From our old friends at National Review: Or, as Bill Bennett puts it: Colombia is the Israel of Latin America. Your nominations please for other unlikely Israels in unlikely corners of the planet. eg, Andorra is the Israel of Europe or Orvieto the Israel of Umbria etc. A prize to the best suggestion…
I’ve missed Silvio Berlusconi and suspect you have too. Sure, I wouldn’t want him running my country but it seems important that he be able to remain on the international stage for some time yet; It is a rather unorthodox argument for being elected, but in image-obsessed Italy it just might work. Famously outspoken Italian opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi has claimed that right-wing politicians are more attractive than their left-wing rivals. The centre-right’s candidate in this weekend’s national elections said the Left had “no taste” in women. He said that when he looked around parliament, he found female politicians from the right were “more beautiful”, the BBC reports. “The left
This article in the New York Times is, I suppose, unintentionally hilarious. No-one should be surprised if it prompts calls for regulation. Growing numbers of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment. The bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major upfront investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the past few
Jon Chait is in good form in The New Republic this week, arguing that Hillary Clinton ought to drop out now since, barring cataclysm, she can’t win the Democratic party’s presidential nomination. This is true. Still, I liked Toby Harnden’s take best: It seems that Hillary Clinton is pondering three options: seeking an amnesty deal and fleeing the country; going for an immediate run-off (on April 1st, she suggesting a bowling match with Barack Obama) or declaring a 90-day state of emergency and taking the whole thing into July. But she’s been ignoring pleas from across the civilised world to call it quits, insisting that the people have a right
The BBC: Paris protests mar Olympic relay This, naturally, is entirely incorrect. The problem would have been if there hadn’t been any protestors. Still, the BBC, which is sending more than 400 staff to Beijing, is heavily invested in the Olympics and keeps insisting that London 2012 is something to be jolly proud of whereas much of the population wished the IOC had handed the games to Paris instead.
Hillary Clinton on the proposed US-Colombia trade deal: I am disappointed that President Bush has decided to send the Colombia Free Trade Agreement to Congress. As I have said consistently for several months, I oppose signing any trade deal with Colombia while violence against trade unionists continues and the perpetrators are not brought to justice. The United States should be pursuing trade agreements that promote human rights and worker rights, not overlook egregious abuses. I will vote against the President’s Colombia trade agreement, and will urge my Senate colleagues to do the same. No surprise there. No surprise either that Barack Obama is bound to vote against the deal himself.
Here’s The Economist reporting developments in France: THE Gaullist backlash against Nicolas Sarkozy’s new Atlanticism has begun in earnest, and its new poster boy is Dominique de Villepin… Not only did he denounce the French president’s decision, which was warmly greeted by George Bush at last week’s NATO summit in Bucharest, to send an extra French battalion (some 700 troops) to Afghanistan. He went on to chastise Sarkozy for planning to reintegrate France into NATO’s military command structure. “Not only is the return of France to NATO not in our country’s interests, but I also think it’s dangerous,” he said: “We will lose space to manoeuvre, space to be independent”
It was Eddie Murphy who pointed out, brilliantly, that white people make the terrible mistake of thinking that Rocky is true. His stand-up riff on the subject involved an Italian who had just seen one of Sylvester Stallone’s boxing epics picking a fight with a much taller black man – and ending up in hospital. Hillary Clinton, I fear, is making the same error. “Let me tell you something,” she said, “when it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit.” No doubt. But as a shameless student of all six Rocky films I can tell the Senator that her choice of cinematic
Australia’s residents are fond of referring to the place as ‘the lucky country’ but most are blissfully unaware of the phrase’s origins. ‘Lucky’ was never meant as a compliment. When the late Donald Horne, a giant of Australian intellectual life, conjured the tag in the 1960s he intended it as a putdown: ‘Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.’ Much of this rings true for the Australian economic story. For most of the 20th century the Australian economy flourished because of its natural mineral endowment and its agricultural sector; commodity exports were its lifeblood. Such industry as existed was cosseted by high tariff barriers
I mentioned some of the factors that make Jim Webb, the Democratic Senator from Virginia, a less than entirely compelling Vice-Presidential pick for Barack Obama, here. To recap: when he campaigned for the Senate in 2006 Webb was, not to put too fine a point on it, hopeless on the campaign trail. You could see that it pained him to even ask people to vote for him and he plainly had little patience for the self-abasement and daily humiliations of life on the campaign trail. He is not a natural baby-kisser. My sense – from his own writing and what I’ve read about him – is that he is also
