It started with Friday cat-blogging. Then there was a dog-blogging splinter group. I predict, however, that chicken-blogging will be the sensation of 2009. Here’s one of the cockerels, the one I call Lescarboura, surveying his manor…(Oddly, all cockerels here are named after French* rugby players. We’ve had Serge Blanco and Michalak and Yachvili before…) *UPDATE:
The President of the United States often really seems to be a kind of elected Priest-Monarch. One area in which this is obviously apparent, is his ability to reward cronies and fundraisers with agreeable Ambassadorships overseas. Matt Yglesias, who is too wise to buy the wisdom himself, offers the official justificatory fig-leaf for this patronage:
I’ve finally got round to joining amazon’s Associates programme. Unless I’ve made a complete hash of things then anytime you click through to via the little Amazon button on the right I should receive a commission on anything you purchase. Clearly this is the way to do your Christmas shopping… Also, a friend said that
Dan Drezner politely suggests I’m talking (or writing, rather) through my hat in this gloomy assessment of the transformational potential of the Obama presidency. Dan prefers to see the potential rather than the pitfalls. And he may be correct. It would probably be better for all if he were. As it happens, I do think
I don’t mean to pick on Tom Harris. After all, I think it a very good thing that MPs should have their own blogs. And, as it happens, I have no firm opinion either way on the desirability or not of a third runway at Heathrow airport. But I thought this a telling part of
Back to The Wire: Ross is of course correct to argue that one of David Simon’s great achievements was creating a television show that was open to multiple legitimate interpretations. Though I might see the show as grist for a certain libertarian strain of thinking, I can quite see why an ardent drug warrior could
Much blogospheric hand-wringing on whether to refer to a great Indian city as Bombay or Mumbai. This is a road I’ve been down before. Ezra Klein says that “Bombay is the term of the colonialist oppressors. Mumbai is the term of the people who live and vote and die there.” Well fine. Does this mean
Tom Harris’s blog is a very useful creation. Now as it happens I don’t think that parliamentary democracy is under threat because Damien Green was arrested, disgraceful though that arrest certainly was. Nonetheless, there’s little doubt that this government has, time and time again and to an extent that may be as modern as it
Hurrah for Alan Jacobs at the fabulous American Scene for alerting me to this excerpt from Laura Miller’s new book in which she visits Wheaton College, Illinois. (Wheaton is Billy Graham’s alma mater and the college at which Jacobs teaches.) Miller’s book is about how a religious sceptic can still lose themselves in Narnia, but
Seriously. Well, not impossibly. Perhaps. Weirder things may have happened*. Yup, Jeb Bush is apparently considering running for Mel Martinez’s soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat. I imagine Jeb would win handily. These days I think people forget that Jeb was the Bush who was supposed to be President. One of the hinge moments in recent American political
Another sign of the times: every single employee of the Glasgow Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times was sacked today and told to reapply for their jobs (on changed – that is, less favourable – terms and conditions of course) if they hope to have some sort of a future in newspapers. Or at least
Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times: At least 38 people have been killed in Tijuana since Saturday, nine of them decapitated, in escalating drug-related violence that appears to have left in tatters a Mexican military offensive launched two weeks ago. To which NRO’s Mark Krikorian responds: “Better Get That Fence Built”. I suppose that’s a
Steve Clemons posts a very droll email purporting to be from an anxious Democrat wondering what, if any, job he (or she) might receive in the Age of Obama… Like you, I keep a secret “A list” of positions I would kill for, including all manner of ambassador slots, sub-secretary -ships and senior director positions.
Bruce Schneier suspects we’ll probably learn the wrong ones. After all, as he points out, there’s very little you can do to stop 18 men with guns and grenades once they’ve begun their attack. I suspect John Robb would agree. Well-planned low-tech attacks that “leverage” a city’s own infrastructure are one of the nightmare scenarios.
For those of you interested in Scottish politics, it’s not a bad thing to be able, not before time, to welcome the country’s newspapers to the blogosphere. So, huzzahs for The Steamie then, a new blog devoted to tartan politics written by the political journos at the Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and the Edinburgh Evening
Matt Yglesias wrote a column last week in which he disputed what he termed the “counterintuitive” view that President Obama’s relations with Europe will not necessarily improve as much or as swiftly as is commonly imagine. On the contray, he suggested, simpley a) not being George W Bush and b) not going out of his
Commenting on the future of transatlantic relations, Anthony writes: The plain fact of the matter is that there are structural issues at play that will ensure tensions remain. One of the great pieces of historical revisionism spurred by the Bush 43 tenure is the conviction that has emerged that under Clinton Euro-American relations were going
Is that the future of American foreign policy debate? Noah Millman, super as ever, considers this through a Beckettian lens here. Great stuff.
Jonh Goldberg says that The Wire should be more popular amongst conservatives. He argues that conservatives should love The Wire because it shows what happens when you let Democrats run a major, if declining, American city. Well! At a certain point this is too dull for words: have we really reached the stage where even
Andrew Coyne defends Stephen Harper from his critics. Or at least, from some of them: While this laissez-faire, do-nothing government contents itself with spending more than any government in the history of Canada — 25% more, after inflation and population growth, than at the start of the decade — and pumping tens of billions of