Atlantic Rift

The end

2006-12-30T18:17:00.000-05:00

Life has become increasingly hectic as this year has gone on, for reasons including a bigger workload at my day job, the odd bit of freelancing, some light playwriting, and the unexpected urge to move in with my girlfriend.

The upshot of this is, as any regular readers will have noticed, my blogging has slowed to a standstill. Whether this will change in the New Year, I can't say; but I wouldn't put money on it, unless you want to a) lose it, and b) get a really weird look from a rather bemused bookie.

However, I thought I should at least make one last post before 2006 winds down. And with his speech on how the execution of Saddam Hussein marks the end of 'a dark chapter in Iraq's history', Iraqi prime minister Nouri Maliki made the choice of subject rather obvious.

I was on the fence about the invasion of Iraq. On the one hand: wicked tyrant created by Britain and America, a threat to regional stability, and those terrifying weapons of mass destruction. On the other, pre-emptive war is a bloody scary precedent, Iraq had bugger all to do with 9-11, and we were all told lies by our governments to persuade us it was a good idea.

As it has turned out, the case against was the stronger. This is partly because it's clearly made us less safe (remember July 7th?). But perhaps more worryingly, it turned out that the detailed battle plan put together by the finest military minds the US had to offer consisted entirely of the words, "Invade Baghdad! Freedom is on the march!", followed by 400 blank pages where a plan for reconstruction was supposed to be.

Through all this mess, though, the one thing that everyone seemed to agree on was the Saddam Was Bad. He killed hundreds of thousands; he created an apartheid in which a Sunni minority ruled over the Shiites and the Kurds; he invaded neighbouring states; and, in one bizarre televised incident, he felt up a ten year old boy. Let's face it, this guy was nuts.

And now he's dead. That should be a good thing, right? So why was it that reading the headlines this morning, I felt my skin crawling?

Partly I suspect it's because Saddam is the first 'celebrity' to be executed in my lifetime. (Well, there was Ceausescu, but I was nine at the time and more interested in what Father Christmas had brought me.)

But partly also it's because of the horribly excited way in which the incident has been greeted by parts of the media. The Star, the British tabloid for those who find the Sun too intellectually taxing, ran the headline "Happy Noose Year" over a mocked up picture of... well, you can guess the rest. As I write, the frontpage over at Fox News is offering us video footage of Saddam actually having the noose tied around him.

...does this strike anyone else as just a little barbaric? A man had been executed as a direct result of Anglosphere foreign policy - and people are cheering. Aren't the values that we're supposed to be trying to export to the Middle East precisely the ones which would tell us to rise above this kind of thing?

And isn't 'an eye for an eye' such a monumentally fucking stupid ethical code, that Aeschylus was writing plays about how it screws people up twenty five fucking centuries ago?

One suspects there are going to be a lot of angry Sunnis out there right now - and they weren't exactly feeling serene to start with. And then there are Saddam's mates over in Palestine's Hamas-led government, who now have yet another excuse for refusing to sit down and talk peace with the Israelis.

Still, as Bush and Blair will keep reminding us, Saddam was evil. That of course makes everything that flows from his death entirely justified, doesn't it.

Anyway. Happy new year to one and all. In Lovell-related news, check this out.

The headline laughs

2006-12-11T14:23:00.000-05:00

Surely this headline from the International Herald Tribune this weekend was written with a thick dose of black humor? It reads:

White House commends Chile for surviving 'difficult period' of Pinochet reign

Hitchens has a good write-up on the man and his sins.

Spaced out

2006-12-05T11:54:00.000-05:00

I heard this story on the radio this morning: NASA is planning to start building a colony on the moon in 2020. What was once science fiction could become science fact in 15 years or so.

Dropped amid the latest body count from Baghdad and the odd bit of good news—Pakistan offering an olive branch to India over Kashmir—the new space plans seemed almost a quaint.

But immediately I wondered, surely the Chinese can somehow do this faster and more efficiently?

The lengths they'll go to to publicize a Bond film

2006-12-05T05:48:00.000-05:00

Don't know if this one's getting much coverage in the States: London has turned into the set of Smiley's People.

Former Russian spy Alexander Livtenenko, who later defected and became a British citizen, fell mysteriously ill and died after meeting with some former associates. This became a whole lot less mysterious once it became clear that someone had stuck a chunk of polonium-210 into his food, thus irradiating him from the inside out.

Anyway, the Russians aren't too happy at how seriously the British police are looking into this one. From a daily email sent out by the BBC's Newsnight:

Tensions are rising between Britain and Russia over the poisoning of the former Russian secret agent, Alexander Litvenenko. Moscow is accusing British officials of helping to whip up an "unacceptable" campaign against Russia. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that relations between the two countries were being harmed.

...Is anyone else resisting the urge to splutter, "Well, you shouldn't have bloody well killed him then!"?

Keepin’ it real

2006-12-01T11:41:00.001-05:00

George Packer had a leader in last week’s issue of the New Yorker, which is no longer online, lamenting how US foreign policy is now firmly headed down the realist foreign policy path. Discussing the influence of decidedly non-Neo Cons Robert Gates and James Baker III on White House foreign policy decisions going forward, Packer writes:

These are the same men who, fifteen years ago, abandoned Afghanistan to civil war and Al Qaeda, allowed Saddam to massacre his own people and concluded that genocide in the Balkans was none of America’s business. They are not the guardians of all wisdom. At some point, events will remind Americans that currently discredited concepts such as humanitarian intervention and nation-building have a lot to do with national security—that they originated as necessary evils to prevent greater evils. But, for now, Kissinger is king.

In other words, to quote Dr. Phil, the entire US political establishment has decided its “time to get real,” with the possible exception of John McCain who is suggesting we send more troops in. (Though, as Frank Rich pointed out, he probably knows this isn’t going to happen.)

The rest of the GOP, despite their lip service, have long since abandoned their short-lived flirtation with neo-conservatism and are going back to the position President Bush espoused in the 2000 primaries. One prominent right-winger pundit proclaimed, essentially, Iraq is the Democrats problem now. And the Dems, who won the election based on some vague notion of leaving ASAP, have found a newfound respect for the Scowcroft set.

This is the other casualty of the Bush Administration’s Iraq plan: The ability for the US to confidently work with other nations to solve increasingly global problems the world over: the natural resource issues Jonn has written about, strife in Africa and Palestine. The politicized push into Iraq discredited it, while the ongoing fallout from the war made sure people won’t support it again anytime in the immediate future.

It’s a shame. These “discredited concepts” could help in a place like Darfur, where 500,000 lives have been lost so far in the Second Sudanese Civil War. This week I stumbled onto the website of two filmmakers, Jason Mojica and Jim Malik, who are currently raising money to travel to Darfur next month and make a movie called Christmas in Darfur.

It’s the sort of gutsy reporting project we here at AR like, but the filmmakers admit they have an uphill battle. For one, intervention in Darfur isn’t the sort of thing that captures the imagination of the well-heeled, “war-weary” youth of the West. And forget sullen young people when the filmmakers note you can't even get through to the politicians. The filmmakers write in their web site:

[G]overnments have realized that there is absolutely zero percentage for them in stepping in to try to stop the bloodshed. They catch hell domestically ("No Blood for Oil!”, “Wag the Dog!”) or get pictures of the corpses of 19-year-old kids getting dragged through the street . . . . What this means is that the marginal value of each life has effectively dropped to zero. Kill 5 people, kill 500, kill 500,000 - it makes no difference - each added fatality has absolutely no policy impact and won’t change the situation one iota

With Kissinger Associates in charge of our current foreign policy and the Democrats racking up all manner of political points going along for the ride, Darfur isn’t going to be on the US foreign policy agenda anytime soon. But should that stop anything?

No, Mister Nasser, I expect you to die

2006-12-01T11:00:00.000-05:00

Former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden

Good heavens:

Britain drew up plans to cut the flow of the River Nile to Egypt to force President Gamal Abdel Nasser to give up the Suez Canal in 1956, files reveal.

Military officials believed they could harm agriculture and cut communications by reducing the flow of water, newly-released documents show.

The plan was outlined to Prime Minister Anthony Eden six weeks before British and French forces invaded Egypt.

But it was abandoned because of fears it would trigger a violent backlash.

See, this is what happens when you get too used to being top dog in world affairs. You start thinking you're a James Bond villain.

Now I'm half-expecting the Pentagon to demand protection money from developing countries, in exchange for not turning their giant space lasers on Lagos or Mumba.

London's Bridge is falling down

2006-11-30T08:22:00.000-05:00

When we started this blog, one of our flimsier aims was to write about the ins and outs of the relationship between our two countries: Aaron's an anglophile, I have an unhealthy fascination with American politics, we were wasting valuable time emailing each other about these things anyway, so we thought we might as well publish some of our ramblings. In this aim, we have spectacularly failed, even in weeks where we do manage more than one post.

At last, though, a story too good not to comment on. So, of course, I've commented somewhere that isn't here. (Whoopsie.) Over at the Sharpener:

I'm about as pro-American as anyone you'll find on the British left, and I agree that the Bush-Blair relationship is a sick joke. But... I think Myers has misunderstood the Prime Minister's motives on this one (...) Asking what Blair wanted in exchange for invading Iraq is a meaningless question. It's like asking what Tom Cruise would want in exchange for accepting an Oscar.

Downwardly Mobile

2006-11-23T05:41:00.000-05:00

Interesting economic history factoid I came across the other week: until the industrial revolution, your grandchildren were on average likely to end up doing significantly shittier work than you did.

Two reasons behind this. Firstly, economic growth was all but nonexistent. More people meant less food, which meant - rather upsettingly - starvation. So on the whole, populations didn't grow very much. And the number of 'good' jobs stayed pretty stable.

Secondly, reproduction rates were higher at the top of the economic ladder - that is, the rich were likely to have more children that made it past puberty than the poor did. Multiply that by a couple of generations, and a lord was likely to have a lot more descendants than his serfs.

But, of course, with the number of good jobs frustratingly static, all those kids couldn't grow up to be lords like great granddaddy was. Luckily, there were convenient labour gaps at the more poverty stricken end of the economy because those damned peasants kept snuffing it. So everyone could move down a level.

There were exceptions, of course. But the result was that the overriding economic tendency was towards downward mobility: on average, each generation could expect lives slightly worse than their parents had. This is the exact opposite of the scenario the western middle classes have got used to the last couple of centuries.

Resources, and lack thereof

2006-11-16T10:53:00.000-05:00

I am, as has been noted, incredibly busy again. So, two quickies:

1) At a health conference on Tuesday I was informed that costs in Britain's National Health Service - led by wages and high tech drugs - are rising at a rate of 6% a year. After next year's Comprehensive Spending Review, NHS funding will be rising at an expected 3% a year. You think we're seeing cuts now? Just you wait.

2) On the Sharpener I'm asking - what do we do when the planet runs out?

Too rich for words

2006-11-13T14:24:00.000-05:00

Far-right blog Red State is always good for some funny comments. They had an interesting take on Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi's choice of Rep. John Murtha as House Majority Leader:

With the next Speaker's support, odds are that 25-years after
the Democrat-controlled House Ethics Committee cleared Murtha of all charges in
the ABSCAM scandal, Okinawa Jack finally will get the leadership position to
which he had been working before getting caught.

Just to recap some more recent history than ABSCAM: Before John Boehner replaced him after he was indicted, your Majority Leader was, how do we say this, Tom DeLay.

Then, last week, corruption was cited as a major factor in the Democrats retaking the House.

So, you know, maybe wait a few days before you start tossing around 20-year old corruption allegations.

Altman in Iraq

2006-11-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

This NY Times piece from this morning read more like a scene from a Robert Altman movie than a newspaper article, complete with unlikely bedfellows and witty, off-the-cuff banter.

Hashim al-Menti smiled wanly at the marine sergeant beside him
on his couch. The sergeant had appeared in the darkness on Wednesday night,
knocking on the door of Mr. Menti’s home.

When Mr.
Menti answered, a squad of infantrymen swiftly moved in, making him an
involuntary host.

Since then marines had been on his roof with rifles,
watching roads where insurgents often planted bombs.

Mr. Menti had
passed the time watching television. Now he had news. He spoke in broken
English. “Rumsfeld is gone,” he told the sergeant, Michael A. McKinnon.
“Democracy,” he added, and made a thumbs-up sign. “Good.”

The marines had
been on a continuous foot patrol for several days, hunting for insurgents. They
were lost in the hard and isolating rhythms of infantry life. They knew nothing
of the week’s news.

Now they were being told by an Iraqi whose house
they occupied that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, one of the principal
architects of the policies that had them here, had resigned. “Rumsfeld is gone?”
the sergeant asked. “Really?”

Mr. Menti nodded. “This is better for
Iraq,” he said. “Iraqi people say thank you.”

The sergeant went upstairs
to tell his marines, just as he had informed them the day before that the
Republican Party had lost control of the House of Representatives and that
Congress was in the midst of sweeping change. Mr. Menti had told them that,
too.

“Rumsfeld’s out,” he said to five marines sprawled with rifles on
the cold floor.

Lance Cpl. James L. Davis Jr. looked up from his
cigarette. “Who’s Rumsfeld?” he asked.

Random notes on the recent rapture

2006-11-09T18:15:00.000-05:00

In the blizzard of words and articles following Tuesday’s election in the US (and today’s confirmation that both houses were, indeed, sacked by the Dems) and the cheery-on-top resignation of Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday, there probably isn’t much to add at this point. Like Jonn, I didn't think they could do it.

A few quick, random notes:

The news that Dick Cheney was against shoving Rummy out of the lifeboat served only to endear the VP to the conservatives, at the expense of his boss who they had already disliked for a good 12 hours or so. It didn’t help Bush with the right flank that he had the incoming Majority Speaker Nancy Pelosi over to the White House for lunch the same day.
As one AR commenter asked the other day, what are the Dems really going to do now that they have both houses of Congress? Will they, as the GOP faithful have been screaming for months, use their subpoena to drag people up to Capital Hill? Will they try to impeach President Bush? Are they going to create a solid base for 2008?
God knows what they’ll do, but there’ll certainly be more investigations than we’ve seen as of late. The whole sordid tale of the outgoing Congress can be read here, every insult nicely cataloged by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. It’s blood-boiling stuff.
Perhaps the more interesting story from Tuesday is this: The Dems did pretty well at the state-level, picking up six governorships and nine legislatures. It’s the sort of help that could turn an Ohio—which jumped into the arms of the Democratic Party this week—in a tight election. As the pundits have pointed out all week, it might have made a difference in the 2004 presidential race.
Why is Bush dusting off the Spring-2001, uniter-not-a-divider shtick? Because all those Dems forgot about the last six years, right?
Right-wing blog Red State came out with a piece today declaring that it’s going to “fight on.” Not sure who asked, but, like a lot of the response from the right-wing blogs and pundits—which, for the most part, just congratulated one another on not complaining about voter fraud like those pesky, uppity Democrats—it seemed like a pretty defensive pose. Particularly coming from a site that, for months leading up to the election, was mind-numbingly smug.

Rapture!

2006-11-08T12:15:00.000-05:00

I have never before been so utterly ecstatic to be so utterly wrong.

All day long I've been periodically breaking into a smirk, and have had the theme from Team America: World Police stuck in my head ("America - fuck, yeah!").

There is a niggling part of me that suspects that, like the removal of Margaret Thatcher from 10 Downing Street sixteen years ago this month, this does just make it more likely the right will make gains at the next election. But there's such a simple, natural justice in it that it somehow doesn't dent my mood.

Nice one, Democrats. Now prove you were worth it.

More losers

2006-11-07T12:04:00.000-05:00

A couple of depressing quotes from coverage of the US midterm elections on this morning's Today.

Republican activist Grover Norquist - the man who compared the estate tax to the Holocaust - said that if the Democrats lost this time he expected the Republicans to stay in power for a another 20 years, thanks to the control over redistricting victory will bring them.

But that's okay, because the guys on the other side of the trenches have a through and detailed plan for victory. This is former Senator Tom Daschle, once the Democrats' leader in the upper house, on what the party needs to do to win. "And this point, all the voters want us to do is show that we're not Bush and the Republicans. Later they'll want more, but now that's all they want."

And if this ingenious strategy doesn't quite cut it, and the Democrats lose anyway? "It would show us as feckless and incompetent."

I don't have these word for word - I mean, I heard them once, eight hours ago - but somehow "feckless and incompetent" sticks in the memory.

Why am I getting this sinking feeling that tomorrow isn't going to be a happy day.

Still just a bunch of losers

2006-11-03T12:49:00.000-05:00

Muggins here got lumbered with kicking off a new slot at the Sharpener, the Friday debate (which has, so far, failed to spark any debate whatsoever, you notice). My hypothesis is simple:

The Democrats will lose the midterms. And that’s probably all they deserve.

Pop over and argue with me, if you like.

Light my fire

2006-11-01T06:57:00.000-05:00

One of the nuttier ideas you may have missed over the weekend: Britain's police have suggested making flag-burning a criminal offence:

The plans have been drawn up by Scotland Yard and submitted to the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, by Britain's most senior Muslim police chief, Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur.

