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Another gem featuring three great pickers and Alison Krauss. The Banks of the Ohio is a great song too and, like so many other murder ballads, a reminder of how closely connected old-style country is to the music of these islands.
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Yup, that's what the whizz kids and the marketing gurus at Labour HQ have come up with for Labour's election campaign slogan*. A Future Fair for All. Try that one on for size. Note too the now traditional absence of punctuation that further obscures the meaning. As one wag put it, the Tory response might be A Fête Worse than Death. More than anything else, however, it reminded me of Wolcott Gibbs's classic profile of Henry Luce. Published** by the New Yorker in 1939 it remains a hoot today and a devastating parody of Luce's bombast and the special, magnificently empty prose style he favoured at Time. Timespeak, however, seems to inspire our political parties.
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It's not something I'd thought about but, in a certain way or looked at from the right perspective, it's a good question: What happens to your pet when the Rapture comes? Happily, After the Rapture Pet Care are here to help: It's only $10 a month! Now it's true that cynics might say that this is either a joke or a scam but I prefer to admire the considerate (and considerable) piety behind the scheme and take my hat off to the entrepreneurial spirit that accompanies it. (Relatedly, there are parts of the internets that Mencken would love. Waugh too, of course.) People say this will be the Chinese century but I tell you there's life in America yet. Until the Rapture, anyway, at which point the unbelievers will inherit, well, everything... [Hat-tip, SM via Twitter.
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Family visiting = a few days off from blogging. Normal service to resume soon. Meanwhile, this is the view looking west down the Loch of the Lowes in Selkirkshire. This is James Hogg country and the Ettrick Shepherd is the subject of a memorial statue on the hillside above the loch.
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It's disappointing to see my old and good chum and all-round good egg Iain Martin ask this question. But of course many people doubt, even though both the State Department and the FCO consider sleep deprivation a torture technique, that it really can be so vicious a tactic as to merit that label.. It sounds quite harmless, doesn't it? A bit like working the night-shift and then having to look after a couple of young kids while your wife goes out to work. Sleep Deprivation? That just means feeling tired, doesn't it? Same with shackling, eh? That just means being hand-cuffed. And the constant playing of loud music? Hell, my teenage son does that all the time! Is he being tortured? What a lot of fuss about nothing! Except it is worth a fuss.
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David has already highlighted some of the more dubious arguments Con Coughlin deploys in response to his critics but a couple of other points may still be made. Con writes: If I understand correctly Alex Deane’s high-minded rant about the rights of innocent people receiving a fair trial (which, just to put the record straight, I fully support), he is prepared to accept at face value former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed’s claim that he was brutally tortured during his interrogation with the full complicity of British security officials. David Davies, the former shadow Home Secretary, made a similar argument on the Today programme this morning, preferring to believe the word of Mr Mohamed rather than our own intelligence establishment.
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Charlie Wilson in Afghanistan. I guess the movie they made of Charlie Wilson's War is now more famous than George Crile's book. That's a shame because the movie, while entertaining, ain't half as revelatory as the book which is more than just a political thriller explaining how - with only some exagerration - a lone Congressman funded and armed the mujahedeen in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. It's a terrific piece of work and an excellent, if extreme in the particulars, introduction to the way the United States Congress actually works. Or worked back then, anyway, in the age of Tip O'Neil when Congress was more powerful, or perhaps simply insisted upon its prerogatives more keenly than it does now. Well there aren't too many Congresspeeps like Charlie Wilson these days.
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Ben Brogan's column in the Telegraph today is a rum one. His thesis is that David Cameron's job is not merely to present himself as a plausible Prime Minister in waiting but also to persuade voters that they can and should trust politicians again. So, not a tricky job then. [W]e have lost our ability to suspend disbelief and take at face value what politicians tell us. The MPs' expenses scandal has had the purgative effect Parliament desperately needed, but the collateral damage has been a growth in cynicism and a loss of trust. And no one is suffering the consequences of that more than Mr Cameron.
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Con Coughlin has an awful piece up at the Telegraph arguing that, in the light of today's decision in the case of Binyam Mohamed, "if another al-Qaeda bomb goes off in London, the judges will be as much to blame as Osama bin Laden." Seriously. That's what he wrote. It's as preposterous as it is repellent. Happily, over at Conservative Home, Alex Deane does an excellent job dismantling this and the rest of Coughlin's diatribe here. The crux of Coughlin's argument - in as much as there is one beyond the notion that the judiciary is inviting al-Qaeda to attack the United Kingdom - lies in the idea that the disclosure of the treatment meted out to Mohamed would damage this country's intelligence-relationship with the Americans.
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The New America Foundation's Steve Clemons, who is always good fun, has been giving rave reviews to this Edward Luce piece in the FT that argues, essentially, that Obama's Gang of Four - Emanuel, Axelrod, Gibbs & Jarret - have cut the President off from a wider circe of voices, many of whom he could usefully be hearing from and that the Obama White House is proving less successful than it should be. Pithily, there's too much Chicago and not enough DC. That's accompanied by a second, but related, complaint: the White House is being run as though it were an extension of the campaign. But the United States government is rather bigger than even a Presidential campaign.
