Newspapers

It’s the baseball play-offs. Hurrah. Let’s Go Yankees! But that also means it’s time for America’s sportswriters to be even dumber than is customarily the case. For the sake of your sanity as well as for proper hilarity, trot on over to the lads at Fire Joe Morgan. Recent highlights include: how your mother probably has a better understanding of the value of “wins” than the average Hall of Fame voter, why yes of course you’d be better off packing your team with people who aren’t very good at baseball come the play-offs because, hey, they’re plucky! And gusty! and, today, yet another welcome takedown of America’s worst gasbag, Mr

Paul Krugman complains that the scale of Democratic triumphs is deliberately under-played by the American media. Conspiracy! In fact, it’s quite strange how the magnitude of the Democratic victory has been downplayed. After the 1994 election, the cover of Time showed a charging elephant, and the headline read “GOP stampede.” Indeed, the GOP had won an impressive victory: in House races, Republicans had a 7 percentage point lead in the two-party vote. In 2006, Time’s cover was much more subdued; two overlapping circles, and the headline “The center is the new place to be.” You might assume that this was because the Democrats barely eked out a victory. In fact,

Memo to New York Times/Guardian* columnists: it would be a public service were you to follow the great Myles na Gopaleen’s example: Not the least of my duties is keeping an eye on the Editor of this newspaper and rebutting, for the benefit of our simpler readers, the various heresies propounded in his leading articles. Saturday’s article was agreat shock to me… And again: Today, undismayed by many a reverse, I take up the cudgels on behalf of the Irish nation against the historic enemy of the Irish nation – the Editor of The Irish Times… *Actually all papers could benefit from a dose of mutiny in the ranks. It

Via Samizdata, this from Barry Goldwater: I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be

Sigh. I know we don’t expect much from Polly Toynbee. But perhaps she should read some Irving Kristol before she starts referring to John Redwood as a neocon throwback to the Thatcher era. If she added some other books to her reading list she might remember that the Thatcherites were, to some extent at least, inspired by FA Hayek – a man not generally considered a neoconservative luminary. It’s too delicious, of course, that in terms of policy towards work and families and other social matters La Toynbee deeply cares about, she has rather more in common with neoconservatives than she seems to understand. They, after all, are the proponents

Sunday’s New York Times travel section has a 36-hour guide to what to do and see in Edinburgh. Unfortunately it’s terrible, listing rotten pubs and feeble restaurants. Though it’s a) questionable how much attention people pay to this sort of mini-guide anyway and b) I can’t hope to defeat the NYT,  let me say that I’ll provide a much better personalised weekend guide to Auld Reekie to any reader who happens to be visiting the city this summer/fall/winter.  Can’t say fairer than that, can you? PS: The NYT opens its guide to the city thus: EVERY August, the global theatrical community — well, at least the part that is drawn

I carry no candle for Conrad Black and I’ve never worked for him. But his conviction on charges of fraud (albeit for raking in a comparatively trivial $3m) has occasioned another one of those interesting and illuminating differences between British and North American journalism. Without exception every British journalist I’ve talked to feels rather sorry for Lord Black of Crossharbour; without exception every American or Canadian hack seems pretty pleased that he’s come a cropper. Doubtless there are exceptions to this general rule (after all, my sample size is pretty small in the scheme of things) but it’s striking nonetheless. The case for Black’s defense is simple: he’s a newspaper