Mr Ghaffur, responsible for public order in the capital, said he was concerned the UK had come to be seen at home and abroad as soft on extremist demonstrators. (...)

Mr Malik, MP for Dewsbury, said burning a flag was clearly an incitement to violence practised by a small number of "thugs" who get to the front of demonstrations.

"They hijack what are very legitimate and peaceful protests. Not only do they spoil it, but they have the potential to turn it into something much more sinister."

I mean, I'm all for American imports, but come on.

I can't say I altogether understand how telling fundamentalists that burning the Zambian flag is now a criminal offence is supposed to make them think twice about holding violent demonstrations. Is anyone who is willing to advocate the killing of innocent civilians really going to be put off by the thought that they might get nicked for setting light to a piece of cloth? What exactly are they supposed to be thinking here? ("Oh, well, I was going to march to show our displeasure at the west's lack of respect for Allah, may peace up upon him. But without the flag burning part I'll be bored shitless, so I think I'll stay in and play X-box instead.")

I suspect that this one isn't intended to change the situation on the ground at all: after all, as Shuggy notes, the police already have powers to deal with this stuff.

Rather, these proposals are just signal politics for the benefit of the general public. They're supposed to tell us, "Look how tough we're being to protect you."

This would be all very well, except for the fact that public authorities tend to use their powers to the greatest of their abilities - not because we've got a sinister police state brewing, but simply because it makes it easier to Get Stuff Done. If this law were to pass, we'll have suspects found in possession of a Norwegian flag and a lighter, claiming police fitted them up, you mark my words.

Life imitates art

2006-10-31T17:42:00.000-05:00

As avid AR reader Art pointed out this afternoon, something sounded strangely familiar about Sen. John Kerry’s comments about how if you don’t do well in school you’re going to end up in Iraq. On Monday, Kerry said:

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

I must admit I haven’t caught the Simpsons in some time, but the following exchange is from a recent, George W. Bush-era episode where Bart is apparently kicked out of Springfield Elementary following a prank:

Marge: Bart, I love you, but sometimes I don’t love your choices. (sigh) Now we have to find another school for you.

Homer: Yeah, and if you get kicked out of that one you’re going straight in the army where you’ll be sent straight to America’s latest military quagmire. Where will it be? North Korea? Iran? Anything’s possible with Commander Cuckoo-Bananas in charge.

During the statement flurry that followed, Kerry said he misspoke—it was obviously meant to be a swipe at the administration, not the US armed forces—and even stood up to White House spokesperson Tony Snow, saying: "I'm not going to be lectured by a stuffed-suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium or doughy Rush Limbaugh."

Which leaves a lot of Democrats shaking their heads and wondering: Where was this guy two years ago today?

Ad nauseam

2006-10-26T09:54:00.000-04:00

Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh made headlines this week when he accused actor Michael J. Fox of “acting” to make his Parkinson’s Disease look worse in this commercial. (We’ll chalk the fact up that it’s just sort of a tasteless thing to say up to the fact that it’s Limbaugh and move on.)

Fox has made a number of ads about stem cells in support of a number of Democratic senatorial candidates—including Mary McCaskill in Missouri who supports a state amendments barring legislative interference with federal embryonic stem-cell research.

The right fired back with this (you need to click on the video icon)—it’s a counter-ad featuring disease experts and medical luminaries like St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Jeff Suppan, Kansas City Royal Mike Sweeney, former St. Louis Rams quarterback Kurt Warner, actress Patricia Heaton and the guy who played Jesus in that Mel Gibson movie. It was suppose to air during the World Series game last night, which was cancelled because of rain.

One has to wonder what Limbaugh’s reaction to this second ad will be.

Surely one can argue these folks are “acting”—they're acting like they know what the hell they’re talking about.

I'm a glass half full kind of a president

2006-10-26T09:43:00.000-04:00

I swear to god, Bush sounds like he's about three days away from hiring the Iraqi information minister as his new press secretary. From the latest speech:

US President George W Bush says he is unhappy with the progress of the war in Iraq, admitting that a recent upsurge in violence is a "serious concern".

"I know many Americans are not satisfied with the situation in Iraq," he said. "I'm not satisfied either."

'You think you're pissed? How the hell do you think I feel? You think this was the plan? What the hell are our soldiers doing out there? Didn't they see my victory banner on that boat all those years ago? How do they think it makes me look?'

He said the deaths of 93 US troops and 300 Iraqi security personnel in the last month were of "serious concern" to him.

...because we're running out of troops to replace them with. Say, should we think about bringing back that draft thing Dad got me out of?

Civilians had suffered "unspeakable violence at the hands of the terrorists, insurgents, illegal militias, armed groups and criminals," he said.

'Not to mention kids from the mid west who failed to graduate High School. Still, we got some funny photos, so I guess that's the important thing. Ha! He's hooded! He don't know where he is!'

If the US was not successful in Iraq, he said, extremists could use it as a base from which to try to establish a "radical empire from Spain to Indonesia".

'Yes, we have intelligence telling us that the Costa Brava will form the heart of the new caliphate.'

Mr Bush defended the role of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has faced a barrage of criticism for the way the Iraq war has been fought.

"I'm satisfied with how he's done all his jobs," Mr Bush said, calling Mr Rumsfeld "a smart, tough, capable administrator".

...There isn't actually enough sarcasm in the world to respond to that one, is there? Which war is he watching?

In recent days senior Bush administration figures have increased pressure on the Iraqi government to rein in militias and death squads.

Mr Bush said that he was "making it clear that America's patience is not unlimited".

'So you guys better hurry the hell up and declare peace. Don't you know we got an election coming up?'

Thoughts from the Cloven One

2006-10-24T15:05:00.000-04:00

Bob Novak draws the ire of a lot of people on the left. (Wasn’t it Wonkette who said he had “cloven hooves”?) He wears three-piece suits and has a brusque, stand-off-ish manner. And he’s a far-right conservative.

But I have to say I’ve always liked the old-school, paleocon curmudgeon. Sure, he’s a conservative—but he’s not an uncritical one. Perhaps more importantly, he earned his stripes as a reporter and has been around so long he was trying to convince Rolling Stone’s Timothy Crouse that he shouldn’t be profiling him in The Boys on the Bus, a book about the 1972 presidential elections.

This was years before he developed shows like Crossfire and The Capital Gang for CNN (both good in their time) and decades before he walked off CNN during a live broadcast. (Yes, I thought that was pretty cool, too.)

So it was interesting to hear his take on the upcoming election on Meet the Press with Tim Russert on Sunday. He was asked about what a turnover in power could mean—Novak sees the House going Dem and says the Senate is too close to call:

[A]ll politicians always say, “This is the most important election we’ve ever
been in,” because it is to them. I would make the argument, this is one of the
least important elections I have seen because everybody is really looking ahead
at 2008 as an important election.

Because if the Democrats win the
House, as is, as is probable, then it’s—they can pass a lot of legislation, get
nowhere in the Senate. Senate is a very difficult thing to get through. And the
president will suddenly discover his veto pen that he had—that he had kept—lost
track of for six years.

I would still argue that retaking the House could provide the Dems a base to put forward a plan and better position themselves for 2008.

But it’s an interesting thought, nonetheless. Even if they take the House, it’s still going to be an uphill battle.

Laundry list

2006-10-23T12:34:00.000-04:00

Exchanging emails with Jonn about last week¹s revelation that the Bush Administration doesn’t take the religious right as seriously as it’d like them to think, our conversation quickly devolved into a list of how a once distressingly popular US President can find his way to a mid-thirties approval rating - and, at the same time, make sure his country becomes one of the most-feared laughingstocks in the world.

We’d like to think that our conversation makes a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to why 43 remains the worst. President. EVER. The call-and-response follows:

AL: Well, Bush would always pay lip service to the social conservatives¹ issues -- much to the chagrin to more mainstream Republicans.

I guess that's how you get to a 30-whatever approval rating: Alienate half of your base. Then alienate the other half.

Oh, and do a real half-ass job with a war. That helps, too.

JE: And screw up the economy, don't forget that.

And throw away your country's entire international prestige, just to shore up your gung ho base.

And try to appoint your Number One Biggest Fan to the Supreme Court.

AL: Make sure you don't catch that Osama guy.

And turn a brain-dead woman into a right-to-life crusade.

And if there is a really, really bad natural disaster in the south, fly over it in an airplane. But ignore it for a week first.

JE: Refuse to fire the Septuagenarian incompetent who has single-handedly gutted both the US military and a large chunk of the Middle East.

Declare a three-country axis of evil, and then watch helplessly as two of them develop nukes.

AL: Appoint an attorney general that recently lost his Senate race to a man that died in a plane crash a month before the election. Four years later, replace him with your lawyer.

When abroad, treat foreign leaders like they're your college roommates.

JE: Lock up a bunch of people without trial, and then spend so much time arguing about your constitutional prerogative to do so that it doesn't occur to you to bother to check if they're actually guilty.

The worst thing is, this post will almost inevitably be out of date very, very soon.

Declare war for peace

2006-10-20T12:49:00.002-04:00

My blogging has become increasingly lazy of late, for reasons to dull to bore you with. Until normal service is resumed, here's a placeholder - it's me in a rage over at the Sharpener about the idiocy of the arguments the pro-Bush lobby (such as it is) continues to use when claiming that the Iraq war has made us safer.

They will insist on wheeling out what one might term the "lump of jihad" fallacy, won't they?

Abraham & Barack

2006-10-19T15:14:00.000-04:00

It seems you can’t swing a dead cat in Illinois these days without hitting a columnist from one of the big coastal dailies.

David Brooks of the NY Times filed from the state capital of Springfield this morning after sitting down with Senator Barack Obama, while Gregory Rodriguez of the LA Times reported from, one might assume, a truckstop outside of Cairo earlier in the month, having just driven the length of the state, north to south.

The pieces covered completely different topics, but one passage in each stood out. While Rodriguez lays out the supposed red-blue cultural divide in the US as more of a North-South thing, he offers up Abraham Lincoln representative to the different cultures clashing in Illinois. He writes:

Born on the Kentucky frontier to Virginian parents, Honest Abe never lost his backwoods folksiness. But he turned his back on the South. He arrived in Illinois a country bumpkin and, in part because of the cultural influences and intellectual outlets around him, left a Northern politician

Finishing this, I turned to the Brooks’ piece about Obama, another tall, skinny guy from Illinois. (I don’t have a link as it’s on the pay part of the site, but it can be summed up by the first sentence: “Barack Obama should run for president.”)

In a graph Dems are sure to love—after all, Brooks is the conservative conservatives love to hate—he writes of the dual-nature he sees in Obama. It sounds a bit like the Rodriguez’s take on Lincoln pushed forward 150 years, a man from more than one place thrust into the national political limelight:

Obama himself has a mentality formed by globalization, not the S.D.S. With his multiethnic family and his globe-spanning childhood, there is a little piece of everything in Obama. He is perpetually engaged in an internal discussion between different pieces of his hybrid self — Kenya with Harvard, Kansas with the South Side of Chicago — and he takes that conversation outward into the world.

Obviously, Obama isn’t Lincoln. But what else is there to get excited about in the next two years?

The most discouraging number

2006-10-17T18:17:00.000-04:00

Listening to NPR’s daily political coverage this morning, I realized how depressing the “10 percent number” is. Ten percent is the amount of the 435 seats in the US House seats that are considered up-for-grabs in the November election.

It should be depressing to Republicans, as well as Democrats. Because of the partisan gerrymandering, there will never be another 1994. Of course, I don’t want another 1994 GOP takeover of Congress. But it always seemed sort of refreshing that that could exist. There could be a large-scale turnover of power in the country.

Combined with a two-party system that rewards loyalty, the closely gerrymandered districts force pols to tow the party line, regardless of whether a D or an R appears after their name. When was the last time the House produced a maverick that captured the nation’s attention? (OK, maybe Jim Traficant.) They’re all senators, big-city mayors and idiosyncratic governors.

When you think of the House, you think of calculated political moves designed to hijack a news-cycle or two and fire up the base: It’s all freedom fries and impeachment hearings. And is it any surprise the best scandals come out of the House?

So now push comes to shove: When the party that’s in power is mired in scandal and its party leader is facing some pretty poor approval ratings, when the country is bogged down in two wars which seem to get worse by the day, when the domestic agenda is mainly concerned with petty pandering, pork barrel politics and building a really long fence . . . .

We only have the opportunity to throw 10 percent of them out.

If you can't beat them...

2006-10-12T13:20:00.000-04:00

Tense? Nervous? Having sleepness nights about the possibility of a nuclear armed axis of evil?

No more. Boris Johnson, everyone's favourite Tory, has a solution. Let's switch sides:

The Iranians are one day going to possess a nuclear bomb; there is almost certainly nothing we can do about it; all our blustering and threats are pointless. Indeed, if all else fails, there may even be a case for giving the Iranians the bomb — that's right: maybe it is time for the Americans to take control themselves of this unstoppable programme.

If I am right in thinking that an Iranian bomb is not only inevitable, but also corresponds to the wishes of the people of Iran, then perhaps we could turn this whole thing on its head. Perhaps it is time to end the sense of terror, and suspicion, and escalating menace. Perhaps the Americans could actually assist with the technology, as they assist the United Kingdom, in return for certain conditions: that the Iranian leadership stops raving about attacking Israel, for instance, and that progress is made towards democracy, and so on.

The Iranian public might feel grateful, and engaged, and not demonised. Would it mean the end of Israel, which has 200 warheads of its own? Of course not. The logic of mutually assured destruction still applies, and even the mullahs are not mad enough to take on a country that could turn their desert into molten glass. (...)

The tragedy of growing up is that human beings acquire the means of killing themselves and others. (...) The Iranians will join in soon enough. It might be sensible if they did so in an atmosphere of co-operation and understanding, and not amid intensifying threats and hysteria...

The argument makes a kind of sense. America, thanks to Iraq, Afghanistan and the public's waning taste for war, no longer has either the resources nor the stomach for an invasion. And while a bombing campaign is feasible, it Lebanon taught us anything it's that bombing a country back to the stoneage isn't going to make their people like their leaders less and the west more. Indeed, it might only prove Ahmadinejad's point that Iran needs the bomb to defend itself.

The Republicans aren't going to go for it - hell, no one's going to go for it. But they're deluding themselves if they still think they can bomb their way to peace.

Fold your hands, child, you walk like a peasant

2006-10-09T13:44:00.000-04:00

Here we go again. Jack Straw, Britain's former foreign secretary, has suggested that it would help break down barriers between communities if the faces of Muslim women were not obscured by the Niqab. He wrote in a local newspaper that, in his duties as MP for Blackburn, a town in Lancashire with a large Muslim population, he asks Muslim women to remove their veils when speaking with him. He also stressed that he would never do so without another woman present and that, by and large, people have been happy to oblige.

The results have been... predictable. "Islamophobe!" cried a fair chunk of the Muslim lobby; "Islamofascist thought police in action!" came the retort from the right; "He's just lining himself up for the Labour deputy leadership race!" yell the politics pages; "Why can't we talk about these things without it descending into this &$@*ing hysteria?" weeps just about everyone else.

The debate has focused on a relatively small number of issues: whether headscarfs represent freedom or oppression for Muslim women; whether Straw was being naive or deliberately inflammatory; whether Islam requires such extreme coverings or whether women need merely 'dress modestly', which as as far as the Koran goes on this particular subject.

There is one thing that most of the coverage seems to have missed, though, that I only know of because of the Sharpener writers' mailing list - and that seems to be the key to the whole debate.

Jack Straw is deaf in his right ear. He relies partly on being able to see someone's face to make out what they are saying.

And whatever the myriad benefits or disadvantages of face coverings, one thing they are unequivocally useless as is tools to assist lip-reading.

Why this hasn't featured more prominently in the debate I don't know. Best explanation I've got is that there are plenty of people among both the Muslim and anti-multiculturalism lobbies who would rather be throwing rocks at each other than having the rational debate that Straw was asking for.

...we're screwed, aren't we?

ObLink: Sunny has a nice overview of the issues on this one.

But can you see it from space?

2006-10-05T09:39:00.000-04:00

I love this one. Of all the dumb things the Bush administration has said, done or screwed up over the last six years, this one may actually be my favourite.

The Republicans are going to save America from illegal immigration... by putting up a fence.

They essentially want to turn North America into the world's largest gated community. High tech security systems and gatekeepers will be employed to stop the plebs from sneaking their way into the leafy suburbs of Middle America, where they would be free to do appalling things like mix drinks and clean toilets.

There are some quite obvious practical problems here. The fence is planned to be only 700 miles long - and while that's still more than you could comfortably grow dahlias against, it's a good 1,200 miles shorter than the actual border. The rest of the border follows the Rio Grande - and while you and I may not think it worth trying to swim across a major river, just for the privilege of serving some plump Texans their lunch, I'm not convinced that the entire population of Latin America will agree.

A lot of these guys are already risking their life to get into the US - by crossing the desert, by cramming into container lorries alongside 40 or 50 other people, by (at least, if PJ O'Rourke is to be believed) clinging to the underside of trains. Do the Republicans really think these guys will be put off by one teensy little river crossing? And can those border guards really search every vehicle that crosses the border to check it isn't hiding 20 or 30 hungry looking Hispanics?

