In a risky break from blogging orthodoxy, I’m actually attending a political event today (and tomorrow!) and have travelled north to Perth for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party’s annual conference. Next year’s election – assuming we have to wait until then – will be a strange one in Scotland since, for the first time,
There was a crazy puff piece for the Endless War on Drugs on the BBC News tonight in which the reporter, Mark Easton, was handed a story by the Serious Organised Crime Agency full of dramatic pictres and supposedly encouraging figures. Coincidentally, this appeared the day before Soca releases its annual report and at a
Is this the oddest argument in favour of torture yet? Karl Rove says that failing to torture prisoners only encourages al-Qaeda. Taking, for example, the memoranda about the enhanced interrogation techniques and making them public has been a value to our enemy. It has served, frankly, I think, as a recruiting tool. They can now
Well, sort of. There’s a serious shortage of coins in Argentina at the moment, possibly because they’re worth more, as commodities prices rise, when they’re melted down and resold. Or it may have a different explanation. It’s a mystery! Anyway… The coin scarcity has created a strange predicament: Merchants regularly refuse to sell their goods
Like Bagehot I think this one of most entertaining – and revealing – reactions to the revelations of the Great Expenses Swindle of 2009: The latest batch of expenses details revealed by the Telegraph included the fact that Peterborough MP Stewart Jackson had made a claim of £304.10 for the upkeep of a swimming pool.
The problem with being a newspaper columnist is that you have to keep finding new stuff to say. New is more important than better, you understand. So when everyone is outraged (and, hell, justifiably so for once!) by the spectacle of MPs’ outrageous abuse of the spirit, and often the letter, of their expense arrangements
Way back in February I suggested that Geert Wilders should have been allowed to show his wee film Fitna in Britain and that it was a mistake to deny him entry to the United Kingdom. But I also suggested that he was no sort of champion of freedom or free speech or any liberal sense
Like any sensible person I’ve been thoroughly amused and appalled by the scandal of MPs expenses. Appalled because the extent of MPs’ avarice is sufficient to shock even an iron-souled cynic; amused because watching MPs try to justify their gluttonous appetite for taxpayer-funded freebies affords a certain pleasure that one might consider vindictive if only
First we had Dolly Parton and then last week we featured Emmylou Harris singing Pancho & Lefty so this Saturday it makes sense to put Townes van Zandt in the spotlight. This video comes from towards the end of his life by which time his voice was even more ragged than it ever was. Then
You’ll recall that this is what Carver did when he was trying to persuade the hoppers to move to Hamsterdam: Two Baltimore detectives have been suspended as authorities explore allegations that they drove a teenage boy to Patapsco Valley State Park in Ellicott City on Monday night and left him there, officials said. Anthony Guglielmi,
Christopher Caldwell’s* diary in the latest edition of the print magazine is good fun and I look forward to reading his new book. This part was especially entertaining: For many years, the ingenuity of the British press in exploiting the Brown-Blair rivalry story amazed me. What a gift the papers had for conveying that, this
Dick Cheney is quite a piece of work. I confess that back in 2000 I thought Bush did well in choosing Cheney to be his Vice-President. After all, the neophyte President-to-be could use some sage advice from a Washington veteran. And, yes, I enjoyed seeing Cheney cuff Joe Lieberman during their Vice-Presidential debate. That sanctimonious
I’m not* one to mock the Irish armed forces and there’s no gainsaying the fact that Irish troops have done their bit in various peacekeeping operations around the world. But (you guessed there’d be a “but”, right?) it’s hard impossible not to be amused by the fact that Irish troops preparing for deployment to Chad
An interesting exchange between Danny Finkelstein and Andrew Cooper, director of Populus in which Mr Cooper addresses public attitudes towards cuts in public spending: In principle, then, there seems to be an acceptance of the need for (inevitability of) some spending cuts. But three quarters of voters think that some areas of spending should be
Reihan Salam offers some tough love to the GOP: In a Pew survey conducted shortly after the 2008 election, an impressive 38 percent of the electorate identified themselves as conservatives, far more than the 21 percent who called themselves liberals. Yet 51 percent of those self-described conservatives favored repealing some of the Bush tax cuts.
Shamefully, I’ve not kept a sufficiently close eye on the cricket today. It’s early May and it doesn’t feel right for there to be a test match on so soon. Anyway, reader TS writes “Do you realize that England have just given Graeme Swann the new ball? In a test match at Lords, no less!
Jim Henley had a great post a while back naming names and shaming those people who blog too much. As Jim rightly put it, these days you need to be a professional blog reader just to keep up. On the other hand, there are those people who don’t blog nearly enough. My friend Kerry Howley
Alex Salmond may argue that Scotland is “two thirds” of the way towards independence (though even if Salmond is correct that doesn’t mean independence is necessarily imminent) but the Royal Navy doesn’t seem to agree. In fact, the MoD must consider independence unlikely, otherwise why* would it be basing all of Britain’s submarines at the
There is, as you might expect, some good stuff in Christopher Caldwell’s Weekly Standard piece on the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger. But it also contains some strange thinking, albeit of a kind that is often found when foreigners consider the Irish. Thus: This [prosperity and immigration] is all very exciting for the
Good and bad news from China: A Chinese county has rescinded a rule urging its government workers to smoke more in order to boost tax income. The authorities in Gong’an county had told civil servants and teachers to smoke 230,000 packs of the locally-made Hubei brand each year. Those who did not smoke enough or