This New York Times piece by Eric Asimov has, for British readers, a certain charm. It’s rather like seeing the world through alien eyes. My what strange yet wondrous habits you quaintly old-fashioned humans have: I WAS sitting at a noisy bar on a beautiful fall afternoon, watching the bartender work, and she was indeed
Well, who’d have thunk it? According to today’s New York Times: Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton In classic NYT fashion here’s something a little Pooterish about the headline of course. But still, it’s somewhat remarkable that just eight weeks before the Iowa caucuses the leading challenger has to be prodded and cajoled into,
Via Arthur Goldhammer – curator of the excellent French Politics blog which has become an invaluable resource for keeping up to speed with Sarko et al – comes this splendid illustration of the benefits of a Harvard education. As Mr Goldhammer says, “Note the translation of Hautes Etudes”: Mr Goldhammer also draws one’s attention to
John McCain tells ABC’s This Week that – shockingly! – torture is ” a very important issue to me” and consequently that he can’t guarantee that he will vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as Attorney General if the nominee continues to fudge on the question of whether or not he believes waterboarding constitutes torture. McCain,
Say what one may about the Blair-Brown years but I’m not sure even they would be mad brazen enough to try something like this: The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s No. 2 official apologized yesterday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters listened on a telephone
As someone who has, er, fond teenage memories of being barked at by NCOs from the Black Watch during hours of drill on the parade-ground and rather fonder recollections of cricket matches against the regiment, I’ve been looking forward for months to seeing Gregory Burke’s prize-winning play about the regiment’s experiences in Iraq during its
Andrew Sullivan really doesn’t like Hillary Clinton. Fair enough. I look forward to seeing him make the case for Barack Obama in next month’s Atlantic. Andrew’s taken to calling Hillary “Nixon in a Pant Suit” and “She Who Is Inevitable”. Again, fair enough and good knockabout stuff. The latter appelation, mind you, made me wonder
Lots of talk about the Laffer Curve these days as folk argue over whether it a) exists at all and b) under what circumstances it might be applicable if a) is true. But it seems odd to me that fiscal conservatives in either the US or the UK would seek to make the argument that
Via Julian Sanchez, here’s a documentary I hope reaches DC soon. Just the ticket: a movie about – drum roll please – debating. Like Julian, mind you, I’d rather it focused on proper debating – by which i mean, naturally, British Parliamentary style – rather than the mad, mad, mad world of American Policy debating
Rudy Giuliani in Iowa: Asked at a community meeting here whether he considered waterboarding torture, Mr. Giuliani said: “It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.” I think what that means is that if the Iranians were to waterboard a captured US pilot it would be
David Frum reads Robert Draper’s Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, and reports [emphasis added]: If he [Bush] has anything more to say, it will have to wait for later. But my guess is that he has nothing to say. What Ulysses S. Grant said of himself is true of George W. Bush:
I’ve a piece in the new edition of The American Conservative looking at Rudy Giuliani’s trip to London last month – a trip designed to make Rudy seem like an international statesman who can claim, however implausibly, to be the heir to Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Hmmm indeed. It was an audacious gambit that
A splendid Daily Telegraph obituary of Sammy Duddy, a, er, colourful figure in Loyalist paramilitary circles: Sammy Duddy, who died on October 17 aged 62, had a rather unusual curriculum vitae for a member of the Loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association in having been a drag artiste who went by the stage name of Samantha.
A bar worth making the effort to visit: DC grants first exemption to its brutal ban on smoking in pubs.
I highly recommend Ryan Lizza’s dissection of Mitt Romney’s campaign in the current issue of The New Yorker. If, after eight years of presidential overstretch, you’re looking for a period of calm and a President who might adopt a more restrained view of what he might be able to achieve, might I suggest that a
Republican Facebook? Well, an amusing parody anyway. [Hat-tip Crooked Timber]
Mike Crowley has a jolly piece* in the new issue of The New Republic in which he gallantly makes the case for Fred Thompson. Or rather, strictly speaking, suggests that it’s wrong to pick on Thompson’s laziness (there being, after all, many other, better, reasons to be suspicious of Thompson’s potemkin candidacy). Still, candidates are
Great. Not content with introducing one ridiculous, potentially series-killing storyline (the whole Landry killing a man and dumping the body in the river thing, you know) Friday Night Lights decides it needs a second: hence this evening’s nonsense about Street seeking a miracle cure in Mexico so he may walk again*. This is schlock. And
Sweet, sweet piece on the great Serge Gainsbourg in Vanity Fair. Jane Birkin describes their daily routine in the 1970s as follows: they woke up at three in the afternoon; she picked up the children at school and took them to the park, brought them home for a children’s dinner, the au pair would give
The New York Times’ Martin Fackler has your most entertaining story of the day. Magnificent stuff, and oddly charming too: On a narrow Tokyo street, near a beef bowl restaurant and a pachinko parlor, Aya Tsukioka demonstrated new clothing designs that she hopes will ease Japan’s growing fears of crime. Deftly, Ms. Tsukioka, a 29-year-old