Hillary Clinton might not have conceded last night but Barack Obama now has the delegates he needs to be the nominee. He declared himself the nominee last night despite Hillary Clinton’s refusal to drop out. His immediate challenge is to usher her off the stage and re-unite the party. He started that task with generous praise for her last night and a speech that hit the Democratic high notes.
NBC’s delegate count shows that following the flurry of super delegate declarations for him today, Obama is only 11 away from having an absolute majority of delegates. Considering that there are 31 up for grabs in Montana and South Dakota, Obama is pretty much certain to reach that mark before the end of the night. According to the prepared remarks that have leaked to Drudge, Obama will declare himself the nominee this evening. He will, though, sweeten the pill for Hillary and her supporters with effusive praise for the Clintons.
Matthew Lynn wonders whether the world’s greatest investor will be able to pick winners in continental Europe the way he has for more than four decades in the US If Warren Buffett had not become famous as the world’s richest man — a career choice that trumps most alternatives — he could still have carved out a niche for himself as a writer of homely lessons in economics and business. The Sage of Omaha, as Buffett is known for his uncanny knack of calling the markets right, has always been able to explain his decisions in simple language. Buffettisms such as ‘Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2:
The Financial Services Authority has had only two chairmen since its creation in 1997, and as the Northern Rock debacle happened on the watch of the second incumbent, Sir Callum McCarthy, the model for his replacement is inevitably the original holder, Sir Howard Davies. On that basis, Adair Turner — Lord Turner of Ecchinswell — ticks all the boxes. Both are former McKinsey men; Turner followed Davies as director-general of the CBI; Turner is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, where Davies is now director. Both sit on the board of Paternoster, a private company that buys out corporate pension funds. Their kids even attended the same
Adam Thorpe set his previous novel, Between Each Breath, in Hampstead. He moves in his latest to the liberal intelligentsia’s summer hunting ground, the south of France. Nick and Sarah Mallinson, two not quite successful enough Cambridge historians, decamp on their sabbatical to Languedoc with their three young daughters. Their house is rented from the Sandlers, a mercenary pair of art dealers; the husband, Alan, took advantage of the invasion of Iraq to bag a number of archaeological artefacts by dubious means. Intent on completing neglected books and home-educating their children, the Mallinsons’ time dissipates into distraction and peacekeeping between warring kids. Meanwhile, the decidedly weird handyman, Jean-Luc, tends the
An occasional series in which we dare to take a look at what’s actually happening in the Scottish Parliament. Not, I warn you, for the faint of heart or the easily enraged. Now, yes, it’s true that most MSPs are well-intentioned, even kindly, souls concerned with the public good. But this takes them to some strange places. Consider these questions from “Health and Wellbeing” questions last week (what an awful title for a government ministry incidentally, one that explicitly endorses the idea of nannying adults)…
Gene Healy draws attention to this Bill Clinton quotation from 1997*:And it’s hard when you’re not threatened by a foreign enemy to whip people up to a fever pitch of common, intense, sustained, disciplined endeavor. But that is what we must do, my fellow Americans. That is what we must do.I don’t mean to pick on Bill Clinton here since, after all, Barack Obama and John McCain would each agree with the sentiment expressed by Clinton here. So too would George W Bush who, accepting his party’s nomination in 2000, lamented the lack of “purpose” *Of course, many of the American right would say that the US was threatened in
The news that ASDA is selling sausages that are, alarmingly, just 34% pork for 2p each naturally brought this classic Yes, Minister moment to mind: [Hat-tip: The Corridor]
The boys at The Daily Mash have the gory details… SMOKERS will have to hold a large piece of card over their face so they cannot look at the cigarette they are smoking, ministers said last night. The ‘smoking mask’ will include a small mouth hole and a handle, though later models may be fitted with elasticated straps… The mask will also carry a warning which reads: “Lighting a Cigarette While Wearing This Mask May Cause You to Set Fire to the Mask Instead of the Cigarette and Burn Your Face Off.”
As the final votes are cast in the Democratic primaries, Americano reflects on when the race tipped in Barack Obama’s favour and looks at the proposed five-step plan for how Hillary can restore her reputation among Democratic activists. Plus, video of how this whole process has driven a Clinton campaign chair to drink.
Over on Americano, an explanation of why Hillary Clinton holds the key to what Barack Obama will say on Tuesday night when the primary process finally finishes.
