World

Dan Drezner thinks that the Clintons are probably right to suppose that the press has favoured Barack Obama this year. Still, he says, they probably shouldn’t read the UK papers and cites this piece by the Times’ Tim Reid which begins: Seventeen months after she sat regally in her New York living room and calmly declared: “I’m in and I’m in to win,” Hillary Clinton stands on a stage in a stifling hot shed in South Dakota, coughing and spluttering, as her daughter, Chelsea, grabs the microphone from her hand to take over the show. “A long campaign,” the former First Lady chokes out between sips of water. Her husband,

All sorts of speculation as to what Hillary Clinton will do once the primary season ends this evening and even her doughtiest supporters might begin to realise it’s unlikely she’s going to be the Democratic party’s nominee. Some of them doubtless want her to “fight on” all the way to the convention. For what little it’s worth I’d hazard that this is unlikely. Self-interest demands that she concede this week and that she does so graciously. At the risk of looking too far down the road (why bother with this election when we can have fun with one to come?) let’s just say that it’s all about 2012. Assume that

Via Cato, comes this report from The Times: They turn out in their hundreds in Stetsons and boots as hits such as the Crazy Foot Mambo and the Cowboy Strut echo around their village halls. They are drawn by a love of American culture – although definitely not American politics – and a passion for line dancing… Now country and western has become so big in France that the country’s bureaucrats have decided to bring the craze under state control. The French administration has moved to create an official country dancing diploma as part of a drive to regulate the fad. Authorised instructors who have been on publicly funded training

In the Republican corner it is to be John Sidney McCain III, white, age 71. In the Democratic corner we have Barack Hussein Obama, black, age 46. No American election battle since the days of Franklin Roosevelt has attracted so much worldwide attention. A recent visitor to North Korea, a nation supposedly hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, tells me that the first question his ‘minder’ asked was: ‘Who will win the American elections?’ His concern is unsurprising: a President McCain would favour continuing existing multilateral pressure on North Korea to eliminate its nuclear weapons, and might even give some meaning to the phrase ‘or else’. President Obama

Ezra Klein asks if Jim Webb is “too good for the Vice-Presidency”. And perhaps he is. Or rather, he’d be more useful to Democrats if he remained in the Senate, uninhibited by the restrictions imposed by the Vice-Presidency. And perhaps that too is so. Nonetheless Ezra’s piece also demonstrates the extent to which Webb is by some way the most interesting but also, perhaps, riskiest choice Obama could make. Still, here’s another notion: Obama might consider naming some members of his cabinet this summer, creating a British-style shadow cabinet to act as spokesmen for his campaign during the general election. Clearly, all such nominees would remain subject to Congressional confirmation,

Are Paris Saint-Germain the worst football team in Europe? This obviously depends upon how one measures or defines “worst”. PSG, despite another appalling season, would (thankfully) still be expected to defeat, say, Shamrock Rovers. But in a pound-for-pound sense is there a more pathetic club in europe? I’s not just that they only narrowly avoided relegation this season, it’s that they continue to squander resources. Even when they were owned by Canal Plus, PSG under-performed. Indeed, since the club was formed in 1970 they’ve only won the French championship twice (in 1986 and 1994), despite being one of the richest clubs in France and the only major club in Paris.

How many people really think of Che Guevara as a romantic, if occasionally headstrong, revolutionary? Outside Latin America, I mean. Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but does anyone under the age of 35 really give even half a damn about Che Guevara? Certainly, the anti-Che forces continue to write as though he remained a clear, present, danger to all things good and holy. Here’s John J Miller at The Corner, for instance: I have no objection to a movie about the life of Che Guevara. At least in theory. Yet it’s probably impossible for Hollywood to make an honest film about this awful man — case in point being the

In one sense there’s little point in writing about Hillary Clinton anymore. She’s lost. Still, if there is any truth to the notion, much-favoured by Washington reporters, that you can gain a sense of character and, indeed, governing style from the way in which a candidate campaigns then, by gum, we should be glad that Hillary Clinton is not going to be the next President of the United States. Her caterwauling about the perceived injustice of not counting the Florida and Michigan primary results on account of their determination to break DNC rules, has conquered many peaks of absurdity lately. Norm draws my attention to this one: People go through

American breakfasts are pretty good, or at least as fine as can be expected from a meal that doesn’t include black pudding. But there’s no doubting that the United States’ greatest culinary marvel is proper BBQ. It’s the finest American food there is. Porcine perfection. And BBQ is going international, according to this lovely piece in the Washington Post: It’s difficult enough for any new team to compete in the Super Bowl of Swine, which sends smoke wafting over downtown Memphis for three days every year. There are rules (written and unwritten) and traditions aplenty in this 30-year-old contest, which drew 125,000 spectators to one of the cradles of American

The Los Angeles Times’ Don Frederick claims Barack Obama has “disrespected” Kentucky by declining to campaign in the Bluegrass State. Does this mean he disrespected Guam too? More interestingly – if no more usefully – Frederick asks what might have happened if Clinton had, as her then deputy campaign manager Mike Henry urged, simply skipped the Iowa caucuses entirely? Well, yes, there’s something to that. At the risk of stating the obvious, Iowa was by some clear distance the most important state in the race. That seems clear now. But that importance is qualified: Iowa would not have been as significant if John Edwards had won. True, Edwards would presumably