Alex Massie is Scotland Editor of The Spectator.
The good news is that Rod Dreher is blogging again, this time at the American Conservative; the sad news is that his sister Ruthie, pictured above with her daughter Claire, has just been killed by cancer. Rod – we email-know one another and have at least one good friend in common – has been blogging
The great story-teller’s latest piece is a rum business indeed. Apparently: The guiding idea at the heart of today’s political system is freedom of choice. The belief that if you apply the ideals of the free market to all sorts of areas in society, people will be liberated from the dead hand of government.
I hadn’t noticed that Keith Tantlinger, who may fairly be considered on of the fathers of globalisation, had died. Actually, until I read his obituary in yesterday’s Telegraph I’d never heard of him. Nevertheless, were you to write a history of the last fifty years you’d want to include a chapter on the man who,
Summed-up by the Economist in a single chart. When you consider that many people support spending cuts in principle but tend to oppose them when they target particular favourite programmes you may appreciate that the government faces a fairly acute political problem. That’s before you consider the practical difficulties of really cutting spending. In its
Who dares say the County Championship is a useless anachronism? Rumours of its irrelevance have been much exagerrated for years and we were reminded of this again today as Lancashire took their first outright title since 1934, defeating my beloved Somerset by eight wickets and with just five overs to spare. It still, even in
If Mitt Romney is taking the role of John Kerry (2004 edition) then you can trot out a case that Rick Perry is playing the part of Howard Dean. Ross Douthat duly makes this argument: One interesting quality that Perry has in common with Dean, and which last night’s various back-and-forths brought out, is the
File Tim Pawlenty’s endorsement of Mitt Romney in the drawer marked Fancy That! So, not a surprise but telling nevertheless and a useful signal that the battle for the Republican party’s presidential nomination can be summarised as Problem Solvers vs Firebrands. This may be a little unfair on Rick Perry since his candidacy is an
Wee Georgie Monbiot is desperate to find a Koch-sized “conspiracy” in Britain. Apparently: [F]ree-market thinktanks are nothing of the kind. They are public relations agencies, secretly lobbying for the corporations and multimillionaires who finance them. If they wish to refute this claim, they should disclose their funding. Until then, whenever you hear the term free-market
From the Department of Irony Overload: Congressman Peter King says he admires the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism efforts: King also praised the United Kingdom’s government for its work on stemming Muslim radicalization, noting that its “Prevent” strategy “offers a candid assessment of the problem and a model for effectively addressing and countering this problem.” The Prevent
A telling admission from Janet Napolitano, heid-bummer at the ludicrous (though founded for obvious, understandable reasons) Department of Homeland Security: “We are moving towards an intelligence and risk-based approach to how we screen [people at airports],” Napolitano told Mike Allen during a morning forum at the Newseum. “I think one of the first things you
Actually, this is in memory of the Man in Black’s life-support machine Marshall Grant who died this week. But here are the boys at San quentin with I Walk the Line, a tune Cash wrote in 1956 that, it is said, was inspired by Grant:
Bipartianship: the quaint idea, much loved by newspaper columnists, that the opposition should help an incumbent President win re-election. A curiosity of the American political system that reflects, indeed encourages, the belief that the President of the United States should be regarded as a regal father-of-the-nation figure and not, heavens above, as a mere politician.
And so they’re off: Barack Obama’s speech to Congress last night was the beginning of his re-election campaign. This is a jobs bill, he said. You should pass it. In case anyone doubted this he repeated the message more than a dozen times. The forcefulness of his tone appears to have delighted the liberal blogosphere.
The original and gravest episode of Disaster for Scotland. Today’s the 498th anniversary of Flodden. A bleak day for Scotland; bleaker still for King James himself and the Men of the Ettrick Forest. Legend has it only one man from these parts returned alive and the memory of that remains the centrepiece of Selkirk’s annual
Surprise: there’s some good news coming out of California! Governor Jerry Brown, enjoying his second tour in office, has taken to slapping down the kind of mollyocddling absurdities much favoured by that state’s woeful state legislature. Better still than a flourished veto pen are Governor Moonbeam’s reasons for despising the stuff sent to him by
As world-class moaners it’s not a surprise that Arsenal football club behave in this fashion but it’s depressing to see their groundless whingeing tolerated by a judge, even a Spanish judge: The Gunners have won their case against Seville resident Alicia Simon, who has now been told by the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office to
The times they change but the questions remain the same. It’s the Republican party that has changed. A candidate who talked about (illegal)immigration the way Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush did in this 1980 debate would receive pelters. Now, in part that reflects the fact that 30 years on the problem remains unsolved and
So this was Rick Perry’s big debut on the national stage and, meh, he was only OK. Perhaps that’s being too kind. Sure, there were moments when he looked and sounded like a heavyweight contender but these were generally (though not exclusively) when he could talk about Texas. The Lone Star State is a mighty
I’m sure Karl Rove is, on this at least, correct: Rick Perry’s book will cause him problems for as long as he remains in the race for the Republican nomination. To put it gently, few Americans believe that Social Security and many other federal programmes are unconstitutional; even fewer are likely to vote for a
Like most sensible folk I have a grand opinion of Alan Cochrane and, this being the case, alert readers will know that this is by way of a throat-clearing before we move on to the business of suggesting that his latest Daily Telegraph column is a little less persuasive than the Sage of Angus would