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Lib Dem Voice had an interesting conversation under the title What should political bloggers be trying to achieve?, where Brian Coleman was used as an example of a search term that had been targeted by the Lib Dems in Google. This was the relevant bit of the conversation about Brian Coleman AM, the London Assembly Member for Barnet (the Lib Dems think he is a bit thin up top) and Camden.

The story is that Brian Coleman was the one who had a go at Lynne Featherstone for calling the Fire Brigade when her boiler made a funny noise, and the Lib Dems don’t like him as a result.

I thought I’d have a test on Google to see how we get on competing for a term such as “Brian Coleman” with the Liberal Democrat blogs on their top rated story for Brian Coleman: “Brian Coleman AM and his taxi bills”

(Click on the title to read the whole article)

Wall Street and Washington are never soulmates. Building a coalition to bail out financiers with public money would never be easy, especially when this involves…

Three years ago, Londoners noticed that a sort of Victorian space shuttle seemed to have crashed into one of its most famous streets. They telephoned their friends, and their friends telephoned their friends. Shortly afterwards, a giant puppet of a small girl emerged, soon to be joined by a colossal puppet of an elephant.

I’ve become the first Leader of the Green Party at a time when progressive leadership has never been more urgent. We face the interconnected challenges of recession, soaring oil prices and climate change, but the leadership of the establishment parties has been so timid as to actually deepen the crisis.

I have a confession to make. I love not one despised style of music, but two: heavy metal, and country& western. As they scroll down my iPod, my friends weep – and retch. And it gets worse: I believe these eruptions of noise offer a political parable. Really: set aside your prejudices and your earplugs and stock up on metal and country. You will slowly see we have misunderstood two of the most politically charged, politically reviled places on earth: the Muslim world, and the Deep South. Don’t turn the page over; stay with me.

“Too big to fail” is an expression that well suits Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson warned yesterday that these two institutions "are so large and interwoven in our financial system that a failure of either of them would create great turmoil in financial markets here and around the globe”. He was right. He might even have been understating things. For if Freddie and Fannie had been allowed to go under, what we have seen of the credit crunch thus far would have been a mere prelude to a much more profound slump - one comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the last time the banks simply stopped lending. Global financial turmoil would have been the beginning of it.

Few British MPs have ever been expelled from Parliament and sent to prison. Among the handful were a couple of Jacobites and John Wilkes, the radical hero who fled to America to avoid trial for libel in the reign of George III. Will the Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik be the next to join them?

Nicolas Sarkozy faces a hard task when he travels to Moscow today in an attempt to bridge East-West differences over the Georgia crisis that have, if anything, widened in recent weeks. A month after the Georgian government launched its ill-fated assault on the breakaway region of South Ossetia, the French President, who holds the EU presidency, has to persuade Russia to abide by the six-point peace plan he brokered. This would involve Russia withdrawing forces from Georgia proper, agreeing to the free movement of monitors in a buffer zone between South Ossetia and Georgia and initiating a framework for security talks between Tblisi and Moscow.

The annual conference of the Trades Union Congress opens in Brighton today with a varied agenda but one that is bound to be overshadowed by continuing speculation about Gordon Brown’s leadership. Although unions clearly do not wield anything like the same power within the Labour Party that they did 30 years ago, when they all but terrorised the governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, they remain a significant force, not least because of their financial donations. Their voice is important when doubts arise about the party leadership.

For all George Bush’s talk of liberty, democracy and the rule of law, he has retreated on matters of principle before the advancing powers of India and China

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column From tender flower to noisy hoyden, Cherie Blair has come a long, long way. How extraordinary to find that this person, whose privacy was so sacrosanct that it was considered sinful to…

Gordon Brown spoke for us all when, last week, he described the Burmese government’s dismal failure to respond in an even remotely adequate way to the cyclone that struck the Irrawaddy delta as “intolerable”.

The minister’s daring skirts set Westminster astir, but not as much as last week’s exposure of her Government’s gloomy thoughts on the housing market, says William Langley.

It’s my son Jackson’s fourth birthday today, and we’re having a big party for him. Stacey has booked a huge bouncy castle for the south lawn, and boxes of going-away presents, dinosaur-related plates and other bric-a-brac has been overloading our poor postman. Should it rain, the village hall has also been rented as a fallback – nothing has been left to chance. Jackson is blissfully unaware of all Stacey’s hard work. He is more concerned with the guest list. One moment he wants “no girls”, then he wants “no boys”. Invites change by the second, as someone becomes uninvited because they threw sand in his face or were “mean”. In my experience it’s best never to invite boys, as they are a total nightmare compared to girls at that age. I remember the first time my daughter Parker invited boys to her party – a little feral gang rampaged through our house hitting dogs with swords and shouting … so much shouting.

