Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Webb-mania revisited

From our UK edition

Kathy G, guest-blogging for Matt Yglesias, lays out a lengthy case for why Barack Obama should not pick Jim Webb as his Vice-President here. I suspect that the points she makes will prove persuasive and that Obama won't choose Webb, not least because of concerns over his attitude towards women and gender issues generally. It's true that Webb's most controversial statements on women in the military were made more than a generation ago, but thats not the point. As Kathy says, women are a vital Democratic constituency and, with so many women disappointed by Clinton's favour, there's no need to rub salt in their wounds by picking a Veep such as Webb. Kathy G then writes: In addition, I just don't buy many of the pro-Webb arguments.

Alex Massie

The worst team in Europe?

From our UK edition

Are Paris Saint-Germain the worst football team in Europe? This obviously depends upon how one measures or defines "worst". PSG, despite another appalling season, would (thankfully) still be expected to defeat, say, Shamrock Rovers. But in a pound-for-pound sense is there a more pathetic club in europe?I's not just that they only narrowly avoided relegation this season, it's that they continue to squander resources. Even when they were owned by Canal Plus, PSG under-performed. Indeed, since the club was formed in 1970 they've only won the French championship twice (in 1986 and 1994), despite being one of the richest clubs in France and the only major club in Paris.

Alex Massie

Webb 3.0

From our UK edition

Ezra Klein leaps into the great Jim Webb discussion to make the important point that we've little idea what a Webb presidency would actually be like. True enough and that's another useful caveat. It's also the case that Obama's Veep may end up being a candidate for the Presidency themselves, either in 2012 or 2016. Do Democrats want to see Webb in that position? Can they envisage such an outcome? Ezra also observes that Webb has only, officially, been a Democrat for half an hour. That's a matter of some concern to some Democrats. But for those of us who ain't much concerned with the health of the party, that's a good thing.

Alex Massie

America’s Largest Cult

From our UK edition

I've been meaning to rave about and recommend Gene Healy's terrific book The Cult of the Presidency for some time. Now George Will saves me the trouble of doing so. His Newsweek column this week is a useful precis of Healy's case. Will makes the obvious point that the expectation that the President be some kind of Priest-King is infantile and doomed to leave the poor bloody voters disappointed:Michelle Obama says, "Barack will never let you go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed." Leaving aside the insult—her opinion that we are uninvolved and uninformed—do we really elect politicians to yank us out of our usual lives? Americans are said to be cynical about politics. Actually, they are presidential romantics. Which is why they suffer serial disappointments.

Alex Massie

Tales from Labour Britain: Illegal Document Department

From our UK edition

Via Samizdata, this seems to be a quite appalling story. The Guardian reports that:A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the "psychological torture" he endured in custody.Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.

Alex Massie

Photograph of the Day

From our UK edition

 If you asked me where this photograph - which has not been tinkered with to any significant degree - was taken, I suspect I'd have plumped for Texas or New Mexico. But in fact it's a peat bog and moss on the Solway plain in Cumbria that I visited when calling upon my sister last weekend.

Friday

Alex Massie

Brown Toastwatch

From our UK edition

So, as expected, the Tories win the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. Handsomely. The remarkable thing is that it took so long and that the Tory brand remained so toxic that this is the first by-election gain the party has enjoyed enjoyed since Labour came to power in 1997. In fact, it's the Tories first bye-election gain since 1982. But all things must come to an end. Once the worm turns it stays turned. This, remember, is seat number 165 on the Tories' list of target seats. A 17.6% swing is at the high end of Tory hopes.True, this result alone won't topple Gordon Brown. He will limp on. Labour's problem is that they, not the Tories, are the poisonous party now. One should beware of saying "never" but it's hard to see what Brown can do to recover.

Alex Massie

The Frippery of a Rounded Education

From our UK edition

Chris Woodhead, the former head of the schools inspectorate in England and Wales, argues that many private schools are, to all intents and purposes, ripping off their clients. The Telegraph observes that he has an interest to declare, but: Prof Woodhead is the chairman of Cognita, which owns a chain of profitmaking private schools and has purchased four charitable schools. He said running schools as businesses reduced "waste" – such as luxurious sporting facilities and theatres – as fees were kept low to attract parents. "We are absolutely rigorous in not providing frills and frippery, but concentrating on what seems to us to matter most, namely the quality of teaching. I am deeply shocked by the degree of waste within the independent sector.

Alex Massie

Department of Fancy That!

From our UK edition

Like Philip Salter, I dinnae often agree with Gordon Brown. But fair's fair (especially the morning after a brutal by-election thumping), here's some of what the Prime Minister had to say at the Google Zeitgeist conference  this week:The two great protected industries of the moment are the two industries that are causing us the greatest problems today: the oil industry, with a cartel run by Opec; and the food industry, with high levels of subsidy that are preventing prices for people that at are at a realistic level, and preventing people from producing in countries and continents like Africa at a level that they should. And we need to have flexible markets there.Also this:So here we have this contradiction.

Alex Massie

The Che Chronicles

From our UK edition

How many people really think of Che Guevara as a romantic, if occasionally headstrong, revolutionary? Outside Latin America, I mean. Perhaps it's a generational thing, but does anyone under the age of 35 really give even half a damn about Che Guevara? Certainly, the anti-Che forces continue to write as though he remained a clear, present, danger to all things good and holy. Here's John J Miller at The Corner, for instance:I have no objection to a movie about the life of Che Guevara. At least in theory. Yet it's probably impossible for Hollywood to make an honest film about this awful man — case in point being the new one from director Steven Soderbergh and starring Benicio Del Toro. Even the NYT sees the problem clearly, based on a screening at Cannes...

