Alex Massie is Scotland Editor of The Spectator.
Hendrik Hertzberg has some fun with Rick Perry’s occasional suggestions* that Texas could secede from the United States of America. Doing so he quotes extensively from a message Abraham Lincoln sent to Congress on July 4th, 1861. It is, as you would imagine, good stuff. But that doesn’t mean it solves everything and nor is
There is a stramash over government bin policy! James writes: The government is, rightly, receiving a monstering from the papers for its u-turns on weekly bin collections. But what is at stake here is more than just the issue of bins. The government’s failure to honour its promise on this matter casts doubt on whether
Since Rick Perry’s campaign theme – assuming he runs – will be It Worked In Texas, it’s worth observing that Texas’s success in recent years is partly based upon the fact that it is easy and often cheap to move there. That’s because, as Matt Yglesias points out, it’s easy to build houses in Texas.
The odds on Texas governor Rick Perry entering the 2012 GOP Presidential Stakes appear to be shortening. The address he gave in New York yesterday sounds like the first run through a possible stump speech. As Rich Lowry (who was there) points out Perry seems to have at least three of the things you need
DAC has written some dreadful and awful songs but also some mighty fine ones. Though I prefer the stripped-down version of Would You Lay With Me (In A Field Of Stone) this is still a pretty decent version and definitely from the Good DAC School:
Well you can’t blame them, can you? Project Volvo – it just shows how out of touch senior politicians were. Leaked documents labelled Project Volvo, revealed today, that outline a plot to unseat former Prime Minister Tony Blair show just how out of touch with reality senior politicians within the previous government had become with modern Britain. The
That Gordon Brown loathed Tony Blair is hardly news. Nevertheless the details and depth of that hatred, revealed in the Daily Telegraph’s scoop today*, remain hilarious. Poor Gordon. His people seem to believe – or have been told – that being compared by focus groups to a Volvo or a British Rover was a good
Oh look! Newt Gingrich’s preposterous Presidential “campaign” has imploded. His top strategists and campaign staff have resigned en masse and so has his Iowa staff. What a shame. Turns out that staffers didn’t appreciate Newt taking his latest wife on a cruise around the Greek islands while they were working hard to sell the impossible
It seems that, in cycling as everything else, when the facts become intolerable it’s no longer credible to insist upon them. That being the case it’s not, perhaps, a great surprise that the Facts for Lance website appears to have disappeared. In one sense the question of whether or not Lance Armstrong ever took illegal
When a clergyman damns a government I prefer he do so with a proper quantity of hellfire. They do it differently in the Church of England which, though lovely for evensong and all the rest of it, is not a political or particularly muscular enterprise. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s much-trumpeted blast against the Cameron-Clegg regiment
Yes, really. Like his American contemporary George HW Bush, John Major has suffered from being sandwiched between two far more glamorous premiers and like Bush Sr this probably means he’s under-rated these days. At the time his government often looked hopelessly weak and of course it often was, riven with feuding and driven to distraction
Three cheers for Megan McArdle: I think Pawlenty’s claims are crazy–though not specially crazy. They’re crazy the way that all political speeches on the economy are insane: they claim far more power over economic growth than any politician actually has. It is entirely possible that the economy will, for some period in the next few
It might seem axiomatic to observe that Red Tories and Blue Labourites must have as much in common as anything that might divide them. That’s one thing to take from Amol Rajan’s splendid overview of Philip Blond and Maurice Glasman’s attempts to refashion British politics. The other, I would suggest, is that Blond and Glasman’s
John Rentoul’s column in the Independent on Sunday this week was uncharacteristically unpersuasive. His text was Mencken’s aphorism that “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong” and Mr Rentoul suggested the Cardoso Commission’s report on drug legalisation is an example of this approach. Well, perhaps. But I
Or, as it is to be known, the New College of the Humanities? I must say that the prospect of a dozen or so celebrity dons attaching their names to a new private college in London has provoked rather more outrage than might be thought necessary. It is not, after all, as though it is
Selling New York City to the world must be one of the easier jobs in advertising but this beautiful time-lapse video does it brilliantly, capturing something of the stuff that makes Manhattan such a special place. In a way it’s also a hymn to the wonders of big cities everywhere. Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion
Been a while since we saw some Merle around here. Too long. So here’s the great man singing about his poor mama and her Hungry Eyes:
Today’s Dilbert strip is for commenters and bloggers everywhere: We love you all, of course. [Thanks to MS, JPM, AH and others for the tip.]
Via Johnson, a remarkable statute in Victoria which criminalises: Any person who in or near a public place or within the view or hearing of any person being or passing therein or thereon- sings an obscene song or ballad; writes or draws exhibits or displays an indecent or obscene word figure or representation; uses profane
Mitt Romney launched his campaign for the Presidency today. Officially, that is. Good luck to him. Here’s a clip of Mitt last time he ran: Who let the dogs out? Not Mitt Romney. He prefers to put his luggage in the boot and strap his dog to the roof rack. This does not end well