During his time as Brussels correspondent for ‘The Daily Telegraph’, Boris Johnson impressed his editor by filing story after exclusive story, all apparently unnoticed by other papers. There were mutterings that these scoops were perhaps not as firmly wedded to the truth as might have been desirable. Most memorable among them was a story in 1991 following an announcement by the European Commission that it was leaving its Berlaymont headquarters because of the health and safety risks from leaking asbestos. Johnson’s explosive take on this was that the much-despised building was subsequently to be blown up. Seventeen years later, although it is now free of asbestos, the EC has yet to pack the walls with dynamite.

My mother swears like a trooper. Actually, that’s not fair - I grew up near soldiers’ barracks and I never heard any of them explete like she does. Now it turns out that Keira Knightley and Madonna curse more than squaddies too, and they’ve both been told to bloody well stop it.

Three High Court judges debating the sexual allure of man boobs is the stuff of music hall. The Court of Appeal has just overturned the conviction of a homosexual care worker who filmed another man at a swimming pool. He could not have been found guilty of voyeurism under the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, because the male chest is not accorded the same privacy as female breasts.

It is 15 days since Cyclone Nargis hit Burma’s Irrawaddy delta. Officially, 78,000 people have died (with another 55,000 missing), but NGOs estimate the figures will go a good deal higher yet. The UN admits it hasn’t a clue how bad things are. Offers of help for the 2.5 million people affected have come from all over the world, and aid organisations have done their valiant best to bring assistance. The situation is dire. There is nothing more certain than that corpses lying around in stagnant water will give rise to disease, yet that is precisely what the few images we have been allowed to see have shown us.

Do you digg? Or twitter? Are you busy poking your friends on Facebook? Or feeding your aggregators? Most readers of the ‘IoS’ are pretty techno-savvy, and I expect you’ll know what I’m on about. Even Gordon Brown is twittering these days (and I don’t mean just at the dispatch box). But the rise of the digitally literate reader is causing a shudder of anxiety among the ombudsmen of the world’s newspapers, who are getting together for their annual conference in Sweden at the end of this month. (What do you call a gathering of readers’ editors? A “niggle”, perhaps?)

The Tony award nominations for the best work in New York were announced on Wednesday, and it was a good moment for London theatre. Eight Brits were nominated for major acting prizes, and the Chocolate Factory’s show, Sunday in the Park with George, picked up nine nominations of its own. To think that it started in our small theatre in Southwark makes me very proud.

What shall we do with our young women, do you suppose? Two surveys out last
week suggest they are increasingly prone to acts of criminal violence and,
worse, have become among fattest girls in Europe. This follows earlier
surveys which indicated that they are also the most stupid, ill-mannered,
flatulent, drug-addicted and sexually incontinent girls in Europe. Perhaps
as a consequence of this, they are the girls with whom Europe’s men would
least like to have sexual intercourse. Also perhaps as a consequence, the
girls with whom most of Europe’s men have already enjoyed sexual congress.
British girls are a cinch, although not, it would seem, a very desirable
cinch.

In a street where few people work, near a corner where the pushers do their
business, I picked up a little girl who’d fallen off her bike in the middle
of the road. She must have been five years old, on a bike that was much too
big for her, in the rain, clutching a bag of copper coins. Her mum had sent
her out to get some things from the local shop. She was in tears.

Brideshead Revisited is being, well, revisited. A film version has apparently
upset fans of Evelyn Waugh’s novel because it features a scene in which all
the main characters – Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte and Julia Flyte – go to
Venice. In the book this does not happen. Only Charles and Sebastian visit
Venice, although I suppose Julia might have gone for a long weekend when
Waugh wasn’t looking.

Boy, it’s going to be one hell of a bunfight on College Green on
Tuesday. It’s shaping up to be just like the old days. Well, almost. Not
only will there be a mass protest vigil from the We Can crowd from west
London (short for “Mummies and Labradors Against the Third Runway”),
protesting against airport expansion, but they’ll be joined by the clashing
demos of pro-lifers and pro-choicers, all duking it out for lebensraum and
media attention, while inside the relative calm of the Palace of
Westminster, lucky MPs get a free vote regarding the upper time limit
governing abortions.

I used to really like the idea of being an old lady. I’d daydream sometimes
about which version of my OAP self I’d like best. Version A was really fat
(farewell, dieting), unwaxed and stubby-nailed (farewell, tyranny of
grooming), quite drunk (goodbye, units), living on a diet of cakes (mm,
carbohydrates) and gin, happy as a clam. Version B was whip-thin, in Chanel,
being insufferably rude and travelling a lot – less blissfully slothful, but
perhaps more interesting. I’d have that mad violet hair you used to see in
the 1970s. It would be great.