The invasion of Iraq may have been deeply unpopular in much of the world, but this is the sort of horrific story that has done the United States much more damage than the initial decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. And, alas, it’s hard not to think that this damage is entirely deserved. The shame of it. At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America’s shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI
Oh god. Here she goes again. ABC’s Jake Tapper reports that: In a speech in Philadelphia today, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, will compare herself to Philly icon Rocky Balboa. “Well, could you imagine if Rocky Balboa had gotten half way up those Art Museum steps and said, ‘Well, I guess that’s about far enough?'” Clinton will ask, according to her prepared remarks released to the press. “Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing the fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common,” she will tell the Pennsylvania A.F.L.-C.I.O. audience. “I never quit. I never give up. And neither do the American people.” Fair enough, but as
Ha! Those canny Germans! they published the fingerprint of German Secretary of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble (link is to a Google translation of the German original). The club has been active in opposition to Germany’s increasing push to use biometrics in, for example, e-passports. Someone friendly to the club’s aims captured Schäuble’s fingerprint from a glass he drank from at a panel discussion. The club published 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder including a plastic foil reproducing the minister’s fingerprint — ready to glue to someone else’s finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake
This time in poor Colombia: Funded in part by the Bush administration, a six-year military offensive has helped the government here wrest back territory once controlled by guerrillas and kill hundreds of rebels in recent months, including two top commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But under intense pressure from Colombian military commanders to register combat kills, the army has in recent years also increasingly been killing poor farmers and passing them off as rebels slain in combat, government officials and human rights groups say. The tactic has touched off a fierce debate in the Defense Ministry between tradition-bound generals who favor an aggressive campaign that
From Stephen Pollard, interrupting his holiday to enjoy the chaos at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5: Does anything work in Britain? Ever? Well, does it?
John J Miller at The Corner: I’ve always had some fondness for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens because their team name is a literary reference. Last weekend, while visiting the in-laws in South Carolina, I went to an NCAA baseball game featuring the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers. Literary references in team names don’t get much better than that. Up to a point Lord Copper. Turns out the Chanticleers have only been so-nicknamed since the 1960s when the University tired of being just one more bunch of Trojans. Still, not bad but not nearly as good, obviously, as Heart of Midlothian FC, Edinburgh’s finest. Now if only the club favoured a more literate,
Travis Daub at Foreign Policy: A couple weeks back, we pointed out that John McCain likes to refer to America as “She,” a habit that I assume builds some linguistic distance between himself and Hillary Clinton. Hillary could never refer to America as “She,” so McCain subtly infers that a president Clinton could never protect the country in the same way that a masculine figure could. David Corn over at Mother Jones took the analysis a step further: Could the implication be that Barack Obama is not quite American and that he is not interested in protecting our country, which the ad describes with the feminine
Revealed: the ten questions that CoffeeHousers will pose to Nick Clegg. James Forsyth says the Tories need to get serious about Iraq. Peter Hoskin assesses Nick Clegg’s first 100 days as Lib Dem leader. Fraser Nelson highlights a swathe of Brownies at PMQs. And Matthew d’Ancona asks you to comment on the state of the nation.
Add this to the reasons to be skeptical of Barack Obama… Vice-President Bloomberg*? I want to thank Mayor Bloomberg for his extraordinary leadership. At a time when Washington is divided in old ideological battles, he shows us what can be achieved when we bring people together to seek pragmatic solutions. Not only has he been a remarkable leader for New York –he has established himself as a major voice in our national debate on issues like renewing our economy, educating our children, and seeking energy independence. Mr. Mayor, I share your determination to bring this country together to finally make progress for the American people. Because obviously what the United
I have known David Selbourne for almost a decade and a half, and have long admired his trenchant, impeccably argued analysis of the state of modern society (as well as his many other writings). His book The Principle of Duty (1994) was one of the earliest moral road-maps for the Blair era, a copy of which was famously bought by President Clinton at Blackwell’s in Oxford. It is fair to say that neither Tony or Bill followed the advice set out in that magisterial book. But it certainly foreshadowed the growing importance that the language of “responsibility” would have in political discourse, if not the reality of Government policy. In