Briefly...

Chris Brooke has immense fun with Anthony Browne's allegations of a wave of political correctness swamping traditional British common sense and straight speaking. The kind of traditional British common sense and straight speaking that Enoch Powell represents, presumably. Andrew Bartlett is exactly right on this: tirades against political correctness, which treat it as if it were enforced by some heavily-armed and secretive unit of the Commission for Racial Equality, with torture chambers under Millbank, seek to hide reactionary political goals in the rhetoric of liberal equality, and should be given all the respect which dissimulation in the cause of a fairly uniformly unpleasant ideology generally is.

On the subject of political correctness, Lenin has a piece on exactly the kind of thing which shows that considerable work on attitudes towards those of different skin pigmentation or religious practices is required.

Finally, whilst it's unlikely that the power vacuum created by Sharon's surely inevitable withdrawal from active politics will do the somewhat stagnating peace process any good, I'm waiting eagerly for the next time that the imminent disappearance of an ex-terrorist and sometime war criminal, who appears to have tried to deliberately provoke a bloody ethnic conflict for their own political ends, be greeted with apparent sadness across the western world.