Thursday

Alex Massie

Further Tales from the Bold New Scotland

From our UK edition

It could have been worse, I suppose. There was a proposal that you'd soon need a special license to be permitted to purchase cigarettes in Scotland. Presumably this would be accompanied by arm-twisting from "health care professionals" to persuade you to stop, or mandatory sessions with a shrink to demonstrate that you were indeed sufficiently and genuinely bonkers as to be granted a special license to enjoy abuse tobacco...Happily, if somewhat surprisingly, that proposal hasn't actually passed. Yet. Still, yesterday the Scottish parliament confirmed that it was going to ban the display of cigarettes in shops. Apparently a ban on tobacco advertising - itself an outrageous abridgment of liberty - was not enough.

Alex Massie

Hillary of Harare

From our UK edition

In one sense there's little point in writing about Hillary Clinton anymore. She's lost. Still, if there is any truth to the notion, much-favoured by Washington reporters, that you can gain a sense of character and, indeed, governing style from the way in which a candidate campaigns then, by gum, we should be glad that Hillary Clinton is not going to be the next President of the United States. Her caterwauling about the perceived injustice of not counting the Florida and Michigan primary results on account of their determination to break DNC rules, has conquered many peaks of absurdity lately. Norm draws my attention to this one:People go through the motions of an election only to have it discarded and disregarded.

Alex Massie

The Kennedy Empire

From our UK edition

Remember: it's a Republic, not a Democracy. From the New York Daily News: Ted Kennedy has made clear to confidants that when his time is up, he wants his Senate seat to stay in the family - with his wife, Vicki.Multiple sources in Massachusetts with close ties to the liberal lion say his wife of 16 years has long been his choice to continue carrying the family flame in the Senate. Kennedy won the seat in 1962; his brother John held it from 1953 to 1960.[Hat-tip, Eve Fairbanks.

Alex Massie

Libertarians and the Spiders from Mars

From our UK edition

Dave Weigel is going to be blogging from the Libertarian Party convention in Denver this weekend. Great copy all-but-guaranteed:We turned to the speaker schedule, and couldn't figure out if Richard Hoagland—an author who argues that NASA is covering up evidence of dead civilizations found with their probes—was an official convention speaker. Hoagland, Latham mentioned, had really had an impact on Utah House candidate Joe Buchman. "He went to one of those conferences and came back convinced." Latham read my expression: I was wincing. "You'll meet him," Latham said. "He's not a kook. He talks about this as a secrecy issue, in a relatable way.""No matter how he talks about it," I said, "can't the two parties use it to marginalize him? I mean, how is it playing.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Giant Carnivorous Mice!

From our UK edition

Seriously:For tens of thousands of years, the birds of Gough Island lived unmolested, without predators on a remote outcrop in the south Atlantic. Today, the British-owned island, described as the home of the most important seabird colony in the world, still hosts 22 breeding species and is a world heritage site. But as a terrible consequence of the first whalers making landfall there 150 years ago, Gough has become the stage for one of nature's great horror shows. Mice stowed away on the whaling boats jumped ship and have since multiplied to 700,000 or more on an island of about 25 square miles.

Alex Massie

Graph of the Day

From our UK edition

Courtesy of Danny Finkelstein: The red line shows Labour's approval rating since 2005, the blue John Major's 1992-97 ministry. Nuff said. (The bulge was the brief Brown Summer in which, helped by not being Tony Blair and his calm response to terrorism, Brown was for a moment or two actually quite popular.

Alex Massie

Belgian BBQ in Memphis

From our UK edition

American breakfasts are pretty good, or at least as fine as can be expected from a meal that doesn't include black pudding. But there's no doubting that the United States' greatest culinary marvel is proper BBQ. It's the finest American food there is. Porcine perfection. And BBQ is going international, according to this lovely piece in the Washington Post:It's difficult enough for any new team to compete in the Super Bowl of Swine, which sends smoke wafting over downtown Memphis for three days every year. There are rules (written and unwritten) and traditions aplenty in this 30-year-old contest, which drew 125,000 spectators to one of the cradles of American barbecue culture.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Thoughts on a Test Match

From our UK edition

So, to no-one's great surprise, the first test between England and New Zealand ended in a draw. Commendations are due Daniel Vettori for his bowling and Jacob Oram for the century that ensured England would have no chance to snatch an improbable victory. England's pusillanimous tactics made achieving victory, however, very much more improbable than it needed to have been.

Alex Massie

J is for Jardine (Who else?)

From our UK edition

Apologies for the (unconscionable?) delay in posting this latest installment. I know this has disappointed some of you. What can I say? Well, the truth is that Firefox ate this post and this set me back a few days as it was some time before I could muster the energy or enthusiasm to write a new version. Still, you can't discount indolence as a factor either. Anyway, here we are at last. This series has featured teams skippered by: Armstrong, Benaud, Constantine, Dexter,  Edrich,  Fry, Gower,  Hutton and Imran. There are some tough cookies in that list, you'll agree, but none sterner than the man leading the J XI onto the field: Douglas Robert Jardine. THE J XI 1. Sanath Jayasuriya (SL) 2. Archie Jackson (AUS) 3. Mahela Jayawardene (SL)4. FS Jackson (ENG)5.