This is signal politics at its worst. The fence isn't intended to actually fix a problem - it's intended to make it look like someone's fixing it. In fact it's doing so just a month before the midterm elections. Now isn't that a convenient coincidence?

But the thing that worries me most about this entire project is - someone, somewhere, believed it would pass the giggle test. They thought that they could get away with sticking up a garden wall to keep Mexico out and that nobody would snigger.

And does that strike you as the action of someone you'd trust to run a superpower?

Leave it, Dave, they're not worth it!

2006-10-02T12:53:00.000-04:00

This week, we're told, Conservative leader David Cameron is going to have a moderately crappy time of it at his party conference thanks to a membership who think he's not sufficiently gung-ho about good old fashioned Tory ideals. The Guardian's Max Hastings writes that "Cameron is about to discover his big problem: the Conservative party"; a survey in the Independent finds that "Tories are at odds with Cameron's agenda".

And, right on cue, the scariest of the vultures are indeed beginning to circle. Janet Daley grumbles in the Telegraph that "It's not 'Right-wing' to believe in tax cuts: it's just good sense", which sounds unpleasantly like the kind of slogan that lost the party the 2005 election. The Mail's Melanie Phillips, meanwhile, is growling that "There are distinct limits to presenting politics as the new aromatherapy" (I'm unfortunately without a link to that one, but really don't think it's worth buying a copy of the Mail just to read a columnist as horribly bilious as Phillips). It seems that everyone and their dog thinks the bright young thing is at serious risk of getting his backside well and truly clobbered.

No matter how I look at it, though, I think that's misreading it. I think he wants a fight. After all, in 1985 Labour's Neil Kinnock took on the militant tendency; ten years later, Tony Blair played a similar game by abandoning "clause four", the part of the party's constitution that committed it to spreading public ownership of industry and commerce as far as the eye can see.

Leaders of opposition parties with image problems need that symbolic battle. It isn't enough in itself - Kinnock still failed spectacularly to win two elections after his battle, after all - but it goes a long way towards showing that the leader is on the side of the electorate, and not that of their own party's extremists. The fact that so many commentators are convinced that the party faithful will once again drag it back to the right merely shows that Cameron still needs this battle.

That, I suspect, is why he keeps going on about how economic stability matters more than tax cuts, even though the party has admitted that it wants to use some of the proceeds of growth to cut taxes. It's probably also why shadow chancellor George Osborne is muttering darkly that taxes might even have to rise, which is just about the stupid thing any conservative anywhere could ever say to their supporters. They're actually trying to provoke the right. If they don't, how are the electorate to see that the party has really moved away from the right-wing ground from where it has lost the last three elections?

I don't think he's worried. Actually, I suspect he can't wait.

Is there an election coming up?

2006-09-29T17:24:00.000-04:00

Having largely left the trench-fighting up to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney for the past several years, President Bush has now launched his own direct attack on the Democrats and people who dare to critique his foreign policy:

Five years after 9/11, the worst attack on the American homeland in our history, the Democrats offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless second-guessing. The party of F.D.R. and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.

Forgetting for a moment that the Dems have long ceased to be the party of FDR, the President continued:

The American people need to know what withdrawal from Iraq would mean. By withdrawing from Iraq before the job is done, we would be doing exactly what the extremists and terrorists want.

And—apparently—seven out of ten Iraqis (remember them?). According to a recent poll, the majority of Iraqi respondents believe the US should commit to withdrawal within a year. According to the pollsters:

If the US made a commitment to withdraw, a majority believes that this would strengthen the Iraqi government. Support for attacks on US-led forces has grown to a majority position—now six in ten. Support appears to be related to a widespread perception, held by all ethnic groups, that the US government plans to have permanent military bases in Iraq.

And about those horrible, second-guessing Democrats and Republicans: Anyone who has picked up a newspaper in the last three years (or in the last two months, which have seen more than 7,000 Iraqi civilian casualties in addition to those suffered by US forces) might be wondering: perhaps there hasn’t been enough second guessing?

(Yeah, I know, parsing the words of a Bush speech is like looking at fish in a barrel these days. Off to Singapore and Indonesia next week, but hope to get back in time to see some of the real carnage in the last four weeks leading up to the November mid-terms. For instance, noone had factored this into their House calculations, did they?)

Physician, heal thyself

2006-09-27T10:58:00.000-04:00

On the Sharpener today I'm rambling on about the failures of British business, and their insistence that it's all the government's fault:

The British business community complains, pretty much constantly, that the tax-and-regulation-happy policies instituted during nine years of Labour government are risking our national competitiveness. That jobs, capital and rich people alike are going to start flooding out of the country in a nigh apocalyptic panic because Gordon Brown wants to spend more money on spurious stuff like schools and hospitals. That if the government doesn’t buck its ideas up sharpish, it won’t be long before the population of Bradford will be working in call centres and attending training sessions involving Bollywood movies, while the population of Mumbai and Bangalore panic about outsourcing...

But this morning I came across something that cheered me somewhat, courtesy of the excellent New Economist blog. It’s the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2006-07, which ranks the countries of the industrialized world based on their ability to compete in the global economy. Its commentary on the UK is… enlightening...

Why not check it out - passes the time, doesn't it?

It's getting ugly

2006-09-26T10:57:00.000-04:00

Here’s one way to win a Senate race if you’re six weeks out and the poll numbers aren’t in your favor: Make a mockery of the two-party system by backing a third-party candidate for the sole purpose of cutting into your opponents lead.

It’s allegedly what Sen. Rick Santorum and the GOP is doing in his race against Pennsylvania treasurer Bob Casey, but the plan sort of backfired when a judge ordered the candidate off the ballot yesterday for having too many invalid signatures.

Embarrassingly, Santorum had to debate the ghost candidate this morning, putting into a situation that might, according to libertarian blog Reason, “be the first case of a candidate debating another candidate who isn't technically running against him.”

Santorum’s back-handed support of the candidate, Carl Romanelli, is certainly politics of the most cynical order.

Funny, then, that Santorum is also running an ad that accuses Casey of being the one doing the backroom wheeling-and-dealing. According to the NY Times, it depicts:

[A] room that is literally smoke-filled, with a group of cigar-smoking men (who
are actors) playing cards, and clearly up to no good.

“Meet Bob
Casey’s campaign team,” the announcer intones, citing unnamed developers and
businessmen who have contributed to Mr. Casey and are now under investigation.
Only when the camera pans back is it clear where the men are meeting — behind
bars.

The spot reads like a sketch-comedy version of a political attack ad or, better yet one of the ads in Bob Roberts, a mockumentary about, you guessed it, a Pennsylvania Senate race.

A non-partisan group has declared the ad "misleading," while the Annenberg Public Policy Center pointed out the small fact that the same group of PA businessmen also made contributions to previous Santorum campaigns.

Better stick to the “third-party, vote-siphoning candidate” strategy.

The I-didn't-do-it guy

2006-09-23T08:07:00.000-04:00

Friends of Gordon Brown, Britain's Chancellor and the man most likely to succeed Tony Blair as Prime Minister some time over the next 11 months, have hinted at what a first step in a Brownite health policy would look like: an independent NHS board, with politicians taking fewer key decisions.

Anglophiles may remember that Brown's first, much praised move when he took over Britain's finances back in 1997 was to make the Bank of England independent... with politicians (e.g. him) taking fewer key decisions over piffling little things like interest rates.

Now there are good arguments for depoliticizing the NHS in this way: it's Europe's biggest employer, so it's a bit unfair to expect the British government to take responsibility for everything that happens in it, particularly when they also have terrorism, half a dozen wars, and the economy to worry about as well. So giving an independent board real power but making it accountable to Parliament could be a smart move.

But... does this look to anyone else like Brown's first priority when taking on any important job is to wash his hands of any responsibilities that could get him in trouble?

Rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated

2006-09-22T10:27:00.000-04:00

The American writer Noam Chomsky was declared dead by Hugo Chavez yesterday, in New York for the General Assembly of the UN, who said one of his greatest regrets was not meeting the famed linguist.

As numerous newspapers have reported, Chomsky is very much alive and living in suburban Massachusetts.

Chavez also suggested Americans read Chomsky, rather than watch comic book movies like Superman and Batman; somewhat surprisingly, his recommendation launched Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance to the top of the charts at the large online booksellers. It’s now destined to gather dust on millions of US bookshelves, right next to A Brief History of Time.

The mix-up does give good reason to link to this, a 1969 appearance by Chomsky on William F. Buckley Jr.’s long-running PBS series Firing Line. The second part is here.

The autumn of our discontent

2006-09-21T17:00:00.000-04:00

Reading today’s NY Times poll story—which points out only a quarter of the polled feel the Congress is doing a good job and more than 71 percent of respondents don’t trust the government—should be music to the ears of Democrats across the land.

The paper even points out fact that satisfaction with incumbents is as low as it was during the 1994 mid-terms, when Newt Gingrich and his far-right flank rode into to Washington to clean it up. Carrying around his toilet seats and ice buckets, which, along with their high price tags were easy symbols of government largesse, Gingrich et al rode the wave of discouragement in majorities in both the House and the Senate—the former chamber they hadn’t lead since the 1950s.

But the article is quick to squash any excitement of Dems hoping to recreate 1994: Partisan gerrymandering has created fewer and fewer in-play seats—around 40 last count, compared to 100 in 1994—which undercuts any sort of large-scale popular “throw-the-bums-out” movement while sucking a lot of the fun out of national politics, as well.

One could go a bit further—in 2006, it’s easy to forget the role of the dreadful “Contract with America” in that 1994 mid-term election. While silly, this 8-point program tied together an array of GOP challengers in the House, giving them a single script to read from. With the help of the media, the “contract” turned the mid-term elections into a national crusade.

OK, so what if few of the planks were enacted into law and the “Contract” itself was ill though-out and poll-driven? (Laughably, one of the bullet points was term limits, something most signatories have conveniently forgotten about.) It gave the GOP dominance in Washington that has lasted, despite a 2000-ish hiccup in the Senate, to the present day.

It’d be cynical to suggest that the Dems should—or could—throw together their own “Contract” that would resonate with voters. (Though it’s not too late—the “Contract with America” was introduced a scant six weeks before the election.) But the dominance the “Contract” had on the 1994 elections and 94-95 Congressional term was noticeable and long-lasting.

In times of this sort of widespread discouragement, it seems, people are looking for some sort of coalescing force, something set of beliefs to replace the current malaise. In 1994, the GOP were out of power, had just lost the presidency and just sat through two years of legislative gridlock—less than two years later, they’d passed their welfare reform bill and dominated the Legislative branch. To take advantage of the discontent, you need to offer people something more than the “we’re-not-them” line currently being peddled by the Dems.

Still, the paper reports that 43 percent of respondents are more enthused about voting than usual. People are excited about voting and hate the people running things—with no real national strategy, that could be the best news of all for Democrats.

Dog bites man

2006-09-20T09:44:00.000-04:00

I'm irritatingly, upsettingly, agonizingly busy right now. So instead of the ramblings regarding French politics that I was thinking on gracing you with after my three day wander round various Parisian office blocks last week, you'll have to make do instead with some rather shorter ramblings on Hungary. Where, as you may have noticed, there have been two nights of riots.

Because a politician lied.

Just think about that for a moment.

How much more fun would politics be in the west if we all got to do that? "There is a clear link between Saddam an Al-Qaeda..." Hit the streets! "...can launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes..." Loot! Pillage! "...no secret CIA prisons..." Burn them in their beds until they're good and crispy!

I'm not advocating violence here (well, I am, but only for a laugh). But Budapest ablaze (not to mention the Thai tanks is a reminder of how much less mature democracy is in most places outside North America and Western Europe. Most of us expect our governments to lie. There are rules to this deception - at least until recently, lying to Parliament was supposed to be a resigning offence in Britain, so the biggest porkies were restrained to outside the House of Commons - but I suspect that the vast, vast majority of western voters would file "politicians lie" under W for "Well, duh."

And the thing is... the lie Ferenc Gyurcsany, the Hungarian PM, told wasn't even that big. I mean, he did say '"we lied morning, noon and night," in a speech punctuated by obscenities', yes yes, but what he was essentially doing was lying to the electorate about the state of the country's finances and the scale of economic reform it needed.

Now find me a speech by Jacques Chirac, or Gerhard Schroeder, or just about anyone in Italian politics, where they haven't effectively done just that.

Gotta admire the naive trust and enthusiasm of the Hungarian electorate, though. Aren't they just the sweetest thing?

Losers of the Year

2006-09-14T11:59:00.000-04:00

“Whatever happened to all this season's losers of the year?”
--Cheap Trick, “Surrender”

Ever the optimists, it seems the Republican Party is increasingly looking at how a loss could be helpful in the mid-term elections. Washington Monthly asked a whole host of right-wingers—including Bruce Bartlett, Joe Scarborough, and Bruce Fein—to wonder if a loss in November would jolt the part out of its big spendin’, not-particularly-conservative ways.

A lot of the essays are sort of lame, let-the-country-see-how-it-likes-Pelosi-type arguments, but particularly readable is Christopher Buckley’s take on the party’s current malaise:

On Capitol Hill, a Republican Senate and House are now distinguished by—or perhaps even synonymous with—earmarks, the K Street Project, Randy Cunningham (bandit, 12 o’clock high!), Sen. Ted Stevens’s $250-million Bridge to Nowhere, Jack Abramoff (Who? Never heard of him), and a Senate Majority Leader who declared, after conducting his own medical evaluation via videotape, that he knew every bit as much about the medical condition of Terry Schiavo as her own doctors and husband.

Though I’m not sure exactly how restoring George H. W. Bush to office would help matters, self-criticism of any sort is usually pretty refreshing.

While you could see Buckley as some sort of conservative rogue, this sort of sinking thinking seems to be entering the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Enter Ramesh “Party of Death” Ponnuru, who joined the chorus in the New York Times this morning. You can sort of guess Ponnuru’s dream situation, laid out in his usual noxious prose: The Democrats take the House in November and, driven by the fringes of their party, wouldn’t be able to handle their new-found control. “Powerlessness has stoked their rage,” you see. The Republicans, of course, ever calm and logical, would smartly use the opportunity to strengthen the party and prepare for 2008. So a loss would really be a good thing, you see.

Seeing a lot of name-brand conservatives pulling for GOP losses in November does give one pause. Sure, a lot of this is wishful thinking and positive spin. Despite Ponnuru’s fantasies and the ever-shortening newscycle, a party doesn’t slip out of favor like the GOP have and then, with an unpopular president and do-nothing Senate, stage some sort of radical reformation two years later.

But, then again, with the events of the past six years, does the country really want these guys slipping out of the back door in the mid-term night? Perhaps the best situation for the Democrats—in terms of taking the White House and Congress in 2008—is another two years of the Republicans?

Five years

2006-09-11T18:40:00.000-04:00

Around here, the media coverage was inescapable. So rather than add a piece of questionable commentary to the already growing media-wide word-heap, here's a round-up of some of the better bits reportage and punditry:

We are all Americans: Well, not anymore
Matin Amis: A wordy take on the Age of Horrorism
About that very large hole in lower Manhattan
Osama: Still missing
Wonkette looks at some of the things we’ve lost since that grey autumn 2001

Style victim

2006-09-07T12:53:00.000-04:00

Anyone who wants a window into the far right in the US should have a look at Red State, as the site gives great insight into that wing of the Republican party. Take, for example, this recent post. It’s about, of all things, the AP Stylebook’s entry on abortion, which mistakenly assumes the AP has changed the recommended terminology surrounding abortion.

The guide suggests reporters use the word “anti-abortion” instead of “pro-choice” and “abortion rights” [supporter] instead of “pro-abortion” or “pro-choice.”

The poster begins:

It is important, first of all, to realize that this is a reversal of a decades-old practice . . . the media has been remarkably restrained and content (with a few exceptions) to refer to the respective sides as "pro-life" and "pro-choice," at least in the context of non-opinion pieces. Despite the fact that the central issue has not changed, apparently now the terminology must.

Once again, the poster is talking about this like its something new. My own copy of the stylebook, with a 2000 copyright, has the exact same definition. So, this usage is at least five years old and, one might safely wager, probably goes back even further.

But, more importantly, the poster goes on to complain that this “change” has affected the framing of the debate. The AP, a non-profit entity founded in 1846, is obviously not looking to advance an ideological viewpoint with this definition, despite what the poster thinks. They’re looking for terminology that is as clear and neutral and uncontroversial as possible.

You get the feeling the Red State writer could have a problem with pretty much any terminology used by the AP, but in this case the anti-abortion/abortion rights descriptors are seeming much less loaded than even the pro-life/pro-choice ones. Rather than addressing some larger, confusing ideas about “life” or “choice”—lots of people who don’t like abortion support the death penalty and vice-versa—the AP language simply relays an opinion towards abortion: one is either against the practice of abortion, currently legal in the US, or supports the availability of the procedure.

The writer also takes issue with the fact that the AP recommends against the use of the word abortionist—but not because it’s an awkward, rarely-used word. Read on:

The other ridiculous portion of this "guideline" is the treatment of the word "abortionist." Personally, it seems like a handy word to describe someone who performs abortions, but even if I were to grant that the word has pejorative qualities, the AP's explanation of why it should be avoided is laughable: it connotes someone who performs clandestine abortions?? In case the good folks at the Associated Press haven't been paying attention, there is, as far as I know (and I follow this issue pretty closely) no such person who exists in the United States.

