World

First parliament, now the BBC. Steadily, the public is seeing details of the kind of lifestyles that have been funded by the taxpayer for all these years. To the tawdry parliamentarians’ list — duck houses, porn films, Kit Kat bars — we can now add the £638 taxi bills for BBC executives and the £3 which cash machines charge them to take out money. As the Freedom of Information requests are steadily lodged with the legion of quangos, we can expect another tranche of horrors — and this is before anyone moves on to the local authorities. As David Cameron says, sunlight is the best disinfectant. The more we see, the

I first became aware of another Martin Bright with an interest in radical Islam a couple of years ago when a neighbour commented on remarks I had supposedly made on Any Answers. “Bit strong”, he said. As I hadn’t called the programme, I just thought he was being a bit weird. Then he mentioned another appearance a few weeks later and I twigged I had a doppelganger.  This was very unsetting for a while, but then the other Martin Bright went away.  Now he has turned up again, commenting regularly on The Times website. I first found out when I received a call from an old friend and colleague working

The New America Foundation’s Steve Clemons, who is always good fun, has been giving rave reviews to this Edward Luce piece in the FT that argues, essentially, that Obama’s Gang of Four – Emanuel, Axelrod, Gibbs & Jarret – have cut the President off from a wider circe of voices, many of whom he could usefully be hearing from and that the Obama White House is proving less successful than it should be. Pithily, there’s too much Chicago and not enough DC. That’s accompanied by a second, but related, complaint: the White House is being run as though it were an extension of the campaign. But the United States government

Gita Sahgal has now published a statement following her suspension from Amnesty International. I have seen it at Stroppyblog, but please circulate it as widely as possible. Gita has been an active member of Women Against Fundamentalism for many years. Perhaps the publicity around this case will allow their voices to be heard. Amnesty International and Cageprisoners Statement by Gita Sahgal 7 February 2010 This morning the Sunday Times published an article about Amnesty International’s association with groups that support the Taliban and promote Islamic Right ideas. In that article, I was quoted as raising concerns about Amnesty’s very high profile associations with Guantanamo-detainee Moazzam Begg. I felt that Amnesty

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Will I join the ticker-tape parade to welcome back Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Congressman Henry B. Steagall of Alabama? Well, I might lurk in the crowd, but I certainly won’t be cheering. These venerable legislators sponsored the US Banking Act of 1933 which built a wall between securities trading and deposit-taking that remained in place until 1999. To use the labels invented by the economist John Kay, it separated the ‘casino’ of Wall Street from the ‘utility’ of retail banking on Main Street. And there’s a clamour to rebuild it brick by brick, beginning with the so-called Volcker Rule (devised for Barack

Given that homosexuals are permitted to serve in the armed forces of, I think, every NATO country bar Turkey and the United States and that none of these countries have reported any great difficulty as a consequence of ending this discrimination, it’s hard to see how lifting the ban on gays serving in the military can really destroy the United States military. For that matter, in the draft era, thousands of gay men obviously served in the army and, as best I can recall, this didn’t have any significant operational impact. Still, it’s grimly amusing seeing what excuses the opponents – including a flip-flopping John McCain – can come up

Reihan Salam has a very good column on GOP tactics and oportunities that I heartily recommend. He concludes: The Democrats have offered a series of bloated, heavy-handed bills to tackle real problems facing the economy, and Republicans have been right to take them to task. But they’re now in a position to offer more cost-effective, scalpel-like proposals of their own that can demonstrate their readiness to govern. And besides, Republicans will still be well within their rights to criticize the Democrats for their major missteps in 2009—President Obama spent most of his 2008 presidential campaign running against George W. Bush’s first term. If Republicans choose not to pivot, if they

Courtesy of Erica Grieder: Good evening, Madame Speaker. I’m always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. But I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me last year. It started with the economy. Bailout. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it. We all hated each other’s guts after that. You could see there wasn’t any sense trying to have an intelligent conversation. I was sorry as hell I’d started. But if you’re supposed to sock somebody in

One of the charming things about National Review’s blog The Corner, is that one never knows what will irritate someone next. Then again, almost anything and everything Obama does annoys some of the Corner kids. Today’s example: not going to Mars! For real: Yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration plans to scrap funding for voyages to the moon and to Mars, shows how low President Obama’s horizons truly are.  Oh noes! Jeffrey Anderson continues: You know those great pictures of Earth from outer space, showing our planet suspended against the blackness, a beautiful blue ball? No one has seen that view since the Apollo program ended 38 years ago. No