World

Newt Gingrich’s campaign to secure the Republican party’s 2012 nomination doesn’t deserve to be taken as seriusly as plenty of serious people seem to be taking it. No-one thinks Newt can win but he receives vastly more coverage than other (and sane!) no-hopers such as Gary Johnson. Perhaps that’s explained by the fact that Newt can’t come within 150 yards of a microphone without making a fool of himself. As a result he provides good copy. Which wins him more publicity. The latest: his marital problems were just the consequence of his patriotism. He tells the Christian Broadcasting Network: “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by

Peter King, America’s worst Congressman, is back in the news and just as loathsome as ever. No surprise there. This, however, is news to me and wholly surprising: After Obama was elected president, King got a call from Rahm Emanuel, the incoming chief of staff. “President-elect Obama would like you to be ambassador to Ireland,” said Emanuel, according to King’s recollection of the conversation. King said he thought hard about it over a long weekend, fantasizing about hosting his Irish relatives at the ambassador’s 62-acre estate inside Dublin’s Phoenix Park, where the Irish president also lives. But King declined the offer. “I just felt I would be defending foreign policy

My esteemed colleage Nick Cohen dislikes disagreeing with the equally estimable James Forsyth and I dislike disagreeing with Nick in turn. But his comments on the decision not to block Rupert Murdoch’s bid to purchase the 61% of BSkyB he did not already own seem unecessarily belligerent and, moreover, hyperbolic. Nick writes: The editors of every newspaper, television channel and radio station, with the exception of editors at News International, will be telling their hacks to go for Hunt. My colleagues will have a solid public interest justification for acting in their employers’ interest because we will be punishing corruption so blatant a seven-year-old could see through it. Rupert Murdoch

I think that nice Laurie Penny over at the New Statesman must actually be a conservative mole dedicated to undermining leftism from within. How else to explain this sort of stuff: The difference between Tahrir Square and Parliament Square is one of scale, but not of substance. Across the world, ordinary people are being denied a voice, shut out of work and education, having their dignity trashed. While armchair liberals express sympathy with protesters in the Middle East, workers and students in Britain have begun to express something far more powerful: solidarity. Solidarity, the watchword of this movement, hashtagged and chanted across the world, is not about pretending that there’s

As the candidate most likely to aver that the stars really are “God’s daisy chain” Mike Huckabee is already the Madeleine Bassett of the not-yet-officially-existing Republican Presidential campaign. That’s enough reason to wish him ill. Now there’s more: beneath that jovial southern-aw-shucks exterior lurks a Class A Idiot. From a recent radio interview: MALZBERG: Don’t you think it’s fair also to ask him, I know your stance on this. How come we don’t have a health record, we don’t have a college record, we don’t have a birth cer – why Mr. Obama did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to

Slowly, haltingly, the West decides what to do about Gaddafi. The latest news is that, having broken his silence over Libya a few days ago, Barack Obama is now imposing sanctions against its despicable regime: freezing assets, blocking transactions, that sort of thing. It follows a package of sanctions, including an arms embargo, that Britain and France have proposed to the UN. Although these sanctions are better than nothing – the West shouldn’t house Gaddafi’s slush funds, nor transfer weapons in his direction – they are of limited actual worth. Yesterday, the Mad Dog was parading the parapets once again, promising death for the protestors. You suspect he is unlikely