No doubting this. Apparently you need to win an election to become Coroner in New Orleans. This is good news since it has produced the strangest attack ad I’ve seen in ages: By way of background: The spot portraying [Dr Frank] Minyard as a Frankensteinian crazy was paid for by Dwight McKenna, MD, a convicted
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
Oh dear. George Osborne and his guru, Richard Thaler, have been at Davos. This means, sure as eggs is eggs, that there’s a piece celebrating behavioural economics on the way. And, yup, it duly arrives in the Guardian today. I’ve mentioned the Nudgers before and few people doubt that there are some useful ideas that
When Charlie Brooker is on form he’s pretty good you know.
Barack Obama and George W Bush might not have much in common, but you can certainly argue that their speechwriters do. One of the limitations of set-piece events such as the State of the Union is that, in the end, many of them are pretty similar. Certainly, you can bet that the same ideas will
As President Obama might put it, let me be clear: the Daily Mail is a terrific newspaper and one may admire its professionalism and the talent of its journalists (some of whom are friends, of course) without necessarily agreeing or even sympathising with its worldview. But, if you were to only read the Mail you
Well that was long. 70 minutes in fact. And, as the genre demands, there was a considerable gap between Presidential rhetoric and anything that is actually likely to happen. Do you really believe, now that Obama has promised this, that American exports will double in five years? Of course not. Ezra Klein has a useful
Of all the misunderstood phrases popular in Washington, one of the most frequently cited is Teddy Roosevelt’s observation that the Presidency is a bully pulpit. This is often, perhaps even usually, understood as an expression of Presidential power. When the Commander-in-Chief speaks, the country listens and when he decrees that something must be done, Washington
I remain unpersuaded that there’s much point to the Chilcot Inquiry and the stramash over Lord Goldsmith’s interpretation of the legal case for toppling Saddam does little to change that. Paul Waugh has a nice, if somewhat scathing, summary here. But the case against the war’s legality is a) pretty irrelevent now and b) rests
I should have known that the news was too good to be, you know, true. Turns out that all the excitement about the Unted States dropping its disgraceful ban on the importation of proper haggis is somewhat premature. A spokeswoman from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service emails to “clarify”
I’m a monarchist- and much more keenly so than I was as a young chap – but the way this Daily Mail story is written is so ghastly and gawd-help-us that it almost makes one doubt the sense of having a non-elected head of state… Prince Philip has been spotted doing his bit for the
This is superb. Friedrich August vs John Maynard. Rapping. Needless to say, if we were to have a real discussion and a real debate between FAH and JMK this election season then we’d have an election to look forward to. As it is no-one of any sense can be anything but terrified by the nonsense
At last, real change we can believe in: the Obama administration is lifting the pernicious ban on haggis that for more than 20 years* has deprived Americans the chance to munch the great chieftain o’ the pudden-race. True, during the long, dark years of prohibition some enterprising American butchers stepped into the breach and made
Sunday evening: a roaring log fire, a calming glass of claret and listening to HMS Pinafore. For once, cruel world is vanquished. For a time anyway. And, of course, Pinafore helps illuminate our Britain too. Here, for instance, is how Bob Ainsworth became Secretary of State for Defence: And here is what the Barmy Army,
At the very least, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by this sort of caper anymore: Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance. The arms manufacturer BAE
Earl Scruggs and his boys pay a visit to Doc Watson’s home in North Carolina for some good times and some even better music. It’s old school and it’s great.
I think Chris Morris’s new film Four Lions is probably the (English-speaking) world’s first suicide-bomber comedy. So it’s all but guaranteed to offend just about everyone. Splendid. Doubtless it’s a sign of terrible, even craven decadence to admit to looking forward to seeing it… Here’s a clip, anyway:
All American Presidents are elected on a platform of hope and change. Each arrives in Washington promising to be, in the words of George W Bush, “a uniter not a divider”. But few took possession of the White House quite as heavily weighed down by the burden of expectation as Barack Hussein Obama. The hopes
Some observations on the Bay State Shocker: Candidates matter, don’t they? Yes they surely do. Martha Coakley’s campaign was so staggeringly inept, complacent, arrrogant and stupid that she threw away a Senate seat in a state Barack Obama won by 26 points a year ago. Yes, Republicans have won statewide before in MA but this
More on Massachusetts later, but Conor Friedersdorf makes a necessary point that applies to pundits from all quarters most of the time and not just to this election in the Bay State: It is particularly amusing to see folks call the outcome stunning in one breath and aver in the next that they can explain