Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Friday

Alex Massie

“Appalling people doing appalling things”

Great column by Simon Jenkins in today's Guardian. The celebration of the "Cheeky Brothers" Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley has been nauseating. Now the old brute has gone and good riddance to him. Or at least so you might think. But no, instead you could have been forgiven for supposing that a national treasure is slipping from the scene. Jenkins is absolutely correct: Why do rats float while good men sink? Readers may have exploded over the headline on this page yesterday. It read "A fascinating, gracious man", and crowned a eulogy on Northern Ireland's retiring first minister, Ian Paisley, written by his one-time bitterest foe, Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin/IRA.

Alex Massie

Journalism 101

When is "off the record" actually off the record? Dana Goldstein says "shame on The Scotsman" for publishing Samantha Power's description of Hillary Clinton as "a monster". But this is not a matter of shame, nor necessarily, as Goldstein suggests, of the foreign press "stooping to play gotcha with secondary advisors". It may well be that Power's comments came at the end of an interview which mainly focused on her new book. I don't know. But I do know that you don't really get to take a mulligan when you make a blunder in an interview. If power had prefaced her characterisation of Hillary as a monster with the phrase, "Now, what I'm about to say is off the record..." then that would be one thing and it would be a breach of trust or etiquette for the paper* to print her comments.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Rational government?

Like Robin Hanson, I meant to blog these words of wisdom from Will Wilkinson last week. I say, again and again, that it is an embarrassing non-sequitur to argue that people are "irrational" and then leap to the conclusion that they need benevolent paternal guidance from the state. After all, if people are irrational then voters are irrational, politicians are irrational, bureaucrats are irrational, etc. ... There is no way to wriggle out of the fact that people who win elections are just like the rest of us. ... I don't doubt that non-terrible policies are sometimes successfully enacted. To doubt that would be a bit like a market skeptic doubting that anyone ever succeeds in buying a candy bar. That would be terrifically dense.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The morning after

So a good night for Hillary Clinton last night but a better one for John McCain. Here's what Obama had to say this morning: "I hope people start asking is what exactly is this foreign experience she is claiming," he said. "Was she handling crises during this period of time? I haven’t seen any evidence that she is more equipped to handle a crisis. "She made the experience argument and her ability to handle a crisis, so I think it is important to examine that claim and not just allow her to assert it," he added. "She has made the argument that she is thoroughly vetted.

Alex Massie

Brown Opens Barnett’s Box?

Grrrr. According to the Telegraph Gordon Brown has announced a review of the Barnett Formula. Fair enough. It was, after all, designed as a temporary measure, updating the 19th century Goschen Formula that  allocated spending across the UK. But it would be nice if people writing about it knew what they were talking about. Here's Iain Dale for instance: In some ways, this formula is a bit like the Schleswig Holstein question in the days of Lord Palmerston. Only three people understand it, and two of them are dead. The one thing I remember about it is that I discovered that when Crossrail got the go-ahead, it meant that Scotland would also benefit to the tune of 10 per cent of Crossrail's cost.

Alex Massie

Hillary Clintons Duty to Quit

The general view seems to be that Clinton needs to gain an edge in either the cumulative popular vote or, less probably, the pledged-delegate count if she is to have a chance of persuading the Superdelegates to give her the nomination (and of course, once you strip independents and other non-Democrats out of the election tallies, Clinton has won a majority of registered Democratic voters). Even so, it's not hard to see how this sort of caper could tear the party apart. Most folk seem to think this would be a terrible, undemocratic way to win the nomination. Not so fast says a friend: Don’t hate the player, hate the game.  The rules of the game are that superdelegates matter.  And they won’t be “overturning” anything.

Alex Massie

Clinton and Katyn

It's an election,  of course, so no card must be left un-played. Nonetheless, there's something a little unseemly about trying to exploit war crimes and massacres for personal, political gain. In fact it's grotesque. I assume this press release* was supposed to appeal to Polish-Americans in Ohio. Statement from Senator Hillary Clinton “We will soon mark the 68th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre of Polish prisoners during World War II. “This is a time to remember the victims of the Katyn massacre and also to reflect on the importance of remembrance itself.  Only by preserving the memory of past inhumanities can we hope to avoid inhumanity in the future. Only by seeking the truth about the past can we be confident about our pursuit of peace and justice today.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

We already have the NHS, do we need a DHS too?

Earlier this year Con Coughlin argued in The Spectator: Clearly there is a need for the government to get a firm grip on all the various security challenges that might come our way, which is why there has been much talk at the Cabinet Office, which is overseeing the review, of establishing a National Security Council along the lines of the body in Washington that advises the White House on security policy — both short-term and long-term... A better alternative might be to set up our own Homeland Security Department — represented by a minister of Cabinet rank — which would have responsibility for ensuring proper protection of our borders and joined-up liaison between the various bodies responsible for intelligence and security issues.

Alex Massie

If you ain’t got family, what you got?

Another sad tale of a writer essentially making up a memoir: In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. The problem is that none of it is true. Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members.

Alex Massie

Joke of the Day

This could be the most risible thing one's seen yet from this risible government: The Labour Party has accused the BBC of bias towards the Tories. An official complaint has been lodged, claiming Radio 4's Today programme has given David Cameron an easy ride in recent interviews. A senior party official accused the broadcaster of coming to a "special arrangement" with the Conservatives to avoid any "difficult questioning" of the Tory leader. But it's also further evidence of something else: Brown's goose is cooked. This is the sort of desperate floundering you associate with governments in their final, failing days. It's not the action of a ministry bursting with important new ideas. This sort of thing has a very 1996 sort of flavour doesn't it?

