Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Friday

Alex Massie

There With The Grace of God…

The good news is that Rod Dreher is blogging again, this time at the American Conservative; the sad news is that his sister Ruthie, pictured above with her daughter Claire, has just been killed by cancer. Rod - we email-know one another and have at least one good friend in common - has been blogging about the reaction to his sister's death. It is, as it must be, emotional, passionate stuff. There's no pressing need for me to write about this, I guess, save that blogging is most often a means of expressing frustration or unhappiness or outrage and it is not often that we - that is, people who generally write about politics or culture - pause to reflect on the greater issues, far less note how often humanity or decency prevails in even the direst personal circumstances.

Alex Massie

Adam Curtis Is At It Again

  The great story-teller's latest piece is a rum business indeed. Apparently: The guiding idea at the heart of today's political system is freedom of choice. The belief that if you apply the ideals of the free market to all sorts of areas in society, people will be liberated from the dead hand of government. The wants and desires of individuals then become the primary motor of society. But this has led to a very peculiar paradox. In politics today we have no choice at all. Quite simply There Is No Alternative. That was fine when the system was working well. But since 2008 there has been a rolling economic crisis, and the system increasingly seems unable to rescue itself. You would expect that in response to such a crisis new, alternative ideas would emerge.

Alex Massie

The Father of Globalisation

I hadn't noticed that Keith Tantlinger, who may fairly be considered on of the fathers of globalisation, had died. Actually, until I read his obituary in yesterday's Telegraph I'd never heard of him. Nevertheless, were you to write a history of the last fifty years you'd want to include a chapter on the man who, essentially, invented container shipping and explain how his work helped build the modern world: The idea of transporting cargos in a sealed metal box is a simple one, and indeed containers had been in use since the 19th century to haul heavy cargo like coal.

Thursday

Alex Massie

George Osborne’s Difficulty

Summed-up by the Economist in a single chart. When you consider that many people support spending cuts in principle but tend to oppose them when they target particular favourite programmes you may appreciate that the government faces a fairly acute political problem. That's before you consider the practical difficulties of really cutting spending. In its way, all this is also a bleak testament to the consequences of a dozen years of Labour rule and, one might add, to the Tories' belated conversion to restraining government spending.

Alex Massie

When the Red Rose Blooms Again

Who dares say the County Championship is a useless anachronism? Rumours of its irrelevance have been much exagerrated for years and we were reminded of this again today as Lancashire took their first outright title since 1934, defeating my beloved Somerset by eight wickets and with just five overs to spare. It still, even in the evening glow of victory, seems improbable that a county with Lancashire's cricketing resources and tradition could have gone so many decades without a championship but whenever Lancs were good someone else was just a little bit better and, of course, sometimes - or so they'll tell you in Manchester - the rain would make it harder for the Red Rose county to prevail.

Alex Massie

Rick Perry: 2012’s Howard Dean?

If Mitt Romney is taking the role of John Kerry (2004 edition) then you can trot out a case that Rick Perry is playing the part of Howard Dean. Ross Douthat duly makes this argument: One interesting quality that Perry has in common with Dean, and which last night’s various back-and-forths brought out, is the extent to which both his national profile and his personal affect are much more ideological than his actual gubernatorial record.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Pawlenty: Rick Perry Must Be Stopped

File Tim Pawlenty's endorsement of Mitt Romney in the drawer marked Fancy That! So, not a surprise but telling nevertheless and a useful signal that the battle for the Republican party's presidential nomination can be summarised as Problem Solvers vs Firebrands. This may be a little unfair on Rick Perry since his candidacy is an attempt to fuse the two, albeit by pointing to Texas policies that may not be replicable in other parts of the great Union. Nevertheless, Perry's campaign is, thus far at least, predicated upon an appeal to a certain kind of muscular conservatism whose appeal is largely a matter of aesthetics. That is, sound and style matter more than substance. If the candidate walks and talks like a proper conservative then to hell with his actual record.

Alex Massie

The Think-Tank Conspiracy

Wee Georgie Monbiot is desperate to find a Koch-sized "conspiracy" in Britain. Apparently: [F]ree-market thinktanks are nothing of the kind. They are public relations agencies, secretly lobbying for the corporations and multimillionaires who finance them. If they wish to refute this claim, they should disclose their funding. Until then, whenever you hear the term free-market thinktank, think of a tank, crushing democracy, driven by big business. So, no hyperbole there. As it happens, I think it's a good idea for think tanks to disclose their funding. At the same time it's perfectly reasonable for private entities to ask that their donations be a private matter and that you have to be a Class A loon* to think that sending the Adam Smith Institute (fine people!

Alex Massie

Peter King Comes to Westminster

From the Department of Irony Overload: Congressman Peter King says he admires the United Kingdom's counter-terrorism efforts: King also praised the United Kingdom’s government for its work on stemming Muslim radicalization, noting that its “Prevent” strategy “offers a candid assessment of the problem and a model for effectively addressing and countering this problem.” The Prevent strategy is one part of the UK’s Home Office counterterrorism program, and focuses on preventative measures to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. Better late than never, I suppose and even a sinner such as Congressman King may be permitted a moment of repentance and all that. Still, the gall and the irony and all that.

