The Campaigns and Elections website has trawled the American airwaves for the toughest campaign advertisements of the 2012 elections. Its has come up with this top nine.
But the most effective has to be this one - dealing with the outrageous comments on rape by (now ex) Republican representive for Missouri's second congressional district, Todd Akin.
The Alliance party has been targeted by unionist thugs over recent weeks for being the catalyst to a decision by Belfast's city council to fly the Union flag only on selected days. A practice mirrored in the majority of local authorities in other parts of the kingdom.
The Alliance's rebuttal Q&A document makes it quite clear what the facts are and should be compulsory reading before anyone takes to the streets with their molotov cocktail at the ready.
The Liberator bog has published a letter from Yabloko - the Russian liberal party (not to be confused with the Russian Liberal Democrats) to Gerard Depardieu challenging him on his decision to move to the republic of Mordovia. It's the sort of thing that needs a wider circulation.
The world's oldest subway system is 150 today. And despite it being immensly overcrowded at times (and expensive) it still takes millions of Londoners in and out of the capital every day pretty efficiently.
The Underground's Harry Beck, of course responsible for the iconic and much copied tube map. This one is of the galaxy with each stop representing 1,000 light years. More at the excellent London List alternative tube map site
One of the gems of bureaucratic jargon liberally spread through yesterday's coalition mid term review was this beauty:
We will encourage the exploitation of shale gas by developing a targeted tax
regime for the industry and by ensuring that regulation is properly
co-ordinated through a new single Office for Unconventional Gas...
Which left me thinking who could head up an office for
unconventional gas? Well only one person really springs to mind...
I'm not the only person seemingly underwhelmed by the coalition's mid term review. Stephen Tall on Lib Dem voice talked about 'wasted opportunities' and Newsnight even illustrated the dearth of new initiatives with the sound of tumbleweed.
My main issue with it (apart from the unnecessary repeat of the Rose Garden double act) is that it takes no regard of the origins of the various policies or what the competing elements of the coalition are seeking to do going forward. Now I know the document was probably written by some civil servant or policy wonk - but it is in both parties interests to be clear where the fault lines lie and these could have been presented in the document.
This has been the main failing of Clegg, Lib Dem ministers and their advisers over the last two and half years - at no point have they argued what their purpose is in government and what they aim to achieve over its lifetime.
I argued nearly two years ago that the party needed an agenda for government - saying:
What the party has to do is to be clear - in about four simple and
populist sentences - about what they are doing and working to achieve in
government. And why these things are those that a Tory government
would never do.
The mid term review takes us no closer to that and leaves the voter looking in on an essentially Tory government being propped up by compliant Lib Dems. And that can only be a bad thing for what's left of the party on the ground.
My eagle eyed viewer may have noticed I've added a couple of new links - Gareth Epps and the Liberator blog. Both are well worth a read.
And if you don't subscribe to Liberator I'd encourage you to do so. You might disagree with some or all of its content - but it is the only independent voice for liberals in the UK and as a result is worth its very reasonable subs.
BBC radio 2 has run a competition for the nation's favourite number two single. The results include many songs worthy of the number one slot - particularly given some of the songs that stopped them topping the chart.
Here's one of my favourites Sit down by James - number two in 1991 beaten to the top spot by Chesney Hawke's The one and only. Here they are a few years later on the ever excellent Jules Holland.
Some may remember a rather amusing advertising campaign in favour of a fictitional political party in the spring of 2010 - the Labservatives:
It was of course the Lib Dems - making the point that whoever won the election nothing really changed. And the upshot of the inconclusive result in 2010 was a coalition that was supposed to be the embodiment of this new politics - a real change in the way goverment was conducted.
But sadly as Lib Dem ministers have got their feet comfortably under their desks the old politics crept back. And two statements from senior Lib Dems over the Christmas and New Year break show how indistinguishable Lib Dems in government are now from either Labour or Conservatives.
Jeremy Browne's fatuous call in the Telegraph for the party to grow up in government and his rewriting of the history of the tuition fee pledge was the first. For Browne's information the tuition fee debacle wasn't a failure of policy making (or costing) it was a failure of delivery by Lib Dem ministers.
The second is Clegg's refusal to meet with his own party members campaigning against secret courts. It is a long standing liberal principle that justice needs to be seen to be done as well as be done. The Clegg who pledged not to cooperate with ID cards and the identity database would surely embrace the campaign against secret courts not snub them.