Alex Massie

Oiks Welcome!

Comments are good. It's always nice to hear - and learn - from readers. So it was lovely to receive this comment from, appropriately, "Monoglot", on this post about Marion Cotillard's love of conspiracy theories: What is it [about] french and the strange conceit that it needs no translation, in some circles? You don't see people doing this with german, polish, russian, chinese. A big blob of Chinese wouldn't be pasted into this blog - why French? Is it a public school thing? There's a few public schoolboy blogs that do this, in England - not so much abroad in more egalitarian english speaking countries however. I suppose this used to happen with greek and latin in certain academic works. If you can't read it, why are you reading? You don't belong here you oik.

Alex Massie

Obama on trade: still not as grim as Clinton?

More on trade. Jagdish Bhagwati says that Obama's better  - or, rather "a less disturbing prospect" - on trade than Clinton. He gives five reasons: First, Mrs Clinton, in an infamous interview with the Financial Times, responded to a question on support for the Doha round with the need for a pause, whereas Mr Obama has not done so. Second, whereas Mr Obama’s economist is Austan Goolsbee, a brilliant Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD at Chicago Business School and a valuable source of free-trade advice over almost a decade, Mrs Clinton’s campaign boasts of no professional economist of high repute. Instead, her trade advisers are reputed to be largely from the pro-union, anti-globalisation Economic Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO union federation.

Alex Massie

Live-blogging Ohio, Texas and, er, Hamilton…

The internet is all about niche, right? It's clear to me that there's an as yet unfilled opening for a blog that combines analysis of the latest shenanigans between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton with equally speculative and ill-informed musings on England's tour of New Zealand. We break new ground here, folks, with the world's first (I believe) cricket-politics live-blog... We'll be roaming all over the globe tonight, taking in the results from Ohio and Texas as well as the action from Hamilton as the Black Caps take on the visiting English... 9.14pm: Michael Vaughan makes a hash of the toss. He calls heads and it's tails. Daniel Vettori and his boys will have a bat. Odds on Steve Harmison hitting second slip on the knee with the first ball of the match? 9.

Monday

Alex Massie

I, Criminal

Mr Eugenides has the details about how the Scottish government's advertising campaigns presume that we're all criminals. Depressing stuff. Mind you, when I saw this poster I assumed it was a police recruitment campaign, not a warning to prostitutes' customers.

Alex Massie

This is your government boasting…

Charles Moore in The Spectator: One of the running jokes in Private Eye used to be a list of benefits from some public service or other which included, inexplicably, ‘grapefruit segments’. Last week, the Labour party emailed me ‘Our 50 top achievements since being elected in 1997’. Achievement no. 50 is ‘Free fruit for most four- to six-year-olds at school’. It's the sheepish "most" that makes it priceless, rescuing it from the usual vacuous banality of government announcements.

Alex Massie

The Democrats’ War on Canada

Megan McArdle suggested last year that one way to choose a candidate was to look at their economic advisers and pick the candidate with the smartest team. That being so, she lauded the University of Chicago's Austan Goolsbee, an advisor to Barack Obama. This week Goolsbee's in trouble for suggesting that the grotesque nonsense on trade being peddled by the Obama campaign was largely political posturing in advance of tomorrow's Ohio primary. Let us trust that he's right. According to a memo written by a Canadian diplomat at the Chicago Consulate: "Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign.

Alex Massie

More Canadian Bacon

The Canadians say the Clinton campaign has also told them that her abysmal campaign rhetoric should not be taken too literally. One hopes that is the case. This leads Noam to add, tongue in cheek (I hope): What is it with these Canadians? Are they running some sort of entrapment operation up there? Why do they keep trying to torpedo Democratic candidates? But why shouldn't the Canadians respond to threats made against them? NAFTA isn't all about the USA after all, Canada and Mexico have interests too. Or, to put it this way, imagine if a British would-be Prime Minister ran on a platform that called for opting out of NATO. Don't you think the Americans might point out that this was a bad idea and one that would have consequences for all areas of the US-UK relationship?

Alex Massie

Doh is not a real word…

But... The makers of Scrabble are going after the Indian boys responsible for the wondrous Scrabulous. What stupidity. Don't they realise that Scrabulous has introduced the Facebook generation to the game. Yes, it's a rip-off of the boardgame but it's also the best thing to have happened to Scrabble in years. How many sets will be sold to people introduced to the game online? Plenty I should imagine. Why, for the first time in years I played a couple of games of "real" Scrabble last weekend. I doubt that would have been the case but for Scrabulous. Tellingly, Hasbro and Mittel aren't cracking down, as best one can tell, on less popular online rip-offs of the game. Which rather suggests intellectual property isn't their prime concern and they are in fact just as foolish as they seem.

Alex Massie

The Terrible Exchange Rate Gap…

Larry Kudlow, who normally sees brilliance in every aspect of the Bush administration's record, now sees only disaster. Here he is at The Corner: If Sen. John McCain wants to run as a candidate of change, and if he’s truly interested in distancing himself from President Bush, he should reverse the declining fortunes of the Bush wartime dollar. America’s prestige is on the line... The falling U.S. greenback has become a symbol of American decline... Folks are making fun of the dollar. Our enemies around the world are pointing to the unreliable dollar as evidence of American weakness. It’s as though the administration’s neglect of the dollar is “peso-izing” or “Latin-Americanizing” the greenback.