Saturday

Alex Massie

Department of Homeland Absurdity

A telling admission from Janet Napolitano, heid-bummer at the ludicrous (though founded for obvious, understandable reasons) Department of Homeland Security: “We are moving towards an intelligence and risk-based approach to how we screen [people at airports],” Napolitano told Mike Allen during a morning forum at the Newseum. “I think one of the first things you will see over time is the ability to keep your shoes on. One of the last things you will [see] is the reduction or limitation on liquids.” In other words, current policy has nothing to do with intelligence or risk and is, by the US government's own admission, stupid.

Friday

Alex Massie

Political Definitions

Bipartianship: the quaint idea, much loved by newspaper columnists, that the opposition should help an incumbent President win re-election. A curiosity of the American political system that reflects, indeed encourages, the belief that the President of the United States should be regarded as a regal father-of-the-nation figure and not, heavens above, as a mere politician. Appeals to bipartisan comity are politics as usual, disguised as tender nurturing of the national interest. This remains true even when there's consensus on what the national interest may be.

Alex Massie

Obama’s Re-Election Campaign Begins

And so they're off: Barack Obama's speech to Congress last night was the beginning of his re-election campaign. This is a jobs bill, he said. You should pass it. In case anyone doubted this he repeated the message more than a dozen times. The forcefulness of his tone appears to have delighted the liberal blogosphere. Democrats appear to believe This is the Obama we've been waiting for. Which only reaffirms the fact that this was a political speech disguised as a policy address. As David Frum says, it was all quite cunning. In fact, as Megan McArdle notes, a good deal of what Obama said is unobjectionable: extending payroll tax cuts is a good idea.

Alex Massie

9.9.1513

The original and gravest episode of Disaster for Scotland. Today's the 498th anniversary of Flodden. A bleak day for Scotland; bleaker still for King James himself and the Men of the Ettrick Forest. Legend has it only one man from these parts returned alive and the memory of that remains the centrepiece of Selkirk's annual Common Riding. Jean Elliot's lament, The Flowers of the Forest, dates from 1756.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Winning with Governor Moonbeam

Surprise: there's some good news coming out of California! Governor Jerry Brown, enjoying his second tour in office, has taken to slapping down the kind of mollyocddling absurdities much favoured by that state's woeful state legislature. Better still than a flourished veto pen are Governor Moonbeam's reasons for despising the stuff sent to him by the legislature. To wit: If only more politicians in this country - in this government too - could be as sensible as this. Not every human problem deserves a law. Quite so.

Alex Massie

Arsenal Behaving Badly: Fancy That!

As world-class moaners it's not a surprise that Arsenal football club behave in this fashion but it's depressing to see their groundless whingeing tolerated by a judge, even a Spanish judge: The Gunners have won their case against Seville resident Alicia Simon, who has now been told by the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office to change the name of her hat shop 'Arsenale'. Simon registered the name of her shop before she even opened it in 2007 despite protestations from the club, but Arsenal's lawyers have been petitioning the Spanish authorities ever since, trying to convince them that she has infringed their trademark.

Alex Massie

Bush and Reagan on Immigration

The times they change but the questions remain the same. It's the Republican party that has changed. A candidate who talked about (illegal)immigration the way Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush did in this 1980 debate would receive pelters. Now, in part that reflects the fact that 30 years on the problem remains unsolved and I suppose you could argue the Reagan amnesty made matters worse still.

Alex Massie

Perry vs Romney

So this was Rick Perry's big debut on the national stage and, meh, he was only OK. Perhaps that's being too kind. Sure, there were moments when he looked and sounded like a heavyweight contender but these were generally (though not exclusively) when he could talk about Texas. The Lone Star State is a mighty big place but America is even bigger and Perry looked like a man still coming to terms with the leap from state-level scrutiny to the stuff that comes with prancing on the national stage.  Still, as Jonathan Bernstein says, we should not read too much into this: there will be many more debates before Iowa and New Hampshire and ample time for Perry to improve.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Rick Perry: Texas Gaullist

I'm sure Karl Rove is, on this at least, correct: Rick Perry's book will cause him problems for as long as he remains in the race for the Republican nomination. To put it gently, few Americans believe that Social Security and many other federal programmes are unconstitutional; even fewer are likely to vote for a candidate who was on record, as recently as last year, suspecting that they might be and that these matters were properly the purview of the 50 states, not Washington. So it will be interesting to see how, if at all, Perry is attacked in tonight's debate*. There is no shortage of large-bore ammunition. Against that, a book titled Fed Up! pretty accurately captures the mood in the United States even if disgruntled voters might differ from Perry on any number of specific issues.

Alex Massie

All Hail the Free Unionists, Saviours of Brave New Scotland!

Like most sensible folk I have a grand opinion of Alan Cochrane and, this being the case, alert readers will know that this is by way of a throat-clearing before we move on to the business of suggesting that his latest Daily Telegraph column is a little less persuasive than the Sage of Angus would like it to be. As Alan concludes: It is hard not to sympathise with what Mr Fraser is trying to do. Something dramatic does need to happen to galvanise centre-right supporters in Scotland and the idea of a completely separate party but which is part of an electoral pact with the UK Conservatives in the Commons has been kicking around for decades.