Via Yglesias, here’s a charming leaflet from the Republican Jewish Committee that helps demonstrate just why the GOP deserves – even needs – to lose on Tuesday. Nice touch too, that the photograph used shows Barack Obama speaking in Germany. Obviously Obama is, rather oddly, Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain. Equally obviously, it scarcely needs saying that Neville Chamberlain was not in fact to blame for the Holocaust.
Anyone whose had to spend much time in the company of Scottish football journalists and members of the Scottish Parliament could only hope that a “charity” football match between the two groups could end in serious injury, fiasco and with both sides losing. In that last sense, then, it’s just like the Iran-Iraq war. Happily, in a story I missed earlier this week, this seems to have been the case. More or less. A football match between politicians and journalists was called off after tempers boiled over, it has emerged. The match was stopped after 55 minutes following a number of contentious challenges between the MSPs and the sports journalists
Good grief. Needless to say, one of the more depressing elements to this story is the fact that it won’t prove terribly controversial. That’s to say, there won’t be a fuss or a rumpus and you won’t – alas – see any outrage from politicians in any party. Pub-goers in Aberdeen are facing a drugs test before entering bars as part of a crackdown by Grampian Police. Officers in the force will be the first in Scotland to use an Itemiser – a device which can detect traces of drugs from hand swabs in a matter of seconds. The test is voluntary, but customers will be refused entry if they
Every time the world seems a little more predictable – and even the most intractable conflicts develop a recognisable if horrifying humdrum – something explodes onto our TV screens to shock and surprise even the most hard-nosed conflict-watchers. That is what happened when fighting resumed in North Kivu province on October 25 between the Congolese forces (FARDC) and the militia known as the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), led by former General Laurent Nkunda. Within only a few days, an estimated 50,000 people have fled from North Kivu’s Rutshuru territory, of which between 20,000 to 25,000 are children. Thousands have arrived in the Kibati refugee camp
In 2003, during a long night of swilling fine French wines in Beijing, talk turned to China’s rising economic fortunes. Old China hands at the table reminisced about camel trains clattering through the capital’s dim 1970s streets. Then a mysterious American chipped in with an extraordinary tale. Back in 1983, he said, China’s coffers were so low that starving officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were reduced to selling off the country’s heirlooms. One chilly winter evening he had backed a truck into the Forbidden City and quietly loaded it with priceless antiques. Ten minutes later he was on Chang’an Avenue, weighed down with art worth more than the
In 2003, during a long night of swilling fine French wines in Beijing, talk turned to China’s rising economic fortunes. Old China hands at the table reminisced about camel trains clattering through the capital’s dim 1970s streets. Then a mysterious American chipped in with an extraordinary tale. Back in 1983, he said, China’s coffers were so low that starving officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were reduced to selling off the country’s heirlooms. One chilly winter evening he had backed a truck into the Forbidden City and quietly loaded it with priceless antiques. Ten minutes later he was on Chang’an Avenue, weighed down with art worth more than the
The real BBC scandal is that John Prescott has been allowed to talk about class Obviously, the senior powers at the BBC should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. What a cock-up. What a failure of leadership. What a grubby betrayal of Reithian values. Is our licence fee really well spent on this gibbering nonsense? What were they thinking of? Why did they commission a two-part documentary on class from John Prescott? Russell Brand on class; that could have been interesting. He’d have prank-called the poor and told them he’d shagged their pets, perhaps, but at least he might have approached the subject matter with a relatively open mind. Jonathan Ross,
The news coming out of Afghanistan has gone from bad to worse. Now General Sir Michael Rose, ex-SAS chief and the former commander of UN forces during the Bosnian War, believes NATO forces in Afghanistan have “reached their limit”. Though he believes the insurgency can be held back by the international military campaign, NATO needs, in the ex-soldier’s view, to help form Afghan tribal militias to aid western forces and the Afghan army. “By winning the support of the Pashtun tribes who live on both sides of the border and by developing a sympathetic understanding of their complex tribal systems, it should be possible to achieve security in the key
Yup, it’s another game of answer-some-questions-and-discover-how-few-people-agree-with-you. This quiz is better than some, however. Apparently, like John Schwenkler (from whom I lift the format of this post) I am a “hardcore libertarian” but also a “social progressive” who “probably” considers myself a “citizen of Earth first rather than a citizen of my country”. Additionally, I’m a “capitalist purist” who is a “moderate” on defence issues. Anyway, take it yourself and let me know how you get on… After the jump: my answers…
At this juncture, my best credit-crunch advice is to keep beside your armchair at all times an atlas of the world, a modern American dictionary and a bottle of whisky. If your constitution is strong, you might also want a copy of the Financial Times but do keep the television zapper handy, so you can hit the ‘mute’ button when the news comes on. You can tell from the order of the silent pictures whether markets have plunged or rallied, which is really as much as you want to know. If the first shots to appear are of Russell Brand or yachts at anchor off Corfu, it has been a
