that plane then?" because if they can't answer that, (and they can't) all the missile stuff is obvious bollocks. (PS Please don't tell me the US government shot it down, cos where did it crash and anyway, would that really be an election winning strategy?)

So, surely, we just need to be a bit more critical in our thinking, and not swallow whole what we are told.

As Ayn Rand observed "The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap"