10:36am
I really do hope Barack Obama isn't going to start tying himself in knots over the lapel flag issue: This week, after eschewing the patriotic symbol for quite some time, Obama started wearing the pin to selected events. On Tuesday, he was sans pin on the Senate floor, but then later donned it while speaking to working-class voters in Missouri during the evening. "I haven't been making such a big deal about it. Others have. Sometimes I wear it, sometimes I don't." ...Obama may make it sound like just a random fashion choice, but there is a large swathe of Americans who take symbols like the pledge of allegiance, the national anthem, and, yes, the flag in its many iterations very seriously.
Hillary also drops the accessory from time to time, apparently, but then she's not under anything like the same degree of scrutiny.
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10:21am
Marc Ambinder notes that one of the leaders of the pro-Democratic Atlas Project has put out a video making fun of John McCain's age. Is that really a good idea? It's crude stuff, all in all, even if you can't help smiling at the cheekiness of some of the rhymes:
"He's older than his wife, a little younger than his mama,
He's old enough to be one and a half Barack Obamas."
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9:45am
Just as a PS to James's post about Martin Bright, I thought I'd mention that the Statesman columnist has more to say about his trip to the Middle East in this article. It's a plea to socialists to re-think the simplistic Jews-bad/Palestinians-good approach to the problem:
Postings on our blog casually link Zionism to fascism or South African apartheid. The language is so unpleasant that it is difficult not to draw the conclusion that many of the comments are driven by anti-Semitism...There are all sorts of good reasons for the left to fall out of love with Israel. At the same time, it is quite possible to understand how left-wing Israelis feel betrayed by international liberal opinion.
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6:37pm
One of George Plemper's portraits of 1970s working-class life in south London. The former teacher's photos were hidden away in carrier bags until the advent of Flickr gave him the chance to put them on-line. Michael Collins, author of that fine book, "The Likes of Us", has the full story.
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6:27pm
As Stephen says, it's hard to see how the mayor is going to be able to sell the idea of combining his new post with a reported £250,000 a-year column for the Telegraph. But then, if you've read the Gimson book, you'll know that having one's cake and attempting to eat it while riding a unicycle is a recurrent theme of the man's career. I actually found the biography depressing and hugely entertaining at one and the same time. Let's just hope Boris Mk II wasn't simply a mirage.
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