Fact is, the AP has been around for awhile and stylebook editors could conceivably recall a time when clandestine abortions in the US were a much more common occurrence. Once again, it’s about clear, concise language for newswire writing, to be sent off to pretty much every newspaper in the country. Still, the poster continues:

Notably, the Associated Press does not offer a substitute word for "person who performs abortions" as there simply isn't one.

Err, not quite. To be fair, the mistake here could be chalked up to poor or non-existent fact-checking. (The initial blog post didn’t include this part of the definition, either.)

The AP actually suggests two alternative terms in the 2000 edition and, one would assume, the most recent edition. The unedited entry in the 2000 edition concludes:

Use abortion doctor or abortion practitioner.

Once again, I go through this not to make any sort of point about abortion. Or to recommend the AP Stylebook as a great reference book for reporters and writers. (But I will here: It is.)

The thing that struck me most about this post—and a lot of posts on Red State—is how the right wing of the GOP— a party now entrenched in power for six years, with majorities in both houses of Congress, a healthy online presence and a number of powerful news organs at their disposal—can never tire of finding culture-war bogeymen all over the place.

Cultural warriors have long made a habit of playing the victim to a cabal of newsmen, academics, liberal politicians, trade unionists, politically correct grade school principals, Rockefeller Republicans, gangster rappers, activist judges and Hollywood studio moguls.

It seems the editors of the AP Stylebook can be added to the list.

Rat leaves sinking ship

2006-09-07T05:22:00.000-04:00

Yesterday on the Sharpener I was discussing the latest torpedo to hit the Blair government: the resignation of a junior minister and six parliamentary private secretaries in protest at Blair's refusal to name a timetable for his departure. (You see, Americans, this is what happens when you don't have term limits.)

This turn of events strikes me as both worrying and reassuring. Worrying for the obvious reason: Blair and his cohorts are clearly about as out of touch with the mood of the nation as it’s possible to be without simultaneously putting the case for political union with Belgium and slagging off princess Diana.

“Disloyal”? Well… yeah. That’s pretty much the whole point, isn’t it? A junior minister feels that the Prime Minister is no longer an asset to party, government or country; he believes all three are more deserving of his loyalty than an individual politician; ergo he tells him so, and resigns. Accusing Watson of disloyalty to Tony Blair is roughly akin to accusing the TUC of disloyalty to big business. When Blair says he’d have preferred a quiet private word, one can’t but help suspect our beloved PM has dismissed several dozen of those private words by now, on the grounds that they’re ‘unrepresentative’. The sense that only a public protest could make the point has become pretty much overwhelming.

You can read the rest here.

If we dare to dream

2006-09-06T10:01:00.000-04:00

Gearing up for what will no doubt be a nasty couple of months, the White House is down in the dumps about the November mid-term elections. (Though, as many armchair pundits have pointed out, these days you cannot underestimate the Democrats ability to drop the ball.)

But back to the doom-and-gloom. According to the NY Daily News:

[M]any other senior Bush loyalists privately believe anti-Iraq and anti-Bush sentiment will cost the Republicans the House nine weeks from today, a doomsday scenario that would cripple Bush for his final two years in office.

"We'll lose the House," one of the party's most prominent officials flatly predicted, "and the President will be dead in the water for two years."

“Because,” the prominent official might have continued, “the President and GOP-dominated Congress were already achieving so much this term.”

If they only had those last two years . . . think of the possibilities!

You always hurt the one...

2006-09-04T19:26:00.000-04:00

The Beeb, six years ago:

Are Britons still animal crackers?

Are the British the world's greatest animal lovers?

With all the attention paid to this year's Crufts dog show, the UK does not look like losing its unique reputation as a nation of animal lovers...

The Beeb, last weekend:

Airgun shootings on pets increase

The number of pets shot by airguns has increased by more than a quarter in the past six years.

Figures from the animal charity RSPCA show a 28% rise to 234 incidents in the first six months of 2006, compared to 182 cases in the same period in 2000.

I can only assume that it's the passage of time that has somehow soured the Brits on our fluffy cousins. If I see us described as a nation of animal lovers ever again, I'm going to start describing Israel as a nation of Arab lovers, purely to be consistent.

Doomed, dooooooomed I tell ya

2006-08-31T11:33:00.000-04:00

Still a) ill and b) horribly pressed for time. So, in a shameless act of plagirism, I will lift wholesale this concise comment on Charles Clarke's latest dire warnings about the future of the Labour party, from the ever enjoyable Nosemonkey:

Today (BBC news, Labour 'has alienated key voters'): "Infighting within the Labour Party will help the Conservatives at the next general election, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke has said."

Two months ago (Guardian, Clarke breaks silence with attack on Reid): "In what amounts to one of the most public rows among senior Blairites since 1997, Mr Clarke rejected claims that recent bad publicity showed he had lost control of his department. 'I disagree. I argue that the way it's gone is a direct consequence of the way the current home secretary has conducted his responsibilities,' he said."

Nice to see he's just as much of an inconsistent, loud-mouthed moron out of office as he was in...

Bill to nowhere

2006-08-30T11:16:00.000-04:00

It’s the sort of thing that makes steam shoot out one’s ears. Someone in the Senate placed an “anonymous hold” on a new bill that would create a public database of all government spending, a way for regular folks to track Congressional largesse.

Now Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska has been outed as the lone Senator who put an anonymous hold on a new bill, which was sponsored by Illinois Democrat Barack Obama and Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn.

Stevens, the oldest Republican in the Senate, was in the headlines recently for receiving some $233 million in funding for his state’s controversial pork-project, the “bridge to nowhere”—actually an island in Alaska that’s probably as close to nowhere as you can get. Coburn tried to block the earmark, but it went through regardless.

(Confirming his role as a godsend to Daily Show and Colbert Report writers, Stevens also recently described the internet as “a series of tubes.”)

Allegedly knowing how to hold a grudge, perhaps Stevens’ hostility towards the bill is some sort of payback to Coburn. Or maybe its an issue of image. According to an Anchorage Daily News article from earlier this summer:

[Stevens] has made Alaska the No. 1 state in per-capita federal spending, at $12,885 for every man, woman and child in 2004. Since 2001, his news releases brag, he has earmarked more than $5 billion for Alaska projects, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.

He's been so successful directing federal money that Alaska's governor says he may hire a public-relations firm to fix the image of Alaska as a "greedy state."

No idea where they got that idea . . .

Undiplomatic relations

2006-08-29T08:44:00.000-04:00

I'm feeling horribly, horribly, ill, and having duvet-related fantasies. So for today's post I'm going to do something I generally try and avoid, and shamelessly quote a chunk of an article with the bare minimum of comment.

This is a piece from last week's New Republic in which John B. Judis criticises the Bush administration's dislike of diplomacy, and preference for shutting down relations with enemy states - despite the fact that "while the conventional practice of diplomacy has a long history of successes, the conservative practice has had an unbroken record of failure". You know... China... Cuba...

...and of course Iran. Judis gives a lovely potted history of how, if America's plagued by a fundamentalist Iranian government today, it's got only itself to blame:

Iranian hostility to the United States dated back to the Central Intelligence Agency's intervention in 1953, when it engineered a coup that replaced popular Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq, who had nationalized foreign oil holdings, with the unpopular Shah. Subsequently, the United States became one of the Shah's biggest boosters. It was responsible, among other things, for training his dreaded secret police. The takeover of the U.S. Embassy was triggered by the Carter administration's decision to admit the Shah to the United States for medical treatment--a decision that (however humane) reinforced perception that the United States was the "Great Satan."

After the hostages were released, the United States retained sanctions on Iran, and, in 1983, after a visit of envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad, the Reagan administration began actively supporting Iraq in its war with Iran, which Saddam Hussein had provoked in September 1980. That war cost the Iranians over a million lives. Iran would exact its own revenge in new hostages and terrorist attacks, but, after the death of Khomeini in 1989, it would make periodic attempts to restore relations between the countries. Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would make overtures in 1991 to George H.W. Bush's administration and, in 1995, to the Clinton administration. In 1998, the new reform administration of Mohammed Khatami explicitly rejected terrorism and expressed regret for the embassy takeover and declared "an intellectual affinity with the essence of American civilization." All these overtures were ignored, although both the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations avoided incendiary rhetoric against Iran.

After September 11, the Khatami government cooperated with George W. Bush's administration in Afghanistan. (Syria also helped in the battle against Al Qaeda.) But, in January 2002, Bush pronounced Iran part of an "axis of evil." That would seem to have ended any chance of rapprochement, but, in May 2003, an Iranian representative proposed to the Bush administration a comprehensive agreement that would include Iranian nuclear policy and its policy toward Israel. Still, the Bush administration ignored this proposal.

The Bush administration was never interested in negotiating with Khatami's government, but in overthrowing it. And, ironically, it may have succeeded. Bush's intransigence toward Iran's reformers probably contributed to their eclipse in Iranian politics and to the victory in the presidential election of anti-American, anti-Israel demagogue Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There are still factions in Iran that advocate renewed relations with the United States, but, with Ahmadinejad's ascension, they are in disfavor. So the Bush administration's rejection of any diplomatic initiative toward Iran has made Iran more intransigent. And it has also robbed the United States of a potential partner in trying to stabilize Iraq.

Read it, before the subscription firewall goes up on Thursday night.

My mum says I'm cool

2006-08-27T12:15:00.000-04:00

Some months ago, I noted that a suspiciously high number of demands that Britain's governing Labour party "renew" itself were coming from friends of Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, crown prince and, it's widely assumed, the man who'll get to do the renewing.

Today I heard on the radio that the lord chancellor (yes, that is a different job) Charlie Falconer had told the BBC that "this is not the time to try to change the leader."

The story describes Charlie boy as "one of [Blair's] closest political allies", but this is rather undeplaying it. When he was appointed in 2003, the Beeb wrote - in a story headlined Lordly heights for Blair's friend - that as a childhood friend and former flatmate of the Prime Minister, Falconer is "probably the ultimate example of a 'Tony's Crony'".

...can't any of the players in the battle for the Labour party succession get someone who isn't a blood relative or personal friend to actually back them?

Pocket change

2006-08-24T14:39:00.000-04:00

For the past five years, the Bush Administration has been talking about democracy in the Middle East. Now, here’s a chance to provide aid to a ravaged democracy in the Middle East and the president reaches into his pocket and comes up with . . . a grand total of around $300 million (£159 million).

Slate has a good recap of Bush’s announcement at a news conference earlier this week. (It was the one where he said he doesn’t question the patriotism of those that disagree with him. Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny, too.) Fred Kaplan says of the aid package:

That's a step above the pathetic $50 million that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had offered the week before, but it's still way below the $1 billion or more than Iran is shoveling to Hezbollah, which is using the money to rebuild Lebanon's bombed-out neighborhoods—and to take credit for the assistance.

If there are still some believers out there, perhaps this is the final evidence that all the Bush Administration talk about democracy in the Middle East is just so much post-WMD hot air. Because this would be one way to help a struggling democracy that just got bombarded for a month—and it’s simply been wasted.

Not that it’s been a good month for Bush and press conferences: Last week, responding to a question about the crisis, the president proclaimed: “Hezbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis.”

Maybe he really doesn’t read the newspaper.

Defence of the realm

2006-08-23T13:17:00.000-04:00

Frightfully busy once again, so a quickie on something that struck me yesterday. Britain: we're all about the weapons. We are, quite literally, da bomb. Yesterday's FT reported... well, actually I'm not clear on what they reported, because I just went to find it again in Google News and have come across several different alternatives that pretty much all fit my rather hazy memories. According to the media BAE Systems, the jewel of the British defence industry's rather scary crown, has recently closed deals including:

-a $5.1m deal to refit some vehicles for the US marines

-a £50m deal subcontracting Thales to deliver some army supply and security systems

-a $223m deal involving something called Bradley vehicles

-a contract with Lockheed Martin to provide some naval guns

-and, my personal favourite, a £10bn deal to modernize the Saudi armed forces. You remember the Saudis. They're that nice family with the oil fields and a penchant for abusing human rights.

All these, by the way, have been reported since last Friday.

BAE Systems, oddly enough, does something that I've never seen any other company do: it plays down its contribution to the British economy. From its own Corporate Responsibility page:

In any case, arms exports hardly amount to an essential element of the UK economy. We are now talking of little more than 60,000 jobs, 0.2% of the national labour force and fewer than the number finding new jobs in the average month. Even MoD economists agree that reduced arms exports would create more jobs elsewhere in the economy. BAE Systems’ turnover is around a quarter of one per cent of the UK’s total.

"Oh, don't worry about us, we're tiny. If we vanished you'd hardly notice. Things might even be better, actually." Well, yeah.

It shouldn't come as a surprise - we don't call for ceasefires; we help fly bombs to Israel; we fought five wars between 1997 and 2003, and the only reason we don't fight more is, I suspect, that we're still bogged down in Basra trying to pretend we're not still fighting the last one.

But, when one company can close five weapons-related deals in a six-day span - in August, in a month when noone does anything - doesn't that strike anyone else as a mildly scary comment on the nature of British exports these days?

(Insert Whitney Houston joke here.)

2006-08-22T14:07:00.000-04:00

So Osama bin Laden doesn’t hate everything about American culture. He just hates the tolerable parts. According to press reports spilling out today, his former mistress tells us:

"He said that he had a paramount desire for [Whitney Houston] and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of some day spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting . . . He would say how beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband - Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed."

For some reason, this made me think of the pop music exchanges from American Psycho, particularly Patrick Bateman’s own thoughts on Houston:

Patrick Bateman: Did you know that Whitney Houston's debut LP, called simply Whitney Houston had four number one singles on it? Did you know that, Christie?

Elizabeth: [laughing] You actually listen to Whitney Houston? You own a Whitney Houston CD? More than one?

Patrick Bateman: It's hard to choose a favorite among so many great tracks, but "The Greatest Love of All" is one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation, dignity. Its universal message crosses all boundaries and instills one with the hope that it's not too late to better ourselves. Since, Elizabeth, it's impossible in this world we live in to empathize with others, we can always empathize with ourselves. It's an important message, crucial really. And it's beautifully stated on the album...

The upper classes

2006-08-21T11:49:00.000-04:00

Last month, the House of Commons Science Select Committee slammed Britain's current drugs classification system, on the grounds that it is "riddled with anomalies" and "clearly not fit for purpose". One of these anomalies is that class A, the classification meant to be reserved only for the most evil substances an addled young mind could hope to abuse, includes everything from the genuinely terrifying, such as heroin, right down to the frankly-just-a-bit-of-a-stupid-thing-to-do, such as magic mushrooms.

Meanwhile, over in the education sector, so many students are now getting grade As in their A-level exams that the government is seriously considering introducing a new "starred A" grade to mark out the best results. (This is the system that has been in place for some time for GCSEs, the exams that most British school kids take at the age of 16.)

Will we perhaps be seeing a new drugs classification system in which heroin and cocaine are upgraded to the new and improved class A*, do you think?

Result!

2006-08-17T12:27:00.000-04:00

Here we go again. The pass rate for A-levels, the exams taken by most British* school students at the age of 18, has risen for the 24th year running. Now a huge 96.6% of them are passed.

I don't know how much standards are slipping. I'm sure there must be some truth to the argument that teachers are getting better at telling students what examiners expect (this chap explains that one well), but nonetheless after with a pass rate like that it does begin to look a little suspicious. What's more, with 24% of entries receiving grade A, universities are understandably getting a little irritated that working out who it's worth offering places to is becoming increasingly difficult.

Nonetheless, at this time every year when these stories come out, I find myself feeling sorry for those kids who are receiving their results today. Not the irritating smiley blonde with five As (they always find one of those) - but those kids whose pictures they don't show, because they're crying their eyes out.

Not everyone gets the grades they want. Right now, there are probably thousands of the poor brats who've just found out that they now can't go to the university they've been excited about for months. Yet everywhere they look they'll be exposed to middle-aged columnists and armchair critics, bitterly clutching their two Cs and a D from 1975 and complaining that any idiot can get three grade As these days because A-levels are so bloody easy. It's pouring the entire contents of a salt shaker into a weeping wound.

These exams matter. They should tell universities about a student's academic potential, and they should give the kids useful knowledge and skills. If the system isn't doing its job it should be reformed, and we need to have this debate.

But this annual ritual of beating up on yet another generation's achievement on one of the most stressful days of their lives is just bloody cruelty.

Anyway. Anyone who wants to know what their A-levels are worth in new money can check Matthew Turner's handy grade inflation chart. I'm delighted to discover I'd have a whole extra grade B if I retook mine today.

*Yes I know the Scots have their own system, but you try and find a pithy way of saying "English, Welsh and Northern Irish", okay?

Unintended consequences

2006-08-16T13:12:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons that economics has a reputation as the dismal science, I suspect, is that it tends to work in such a brain-invertingly counter-intuitive way.

