Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Friday

Alex Massie

The Euro-sceptics will bide their time before devouring another Tory leader? Great!

From our UK edition

Yesterday I suggested that Europe may well end up destroying David Cameron's ministry and that, consequently, some of this week's maneouvering has been designed to delay that until a putative second term. So, it's interesting to see James reporting that: The Euro-sceptics are quietly confident. The overwhelming mood among those I have spoken to is that Cameron either has to get the powers back he said he would and show that his measure to prevent any further transfers of sovereignty are effective or there will have to be at some point after 2014 an in or out referendum.  In other words, they're quite happy to bide their time before destroying their own Prime Minister. Then again, for the sceptics everything is a tactic on the road towards their blessed "In or Out?

Alex Massie

Friday Afternoon Country: Lyle Lovett

From our UK edition

Because, frankly, from Afghanistan to Texas to the corridors of Whitehall and the Bank of England, it's been a pretty bleak week it's appropriate to bring Saturday Morning Country forward by a few hours. This Lyle Lovett song - If I Had a Boat - always cheers me up. Added bonus: with its dreams of boats and ponies and ifs and ans and all the rest of it you may also read it as an arch critique of the promises politicians feel compelled to make and that we, because we want to believe, choose to take at more than face value. Not merely boats for all, but ponies on each and every boat too...

Alex Massie

Sod the Public: We Need Representatives, Not Delegates

From our UK edition

I don't mean to pick on David Kerr, the SNP's candidate in the Glasgow North-East by-election, because, frankly, every single one of the candidates would say something like this: "My commitment to the people of Glasgow North East is that I will always put them first. My priorities are their priorities." Really? Personally, I'd prefer it if an MP (or even a prospective MP) put his or her judgement first. I want MPs who will "stand up" (and vote) for what they think right, not merely follow the party line or pander to the presumed self-interest of their constituents. I want parliamentarians prepared to tell their electorate to take a hike, not MPs that act as though they're suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Drug War Economics

From our UK edition

It seems that Mexican drug cartels, vexed by inceased security at the American border, are sensibly moving production to be closer to their clients. Consequently, they're growing marijuana on Indian Reservations inside the United States. As the Wall Street Journal reports: The math is tempting. Start-up expense for about dozen plots, with 10,000 plants each, is well under $500,000, U.S. officials estimate, including the cost of hiring 100 workers to plant marijuana and then several "tenders" to water them for three to four months until harvest. Incidental costs might include generators, PVC pipe and food supplies for the growers. Those plants could fetch about $120 million on the open market.

Alex Massie

Europe: A British Victory?

From our UK edition

Timothy Garton Ash's piece recalling his adventures in central and eastern europe for this magazine is just as enjoyable as you would expect. Which is to say that it's very enjoyable. But, mischievously, he ends with a provocative question: Now, 20 years on, the enlargement of the European Union to include most of the post-communist democracies of central and Eastern Europe, a logical (though not inevitable) conclusion of revolutions that were conducted under the motto of ‘the return to Europe’, has made the dreaded federal superstate of Eurosceptic nightmare a sheer impossibility. It is simply not going to happen, in any foreseeable future, and even Germany, once the motor of federalism, no longer wants it.

Alex Massie

Order is Restored

From our UK edition

The peerless Mariano Rivera. Photo: Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images. After eight long, gruelling years the Curse of Bush is finally lifted and the universe is once more on an even keel: the New York Yankees are World Series champions again. For the 27th* time. Hurrah! Fans of other teams may bridle at the notion that nine years without a championship constitutes a famine. But life in Yankee-land is different. In Yankee-years nine titleless years equals half a century of failure by other, lesser, teams. More than any other American pastime, baseball is unipolar. The Yankees 27 World Series victories eclipse all other contenders: no other team has more than 10.

Alex Massie

Referendum Questions: The 1707 Edition

From our UK edition

Now that the Conservatives have promised a referendum on any future transfers of power to Brussels and have, in general, become fans of referenda perhaps the party leadership can address the other looming referendum issue: that pertaining to the Act of Union of 1707. Perhaps you can be in favour of a referendum on Lisbon and other EU matters and opposed to a Scottish independence referendum but I confess to finding this combination implausible and unsatisfactory. Furthermore, a referendum is clearly popular: polling suggests that roughly 60% of voters want such a vote and that they want it sooner rather than later.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Petitioning Brown to Resign

From our UK edition

A pointless endeavour, of course, but there was a petition sent to Downing Street asking Gordon Brown to do the decent thing and resign. Today the government decided to respond to that petition: The Prime Minister is completely focussed on restoring the economy, getting people back to work and improving standards in public services. As the Prime Minister has consistently said, he is determined to build a stronger, fairer, better Britain for all. Weirdly, that's a kind of non-denial denial. Not that this means GB will retreat, in Matthew Norman's phrase, "to his study with the Glenlivet and trusty Luger" but you'd think that he would at least respond to a petition asking him to resign by saying that, you know, he has no intention of resigning.

Alex Massie

Gordon Brown’s American Helpers

From our UK edition

This is ridiculous. Apparently Gordon Brown has been paying a DC firm of speechwriters for help "tailoring" his speeches to an American audience. West Wing Writers have been paid more than $40,000 by Downing Street. This included $7,000 for "tweaking" Brown's dull, blindingly-obvious and banal speech to Congress earlier this year. According to the Guardian: The documents do not reveal which sections the writers tweaked, but in several instances the remarks betray subtle sensitivity to United States political sentiment.

Alex Massie

Lessons from NY-23 and Virginia?

