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A follow-up to this post: sure, excitable Conservatives in Britain and the United States see the Obama administration’s disinclination to take a position on the latest Falklands dispute as proof that the poor man really does dislike the United Kingdom and is quite happy to see the so-called Special Relationship consigned to the library of
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Kitty Wells was born in 1919 and she’s the oldest living member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. So it’s well past time she featured here and, this being so, it’s sensible to play her first big hit It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels. If Hank Williams was the inspiration for everyone
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Not to trivialise the story too much, but if this ain’t the headline** in every British newspaper tomorrow then, damn it, the subs should be ashamed of themselves. *So far & thankfully & given the size (8.8) of the quake anyway. UPDATE Sunday 7pm: It seems, sadly, that more lives have been lost than had
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Actually, there seem to be rather more than six promises Still, the Daily Mail reports on a series of Tory pledges that Dave & Co will roll out this weekend as part of their Get Back on Track plan. Let’s have a look at them: Act now on debt to get the economy moving: Deal
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Take 35,000 photographs, apply some tilt-shift fancyness and time-lapse brilliance and, hey presto, Sam O’Hare has this groovy film of a day in the life of New York City as seen in, well, miniature. Worth a few minutes of your Friday time and best viewed in full-screen mode: The Sandpit from Sam O’Hare on Vimeo.
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Happily, I couldn’t find a photo of Steve Nicol’s miss against Uruguay in 1986. Could there be anything dafter, yet still wearisomely predictable, than the news that the polis have warned an Aberdeen shop that dares to sell “Anyone But England” t-shirts* in the run-up to this year’s World Cup finals that said items might
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Increasingly I suspect that George HW Bush may be one of the most under-rated American presidents since the Second World War. Politically, sure, he wasn’t the smartest, sharpest or smoothest and some of his greatest achievements – most notably the management of post-Soviet eastern europe – owed something to a policy of what was, in
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Sometimes, you know, stuff appears in the newspapers that offers just a smidgen of hope. Consider this tidbit from the Guardian’s account of the oh-so-entertaining revelations in Andrew Rawnsley’s new book. At the time of the botched 2006 attempt to topple Tony Blair: In the middle of the coup, the former welfare minister Frank Field
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This is irritating but should not come as a surprise: Washington refused to endorse British claims to sovereignty over the Falkland Islands yesterday as the diplomatic row over oil drilling in the South Atlantic intensified in London, Buenos Aires and at the UN. Despite Britain’s close alliance with the US, the Obama Administration is determined
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One of the odder aspects of contemporary politics is the amount of attention lavished upon the goons at the BNP. Anyone would think they were about to win the election. But they’re not. Nevertheless, grant Nick Griffin and his pals this: they’ve managed to hijack the debate – such as it is – on immigration.
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Does it matter if this story is actually true or not? It’s clearly going to be a movie soon. All that needs to be decided is the casting: A lingerie model is believed to be the mastermind behind an all-women drug gang that smuggles cocaine into Britain. An international arrest warrant has been issued for
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Jeb Bush that is. And, it’s fair to say that he doesn’t seem enormously enthusiastic about Palin’s political prospects: My personal belief is that for Governor Palin to be a successful candidate for higher office, she needs to take this charisma she has and also add to it some depth of understanding of the complexity
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Bob Gates’ criticism of european defence shortcomings yesterday was couched in unusually harsh terms. Then again, NATO faces an uncertain future and there’s a growing sense in the United States, I think, that europe is failing to lift its weight when it comes to defence matters. As Gates pointed out just 5 of NATO’s 28
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You don’t have to look too far here, or elsewhere for that matter, to find plenty of concern about the Conservatives’ readyness for government. So it’s useful, occasionally, to step back and notice how the party and, more broadly, the British right, looks like to outside observers. Here’s Ross Douthat for instance: [W]hen you compare
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Although it’s been overshadowed by the fiscal crisis, it remains the case that the closest thing the Conservatives have to a Big Idea is their twinned-commitments to a “Post-Bureaucratic Age” and a future in which local communities enjoy much greater control over their affairs. As Dave has put it, “There is such a thing as
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From a New York Times post on David Remnick’s forthcoming Obama biography An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a “pumped up” version of the article; he did not say that
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Meanwhile, today’s missive from the Party of Torture is written by Dana Perino and Bill Burck, Press Secretary and Special Counsel to George W Bush respectively. The Obama administration is working with Pakistani intelligence to interrogate Mullah Baradar, reportedly the Taliban’s number-two man. We’ve been a little underwhelmed by the Left’s reaction to this news.
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I’ll say this for the Torture Advocates: they’re increasingly creative in their justifications for torturing prisoners and in their attempts to suggest that anyone with any qualms about any of this secretly wants the Bad Guys to win. Granted, this leads them to some strange positions. Here, for instance, is Victor Davis Hanson: It is
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I assume, in accordance with the stale conventions of our time, that the Prime Minister’s treatment of his staff will soon be dubbed Bullygate. But I think we all knew that Gordon Brown is, shall we say, a difficult man to work for. So I broadly agree with Jonathan Pearce’s take: the character of the
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Fraser’s back and forth with the estimable Danny Finkelstein about public spending and the Tories is excellent stuff. Fraser concludes by saying that, regardless of tactical differences, on a strategic level “we’re all cutters now”. And of course in one sense he’s right: anyone who wins the election is going to have to be prepared