Good question! One of the odder aspects of American politics – at least for foreigners used to the rough and tumble of the House of Commons – is the elevation of bispartisanship to the status of some kind of political sacrament. A cynic would say that the principle motivation for this is to ensure that
Despite the tenor of the times, it is still the case that almost all of us have never had it so good. As Brad DeLong writes at The Week: The current recession may turn into a small depression, and may push global living standards down by five percent for one or two or (we hope
Gerry Adams, writing in the Guardian: The recent assault on Gaza is a brutal reminder of the destructive power of war and of the human cost of failure. It is time all of this was brought to an end. Well he would know, wouldn’t he?
My sense is that, like their Scottish counterparts, English nationalists are disproportionately vocal online. Certainly, anything one says about Scotland and the future of the United Kingdom seems to draw them out. But for all that we keep being prmised an English nationalist backlash against Scotland (and Wales!), stubbornly it never quite seems to come.
For all that it’s often criticised in the blogosphere, there’s an awful lot of good stuff in the New York Times. And some of it is very well written. This, for instance, is a splendidly judged intro and set-up: The economic crisis came home to 27-year-old Megan Petrus early last year when her boyfriend of
An oldie but a goodie: Frank Foer’s defence of Conventional Wisdom dates from 2001 but it still a jolly read: Since 1980 the New York Times editorial page has published at least 38 columns condemning world hunger, 241 against South African apartheid, and 465 containing the phrase “conventional wisdom”–and never once did the Times mean
I’ve a piece up at the New Republic today, looking at how George Mitchell’s experience in Northern Ireland may inform his approach to his role as Barack Obama’s middle eastern envoy. Readers of long-standing will know that I take a rather more jaundiced view of the “peace process” than most and that, accordingly, am less
If you go here you can follow Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Twitter feed. Granted, it’s mostly just eco-friendly Californian politics at the moment, but once you sign up to the Governor’s feed he’ll be gracious enough to return the favour and begin following you too. This must be worth precisely nothing but it’s still oddly cool. Or
I’m a sucker for Seasteading. That is, I can’t resist articles about what’s called “homesteading on the high seas” – tiny floating communities based in international waters and thus, happily free from government interference. This is not just a kind of hippyish utopia, there are serious public policy issues at play too! Wired has a
The downside to this latest outbreak of “Labour Sleaze” is that we’re going to hear an awful lot of talk about “reforming” the House of Lords. (Will anyone be brave enough to suggest bringing back the hereditary peers?) but the very last thing anyone should want is for there to yet another round of elections.
Tough news for neoconservatism. From today there’ll be no more Bill Kristol columns in the New York Times. One could react to this news in a number of ways. Here, for instance, is Peter Wehner’s view, courtesy of the good folk at National Review Online: Kristol agreed to a one year commitment at the Times,
Now that I think about it, Simon Heffer’s broadside against Caledonia-dire-and-rotten, missed one obvious target. Sure, Alastair Darling is a much-ridiculed, much-villified Chancellor of the Exchequer but so too was the last-but-one Scottish Chancellor. Remember Norman Lamont? He may have represented an English constituency but that only emphasised how far he’d travelled from his Shetland
Under the headline “Scots have brought Britain to its knees” Simon “John Wilkes” Heffer began his Telegraph column on Saturday like this: As Scots the world over prepare to celebrate tomorrow their third best poet (after Henrysoun and Dunbar, of course) by eating sheep’s intestines filled with what always seems to be gravel, it is
There’s something cheering about today’s announcement that the government has decided to ignore its own experts and reclassify Cannabis as a Class B, rather than a Class C drug. Not the decision itself which is entirely regrettable, but rather what it tells us about this government. Not for the first time Labour wants to be
Or not. Simply astonishing. Who could ever have guessed this? Don’t tell the Daily Express…
If it’s easy to pick on politicians, it’s easier still to pick on lobbyists. This is true on either side of the Atlantic. As Peter says, today’s allegations in the Sunday Times that Labour peers are trading cash for legislative amendments are unlikely to increase the esteem in which parliament is held. While members of
A very entertaining piece on Caroline Kennedy’s “run” for the vacant Senate seat in New York by Larissa MacFarquhar in this week’s New Yorker. There are moments at which one feels rather sorry for Kennedy, but overall the piece is not, shall we say, flattering. And what to make of this splendidly amusing stuff from
Preach it, Brother Wilkinson: When I see Delong more or less indiscriminately trashing everyone at Chicago, or Krugman trashing Barro, etc., what doesn’t arise in my mind is a sense that some of these guys really know what they’re talking about while some of them are idiots. What arises in my mind is the strong suspicion
For reasons I don’t entirely understand the impression that the present regrettable economic circumstances have been caused by a hands-off, laissez-faire approach to regulation seems to be widely held. This is curious since, as Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason.com, puts it in today’s Wall Street Journal, we have not been living in an age of
Can we agree that Rod Blagojevich is making a great run at the title Entertainer of the Year. Here’s the disgraced governor of Illinois protesting his innocence (again!) today: I like old cowboy movies, and I want to explain how these rules work in a more understandable way. There was an old saying in the