From our UK edition

My old chum Toby Harnden says yesterday's election results produced a "miserable night" for Barack Obama and clearly losing the gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia was hardly good news for the White House. But if the GOP has grounds for crowing there, then the result from NY-23, where Doug Hoffman's conservative candidacy was rejected in a constituency in which the Democratic candidate usually fails to win more than 35% of the vote, was an indication of the limits of Palinism. True, as Toby says, the local complicating factors in upstate NY were such as to make drawing too many conclusions from it a pretty hazardous business.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

What’s the Matter with North Dakota?

From our UK edition

Photo: Germain Moyon/AFP/Getty Images Plenty, according to Matt Yglesias. Not least the fact that, like its southern brother, it exists at all. The Roughrider State celebrated the 120th anniversary of its accession to the United States yesterday. Congratulations. Matt, however, sees the Dakotas, and their brethren on the plains, as a problem obstructing the Greater Progressiveness of the United States of America: Given that more people live in Memphis, TN than North Dakota it might seem unfair that this large and essentially empty patch of land gets two senators.

Alex Massie

Unseen Prequels

From our UK edition

There are times when Twitter is a bit like playing I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. Today, for instance, folk have been frittering the afternoon away thinking of Unseen Prequels that have mysteriously disappeared from cinema history. Some of my favourites: All About Adam, Gremlin, Build the Bismarck!, Duck Stock, Le Depart de Martin Guerre, Snakes at a Metal Detector, The Undergraduate, Ferry Across the River Kwai, Blackhawk Aloft, Eyes Up Wolves from the Bar, Subject Kane and, my favourite of favourites, Lambo. Thanks to Mr Eugenides and Overnight to Many Distant Cities for many of these. Readers are invited to submit their own candidates for a Festival of Unmade Prequels... As always, my Twitter feed is here.

Alex Massie

Rod Liddle’s Education Policy is Antediluvian Piffle

From our UK edition

Rod Liddle reminds us that he's no liberal. This will not, I imagine, trouble him unduly. Nevertheless, his disaste for the middle-classes gets the better of him when he writes: The mantra of consumer choice was co-opted by New Labour and applied to all sorts of perfectly unsuitable things. Children should go to their nearest comprehensive school, without right of appeal. If that school is failing then the local education authority, or the government, should take steps to ensure it no longer fails, by either sacking the headteacher, or spending more money on it.

Alex Massie

1989 And All That

From our UK edition

  I don't think there's much doubt that 1989 was the best year of my life. Not so much for me personally, but for the world. True, there aren't many contenders for that bauble, but even if there were 1989 would be tough to beat. In fact, 1989 was probably the last and best year of the brutal short twentieth century. Matt Welch explains why: The consensus Year of Revolution for most of our lifetimes has been 1968, with its political assassinations, its Parisian protests, and a youth-culture rebellion that the baby boomers will never tire of telling us about.

Alex Massie

The State We’re In

From our UK edition

Deficits aren't necessarily the end of the world but they're not your best chum either. This chart, pinched from Burning Our Money, is a handy reminder of where we are and the pickle we're in. Worse than Spain! Worse than the United States! Worse than Iceland! Worse than Ireland! Gordon Brown FTW. Sure, in the long run we're all dead. But we don't have to be dead quite so soon, do we? As always, the Nordics fare very well in this sort of caper. But look too at our friends in New Zealand - a model of how a non-Nordic, English-speaking country can still do pretty well for itself. Yet Alex Salmond never talks about the Kiwi example, even though, as Jim Telfer used to say, New Zealanders are "Scots who learnt how to win". Admittedly, he was talking about rugby.

Alex Massie

Rebranding Republicanism

From our UK edition

Nate Silver says that while the Democratic "brand" is of marginal value in about half the country, the Republican "brand" is pretty toxic across two thirds of those United States. So, he has an idea: You can actually make the argument -- although maybe it's not a good one -- that Republicans should in fact find a way to pull a Blackwater and switch their party ID when nobody is looking, from Republican to capital-C Conservative. This would probably involve at least some degree of bona fide structural change, and undoubtedly some near-term trauma: an orchestrated chaos. But the 'conservative' brand is just as powerful as it ever was in America, whereas the Republican brand is as weak as it has been. Actually, this isn't a terrible idea by any means.

Monday

Alex Massie

Surprising fact about the Iranian opposition: they take Iran’s national interest seriously!

From our UK edition

On the whole, Washington cynicism may be preferable to Washington's special brand of bemused naivete. Consider Jackson Diehl's remarkable column in this morning's Washington Post in which he seems astonished to discover that the Iranian opposition is made up of Iranians, not all of whom share the west's analysis of what Iran should do next. Fancy that! Ataollah Mohajerani, who has been a spokesman in Europe for presidential candidate-turned-dissident Mehdi Karroubi, came to Washington to address the annual conference of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The mostly pro-Israel crowd was primed to cheer what they expected would be a harsh condemnation of Ahmadinejad and his bellicose rhetoric, and a promise of change by the green coalition.

Alex Massie

A Republican Resurgence?

From our UK edition

So, tomorrow's off-off-year elections looks as though they will provide encouraging news for the Republican party. The special election in upstate New York may have been chaotic - it's not often that GOP bigwigs endorse the Conservative challenger to the GOP candidate, nor that often that the Republican candidate drops out and endorses the Democratic candidate - but it looks as though Doug Hoffman, the Conservative "insurgent" in the 23rd Congressional District may well prevail. Add this to the likely GOP triumph in Virginia's gubernatorial contest and the possibility of defeating Governor Corzine in New Jersey and you can see how you could construct a pretty decent The GOP is Back Baby! narrative.

Alex Massie

Deleted Post

From our UK edition

Earlier I posted a compellingly weird video addressed to Gordon Brown. Upon reflection, frankly, the woman responsible for it seems quite disturbed and, consequently, laughing at the fruits of her derangement is in poor taste. Commenters were right to say that I shouldn't have posted her video and so I've deleted the post.