An example I heard on the radio news last night: oil prices are currently at something approaching an all time high. I once wrote an article on the subject, at a time when prices were in the region of $50 a barrel, and someone told me, "Oh, they'll definitely drop. The days of $10 a barrel are probably past, but I expect we'll see $20, $30 a barrel rather than $40 or $50."

Well, that was two years ago. At time of writing the price is currently hovering around $72 a barrel. And this is good news: they've been falling recently thanks to the ceasefire in Lebanon.

So - oil prices are high. Really high. Now what impact do you think this might be having on the UK's inflation rate?

Whatever it was I was half-listening to last night told me it was actually holding inflation down. Why? Because the inflation rate is calculated from a range of goods and services. And a lot of consumers have less disposable income thanks to the need to pour more money into their car's petrol tank. So, in an attempt to remain competitive and keep the shoppers shopping, a lot of retailers are slashing their prices. Thus, while petrol prices have increased, the price of a lot of other things is rising more slowly than it might be otherwise.

(Another factor, of course, is that a lot of the oil price rise has already been factored into prices: because much of the increase didn't come in the last year, it isn't included in current inflation statistics. The Bank of England helpfully explains this here.)

Economics should matter in public policy: one of my greatest frustrations with the left is their tendency to equate it with the evils of capitalism, and consequently to ignore it entirely. But I'm always suspicious when someone tells me that a particular policy will inevitably result in a particular change, always and in any circumstance - because these things are complicated, and high-oil prices can make things cheaper.

Spot the difference

2006-08-15T13:17:00.000-04:00

Another thought on Just How Screwed the Middle East Is. Compare and contrast the following two photographs. This one is President Jimmy Carter presiding over the signing of the 1978 Camp David Accord between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin:

This one is President Clinton looking on while Israel's Yitzhak Rabin shakes hands with PLO leader Yasser Arafat over another peace deal, fifteen years later:

So, what similarities do you see? The stance? The big smiles? The handshake between an Arab and an Israeli, apparently making peace at last? The idealistic Democrat President looking smug?

The one that strikes me as the most telling, though, is the one that you can't see. Within three years of each of these photographs being taken, one of these men had been assassinated by a fundamentalist from among his own people: Sadat in '81, Rabin in '95.

This, to me, speaks volumes about the problems of the Middle East. Even if you can get the key players around a table, being civil to each other and genuinely keen to make peace (laying aside for a moment Arafat's later intractability) - even if you can do that, there's no way it can be made to stick. Because there are those on both sides of this divide that see any concession as a betrayal, and who aren't afraid to use violence to show it.

This isn't a very happy thought, I know. But in a week when it looks like the south Lebanese can finally return to what's left of their homes, I thought it was worth noting: just because they've stopped firing at each other, it doesn't mean there'll be peace. Even if anyone does know how to fix this mess, the hard part is still to come.

Mea Culpa

2006-08-10T08:21:00.000-04:00

Over at the Sharpener I'm rambling on about the inability of public figures to admit to their mistakes - and why exactly this matters:

If you wanted to encapsulate in a single incident the reasons why the voters in just about every major democracy are losing faith in their politicians right now, you could do worse than to go back to Washington University, St Louis, on October 8th 2004. There, during the second of the three presidential debates with Senator John Kerry, President George W. Bush was asked what his three biggest mistakes as President had been.

He couldn’t think of one.

This struck me as absolutely extraordinary. Leave aside the fact that, for four years by then, everything the man had touched had turned to shit; even accepting that he presumably has a rather better opinion of his record than many of the rest of us, could he really be claiming not to have made a single mistake? In four years? Even Jesus had that whole doubt-in-the-desert thing, but George Bush, apparently, is perfect.

You can read the rest here.

...somehow, this seems even more apposite on a day when I find myself suspecting that Blair's foreign policy, from Iraq to Lebanon, has played a role in inspiring today's terrorist threat. (A threat, incidentally, that is top story in much of the American news media, thus inspiring my co-blogger to email me at 7.45am New York time with the concise sentiment, "Jesus fucking christ.")

Hey Joe

2006-08-09T10:40:00.000-04:00

It’s funny to think that, during the 2000 Presidential campaign, right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh referred to Joe Lieberman, then Al Gore’s running mate, as “Joe Liberalman.” That says more about right-wing talk radio’s trouble dealing with political nuance than Lieberman, who was probably put on the Gore ticket to mitigate the impression that Gore was too liberal.

Despite all the talk of the blogger as “kingmaker,” the true test of the will come in November, when Lamont goes up against a Lieberman who will no doubt be picking up votes from Connecticut Republicans, too. (They do exist, apparently.)

Of course, if Lieberman were to win running as an independent—as many think he will—the Democrats would technically be down another Senate seat, which makes you wonder how well the bloggers thought this whole campaign out in the first place.

Whatever happened to Jimmy Carter

2006-08-08T10:55:00.000-04:00

David Plotz, the (Jewish) deputy editor of Slate, has for the past few weeks been reading the Bible from the very beginning and blogging his responses. The result is readable, funny, and - at least, for anyone with even a passing interest in the origins of western civilization - quite, quite fascinating.

The reason I chose today to mention all this, and the religion of Plotz's fathers, is because I just got to this passage from his discussion of the Book of Numbers:

...Moses and Aaron fall on their faces to appease the Israelites, who are now demanding to return to Egypt. Joshua and Caleb yell at the Israelites to pull themselves together, insisting that Canaan is glorious and that if they obey the Lord, He will give it to them.

Listen to how Joshua and Caleb describe the inhabitants of Canaan—the people who rightfully possess the land the Israelites want to seize: "Have no fear then of the people of the country, for they are our prey" (my italics).

"Prey"—that's a breathtaking and sinister word! Again we're reminded that the Torah is not aspiring to be a book for everyone. It is not preaching universal truth for all men. It is the work of a single tribe at war with everyone around it. Their enemies were not human: They were prey.

It's stuff like this - which is, let's face it, a fairly natural corollary of the chosen people/promised land stuff - that makes the settler mentality so bloody scary. Just as much as those kids who are happy to strap bombs to themselves because of the promise of an afterlife, they're fundamentalists - people who will not be diverted from their cause by logic, reason or enlightened self-interest.

I suspect that, like many on the European left, I'm probably coming across as anti-Israel here. I'm not. I'm really not. Even if it was a bad idea sixty years ago, which I might argue after a few drinks, it's there now, and its people deserve peace and security.

I just wish that the country's government (and Bush, and Rice, and Blair) would see that repeatedly murdering innocent Lebanese people who happen to get in the way of their bombs is only going to harden the Arabs' resolve against Israel.

Forget morality - surely the simple self-interest of not wanting to inspire yet another generation of terrorists would have helped them come up with a plan B by now.

Numbering intolerance

2006-08-07T10:08:00.000-04:00

Simon Bucher-Jones, a writer of my acquaintance, has drawn my attention to what mathematics has to say about perceptions of racism. The following actually comes from a private mailing list rather than Simon's blog, so with his permission I'll quote him at length. Citing John Allen Paulos' book Innumeracy, he considers a world in which a hat-wearing minority (10% of the population) feel persecuted by the hatless majority:

Interestingly (I use the term loosely), a minority will always feel badly done to by a majority, even if the acts of badly-doing-to-ness are in fact mostly inflicted the other way (i.e. hatted on hatless violence, rather than hatless on hatted).

This is because the hatted meet more hatless people and so experience more of the violent ones. Thus if 5% of the hatless hate the hatted, but 10% of the hatted hate the hatless, the hatted will still experience more hate because the odds of them actually meeting someone who hates them are greater.

This is one of the reasons minorities rightly complain, while majorities sometimes feel bemused about their complaints: very small percentages of racism in large majorities can cause very large experiences of racism in small minorities.

Do the maths, and you'll find he's right: 4.5% of the population are hatless racists, while only 1% of them are hatted ones. This means you're 4.5 times more likely to meet a hatless racist than a hatted one.

This goes some way to explain why there's so much talk of Islamophobia in Britain, despite the fact that some Muslims can be pretty bloody intolerant themselves.

Another factor, of course, is the fact that the police have developed a nasty habit of nicking and/or shooting innocent brown people.

New York Newsstand, August 4th

2006-08-04T14:40:00.000-04:00

A few worthy articles from this side of the pond:

What’s the matter with Connecticut? Non-Lieberman Ned Lamont goes into the Democratic primary riding a wave of blog support. But when one blog publishes an offensive image of his opponent, Lamont replies, "I don't know anything about the blogs." Slate discusses the endgame of one of the more entertaining political races this year.

Slate also has an interesting take on the increase in non-US IPOs—and why it has nothing to do with Sarbanes-Oxley legislation.

E. J. Dionne isn’t as persuasive as he could be with his piece on the end of conservatism in the US, but he does hit upon the point that the GOP have been supporting a President for six years that doesn’t really look like a conservative.

The Onion has the scoop on the recent troubles at the Court: Deadlocked Supreme Court: “Someone’s voting twice”

Disgraced former House Speaker Tom DeLay isn’t gone yet. In fact, he's running for his old seat.

Christopher Hitchens stops writing about Valerie Plame and gives Tom Paine his propers.

So an Englishman and an Australian go to Los Angeles . . .

2006-08-02T17:10:00.000-04:00

In LA for work this week, the biggest story on television and radio seems to be Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic DUI arrest. While trivial, perhaps it makes sense being in sight of the Hollywood sign, where entertainment news--while not entertainment or news--is oftentimes the only news that really matters.

But people were also talking about Tony Blair’s visit to California. Regardless of his deathwatch back home and his continued support of the US President, Blair remains very popular among Americans. And looking at the news footage, he seemed in good spirits out in sunny California.

But his visit gave the US a stark reminder of how out-of-touch the current administration has become with the rest of the world.

For instance, it was mildly depressing (but perfectly sensible) to see Blair pitch the UK as a great place for embryonic stem-cell research to Cali bio-tech firms, as George W. Bush recently vetoed a bill that would have let federal money go to the research in the US.

Even more embarrassing, Blair met with California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to discuss global warming at a summit on Monday. They walked away with little more than plans to study solutions and share research, with the nation-state of California looking into some new programs developed across the pond in the UK and Europe.

It was a feel-good moment, ruined only when one realized that a very important foreign head of state like Blair has to go meet with a state governor to discuss global warming, because the President of the United States has decided it doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, the Middle West and Eastern seaboard brace for temps to hit the 100˚F-plus (38˚C-plus) mark, as we wonder if 2006 will join 1997, 1998, 2001, 2002 and 2003 as one of the hottest years on record.

(Oh, and if you have time before your power dims and (finally) goes out, check out this hilarious anti-global warming facts page, set up to trick dim-witted kids googling their science homework. As Bush once asked, "Is our children learning?" I'd say the answer is a resounding “yes!”)

Hurricane Bloomberg

2006-07-30T11:07:00.000-04:00

Recently, in this space, we put forth an argument discussing the possibility of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg making the jump from the city hall to the Oval Office. That may have been premature.

It’s certainly something that bears revisiting in light of the recent power outages in the Northwest section of Queens, where around 100,000 people sat in the dark for up to a week in the middle of the country’s largest city.

Many tabloid editorials that week compared the blackout to the Hurricane Katrina disaster last fall. Outside the editorial cubicles of NYC newspapers, the real situation was not nearly so dire.

But Bloomberg's reaction to the Queens blackout seemed worringly close to Bush response to Katrina, even more surprisingly since Bloomberg has gone to great lengths to distance himself from the current president. The Blackout plan, as we see it (or, for full disclosure, lived it):

1) The “let’s-hope-it’ll-go-away” kick-off: At first, the mayor’s inaction seemed natural as the utility, Con Edison, was reporting outages for only 1,500 to 2,000 customers. (Trouble is a “customer” can represent a single-family home or a ten-story apartment building.) The mayor, like the rest of the city, gave the neighborhoods’ trouble a disinterested shrug. When first questioned, he said City Hall was using less power and perhaps people in Queens should do the same. Think back to the early days of the Katrina disaster, when Bush Administration officials were largely vacationing and unconcerned.

2) The disaster-area photo opportunity: As the week wore on, it became pretty obvious there was a problem. Con Ed (yeah, that’s what they go by) eventually upped the actual figures of people affected to 25,000, then to 100,000. Bloomberg eventually did a photo op in Astoria, though the dirty (there wasn’t any hot water), tired (temps, though cooler, were still in the 80s) and pissed-off residents (well, yeah) were kept more than 15 feet away. At least they didn’t chopper in generators and floodlights and put him in front of Silver Cup Studios a-la-Bush-in-New-Orleans.

3) The “Heck-of-a-job-Brownie” moment: Much to the chagrin of city councilmen from Queens, Bloomberg praised the chief of Con Edison on Monday, despite the fact that the lights were still out and the fact that the utility had criminally underestimated the number of people affected by the blackout. Have a look at this news clip: 30 seconds in, Queens pols Eric Gioia, Mike Gianaris and Joe Crowley are visibly rolling their eyes behind Bloomberg, a mayor they’ve both worked with on issues in the past. The show of disbelief earned them a severe talking-to after the press conference in full view of the city-hall press corp.

But one wonders what Bloomberg’s approval rating are now in this swatch of ethnic enclaves and industrial districts on the East River. With the Bush approach to natural disasters comes a natural dip in poll ratings and plenty of negative press. As one Queens pol said after the first week of the blackout, when the Red Cross is handing out hot meals on the streets of Sunnyside, a neighborhood 15 minutes on the subway from Midtown, you know there’s a serious problem.

When the whole city went black in August 2003, Bloomberg was saved by the fact that the city banded together and took it in stride: it was a three-day weekend and an excuse to have a BBQ with your neighbors. When a few neighborhoods outside of Manhattan go black, it’s much tougher to deal with—people get sort of uppity when they’re sitting in the dark for the fifth day in a row, but can look out the window and see the Empire State Building burning bright.

City papers already questioning his apolitical reaction, temps are poised to be record-breaking highs all week, Staten Island experience its now brief blackout early last Thursday and Bloomberg has given everyone a bit of a wake-up call.

Ich bin ein Berliner

2006-07-28T11:15:00.000-04:00

...or at least, I will be next week, so you'll have to fill you little lives without me, somehow.

Parting thought, though. I've been wondering out loud for some time when the British economy was going to go down the pan after 15 years of growth. The Times' Anatole Kaletsky says we shouldn't worry:

The idea that Britain is on the brink of economic crisis is more prevalent than ever this summer because of four narrower causes of economic anxiety overlaid on the great global issues I mentioned above. These are the possibility of much higher taxes after the Blair-Brown transition; the continuing inability of Britain to balance its international payments; the prospect that rising interest rates will puncture a “bubble” of house prices and mortgage borrowing; and, finally, the threat of “stagflation” in the US economy. (...)

Most people in the City would answer that the economic prospects for Britain are indeed darker than at any time since Labour came to power. I beg to differ. In my view a serious decline in the British economy is a worry that you (and Mr Brown) can forget about, even as you fret about all the real dangers threatening the country and the world in the years ahead.

He cites two reasons: the continuing growth of London's role as the hub of the world finance industry as global trade expands; and the fact

Britain appears to be leading, rather than following, the US cycle. This means that, whereas America is now on the brink of a serious slowdown, a big correction in house prices and a possible upsurge of inflation, Britain has probably experienced the worst of these problems already.

The clearest example of this cyclical divergence between America and Britain can be seen in the housing market, which is pulling out of its two-year slowdown in Britain just as the US market declines. And the earlier downturn in the British cycle has kept inflation subdued, while it has steadily risen in the US. As a result, there is much less reason to worry about sharply increasing interest rates in Britain than in the US.

Fingers crossed...

Wealth

2006-07-26T11:24:00.000-04:00

Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott has written a piece on the many crises of the Labour party that translates, roughly, as "You don't know you're born, sunshine." His thesis is that those who say the economy is tanking and the government falling to bits are forgetting just how bad things got for the Wilson governments of the sixties and seventies.

Some good bits:

What is interesting, though, is how what is traditionally a much stronger correlation - between the economy and the standing of the government - has broken down. By all the usual yardsticks, the economy has been doing phenomenally well. Interest rates are at 4.5% and growth is robust.

Twenty years ago this month unemployment on the claimant count measure hit a post-war peak of more than 3 million: today it is less than 1 million. Thirty years ago, the huge increases in gas and electricity prices we have experienced over the past year would have sent the cost of living through the roof. What was really striking about last week's 2.5% inflation figure was not that it was half a percentage point above the government target, but that it was so low.

The strength and stability of the economy have allowed record investment in public services, released resources to tackle child poverty and made it possible to set a target date for hitting the UN target on overseas aid.

He makes a good point. In huge swathes of the country, everything seems to speak of prosperity: shiny new schools and hospitals are springing up all over the place, everyone you meet bores on about their new phone or iPod, and the inner cities are being reborn with canal- or dockside redevelopments and more plush restaurants than you can shake a garlic breadstick at.

I'm not saying everything's perfect: there are still far too many people who aren't sharing in this new found wealth - although there are fewer than there once were. (The fact the government got attacked for missing its poverty reduction target was in itself a massive shift from the 1980s, when the Conservatives apparently didn't give a shit). But, in a reversal of thirty years ago, Britain is now the richest major economy in western Europe.

