Freddy Gray

It is wrong to insult an Olympian who has just missed out on a medal, and worse to bring his dead father into it. But, as Melanie Philips and others have pointed out in this morning's papers, it is hardly criminal. Yesterday, Dorset police arrested a teenager after he sent a nasty message to Tom Daley, the Englishman who finished fourth in the synchronised diving on Monday. 'You let your dad down and I hope you know that,' said @Rileyy_69, on Twitter. Tom Daley’s father died last year of a brain tumour, so he, his friends and his supporters were understandably angry. Even @Rileyy_69 saw that he had crossed a line, and apologised, before threatening to drown Daley in a pool (a tweet he later deleted). But he was too late.

What have we learnt about Willard Mitt Romney since he arrived in Britain? Not a lot. He's a plonker, that's for sure, but most of us knew that. The UK leg of his world tour will be remembered, if it is remembered at all, for the gaffes. And as Isabel suggested yesterday, Mitt's diplomatic clumsiness is a real weak point in his candidacy. It's not just silly slips, his foreign policy ideas seem positively bonkers. Last year, Romney and his neocon advisers published a white paper called An American Century. It talked of Turkey as if it were part of the axis of evil, rather than a member of Nato. It was eager to fear-monger about the rise of East, and proposed that America should arm Taiwan to combat China.

Barack Obama’s latest email appeal for campaign funds – entitled 'we could lose if this continues' - doesn’t seem altogether sincere. The president’s re-election team wants more money, of course – who doesn’t? – and they must be concerned by the fact that Romney and his plutocratic committees are beating them in the fund-raising stakes. As Obama says, 'we can win a race in which the other side spends more than we do. But not this much more'. Yet anyone with half a brain can see what Obama and his strategists are trying to say (again): Romney is a super-rich agent of the super-rich. He represents big business, not ordinary Americans. He is, as one White House adviser put it, trying to 'purchase the White House'. But, hang on.

Grover Norquist, a leading voice of American conservatism, is cross about the date of the Republican Party convention. He tweets: 'Which idiot put the GOP convention the same time as 'Burning Man' in Nevada? Is there time to change this?' Burning Man, in case you didn't know, is a festival in Nevada where 'freethinkers' flock in their tens of thousands to spend a few days being individual. Money is not allowed, natch. It attracts thousands of British trendies -- ex-public school types, on the whole, trying too hard to carve an artsy identity for themselves. They come back considerably more smug than they left, if the ones I know are anything to go by.  How appalled they would be to know that the deeply unfashionable American Right is as fond of Burning Man as they are.

The US Supreme Court's decision to uphold 'Obamacare' and the so-called 'individual mandate' will have brought a little relief to President Obama. If his administration's hardest-fought legislative victory had been struck down by the high court, the president's admirers would have started to wonder whether he had achieved anything at all. But Obama and the Democrats will know that their healthcare battle is far from won. Republicans have pledged to carry on trying to repeal 'Obamacare' in its entirety. And there are bound to be all sorts of complicated and tedious state-by-state legal challenges over various technicalities before the most of the law is brought into force in 2014.  And anyway, the ruling might have dire implications for Obama's re-election campaign.

In this week's issue, the great Robert Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. makes a bold prediction about the upcoming American presidential elections: ‘The Republican nominee will come out of the Republican convention in August with a full head of steam. Boosted by years of growing strength and aided by the independents' concern for Obama's huge deficits and slow growth, he will barrel through the autumn and on to victory in November. Obama will soon be back in Blue Island Illinois, creating his own presidential museum.’ Don't believe him? Look at the economy. Only a few months ago, America's financial health seemed to be improving. Team Obama was lecturing European conservatives about the limits of austerity. Not anymore. American unemployment is back up.

Call me crazy, but I’ve just bet on Nicolas Sarkozy to win the French election. I am not convinced he will — Hollande is rightly the favourite — but at 5/1, Sarko is well worth a punt, I reckon.
 As Gideon Rachman notes, last night's first round was by no means a disaster for Sarko. In fact, given the extent of anti-Sarko sentiment throughout France, he did remarkably well. In the end, Hollande only beat him by about 1.5 per cent. Yes, no French president has ever failed to win the first round before, and the statistics are all against the incumbent. But that need not stop Sarkozy. He has always been a sharp operator, someone who relishes adversity.

Gawker, the American news gossip site, is very pleased with itself. They’ve hired a Fox News ‘mole’, and he or she has already given them their first scoop: off-air footage of Mitt Romney chatting away amicably with Fox News presenter Sean Hannity before an interview. This is meant to be an insight into the sleazy world the American right, and inevitably the clip is going viral. But what Gawker and the mole might not realise is that they may have given the Romney campaign a surprise boost. I've seen many Romney interviews and speeches, far too many. But this is the only time I've seen him come across as a human being.

American hacks have been mystified by what seems to be a ‘non-aggression pact’ between Republican presidential candidates Ron Paul and Mitt Romney. The two men are in many ways opposites. Paul is the favourite of anti-establishment conservatives — principled, dismissed by the media as too radical, critical of the Grand Old Party machine and US foreign policy. Romney, on the other hand, is a typical American politician — rich, lacking clear convictions, happy to talk about bombing the enemies of freedom. And yet — as Jonathan noted a few weeks ago — Paul, though he has repeatedly attacked Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, has been strangely mute when it comes to Mitt. Has a deal been struck?