Dr Gloom

oh CT, will this rollercoaster ride of excitement ever end?

the dilemma for the tories is withdrawing from europe will win votes, most people in this country are eurosceptic and don't fully understand the benefits of being in the EU - this has only been exacerbated by the eurozone crisis, which again, most voters don't really understand. but a lot of the businesses that fund the tory party will be up in arms if we pull out. quite a big call for cameron to make. i'm not confident a referendum would get us the right result - ie staying in the EU.

Toontastic, the site who can't be trusted with private information and also runs the board for their friends, banning people for telling it like it is and ignoring requests to ignore his stalker but retaining the actual stalker despite ignoring requests to stop stalking who has been spouting shite for years even when it is pointed out. classic. going in my sig

how come you're so up his arse anyway? he's a total nutjob

it's the wording of it man. setting yourself up for another fall after the Baines will sign by the weekend ITK.... Tiote is away, every time I've come up with a piece of ITK I've been right, all I'm saying is he's going to Chelsea in June for £23m

Still clinically insane I see

Stevie's Tiote prediction

Nothing better than the crust on a freshly baked loaf. Those on the ready sliced hovis style loaf are less impressive

Potato latkes for the Gloom family tonight.

Endless list of gaping wounds tbh

what happened to the budgie?

He may turn out to be class, I agree but so far he hasn't been impressive. At Fulham he kept getting knocked off the ball and his passing was poor from where I was stood Seeing him in live action makes you realise how small and lightweight he is.

very poor

RIP Ravi. this is possibly my favourite bit of music footage ever. look out for jimi hendrix. love the 60s ravers waking up in a field http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5sRbmJdsFI&feature=youtube_gdata_player

keep telling yourself that. i'm surprised fergie's inclusion isn't on that list. no one at the match was talking about it last night. the big talking points were why was ben arfa subbed when he was our best player and what has happened to cisse's form.

ask me again in march. i'm hoping the owner has learned his lesson from last time and that we invest in january. if that happens we should be ok. never can be sure with ashley though. sacking pardew clearly isn't the answer

i think we've more chance of getting something with one striker and more bodies tucked in behind. all cisse and ba are doing is running into each other anyway. and you can't really move ba out wide with the form cisse's in.

if i were pardew i'd pack the midfield and drop cisse. ba to play the lone ranger role, ben arfa given license to float, jonas, anita and tiote to shore things up.

I thought he had a poor game

LBT - did you even watch the game? how did you not notice cabaye wasn't playing?

Seems too small and light weight for this league, which is a shame as he obviously has a decent touch. He was crap last night though. As was Cisse. Can't believe he subbed Ben Arfa. I know he's coming back from injury but he was by far our best player and he didn't look tired to me when he came off.

Nah, he didn't

Why sub our best player? Anita looks pretty average, and Cisse needs to be rested

an international take on osborne's autumn statement http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/12/george-osbornes-journey-from-austerity-to-cruelty.html?mbid=social_retweet George Osborne’s Game: From Austerity to Cruelty Over at our Daily Comment blog, I’ve put up a longer post on the latest failure of austerity economics: the admission by George Osborne, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, that, after two and half years of furious budget-cutting, he’s still failing to meet his own fiscal targets. One thing I didn’t mention in that piece is that Osborne isn’t merely reaffirming his commitment to the deflationary economics of the early nineteen-thirties. He’s coupling it with an embrace of Reaganite trickle-down economics of the nineteen-eighties and the even harsher Benthamite economics of the eighteen-thirties. Earlier this year, he cut the top tax rate from fifty per cent to forty-five per cent, claiming that Britain’s highest earners needed incentivizing. Now, with roughly one in twelve working-age Britons out of a job, he’s cutting the value of unemployment benefits—a move that harkens back to the infamous Poor Law of 1834, which was designed to stigmatize paupers and vagrants. Cutting the value of unemployment benefits won’t make much of an impact on the deficit. The savings will amount to about four billion pounds in a total budget of about seven hundred billion pounds. But the cut will be felt by the jobless and their families, many of whom already live in poverty or near poverty. In the United Kingdom, unlike in the United States, the level of unemployment benefits isn’t linked to the recipient’s wages in his or her last job. Single people get a maximum of seventy-one pounds (about $115) a week, and couples get up to a hundred and twelve pounds (about $180). For decades, governments of both parties have raised the payments in line with inflation, so that their purchasing power remains steady. But with inflation currently running at more than 2.5 per cent, Osborne has ruled that over the next three years increases in benefits will be limited to one per cent. That might not sound like a big difference, but over three years it could well add up to a five per cent drop in purchasing power. Moreover, the squeeze won’t just fall on the unemployed. The one-per-cent cap will also apply to housing and income-support benefits, which are used to top up the income of many poor and near-poor working families. Taken together, the tax and spending changes that Osborne announced on Wednesday will reduce the incomes of the poorest tenth of U.K. households by 2.7 per cent, according to the Resolution Foundation, an independent research organization. About the only economic justification for these sorts of benefit cuts is that they render the labor market more “flexible,” a codeword for making the poor and the unemployed more eager to seek work and accept low wages. But the British labor market is already pretty flexible, and one of the few bright spots over the past couple of years has been a steady rise in total employment. Osborne’s primary motivation wasn’t economics; it was politics. With Britain’s “lost decade” about to enter its sixth year, and the Conservatives trailing Labour in the polls, he deemed it necessary to do a bit of rabble rousing, appealing to the base instincts of middle-class voters who resent paying taxes to support the unemployed, while also throwing some meat to the Fleet Street jackals who are forever banging on about “scroungers” on the dole. The cut in benefits was “about being fair to the person who leaves home every morning to go out to work and sees their neighbor still asleep, living a life on benefits,” Osborne declared. “As well as a tax system where the richest pay their fair share, we have to have a welfare system that is fair to the working people who pay for it.” For a time, Osborne, who hails from the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, appeared to be an ill-informed aristocratic dilettante posing as an economic authority. Now, he has revealed himself as a cynical and cruel politician, who, in order to distract attention from the failure of his policies, is heaping more financial misery on the poor. Good going, fella!

quality story that like. was he a good lad then? or the affected druggie he appeared later in his short life?