People have become so used to this that, as Elliott argues, they don't even notice it any more. A booming economy is no longer a sufficient achievement for a government to remain secure; the slightest hint of economic trouble sparks panic.

Last October the Independent asked, "Are we heading for a new winter of discontent?" (We weren't). Business groups fret that we're all drowning in red tape. (We're not - at least according to right-wing Washington think-tank the Heritage Foundation, which claims that Britain is economically more free than America). The Businesss, a paper which recently complained bitterly that thanks to David Cameron British voters now face a choice of two centre-left parties, is demanding that Gordon Brown take a leaf out of President Bush's book and cut taxes for the rich. (Oh do be quiet).

People seem to have forgotten what a real economic crisis is like. If things were to turn nasty, and we were to hit a recession, with job losses and a plunging housing market and everything that goes with them, they'd be in for a nasty shock. The Blair era could end up being remembered a lot more fondly than anyone is currently predicting.

Castles in the air

2006-07-25T12:49:00.000-04:00

From the self-declared world's greatest newspaper (and proud of it):

Record property prices are set to soar for at least 10 years in a massive boost for home owners.

They will see the value of their property increase by around £20,000 every year, pushing the average home to almost £400,000 by 2016, experts predicted last night. Huge numbers of Middle Britain families will become paper millionaires.

The prediction is a welcome fillip for home owners worried by economists’ fears that a worldwide recession would bring the housing boom to a halt and plunge millions into the nightmare of negative equity – where their mortgage is higher than the value of their home.

But property experts are confident the UK housing market can ride out any storm and continue to prove the safest bet for investors.

Oh, good.

This stuff always makes me wonder if the Express has done a readership survey and found out that only three of its readers don't own property.

My property interests amount to 11% of a flat in Bermondsey, leaving me in the faintly bizarre position that I find the prospect that there'll be a crash roughly as worrying as the prospect that there won't be. The reason I own such a bizarre fraction of someone else's home is that I inherited the cash and wasn't quite sure what else to do with it.

This smugly middle class factoid, I suspect, says something about the kind of world we'll be living in if the Express is right. It isn't quite true to say that first time buyers will soon be roughly as common in London as dodos. But those who aren't bankers, doctors or footballers, and consequently can be reasonably certain of earning more than £50k a year for life, will be dependent on hand ups and hand outs from their families to get onto the property ladder.

Which suggests to me that that social mobility will be, essentially, fucked.

Does the Express know this? Given that it doesn't have the most moneyed readership of the British newspapers does it realize that its report essentially reads, "First rung on housing ladder out of reach for your children, at least until you're wormfood"?

Bah, I'm just grumpy and hungover. Go and read Andrew Rilstone's marvellous deconstruction of where the Express gets its news instead.

Thinking the unthinkable

2006-07-24T11:17:00.000-04:00

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is out on a limb:

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel's. (...)

Hard-line critics of Ariel Sharon, the now-comatose Israeli leader who initiated the pullout from Gaza, always said this would happen: Gaza would become a terrorist haven. They said that the moderate Palestinian Authority would not be able to control the militants and that Gaza would be used to fire rockets into Israel and to launch terrorist raids. This is precisely what has happened.

It's an odd piece, that will probably offend just about everyone at once by arguing that a) Likud was right, b) Zionism was wrong, and c) Israel should stop killing in the name of its own security.

But what really struck me about it is that Cohen says something that I thought it was impossible to say in America, without being dismissed from serious debate: that maybe Israel wasn't actually such a neat idea.

I don't know how much I agree with that statement, and would want to read a lot more about the region's history before I came to anything half resembling a conclusion. But I do suspect that America's inability to be critical of Israel hampers its chances of sorting out the region, simply by stirring up resentful accusations of bias. On that level, the let's-be-honest-with-ourselves-here rhetoric of Cohen's piece can only be a good thing.

It's a shame the Post doesn't allow blog-style comment posting though. I'd be fascinated to watch that particular flame war.

No way out

2006-07-21T11:26:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of Katie comes this blog being written by an American tourist stuck in Beirut - and desperately trying to leave.

It's taught me two things that I hadn't quite realised. Firstly, turns out it's common practice for evacuating nations to charge their citizens for the privilege - something that reminds me terribly of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

The second thing is, while Britain has been bombarded with images of its citizens being evacuated at the top of every news bulletin, the Americans have been struggling miserably to get their 35,000 people out of the warzone. It's times like this that I realize that, when the Republicans whine on about how the federal bureaucracy couldn't tell its arse from its elbow with a copy of Gray's Anatomy and a magnifying glass, they kind of have a point.

Two extracts that particularly stayed with me:

Wednesday

...I'm right by the port. I can SEE this boat out my window, sitting there taunting me. I've not yet received an email from the DoS (I call it the "DontS" when I'm angry) but this morning, the American simply packed his bags and went for a walk to the port. Upon his return some thirty minutes later (we laughed when he got back, Talal asking him if he had changed his mind?), he claimed that he got through the first level of security (Lebanese military gaurding the port) and then made a b-line for a boat. American Special Forces made him then register at a tent set up on the dock by the cruiseline. To hear him tell it, it was just heartbreaking - they gave him a key to a room and everything, checked him in, a CBS news person begged him to take a camera and role footage of the trip and give it to another CBS person on the other side...it was all so close. But Special Forces stepped in again to do one last check before he jumped on the boat - he wasn't on "the list". "Sir, there are a number of reasons we cannot let you on this boat." "What are the reasons?" he asked. "Yes," one of the Lebanese military standing gaurd chimed in, "he's an American - let him go, just let him go on board."

"Sir, there are a number of reasons why we cannot let you on this ship."

And that was that.

Thursday

...It took the American and another friend to calm me down during the only time I officially lost my cool - the second scuffle. The day was hot and no one had brought enough water. Every so often, a marine would show up with a few bottles of water and instruct the crowd to pass them around and share them. I had brought my own and so would just pass the bottles to the woman behind me - the second time around, I noticed her take the bottle and slide it into her stroller (she had four children with her) where, too, there was another full bottle of water from the last distribution.

"Excuse me, are you...are you just taking that water?"

"I have four children."

"What? WHAT?! Look around - everyone here has children! We're supposed to share this water with people who need it!"

"There's no water on the boat!"

"Look, Jesus Christ I'm not going to argue with you - you do what you want but I don't know what makes your children more thirsty than any of the other kids here - but whatever, let's just be clear here - you're just stealing from people - you just do what you want."

When I turned around, the American was sitting on his backpack and smiling at me. "This always happens in crowds..."

Protection

2006-07-20T11:28:00.000-04:00

"I'll stand in front of you,
I'll take the force of the blow."
-Massive Attack, Protection

As the majority party, the GOP is doing an awful lot to protect the US. This summer alone, attempts have been made to protect us from:

Gay marriage
Flag burning
high gas prices

And now we have the Pledge Protect Act, a clearly unconstitutional bill that would "remove federal judges' jurisdiction in cases challenging the presence of the phrase "under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance."

This would protect us from activist judges, one assumes.

With five weeks left in session for the year (got to get back home and campaign for those seats, folks!) and a number of challenges facing the US in the Middle East, one might mistakenly think there are more pressing issues facing the US House.

Particularly since everyone voting for these measures knows full well they won't pass the Senate.

Scorcher!

2006-07-19T11:46:00.000-04:00

Today in London the temperature has hit 36C/97F, an all-time record for July, and hotter than New York, Algiers and Mumbai. It's too hot to think about politics (or, indeed, anything), so I'll make do with noting that two things are certain in an English heatwave and that, if you squint, tell you something about this green unpleasant land.

Firstly, that everything will break. Today, roads are melting, London Underground is slowing turning into a giant microwave, and there are fears of blackouts due to the sheer number of air conditioners running. In this country, we're frankly not much good at extreme heat (or, indeed, extreme cold, extreme wind, or almost any other weather pattern that deviates slightly from "overcast and mild").

The second certainty is that the media will see it as the perfect excuse to run pictures of scantily clad women. The BBC's "In pictures" page manages to get them into four out of eleven photographs. The Daily Mail runs a guide to the use of sunscreen, which helpfully includes an attractive blonde rubbing herself in, just in case you can't grasp the use of such a product without a visual reference point.

London's Evening Standard promises a "Heat wave picture special" today. I wonder what's in there.

Man with a plan

2006-07-18T13:03:00.000-04:00

Gorgeous George Galloway, the hard left MP and arch enemy of Christopher Hitchens, was on good form on this morning's Today programme.

Asked what he felt should be done about the Israel-Lebanon crisis, he said simply, "Declare a ceasefire!"

When the presenter put it to him that maybe things weren't that simple, he came back - sharp as ever - with, "It's easy, you just stop firing!"

That's the kind of insight we need in our political leaders.

Oi, Bush!

2006-07-18T11:24:00.000-04:00

If President Bush really initiated that conversation by saying “Yo, Blair!,” I would argue that’s a far more egregious offense than using the word “shit” in a sentence.

(OK, I’ll also admit I actually found it a bit refreshing to hear two world leaders talking about important matter like normal human beings, even if Bush was constantly, rudely interrupting Blair.)

But then, today, Bush goes and does something like this to poor Angela Merkel. (Click on the 'video' link to the left.)

But, in any case, don’t worry if the go-nowhere G8 summit, ridiculous heat and current flare-up in the Middle East have got you concerned. Put the gin down, put the limes back in the refrigerator and un-crease your brow.

As the Rapture Ready website points out, it is all a signal that the end times are here: If anything, the events of the past week are a cause for celebration! (Unless you’re a heathen liberal internationalist, anyway.)

Still, you’ve got to appreciate those “clapping smiley faces” on post #2.

I got your solutions right here!

2006-07-17T16:45:00.000-04:00

There was an interesting quote from Katie Couric, the affable broadcaster set to take over the evening news at CBS the September.

She gave USA Today an inkling of how the broadcast, currently hosted by the nework’s long-time chief DC correspondent Bob Schieffer, may change under her watch. At first glance it doesn’t bode well for the Tiffany Network, which once the standard bearer for radio and television journalism (think war zones, Edward R. Murrow, safari jackets, convention floors and stern-voiced Texans). She notes:

“[W]e heard from many people the news is just too depressing. Obviously, we can't sugar-coat what's going on, but there are cases where we can be more solution-oriented.”

Most people would respond to that with, ‘It’s the news. It’s supposed to be depressing.’ Not at CBS, apparently, where we’ll be regaled with all manner of “solutions” to problems like global warming to the current situation in Lebanon.

Remember when the news was someone sitting behind a desk telling you what happened that day, interspersed with short-form documentary pieces and live reports? I guess that was more about “information gathering” and “story telling,” rather than “solutions.”

Nixon in China (2)

2006-07-17T09:37:00.000-04:00

I am, essentially, an optimist. I believe that Europe will sort out its economy and deal with the demographic timebomb. I believe a new Cold War between America and China is pretty unlikely, as long as everyone keeps throwing money at each other. I believe global warming will probably be less scary than the worst predictions tell us (you can swim, can't ya?). I even believed that England could win the World Cup, though admittedly that one only lasted until about the point they actually got near a ball.

One problem with this optimism is that I habitually underestimate Just How Fucked The Middle East Is. To whit, courtesy of defence consultant Thomas P.M. Barnett:

Iran launches a pre-emptive war...

... in the only way it can.

Behind Hamas and Hezbollah stands Iran and its proxy Syria, which is why Israel has always worried far more about Iran than Iraq.

We had a choice on Iran, and we chose to rerun the WMD dynamic, believing--as this Administration seems to--that it was simply a matter of showing that diplomacy can't work before setting in motion the kinetics sometime before the term is up.

Guess what? Iran doesn't care to wait on that timetable, and so it launches it's form of a pre-emptive war--well-timed and well-placed.

Hamas and Hezbollah know what buttons to push with Israel (snatch-and-grabs), and Israel is more than obliging, in its ceaseless quest for buffers, to play its role.

This "open war" will feature far more firepower than deaths (AP reporting 73 Lebanese and 12 Israelis so far, which is barely a decent train wreck). Israel will suffer minimally, mostly in diplomacy. Lebanon and the West Bank will suffer large amounts of infrastructure damage.

None of this will matter in Tehran, which is more than happy to exploit Hamas and Hezbollah to its purposes. Assad will do whatever seems to help most in tying the Americans up and diverting their attention from his failed regime, whose economic fortunes--as always--will rise or fall with Lebanon (get ready for a drop).

...this sounds horribly convincing, doesn't it?

If anyone has come across any opportunities to invest in oil companies of late, let me know. You might just make a killing.

Nixon in China

2006-07-15T06:17:00.000-04:00

Hopelessly optimistic conjecture on the Middle East situation:

It's been said that the reason Ariel Sharon could get away with being a dove because he had a well established reputation as a hawk. Thus he could remove settlers from the Gaza Strip and tell the far right of his own Likud party to go shove it without fear of getting called an Arafat-loving hippy, because he'd been a senior military man whose aggressive tendancies scared the shit out of the left.

Ehud Olmert, his successor as Prime Minister, has said he will continue with his disengagement plan. But Olmert doesn't have the same rep as a warmonger to help give him the credibility when it comes to making peace.

So, he's decided to start a war to show he doesn't take any shit. This will make it much easier when it comes to pushing for unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank later.

That's gotta be it. Right? Right?

Beach reading

2006-07-14T13:25:00.000-04:00

Looking for an old piece he did about the 1968 Democratic National Convention, I somehow stumbled upon Harper's magazine publisher's John MacArthur recent account of a 1990 interview encounter with Graham Greene.

Appearing last week in Boston alt-weekly The Phoneix and largely concerned with the novelist's take on US interventionism (this is a favorite topic of MacArthur's), the piece gives plenty of insight into Greene's take on world affairs at the end of a century that he'd witnessed firsthand.

It's also worth a look for any Greene fan. To wit:

“Hollywood made a bad film of nearly every book I did,” he said. “They did a very bad one of The Quiet American, where they’re saving Vietnam from communism and so on. They completely reversed the plot and got permission from President Diem to shoot in Vietnam. I can’t remember who did the awful film of The End of the Affair. Fritz Lang made a bad film of The Ministry of Fear. And he apologized for it when I ran into him in a bar in Los Angeles. He was old, it was the end of his time, you know, and he’d been handed a script and had to stick to it. He cut out the whole central portion of he book and it lost all its point. You’d think that somebody of Fritz Lang’s reputation would have been able to do something.”

Pulling of hair, gnashing of teeth

2006-07-13T15:27:00.000-04:00

Not that its indicative of any larger cracks in the US right, but it is fun to see a few nü-conservative institutions go at it in catty combat.

The New York Post is largely NYC’s counterweight to the Sun, except educated media-types buy the 25¢ paper because—I’m paraphrasing here—“it’s just trashy fun.”

The Post took a break from its usual Bush cheerleading and Headless-Body-in-Topless-Bar heads to print a piece asking if Ann Coulter might have plagiarized bits in her new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. (I haven’t read it either, but it’s apparently very popular and sounds like an intelligent, even-handed look at politics in the US.)

When I first saw the article in the Post last week, it did seem sort of uncharacteristic. This is, after all, the paper that headlined the US World-Cup loss to the Czech Republic as EUROTRASHED.

But, like any good tabloid, the Post is opportunistic in its targets. It has the ability to bend and morph its positions as needed. And the Post, you must understand, always has the high moral ground. This is unquestioned.

So after Coulter attacked the 9-11 widows in her new book, right-opportunistic ideology or not, it would be hard for the Post to line up with her again. And that’s when you get articles like the plagiarism-charge piece from the Fourth of July weekend (when, incidentally, next to noone was left in town to read the paper).

So Coulter sort-of responds in her latest column, attacking the paper for not running an article about her, but not mentioning that they actually did run an article about her. Coulter reasons (ha!):

Once considered a legitimate daily, the Post has been reduced to tabloid status best known for Page Six's breathless accounts of Paris Hilton's latest ruttings, and headlines like "Vampire Teen -- H.S. Girl Is Out for Blood." How crappy a newspaper is the Post? Let me put it this way: It's New York's second-crappiest paper.

As many have pointed out, it’s hard for the paper to be reduced to a tabloid since it’s been one since the 1940s.

As for the “once considered a legitimate daily” bit, I think that is part of Coulter’s insult and not a reference to the paper’s 200-year life as a bastion of liberalism.

The new new Europe

2006-07-13T10:59:00.000-04:00

Over at the Sharpener, I'm writing about Cameron's decision to delay plans to take Conservative MEPs out of the main centre-right grouping in the European Parliament:

Anyone else get the impression that it’s take out the trash day?

On a day when Labour fundraiser Lord Levy has been arrested and Israel seems to have declared war on Lebanon, David Cameron looks to be quietly dropping the one policy pledge he’s actually made.

...This seems very likely an incredibly a cynical political maneuver to help Cameron escape from a trainwreck of a policy without appearing to backtrack...

…but once you accept that, it’s actually rather good policy.

Ah go on, you know you wanna.

And to think you've misunderstood him for 12 years . . .

