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Photo: Eric Piermont/AFP/Getty Images Cato’s Tad DeHaven and Think Defence each have good posts on the future of the increasingly troubled Joint Strike Fighter. Costs have risen by 50% since 2001 and the plane is already looking like it will be delivered years late. Since the main justification for the JSF was that it was
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So I had an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times yesterday in which, inter alia, I compared Britain’s fiscal position with Greece’s (but at least we have the Elgin Marbles…) and the lack of faith in the political process to California’s own dysfunctional system. Matt Yglesias thinks this exaggerated and, well, “pretty flawed” For one
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Things have come to a pretty pass when the Secretary of State for Education endorses ignorance and scoffs at knowledge pretending, one is given to understand, that it’s just a kind of posh irrelevance favoured only by the terminally stuffy and fuddy-duddy and out-of-touch. Such, however, seems to be the case for you poor English
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No blogging here until Monday: it’s Calcutta Cup weekend and I’m off to Edinburgh today for the festivities. It’s an odd feeling this, the notion that England aren’t the obvious and heavy favourites. Two average sides will meet tomorrow and it’s quite possible they will produce the worst match of the championship. How grim that
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Think Defence has some fun with this video, suggesting that it’s a British version of The Hurt Locker. But actually, it’s also a mini-exemplar of some of the debates currently being heard in Tory circles. From the perspective of the Tory grass roots and true believers, the officer in charge here not only looks like
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Thanks to Matt Welch for spotting this splendid piece of “What me?” nonsense from the President: As we were driving in, I was saying, boy, it’s just good to be back in the Midwest, this is about as close as I’ve been to home in a while. And part of the reason it’s just good
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Watching the news last night, I was struck by how little one had seen of Gordon Brown on TV recently. No wonder the polls have tightened. But the Prime Minister, alas, cannot play McCavity forever. The “bullying” allegations weren’t as damaging as they might have been in other circumstances because, for many, they merely confirmed
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A telling anecdote from Andrew Rawnsley’s book: Subjects that interested him [Gordon Brown] – such as welfare reform, employment and poverty- received enormous attention. Ministers in areas which did not engage him, such as financial regulation, barely saw him. Ruth Kelly, a young and abl junior miniter put in charge of the City, was labelled
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I agree with Melanie Phillips that the principle reason there’s no middle-east preace prcess worth the name is the Palestinian’s reluctance to recognise and guarantee Israel’s security. I believe there are other reasons too, mind you, that help to obstruct any path towards a proper and just settlement. Still, since Melanie doesn’t believe there should
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Dave Weigel has an entertaining takedown of Karl Rove’s new memoir Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight (a title that, oddly, is simultaneously vainglorious and reeking of self-pity). Meanwhile, here’s a snippet of the Rovian style, as relayed by Andrew Rawnsley in his new book*. It’s December 2000 and George
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Simon Hoggart remains a treasure. His sketch in today’s Guardian begins thus: It’s going to be an awful campaign, awful. Yesterday we were at Labour HQ (they still have a smart new building in Westminster, but after the election they may move to a scout hut in Streatham) to see a video. It was introduced
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Tony Blair used to say that “The job of being Labour leader is to save the Labour party from itself.” Right now, I suspect that’s how the Democratic Leadership in the House of Representatives feels about trying to rustle-up 216 votes for health care reform*. Defections from Blue Dogs in Red States are one thing;
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Astonishingly there remain some people who don’t think that waterboarding prisoners rises to the level of torture. In Dick Cheney’s off-hand formulation it’s merely “dunking in water” – as though the process was some kind of ride at the funfair or comparable to having a bucket of gloop tipped over you in a TV game
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Rod Dreher had a good post riffing on David Brooks column last week which is in turn well worth reading. Brooks argues, astutely in my view, that the Tea Party movement is in many ways the flipside of the 1960s New Left: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both
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What the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee gives with one hand: “The current situation of indefinite retention of the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted is impossible to defend in light of the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights and unacceptable in principle,” the committee says in a report
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A quick coda to this earlier post on the Tories and the Northern Ireland peace process: the approach taken by the Guardian (and others) is that the Tories must be a neutral, honest broker for the process, otherwise the whole thing may collapse. And how must the Tories demonstrate their honesty and neutrality? By chivvying,
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Over the course of the past year some people have, from time to time, been wise enough to remind us of just how difficult it will be for the Tories to win a majority. That’s a consequence, of course, of their past anaemic performances (and a further reminder that the base is far from enough)
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Not the least of the entertainments* between now and polling day will be seeing how the Guardian manage to keep up their exhausting warnings of the dire consequences that will inevitably follow any Conservative victory. Nothing but nothing will be too trivial for the paper and that’s fine: free press and all that. The best
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Commenting on this post, Tim Montgomerie writes: Did you actually read what I wrote Alex? Not once did I call for an end to the new Toryism. I advocated blending new and old messages. I did not suggest “banging on” about immigration but as voters’ number two issue it should be part of the mix.
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Our plucky friends in the north have done the right thing: Icelanders have overwhelmingly rejected a plan to repay Britain and the Netherlands billions of pounds lost when Reykjavik’s banks collapsed in 2008 Partial referendum results from around a third of the cast votes showed 93% opposed the deal and less than 2% supported it.