The French President’s strop is more eloquent than any policy or speech, says Celia Walden. He is a pint-sized de Gaulle regularly made to look a fool by his wife The truth, invariably, is in the detail. Theresa May’s leopard-print shoes, Jon Snow’s refusal to wear a poppy, Prince Andrew’s bedful of teddy bears, Nick Clegg’s arithmetic (he counted up the women all right but got the weekly pension wrong by two thirds, at 30 — wait for it — ‘quid’), and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s decision to take OK! to court ‘because they made it look as though all I did on my wedding day was eat’. World events, often opaque
Apart from a couple of pre-prepared items, there’s not likely to be too much blogging in these parts for the next couple of days. The reason? I’m off to Trinity College, Dublin to speak at the College Historical Society’s* US presidential debate on Wednesday. We shall be arguing the motion “This House Would Vote for Obama”. They were having some trouble finding folk who would argue for McCain so I may be on the opposition side – in which case I shall make the case for Bob Barr, not McCain. Actually, whichever side of the motion I’m on, I shall be making a case against McCain. Just possibly against Obama
The BBC’s response to the Brand-Ross row has been pathetic. It’s now been rumbling for around 48 hours yet by late afternoon Tuesday not a single BBC executive has raised his or her head above the parapet. But the quangocracy has trundled into action. The BBC Trust says it wants an explanation while Ofcom has started an investigation. The quangos would be unnecessary if BBC management did its job. First, a senior executive, preferably the director-general himself, Mark Thompson, should apologise to Andrew Sachs, the 76-year-old actor on whose answering machine Brand-Ross left their offensive remarks (also broadcast to 2m people); he should also apologise to license-payers for a lamentable lapse in
Kudos to Frank Foer for alerting one to this priceless passage from David Gelernter’s most recent article in the Weekly Standard: Granting the importance of the topic, the difference in moral stature between presidential candidates has rarely been as enormous as it is today–not (or not only) because Obama’s is so small but because McCain’s is so large. There is no single English word for McCain the hero, the moral entity. But in Hebrew he would be called a tsaddik–a man of such nobility and moral substance that he approaches holiness. If this assertion sounds crazy, that only shows how little we have thought about the issue. OK, we’ll have
Via Clive Davis, I see that Niall Feguson has abandoned John McCain. In a Guardian interview he says: He denies suggestions that Colossus, specifically, was written with half an eye on influencing the White House – but he became, for a time, one of John McCain’s foreign policy advisers. “I must say that since he won the nomination, which I was very happy about, I’ve played virtually no role. In fact, I’ve played no role. Because, uh” – he is suddenly, uncharacteristically halting – “how to describe it? – I felt much less … enthused, I think is probably the word, now that it’s between him and Obama. And I
This won’t surprise everyone but it turns out that Rush Limbaugh is an idiot. To wit: Going after moderates, independents, and all these yokels is not the blueprint. The blueprint’s there, 1994, taking back the House, the blueprint’s there. Why are these people ignoring it? Of course, as Daniel Larison points out, the GOP won in 1994 in large part because it was able to appeal to many more independent voters than it had in 1992. (Clinton’s less than stellar first two years in office obviously also helped). As I have suggested, once a party’s brand has become contaminated – as was the case with the Tories in the mid-1990s
From North Carolina: More than 210,000 blacks who are registered as Democrats have cast early ballots in the Tar Heel State – compared with roughly 174,000 registered Republicans overall. Four years ago, the number of GOP early and absentee voters was more than double that of black Democrats. More on early voting and what it all means, here.
For what little it is worth, I think Barack Obama will carry Ohio with something to spare. I also find it quite hard to believe that he could lose Pennsylvania. Still, the argument has always been that in both these states he “struggles” to “connect” with white men. Well he has a chance to do so on Saturday night. I assume John McCain’s campaign will be buying plenty of advertising during tomorrow’s Ohio State-Penn State showdown. But I also assume Obama can more or less afford to purchase it all himself. It’s the biggest college football game in the midwest this year (alas) and amongst certain demographics seems likely to
Splendidly Confucian intervention by Lord Tebbit in the Osborne saga. “He who lies down with dogs shall catch fleas” should earn an instant place in the handbook of political wisdom – although it helps to deliver it in Norman’s quiet, deadly tones of mordant sorrow. You can rely on the Chingford polecat to come up with the goods in a crisis.
Now I may have actually heard it all. Ralph Peters offers an unintentionally hilarious tour round the globe predicting famine and pestilence and death should Americans be mad enough to elect Barack Obama next month. Apparently America will be fatally weakened and the world will fall apart. I mean, you do realise that Obama will be responsible for losing Bolivia, right? Are you prepared for that? Chavez client President Evo Morales could order his military to seize control of his country’s dissident eastern provinces, whose citizens resist his repression, extortion and semi-literate Leninism. President Obama would do nothing as yet another democracy toppled and bled. Hat-tip to Daniel Larison who