2006-07-11T12:20:00.000-04:00

Democrats looking for some positive reinforcement as the mid-term campaigns hit the summer stretch of county fairs and bake-offs should look at Pennsylvania, where incumbent Senator Rick "Bob Roberts" Santorum is—gasp—highlighting his more “moderate” credentials via a pamphlet called Fifty Things You May Not Know About Rick Santorum.

(Even with the quotation marks, the word “moderate” is probably being misused in that paragraph.)

One telling quote from Santorum even reduces his long record of social and big-government conservatism to mere “other stuff.” He told the NY Times:

"People already know about the other stuff," he said. "You guys remind them every day about the other stuff. Let's tell the rest of the story."

While his record in the Senate is one of the reasons he’s on the ropes—the “other stuff”—his competition, pro-life, pro-gun former governor Robert Casey Jr., is another. His campaign has been resonating with PA voters. But the fact remains, Casey is a moderate with views on abortion and guns that aren’t shared with most of his party.

This may not appeal to the vanguard of the party, but what if this means can win elections and further the overall Democratic message (sans abortion and guns)?

Noone wants to see the Dems drift-rightward, but maybe the quickest way to winning elections without a believable national agenda is via the big-tent strategy. If the culture wars are here to stay, surely this flexibility will be more helpful for the part in the long-run.

People in PA are bracing for a nasty race this fall when the long knives certainly come out. As one pollster says, Santorum will have to paint Casey as an unacceptable candidate—something that may be increasingly hard to do.

Who's a terrorist now

2006-07-11T04:59:00.000-04:00

This from the Daily Mail, Britain's last bastion of all that is middle-class and decent and a paper with a huge female readership:

Relationship terrorism is an increasingly ugly and destructive phenomenon between strong Alpha females and less driven, more laid-back, gamma guys.

Er, relationship what?

You think you're going to get an explanation, but no: the writer never deigns to really explain what she's actually on about. She describes herself as a victim of this particular phenomenon but, as far as I can tell, no violence was involved. Yet the phrase resonates through the piece as if it's something with which we're all intimately familiar. To whit:

Relationship terrorism is not, as some glossy women's magazines have suggested, exclusively a male preserve. Both partners are equally guilty of colluding in a power struggle which, unless they seek to redress the balance, will destroy any chances of a fulfilling, lasting union.

Nope, that's still no clearer on the question of exactly how a power struggle with your sleeping partner equates to "terrorism".

It was left to a follow up piece by Amanda Platell to explain:

...'relationship terrorism’, where her partner strapped an emotional bomb to his back and detonated it in the middle of their relationship.

...er...

...and that's it, is it? Being a bit of a twat during a row counts as "terrorism" now?

What's next? When angry teenagers scream at their parents that they hate them, is that "familial terrorism", simply because it's designed to cause emotional distress? Is maliciously stealing someone's lunch from the office fridge now "workplace terrorism"? Will bullying in schools become "playground terrorism"?

We use the words we do for a reason. And as devastating as the end of a relationship can be, there is a galaxy of difference between Platell's emotional bomb and a real one. If Al-Qaeda took the same view as the Mail, and restricted its terrorism to standing up in the aisles of planes and telling the passengers that they were a bunch of emotionally needy failures, then this'd be a much nicer world than the one we're actually living in.

Empathy

2006-07-10T13:01:00.000-04:00

Conservative leader David Cameron wants to understand criminals:

'...people want their politicians to ask the question: 'What is it that brought that young person to commit that crime at that time? What's the background to it, what are the long-term causes of crime?'

"If you're ill, it's no good putting a sticking plaster on it. You've got to get to the bottom of the illness.

"Let's try and understand what's gone wrong in these children's lives and we'll find it's about family breakdown, it's about drugs, it's about alcohol abuse, often it's young people who are brought up in care when they should be in loving homes. Let's now deal with those problems. That doesn't mean at the same we can't be tough when a crime is committed."

Or, to put it another way, "Tough on crime - tough on the causes of crime."

Now where've we heard that before.

Cynical ploys aplenty

2006-07-10T10:06:00.000-04:00

Last week, GOP House Majority Leader John Boehner reluctantly admitted to the Boston Globe that the House will most likely vote on increasingly the minimum wage this summer and that the chamber's GOP is ”probably going to have to find some way to deal with it." (Maybe they could reignite the debate about censuring the NY Times or something.)

While relatively few people work for minimum wage in the US, it hasn’t been increased since 1997 to the chagrin of low-paid workers everywhere. If we’re in the middle of the glorious economic boom the GOP keeps talking about, why not share the wealth with the lowest paid workers?

(Ironically enough, this would also affect the lowest-paid, on-the-books legal workers – not the illegal immigrants of so much concern to Republicans this spring.)

But even funnier is the fact that Boehner described the Democrats attempts to bring the issue up as a “cynical ploy” in an election year. What, we must ask, would Boehner call the doomed-to-fail votes on gay marriage and flag burning, issues the party brought up in a transparent attempt to shore up its base? Are those also cynical ploys, too?

He didn’t say.

One year on (2)

2006-07-07T12:47:00.000-04:00

And a third, stolen shamelessly from a chap on a mailing list that I'm on*, but I liked it so much I wanted to keep it. Regarding the "anniversary special edition" of London freesheet Metro:

FFS, if you're a free newspaper given away and read on the tube, don't do an issue which is principally about people dying horribly in the exact circumstances that most of your readers are currently in. They should have done one with pictures of scantily clad beautiful people and otehr pictures of flowers and kittens playing.

*Jim Smith, in case you were wondering.

One year on

2006-07-07T07:24:00.000-04:00

Two thoughts on the first anniversary of the July 7th bombings.

Firstly, passing through Baker Street first thing this morning I heard a request for Inspector Sands to go to the control room. There was a moment of paranoia of the "Oh christ, not again" school: Inspector Sands is the codeword London Underground use to alert staff to a fire or other emergency, without alarming passengers. (This is less effective for those passengers who've rather regrettably discovered the code). Seems to have been a false alarm, thankfully, but it does suggest that everyone was on heightened alert this morning.

Secondly, my daily headlines email from the BBC begins with an unfortunate juxtaposition that reminds us that this whole war-on-terror mess probably isn't going away any time soon:

* Nation commemorates 7/7 bombings *
The UK commemorates the first anniversary of the London bombings that claimed 52 lives and injured hundreds.

* Israelis resume Gaza air strikes *
Israeli aircraft renew their assault on the Gaza Strip with early morning raids, killing a militant and wounding three.

England, England

2006-07-06T06:19:00.000-04:00

With the English question, the Conservative party think they're on to a winner. Humiliating World Cup defeat aside, English flags are still ubiquitous. And English voters are more inclined to vote Tory than Scottish and Welsh ones: while on the Celtic fringes, the party has spent much of the last decade languishing in third or even fourth place, it took more votes in England than even Blair's Labour party at the 2005 election. Appealling to English nationalist sentiment thus looks like a good political bet right now.

The issue they're addressing goes something like this. England is the only one of the four constituent nations of the United Kingdom not to have its own political assembly and constitutional status. As a result, Scottish representatives can vote on exclusively English legislation, while English ones cannot vote on Scottish laws. A lot of English voters, particularly chaps from the home counties muttering about how London subsidizes the rest of the country, thus spend a lot of time quietly resenting their celtic fellows for interfering in their affairs without having the common decency to return the favour. The issue is likely to come to a head in the next couple of years when Chancellor Gordon Brown, a man more Scottish than a haggis-smeared Robbie Burns in a kilt, takes over as Prime Minister.

The government, who handily have Scottish and Welsh MPs to help push through their English legislation, claim that there is no problem to address. The Tories, feeling that England's decent Conservative voting majority is having an unwanted Labour agenda forced upon them by a constitutional quirk, fervently argue otherwise: one Conservative front-bencher, Alan Duncan, recently claimed that it was "almost impossible" for a Scot to become Prime Minister, a political move about as subtle as the Battle of Culloden.

While they're right to raise the question, that's the easy part: answering it is the challenge. Cameron has proposed England-only sessions at Westminster. But how do you define an England only law? What about laws relating to hospitals just over the border, that may be used by Scottish or Welsh voters? Or those which have a major impact on the national budget, and thus affect the block grants given to the Scottish Parliament or Welsh Assembly? Celtic MPs may not have the same stake in such laws as English ones - but they do still have a stake. As the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland puts it:

What law counts as "English"? The Speaker will issue a ruling, but there will be frequent rows. And imagine the strangeness of a new category of second-class MPs, shut out of the chamber for days at a stretch.

What would soon emerge is a parliament within a parliament, a de facto English assembly sitting in Westminster on Mondays and Tuesdays, only ushering in the Scots and Welsh when, say, defence and foreign affairs come up on a Wednesday. And these English and UK bodies could be badly at odds. Cameron might well have a majority of English seats at the next election (the Tories won more English votes than Labour did last time), with Labour holding a UK majority. In that scenario, which party is the government and which is the opposition? (...)

The arrangement could not last. The logic would be inescapable: the four nations of the union, separately writing their own laws, would eventually go their own ways.

There is no easy answer to this one. An English Parliament would border on the pointless because, since England makes up 85% of the UK's population, it would come extremely close to just replicating the House of Commons. Yet England-only sessions at Westminster have their own problems, and voters have shown scant interest in the government's plan for regional assemblies.

If this issue is ever to be addressed, it will need a full-scale reassement of the mess that passes as the British constitution. That presumably means some sort of constitutional convention, at which everything - human rights law, the role of the House of Lords, regional and local government, the powers of the judiciary - can be addressed at once. Until that happens, politicians will continue to come up with answers motivated more than self-interest than good policy.

Bloomberg for what?

2006-07-05T14:00:00.000-04:00

With more than two years to go before the 2008 US presidential election, pundits and hacks can put forth all sorts of crazy ideas about who might run. It’s still a parlor game—and a fun one at that.

Since it seems to be New Republic week here at AR, why not have a read at the DC policy magazine’s new piece on why NY mayor Michael Bloomberg might make a run as a third-party candidate?

Election-spoiling aside, there are a number of reasons why, with 28 months to the election, mind you, this might not sounds like that crazy of an idea. Here are five:

1. Regardless of what he really is, mavericks are still sexy. Think John McCain prior to this spring. Think Theodore Roosevelt with he split from the GOP at the 1912 Republican Party Conference in Chicago. Bloomberg was a billionaire Democrat who ran as a Republican because the spot was open, spending around $94-a-vote to get the second-hardest and probably first-most-thankless job in America.

2. The hard right despises him almost as much as they hate that other NY mayor, Rudy Giuliani. The only reason they like him less is fewer people even know who Bloomberg he is past Philadelphia.

3. And, while many on the far left also dislike Giuliani with a passion (You can dislike with a passion on AR.), their vitriol hasn’t yet reached Bloomberg for the same reasons. (Unless, of course, they live in the five boroughs and remember that whole west-side stadium thing.)

4. He has money. But, perhaps more importantly, he has a game plan. From the TNR story, Bloomberg aide Kevin Sheekey says the mayor would only jump into the fray in McCain is defeated/compromised in the GOP primaries and if the Dems put up an “unelectable” candidate (Funny how that word is seemingly exclusive to the Dems these days). Says Sheekey:

"If John McCain gets beaten to the right--which is possible in a conservative Republican primary--and, if Democrats elect someone through a primary who Democrats generally view as unelectable, there's a large segment of the American electorate that is looking for something different, and that could be 36 percent of the vote in enough states to give you an electoral win.”

4b. He would also, much like 1992 and 1996 third-party candidate H. Ross Perot, be coming into ring fresh, after both the GOP and Democratic candidates have just come out of bloody primary battles.

5. In addition to a strategy, he’s cobbled together a platform that could be really appealing to voters worn out from eight years of Bush-Cheney:

In Baltimore, he pressed for stem-cell research and attacked "political science." Back home, he convened a national summit of mayors to press for tighter gun control. He laid out an immigration-reform proposal of his own in The Wall Street Journal, and, in Chicago, he denounced partisan squabbling, adding that "both ends of the political spectrum share the blame. And both seem unwilling to change."

It’s an interesting thought. But, in the Red-Blue rut US politics are stuck in, can a NYC mayor-cum-former-Democrat-turned-Rockefeller-Republican win across the US, doing something even the original Rockefeller Republican, Nelson Rockefeller,was never able to do?

Then again, as Nelson learned the hard way, there is always the Vice Presidency to think about . . .

(Not to mention the fact that there are plenty of mayors who would make good Presidential material.)

Boiling a frog

2006-07-04T10:13:00.000-04:00

Bored? Listless? Missing that adolescent anger that once raged away behind your politics? Read this.

It's a long (and I mean long) exploration of the misguided authoritarianism that has motivated just about every piece of legislation to come out of Britain's Home Office (that's the justice department, to our American readers) over the last nine years. Written by Vanity Fair's London editor Henry Porter, it serves as the one-stop guide that tells you everything you need to know about why Tony Blair Scares The Crap Out Of You. Some extracts:

Many of the measures have been slipped through under legislation that appears to address problems the public is concerned about. For instance, the law banning people from demonstrating within one kilometer of Parliament is contained in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. The right to protest freely has been affected by the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows police to stop and search people in a designated area—which can be anywhere—and by antisocial-behavior laws, which allow police to issue an order banning someone from a particular activity, waving a banner, for instance. If a person breaks that order, he or she risks a prison sentence of up to five years.

Likewise, the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997—designed to combat stalkers and campaigns of intimidation—is being used to control protest. A woman who sent two e-mails to a pharmaceutical company politely asking a member of the staff not to work with a company that did testing on animals was prosecuted for "repeated conduct" in sending an e-mail twice, which the act defines as harassment. (...)

The right to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there is a fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same offense no longer exists. The presumption of innocence is compromised, especially in antisocial-behavior legislation, which also makes hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be punished unless a court decides that the law has been broken is removed in the system of control orders by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from moving about freely and using the phone and Internet, without at any stage being allowed to hear the evidence against him—house arrest in all but name.

Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which preceded Blair's government, but which is now being used to patrol opinion.(...)

There can be few duller documents than the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 or the Inquiries Act of 2005, which is perhaps just as well for the government, for both vastly extend the arbitrary powers of ministers while making them less answerable to Parliament. The Civil Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in, particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur. Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess the situation. If the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he cannot be punished.

One response might be to look into his actions by holding a government investigation under the Inquiries Act, but then the minister may set its terms, suppress evidence, close the hearing to the public, and terminate it without explanation. Under this act, the reports of government inquiries are presented to ministers, not, as they once were, to Parliament. (...)

The National Identity Register will log and store details of every important action in a person's life. When the ID card is swiped as someone identifies himself at, say, a bank, hospital, pharmacy, or insurance company, those details are retained and may be inspected by, among others, the police, tax authorities, customs, and M.I.5, Britain's domestic-intelligence service. The system will locate and track the entire adult population. If you put it together with the national system of license-plate-recognition cameras, which is about to go live on British highways and in town centers, and understand that the ID card, under a new regulation, will also carry details of a person's medical records, you realize that the state will be able to keep tabs on anyone it chooses and find out about the most private parts of a person's life.

Why should this worry us? For all his flaws, Blair isn't a wannabe dictator and Britain isn't a police state. Porter argues that Baroness Kennedy, a lawyer and Labour peer, has the answer:

She accused government ministers of seeing themselves as the embodiment of the state, rather than, as I would put it, the servants of the state.

"The common law is built on moral wisdom," she said, "grounded in the experience of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and when a person is on trial the burden of proof must be on the state and no one's liberty should be removed without evidence of the highest standard. ... Being required to produce your papers to show who you are is a public manifestation of who is in control. What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state."

I don't think Blair is a bad man. I believe he means it when he says he thinks he is acting in the interests of the majority.

But any authority will use the power it is allotted to the fullest - not because it has sinister intentions, simply because it is easier. It is easier to evict protestors from Parliament Square than to face them every day. It is easier to lock suspects up indefinitely than have to prove their guilt in a court of law. The state and its leaders do not have to be totalitarians in order to abuse the kind of powers Blair has given them.

And when have you ever known an increase in power and a decrease in accountability to make a government more competent?

What's so special about it?

2006-07-03T09:50:00.000-04:00

The New Republic seems of late to be rather obsessing about the problems faced by the special relationship.

A couple of months back, it published a feature (now subs only, I'm afraid) by Alex Massie under the subheading, "We're still friends with the British, right?" It catalogued the various reasons why the UK is feeling increasingly short-changed by the special relationship: Tony Blair's prioirities ignored on everything from climate change to the Middle East peace process; the refusal of the Americans to let their closest ally near their military technology, even at the cost of losing major defence deals; and the fact the most recent extradition treaty has been ratified by the UK but not the US, meaning that the yanks can get hold of their most wanted but we can't get hold of ours. (This has been most visible in the case of the "NatWest Three", a trio of British bankers who have fought a losing battle to avoid be tried in Britain on Enron-related fraud charges. They now face trial in Texas.)

And the eastern half of the alliance is getting distinctly peeved. As Massie notes:

...this anxiety revealed itself at a breakfast briefing with British reporters in a swish Washington hotel, when one historically pro-American Tory member of Parliament rose to ask a less-than-genial question about the special relationship: "What do we get out of it?" No one quite knew what to say to this unwelcome piece of breakfast realpolitik.