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So, the government has lost its case and the FCO has now published the famous missing seven paragraphs: v) It was reported that at some stage during that further interview process by the United States authorities, BM had been intentionally subjected to continuous sleep deprivation. The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed. vi) It was reported that combined with the sleep deprivation, threats and inducements were made to him. His fears of being removed from United States custody and “disappearing” were played upon.
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Bad news for David Mundell. The Tories' sole MP in Scotland (at the moment!) might think himself the obvious choice to be Scottish Secretary, should David Cameron form a government later this year but the party leader seems much less convinced of poor Mr Mundell's merits, telling the Herald today: “You will have to wait and see what appointments are made if we win an election but, suffice it to say, David has done an excellent job.” So, Cameron's looking for an alternative. And reasonably so. Mr Mundell is an inoffensive man and that's not something you can say about all MPs, but few people, I think, truly think that he's the man to represent a Conservative government in Scotland.
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It's more than a year since I first scoffed at the notion that "third-hand smoke" was going to kill us all. And now I see that this nonsense is back. Over to you, Chris Snowdon: The respondents were not told that the idea of "tobacco toxins" being harmful at ultra-low levels was no more than a "possibility" (in the words of the final study), nor that the researchers themselves referred to thirdhand smoke only as a "concept". If they had been told that the researchers believed that smokers spread disease "through contaminated dust and surfaces, including the frame of an infant's bed and a smoker's finger" it is fair to guess that far fewer of them would have endorsed the theory. Lots more here.
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Granted, it's not quite as memorable as the unsurpassable Demon Sheep, but this ad for John Oxendine, who's running to be the GOP gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, has a certain zany-yet-quaint charm to it. Gotta love the gratuitous, thrown-in-for-fun Frog-bashing too. And the line that the Ox is "strong enough to oppose the special interest, graceful enough to care for the people." Take that Disney! Go on, watch it, you won't regret doing so. More like this, please.
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This is one of those things that I don't quite understand. Gordon Brown is obsessed with dividing lines and this is supposed to be upsetting us? Sure, this need to draw a contrast (often a false one, but never mind) between his Virtuous Labour party and the Callous Toffs & Cads at Tory head office is frequently petty, prickly and pointless. But what of it? Pete's the latest Spectator gentleman to complain about the Dividing Lines Obsession: So far as the government is concerned, it matters not that these pledges have been made before – what matters is the opportunity to draw more dividing lines across the landscape of British politics. "Caring" versus "cruel", as far as the eye can see.
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As a mild econo-sceptic, I enjoyed James Buchanan's short essay, Economists Have No Clothes: Economists do not really understand what they are doing as they seem forced to make efforts to control aggregate variables that are not controllable in any direct sense. For example, the rate of employment (or unemployment) cannot readily be shifted by governmental mandate. At best, small and peripheral changes may be made while the emergent aggregate generated by the working of the large and complex economy remains stubbornly immune, or worse, to wrongly conceived reform efforts. And: How do markets work? Standing alone, this is an inappropriate and unanswerable question.
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From Sunday's interview on Fox: WALLACE: Why wouldn't you run for president? PALIN: I would. I would if I believe that that is the right thing to do for our country and for the Palin family. Certainly, I would do so. WALLACE: And how do you make that decision over the next three years? PALIN: It's going to be thankfully a lot of time to be able to make such a decision. Right now, I'm looking at, as I say, other potential candidates out there who are strong. They're in a position of having the luxury of having more information at their fingertips right now. So that the current events that we're talking about today, they -- WALLACE: Wait, wait, wait. Because -- you're basically saying you will consider it.
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David Cameron's speech on "Rebuilding trust in politics" (good luck with that!) was the usual curate's egg: nice and appealling in theory but also vague and gimmicky. This part, for instance, was quite reassuring even if, like so much else, it has more than a hint og Googlism about it: We are a new generation, come of age in the modern world of openness and accountability. And when we say we will take power from the political elite and give it to the man and woman in the street - it's not just because we believe it will help fix broken politics. It's what we believe, full stop. We don't believe that an arrogant, all-controlling government sitting in London passing endless laws and regulations actually makes things better. In fact, on many occasions it makes things worse.
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This is optimism's optimum moment. Twelve hours from now everything will change. That's when, alas, France will most probably begin to take control of this afternoon's encounter with Scotland at Murrayfield. And yet, stubbornly and despite logic that dictates Chris Cusiter's boys have just a one in four chance of prevailing, hope still flowers. That's partly because no-one looked very good today. Beat France and all sorts of things suddenly seem possible. Unlikely? For sure, but this is the time for dreaming. Italy were an affront to rugby and a sad one too; Ireland were pretty poor on Saturday and I still think that David Wallace's best days are behind him (despite his rather strange Man of the Match award yesterday) and that Johnny Sexton is now a better fly-half than Ronan O'Gara.
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Connoiseurs of the Guardian will not be surprised by this masterpiece from Mike Gonzalez. The only thing that could improve it is if his piece also found a way to blame the Israelis: News reports still insist on the question of security, as if the pressing problem were the need to maintain public order. This argument has been used to justify placing Haitian society under the direct control of the US military – whose contingent is about to double to 20,000 – very few of whom have skills in distributing aid and assistance. The assumption of control over the airport and the naval blockade around the island's coasts are, by any definition, acts of occupation.