Clive has footage of the Tube riot on the Circle Line which is well worth watching to get a feel for what went . Harry’s Place (link via Stephen) calls on the Met to prosecute the organiser. This seems wrong-headed to me. The only people to blame for what happened were those who turned the event—which was perfectly legal—violent. As Stephen says, the police should be scrutinising the footage on YouTube and other sites and tracking down those who committed violent acts and did criminal damage. They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Over at Red Box, Sam Coates runs down what the brothers appear to want for bailing Labour out of its present financial difficulties: 1. Windfall tax for energy companies (floated by both Dubbins and Simpson) 2. Legislation to require companies to carry out equal pay audits, to close the gap between male and female pay 3. Higher business taxes, following research cited by unions showing “the UK’s top companies are already saving £20 billion a year on tax through allowances and concessions”. 4. New rules are introduced to ensure employees in companies subject to private equity takeovers have their rights protected. 5. Forcing companies to allow more flexible time off
Ed Balls worries quite a lot about the shortcomings of British parents. Today, he says the state should give clearer instructions on drinking – because he has detected confused British parents crying out for instructions from our political class. “Guide us, O leaders,” they say. Here are Balls’s exact words, to Sky News this morning. “I think that parents are often saying to us that with smoking it is clear – smoking is wrong and children shouldn’t smoke, on drugs the same – but with alcohol we have never ever given any clear guidance to parents.” The government’s smoking ban has, you see, finally hammered home the message to these
A selection of some of the posts made over the weekend: James Forsyth argues that the blame for the violence on the Tube on Saturday nights rests not with Mayor but with the perpetrators and highlights Peter Oborne’s analysis of the sorry state of Labour’s finances. Clive Davis notes how The New York Times’ reviewer was neither shaken nor stirred by the new Bond novel. The Skimmer reports on the Indian media’s new nickname for The Guardian. Americano reports on Barack Obama’s cheeky but rather brilliant plan to kick his general election campaign off in the very place that John McCain will accept the Republican nomination.
The behaviour of those protesting the booze ban on the Tube last night was disgraceful. Those who assaulted Tube staff and police officers should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. The reaction of the RMT, though, is bizarre. Rather than pinning the blame on the perpetrators, it has decided that it was the Mayor’s fault for banning alcohol on public transport in the first place. This mindset which always blames the supposed provocation rather than those actually responsible for the actions is one of the great ills of our time. The moral responsibility for last night’s disgraceful scenes lies squarely with its perpetrators.
This May saw fewer US military casualties in Iraq, 18, than any previous month in the war. It also saw the Iraqi government take significant steps to becoming a truly national government; successfully taking on the Shi’ite militias in Basra and Sadr City. As The Washington Post writes in its lead editorial this morning: “Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing
Seek the reason why Sir: I greatly enjoyed Peter Jones’s excellent article on Ancient Roman globalisation (‘For real globalisation, look at Ancient Rome’, 24 May). I respectfully disagree with one paragraph, however, in which he describes Greek philosophers as having ‘proceeded from hypotheses, which they never tested’. It is true, of course, that the Greeks were incapable of testing certain things, such as the nature of the elemental constituents of matter. Nevertheless, in what was within their power to observe, they often proceeded, not from hypotheses, but from the empirical study of natures. The pre-eminent example of this approach is the extant work of Aristotle. About 25 per cent of
That’s a lot of violins, I thought. Then I realised they were violas. The violins were to the left, smaller. Always smaller than I expect, violins — maybe because I wrestled with one as a child and it beat me: Tiny, pretty little things they are, with all the fleeting glamour and tyranny of a whole crowd of Hollywood starlets. Those always come up small, too. The cellos were in their nest to the right of the violas. I don’t think there’s an instrument more beautiful to look at than the cello, all balancing curves and arches, setting off the perfect parallels and perpendiculars of the strings. The more I
This morning, when I woke up, I reached out and pressed the button on my bedside radio and the first word that came out of it was the word ‘tolerance’. The radio was tuned to the Today programme. It isn’t the first time that the first word I’ve heard has been ‘tolerance’. For the past few weeks I’ve been keeping a mental record. I’ve heard ‘tolerance’ three times as I’ve pressed the button, ‘Muslim’ three times and ‘community’ twice. Then I came downstairs and looked at the newspaper. Starving millions, an overheating planet, polluted skies and oceans, scarcities, extinctions, wars, rumours of wars — it was grim reading. And that