This dissatisfaction has at least been noticed by one senior Republican, who said during the Senate hearing that the unwillingness to compromise on military technology was "going to cost us in our relations with the British." Unfortunately, the Republican in question was John McCain, who isn't exactly in any position to do anything about it.

TNR returned to the issue in a slightly more oblique fashion last week, when Peter Beinart praised Tony Blair's foreign policy vision - and bemoaned the fact there isn't the slightest chance of any American liberals paying any attention to it because he hitched his wagon to President Bush over Iraq.

Now, Beinart suggests, even Blair is beginning to subtly criticise his best buddy's way of operating on the international stage:

To build that new architecture, Blair proposed empowering the U.N. secretary-general to respond rapidly to emerging humanitarian crises, before the next Bosnia or Darfur spins out of control. He proposed revamping the Security Council to include India, Germany, and Japan--so it better reflects the power realities of today. He urged fundamental reform of the International Monetary Fund. He proposed an international uranium bank that makes peaceful nuclear power easier and nuclear proliferation harder. And he called for a powerful U.N. environmental organization to coordinate dramatic action on global warming.

And then Blair turned the knife. "What's the obstacle" to such efforts, he asked? "It is that, in creating more effective multilateral institutions, individual nations yield up some of their own independence. This is a hard thing to swallow.... But the [alternative is] ... ad hoc coalitions for action that stir massive controversy about legitimacy or paralysis in the face of crisis. No amount of institutional change will ever work unless the most powerful make it work."

That line about illegitimate "ad hoc coalitions": that's Iraq. "Paralysis in the face of crisis": Darfur. And the "most powerful" without whom such efforts will never work: He's talking about the USA.

The critique remains subtle, and it's damned near impossible to imagine Blair actually doing a Hugh-Grant-in-Love-Actually and telling Bush exactly where he can stick his war. But nonetheless, it should cause the US pause for thought: when even Tony Blair begins to question them, how many friends can they have left?

A slight branding problem

2006-07-03T08:01:00.001-04:00

Nandos, the semi-fast food franchise and purveyor of peri peri chicken to the masses, is still advertising its wares on England's commercial radio stations under the slogan "Be Portuguese!"

You'd have thought that after Saturday they'd want to rethink that one, wouldn't you?

Just say yes

2006-06-30T11:24:00.000-04:00

My favourite press release of the week. From the British Medical Association:

Taking medicine regularly (even placebo) is good for you

People who take their medicine regularly, even dummy (placebo) medicine, have a lower risk of death than those with poor adherence, finds a study in this week’s BMJ.

This intriguing finding supports the concept of the “healthy adherer” effect, whereby adherence to drug treatment may be a marker for overall healthy behaviour, say the authors.

The study comes from Canada, where the government funds the vast majority of hospital and physician care, but pays for a comparatively small share of prescription drugs.

Now the research was conducted by academics, and I'm sure it lived up to all the required ethical and scientific standards and all that...

...but nonetheless, surely I can't be the only one who found myself glossing this as "Pharmaceutical specialists find that giving pharmaceutical companies money is good for you."

Sinking thinking

2006-06-29T15:34:00.000-04:00

If you happened to quickly scan the Supreme Court-Gitmo story today, in which the high court ruled that the military tribunals at Camp X-Ray violated US military law and the Geneva Conventions, you might have very well thought: “Well, the dissenters are Scalia (yep), Thomas (per usual) and Alito (figures). That Roberts, though, he maybe be a bit more of a moderate after all.”

This happened to at least two people I know. Closer inspection (or perhaps rudimentary knowledge of the case’s history in the lower court) shows that Roberts didn’t actually vote on the case.

That’s because it was his case at the federal level. At which point, he ruled in favor of the government.

Oh, well, it was a nice thought.

(Perhaps to avoid any additional confusion, the NY Times’ Supreme Court B-team has a easy-to-understand info-graphic, while the BBC has the whole military-tribunal-versus-real-trial-thing here.)

Caution : genius at work

2006-06-28T16:47:00.000-04:00

One could mistakenly think nothing gets done in Washington, DC in the summertime. That's actually not true. Why, just this week, all manner of important business was conducted, stands were taken and precedents set. Let's have a look:

*The Senate, seemingly eager to use the Constitution to take away liberties, almost passed a bill making flag-burning a crime. Considered by many pundits as a chance to shore up the GOP base a la the gay marriage amendment, these pundits (and Senators from both sides of the aisle) seem to forget some on the Right actually believe the Constitution was about freedom or the government not telling you what to do or something.

*The House of Representatives, much maligned in this parish, is tackling the second-most important issue in the US today, ie bashing the liberal media's national security reporting. (Well, second only to stopping the rash of flag burnings we've been experiencing, anyway.)

The lower body is busying itself with this important task and debating whether or not to condemn the US news media for reporting on the Bush Administration's program of spying on bank accounts. Or, as House Majority Leader Danny Hastert put it, "Loose lips kill American people."

Say what you will about the pols in DC, but they never shy away from the tough issues.

(This week, for their part, the Supreme Court decided that disgraced former House Leader Tom DeLay's political gerrymandering down is Texas was for the most part OK, so get out those census rolls, carve up the districts and make sure there is never, ever a competitive US House seat ever again.)

Big mouth strikes again

2006-06-28T10:32:00.000-04:00

Who exactly does Charles Clarke think he is?

His Cabinet career lasted roughly five years and was, not to put too fine a point on it, shit. He was the education secretary who described education for its own sake as "a bit dodgy", and who broke the Labour manifesto pledge not to introduce university tuition fees.

After two years at education, he ascended to the role of Home Secretary, where he lasted precisely 17 months before being dishonourably discharged. This is little longer than the time served by such luminaries as David Waddington and Kenneth Baker, two figures from an era when the Tories seemed to be under the impression that the Home Office had a revolving door, and who have since descended into well-deserved obscurity.

And what were his achievements in this great office of state? What is his great mark on British society? He undermined the rights to trial by jury, pushed through the identity cards bill, and generally gave the impression that human rights and legal process were optional extras for the modern justice minister.

What's more, he didn't even pursue this recklessly authoritarian course particularly well. The House of Lords is still kicking up a fuss on most of the big issues and, if the tabloids are to be believed, even as I write, foreign criminals are roaming the lands, threatening your kiddies.

Clarke likes to think of himself as a bruiser. But what kind of bruiser can't cope with a little criticism from the liberal media without running crying to the LSE? Why did he almost have an embolism when he was asked a straightforward policy question by a priest?

Most of all, what kind of bruiser would go running to that same liberal media that they accused of spreading such pernicious poison, for no other reason than to slag off his former colleagues and generally squeal "It wasn't my fault!"

Some commentators are already questioning whether Clarke's turnaround heralds the end for Tony Blair, just as 16 years ago Geoffrey Howe started the sequence of events that did it for Thatcher. And one day, quite possibly, a damning attack from a former loyalist will bring down the Prime Minister.

But for such a move to be effective, the attacker needs to be more than loyal. They need to be respected, serious, ideally popular and certainly competent. Clarke is none of these things. Instead he's a has-been who combines all the worst authoritarian excesses of the Blair government with the dignity of a Big Brother contestant and the personality and self-awareness of a snivelling child.

Just ignore him. He'll go away of his own accord.

Favourite-ism

2006-06-27T19:12:00.000-04:00

Spotted from a number 453 bus, somewhere in the vacinity of Trafalgar Square early this evening: several different groups of kids wrapped in Brazillian flags and cheering their hearts out.

Nice to see that, despite the red-and-white madness, not everyone around here is feeling the need to say they're supporting England.

Signs of the times

2006-06-27T13:24:00.000-04:00

I spent the weekend in northern Poland, attending a wedding and generally consuming too much red meat and beer (hey, when in Krokowa).

I was staying in the countryside of North Pomorania, near the Baltic coast and a fair way out from any of the big cities. Unlike almost anywhere else in Europe I've been over the last few years, beyond the confines of the hotel hardly anyone there speaks English. The locals generally rolled their eyes at the funny foreigners, before hopefully trying a spot of German. As a result, in the absence of our Polish hostess, most of the English party were forced to resort to some combination of pointing, miming, attempting to impersonate types of fruit and giggling helplessly when presented with entirely the wrong object.

Despite all that, in the hour long drive from the airport, I spotted signs for the following:

-the Orange mobile network
-Ikea
-Dove soap
-McDonalds
-KFC (a drive in)
-the largest Tesco supermarket I have ever seen

This wasn't particularly surprising - right up until the moment it occured to me that I was in what had once been a communist country.

In retrospect, the Cold War looks a little one sided, don't you think?

Revenge of the Wonk

2006-06-23T11:28:00.000-04:00

One of the last great bastions of US television journalism is Frontline, a long-form documentary show airing Tuesday nights on PBS.

This week’s much-discussed episode—titled “The Dark Side”—feels like it was ghost-directed by George Lucas, putting to rest rumours that Dick Cheney is Senator/Emperor Palpatine. (The title of the program is not only a nod to Lucas' villains; it comes from a Cheney interview in the immediate days after 9/11, discussing the need to "have to go over to the darkside" with intelligence work.)

Following at the political tug-of-war that followed 9/11, which pitted George Tenet and the CIA on one side and Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney on the other, the doc is a fascinating, insider look at two philosophies crashing into one another in the Oval Office.

Thankfully, you can watch the whole thing at the Frontline website (with additional interviews for your true wonks out there) or youtube.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. Your hand will hurt from hitting your forehead and your eyes will hurt from the shot-from-the-car-sodium-lit-shots-of-Washington-DC-at-night footage of the White House, Washington Monument and CIA headquarters.

But it’s US television journalism at it best. And, seeing as there is no Episode VII this summer, it’s a perfectly good way to spend (or maybe ruin?) a summer weekend.

You kids never heard of Korea, then?

2006-06-22T11:15:00.000-04:00

A recent study found that 30% of US teenagers are under the impression that the most heavily fortified border in the world is the one between the US and Mexico.

I know immigration is a big political issue in the states right now, but come on.

Brownian notion

2006-06-21T11:10:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, the economic secretary to the British Treasury and one of Chancellor Gordon Brown's best political friends Ed Balls said, "We need to face the challenges and renew our party while we are in power."

He was talking about the best way to fight the resurgent Conservative party and made no reference to Tony Blair. But the speech has been widely glossed as, "Gordon's turn now, please."

Elsewhere, yesterday's Guardian noted that former minister Michael Wills said that, "The circumstances that sustained Labour for so long are evaporating and that the government requires radical renewal to win a fourth term." The story described him as a "Brown ally".

And on Monday Michael Meacher, a former environment minister described by the Telegraph as a "veteran of Old Labour", demanded that Blair stand down ASAP.

Now I would like Tony Blair out of Number 10 as much as the next voter. But aren't all these demands for a change of leadership in the Labour party rendered slightly suspicious by the fact they keep coming from Gordon's mates?

What's next, the Times quoting the elderly Mrs Brown demanding that her son get to play at Prime Ministers?

Home less

2006-06-19T12:54:00.000-04:00

Today I am writing about housing. Did you know that, over the last 30 years, changes to the structure of family life mean that the number of households in Britain has risen by 30%? At the same time, the level of housebuilding has fallen by 50%.

When you put it like that, the housing market's current ability to defy gravity doesn't look so mysterious after all, does it?

Sick with self love

2006-06-16T11:06:00.000-04:00

That time of the month when I'm buried in public policy journalism once again, so only a quickie. A lovely exploration of why winning the World Cup would be a bad thing for Germany here. Basically, attitudes are always reacting to the last national consciousness raising event: Germany still remains liberal thanks to guilt over the horrors of the Nazis, but a victory for the national football team could result in a resurgance of nationalist feeling:

Take Germany and Britain, and take the matter of surveillance. In East Germany the STASI, the secret police, were surveying everyone. When communism fell, it was understood that this would no longer be the case. Now, Germany has relatively few surveillance cameras. Britain, which never had a STASI, is now the world's most surveyed country: as Liberty reports, "There is one CCTV camera for every 14 people in the UK. If you live in London you are likely to be on cameras 300 times a day."

See, for example, the clashes between German and Polish fans earlier this week.

The piece is well worth a read - though how it squares with the resurgance of patriotism in post-imperialist Japan I'm not sure.

Tehran newsstand

2006-06-15T10:23:00.000-04:00

Well, one rag you won't be picking up this week is The Economist:

Iran has banned The Economist magazine for describing the Persian Gulf as merely "the Gulf" in a map published in the latest edition, state television reported late Wednesday.

According to the Associated Press reporter, it really has less to do with some damning leader than Gulf politics and pride filtered through The Economist PLaza in London:

Tehran believes in aggressively defending the historical term "Persian Gulf" against "Arabian Gulf," which it regards as a name dreamed up by Arab nationalists.

A load of Bull

2006-06-14T13:56:00.000-04:00

I'm at it again over at the Sharpener, this time sounding off on why lefties should be patriots. (Tell me honestly - am I getting right wing in my old age?)

An extract:

The gradual organic growth of the state means that there are few national symbols which we all feel happy uniting behind. Those we do have mostly seem to represent conservatism, whether with a small C (the crown, Parliament) or a whopping great one (Churchill, the Empire). What’s more, much of the British national identity in recent decades has been forged by the Second World War - and while holding the line against fascism is undeniably something to be proud of, it

a) was sixty years ago; and

b) gets twisted all too easily into xenophobia of the Two world wars and one world cup school.

See the rest here.

Today at school I learnt the true meaning of multiculturalism (5)

2006-06-13T05:13:00.000-04:00

The effect of the World Cup on Britain's national consciousness is even more bizarre than I expected.

Everywhere you go in London right now there are England flags, as well as the odd misplaced Union Jack. I can't remember it being like this before: normally such visible manifestations of patriotism are avoided, for fear of being interpreted as casual racism.

On Saturday afternoon, I popped into a corner shop near my house where a first generation immigrant - I think from the Indian subcontinent, but don't quote me on that - was wearing an England cap, despite having what could charitably be described as a limited grasp of the English language.

That evening, I got in a minicab in which the Bhangladeshi driver - like just about every other stranger who's struck up a conversation with me over the last five days - insisted on dissecting England's chances in the competition. (Given I enjoy football roughly as much as I enjoy diarrhea, this wasn't that fun for me.) Having thoroughly damned Sven's squad ("The media build players up too much, man, pretend they're the greatest thing ever when in Brazil they'd be nothing"), he turned to me and said, "But I do support England, you know. I want them to win." It was at that point I realized he was wearing an England shirt.

I'm got weeks of this to look forward to, haven't I? Great.

Odd nation out

2006-06-12T18:05:00.000-04:00

Standing in a North London pub Saturday afternoon watching England play Paraguay in the first round of the World Cup, I found myself thinking about, of all things, US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton.

Earlier last week, Bolton became cross with Brit Mark Malloch Brown, Deputy Secretary General of the UN. Brown had made comments he made about US attitude towards the international body, saying:

“The prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable . . . You will lose the U.N. one way or the other.”

Shocking, I know. Sure, there is quite a bit of reform needed at the UN and, to be fair, Bolton hasn’t been as much of a train wreck on the Hudson as most had assumed, but it’s still hard to understand the outrage on Bolton’s part. Brown pretty much called it as he saw it—the UN needs to cooperation of the US. Recently, the US has been happy not to oblige.

(Of course, there is a book somewhere in the way the Bush Administration have a monopoly on the moral high ground in America. Publishers, feel free to get in touch.)

Bringing it back to Belsize Park on Saturday, I know some charge the World Cup with bringing out the best in drunken loutishness, jingoism and racism the world over. There is probably some truth to this, but as a Yank in a European capital in the opening days of the cup, one gets a very different sense: you see a huge, international sporting event that draws more viewers than anything else, including the Olympics.

And you realize that people in America, by and large, could care less.

(Yeah, I know, this is a huge generalization and needs qualifying. There are a lot of people who care about the World Cup in America: immigrants from pretty much everywhere, people under thirty, Anglo-, Euro- and Francophiles, European ex-pats, kids who currently play soccer, people who studied abroad, Gen X intellectuals, parents whose take their kids to games every weekend, well-rounded sports fans, etc. They just don't form much of a bloc yet-but that's changing.)

But the point remains: you can’t walk five feet in London without some reminder of what is happening in Germany: passerby asking for the score, the very un-English sight of English flags on cars, constant water-cooler talk, pubs advertising how many large-screen televisions they have . . .

Spending some time in a European capital before the World Cup, the distance between the excitement currently enveloping the globe and the disinterested shrug in the US is a decent metaphor of America’s creeping alienation on the world’s stage.

Not only is the US largely removed from a important international sporting event (other than the 4,000 brave souls spending June in Deutschland), it has also been steadily alienating our friends around the world for years. The International Criminal Court, Iraq, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and Kyoto—these weren’t the beginning. But these foreign policy and international relations decisions have served to reinforce the us-against-the-world dichotomy.

Last week’s Bolton episode further reiterated the unilateral direction this administration has taken—and the attitude that it could care less what our allies around the world think.

That attitude is one that will (and pretty much already has) lead to people cheering for the US to fail—no matter what the situation. The problem is, in the end, we’ll be losing a hell of a lot more than a football game in Germany.