Indefatigable commenter ConservativeCabbie argues: No doubt someone will report on the latest WaPo poll which shows Republican ID at 21% and use it as evidences of the GOP’s terminal decline. The only thing I would say to this… is that in the most recent important poll, the election, the GOP still won 47% of the
Actually, Tuesdays are now the best day for the NYT’s op-ed page since in addition to Ross there’s David Brooks. His column today is a good one, making the point that the response to the swine flu outbreak offers a fresh example of the debate Brooks frames as: Do we build centralized global institutions that
Ross Douthat’s debut column for the New York Times begins with a good joke, designed (one might think) to have the Upper West Side howling that all the talk of young Mr Douthat being a conservative we can do business with must be so much baloney: Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies,
After the jump, a series of American PSAs warning about Swine Flu, dating from 1976. The second of them features a soundtrack that sounds as though it more properly should accompany a detective show on American TV. Or, for that matter, a movie such as The Three Days of the Condor. Appropriate in times such
Consider this chart: As you can see, since 1976 there’s been a marked decline in the number of men murdered by their wives in the United States and a smaller, but still significant, decrease in the number of women killed by their husbands. The graph comes from Sociological Images where Jay Livingston asks for suggestions
Sometimes it seems as though the British appetite for nostalgia can never be satisfied. On the other hand, it seems there are in fact limits to our willingness to recreate the past, albeit often as pastiche. Announcing plans for new prisons, Jack Straw reassured/disappointed us by promising: “These new prisons will be neither Victorian replicas
This is the set-up: “Penned up in the Mediterranean’s most infamous prison farm, beautiful young bodies subject to their cruel jailer’s every whim, these man-craving convict women joined forces with a brawling Yank adventurer to burst out of their barbed wire hell cage, setting off a love-and-vengeance revolt that sent tremors through an entire Mid-east
A lovely piece on the Queen of the Smokey Mountains, Dolly Parton, by Jesse Green in this week’s edition of New York magazine. Here is the Backwoods Barbie in typically forthright, charming form: “I’m an energy vampire,” she says. “I just suck off everybody’s energy, but I give it back.” She almost dares me to
So, as expected Barack Obama has reneged upon his campaign promise to call the Armenian genocide, er, genocide. Instead it’s “slaughter”. Such are the prosaic demands of office. As Mike Crowley suggests this is not a defining moment in the Obama administration, but nor is it a particularly edifying spectacle. Memo to politicians: be careful
No surprise, alas, that the government should still be trying to find ways to deny Gurkhas the right to live in this country. The most charitable interpretation of today’s announcement is that the Brown ministry is making it more difficult than it should be for Gurkhas who retired before 1997 to live in Britain. A
This is where the Republican party is now. Karl Rove’s latest Tweet is this: Precautions taken 2 guarantee compliance w/ federal prohibition on torture. U might characterize diligence as overcautious. Got that? A – highly questionable! – “compliance” with anti-torture statutes was “over-cautious”. That is, it was mistakes were made in trying to comply with,
Not so long ago the American conservative movement denied that waterboarding and the other “enhanced interrogation techniques” used upon prisoners were anything remotely akin to torture. That line has shifted somewhat in recent days. Now it’s “Well, maybe you think it is torture but – look! – it works!” Does this constitute progress or not?
Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal today: In New York this week, I asked a former Eastern European dissident who spent time in prison under the Communists: “If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo
Brian Lara gives President Barack Obama a lesson, during last week’s Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. Photo: White House photo by Pete Souza. Kridaya rounds up some of the cricketsphere’s reaction to the President’s meeting with the Prince of Trinidad. Obama is said to have been delighted by his encounter with “the Michael Jordan”
There’s a good deal in David Hare’s speech to the Index on Censorship awards* with which I would disagree, but not this bit: “The principal lesson of the new century is the following: that you must condemn censorship, intimidation, bullying, coercion, torture, encroachment on human rights and illegality in your friends with exactly the same
I can’t decide if this is a) headline of the day or b) just a desperate bid for traffic: Nazi ‘super cows’ shipped to Devon farm
Scottish public spending has essentially doubled (albeit in absolute terms) since Labour came to power. (To what end, you ask? To very little end, I reply.) Now the British government has run out of money and it is obvious that there are going to have to be spending cuts if the public finances are ever
Linking to this post, Daniel Larison makes an excellent point: Even though this claim about fighting on behalf of innocent Muslims is dubious (not least because several of our wars, especially the war in Iraq, have killed or led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of these people), it reflects something basic to Americanism.
Of all the many reasons to be wary of bombing Iran, one of the best is also one of the simplest: it won’t work. Or, rather, whatever advantage there may be in delaying Iran’s nuclear ambitions by a year or two is unlikely to be worth the unfortunate consequences involved, merely increasing the risks of
David Frum is, once again, spot on. Writing about the ludicrous – and loopy – Glenn Beck and his fantasies of armed resistance against the Obama administration’s “fascism”, Frum points out how useful Beck is to Obama (and vice versa) and how poisonous he and his ravings are to the future of the Republican party: