Saturday Morning Country: Lucinda Williams & Willie Nelson
Hands-up if you think Willie Nelson and Lucinda Williams are a good combination? That’s most of you, eh? Good. Well here they are with a very Nelsonesque take on Williams’s Over Time:
Alex Massie
Saturday
Friday
CNN Fail
Via Chris Bodenner. Plenty of folk seem surprised by the fact that, apparently or at least according to one poll, 18% of Americans think Barack Obama is a muslim. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Since at least 10% of the population can be relied upon to believe any old nonsense I’m not sure
Thursday
Faisal Abdul Rauf’s TED Talk
Jeffrey Goldberg reports on a speech Faisal Abdul Rauf gave at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl. It’s worth reading. Secondly, here’s the Imam giving a TED talk last year on the religious backdrop of compassion. Not really my kind of thing but perhaps it is yours. I must say that he doesn’t come across
The Flowers of the Forest
Back when the Iraq war was new and innocent and still pretty popular I recall a Scotsman headline announcing that, with the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards entering the city, there was now the sound of Bagpipes in Basra. There was something thrilling, something tribal too, about this. Regardless of the arguments about the war, the
A Question of Provocation at Ground Zero? Lessons from The Satanic Verses
Despite what some readers and commenters seem to think, I don’t believe that all opponents of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” (which, as one wag put it, is neither at Ground Zero nor any more a mosque than a Vegas casino is a cathedral because it contains a wedding chapel) are bigots or that all
Wednesday
Jobs You Don’t Want: Russian Fortune Teller
Two weeks old, but I’ve only just seen this and it’s sufficiently splendid – and a new if also awful twist on an old fortune teller joke – to share with you just in case you didn’t see it either: A man was jailed by a Kemerovo region court on Thursday for assaulting a Gypsy
Tuesday
The Tories Need A Good Labour Party. And Vice-Versa.
A terrific Five Books discussion about conservatism, liberalism and libertarianism with Cato’s Brink Lindsey in which BL quotes a few essential lines from JS Mill: ‘In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state
The Terrible Threat Posed by Cowboy Barbers
Matt Yglesias has a splendid post bemoaning the utterly unecessary regulation of barber shops and hairdressers in Washington. His commenters think he’s being silly and that hairdressers should be regulated. James Joyner and Kevin Drum also bring their clippers to the fight. Unsurprisingly, this regulation in DC produces regulatory capture. In fact, in regulating hair
A Man You Can Vote For
Over-promising, as Barack Obama might tell you, is dangerous. Candidates everywhere could learn about expectations management from this chap in the Philippines… [Hat-tip: Hattie Garlick]
Darling’s Revenge on Brown and Balls
Not many Labour minister enhanced their reputations during the Last Days but, at least as far as the non-payroll vote was concerned, Alistair Darling was a rare exception. He seems to think so too, if today’s Donald Dewar Lecture at the Edinburgh Book Festival is any indication. Some extracts from his address: “Labour lost because
Monday
The Deplorable Newt Gingrich
Whither American conservatism? Well, there’s the path trod by Reihan Salam, Josh Barro and Ross Douthat, each of whom have produced sane and humane pieces on the Burlington Coat Factory Community Center otherwise known as the “Ground Zero Mosque” or you can hitch your wagon to Newt Gingrich’s caravan and cheer when this self-styled man
Mid-Term Myth-Making
Not long until Labor Day and the semi-official kick-off for the mid-term elections. Which also means that the papers will be stuffed with predictions that the losses in the mid-terms show that Obama is doomed and so on. Whether one cares for the President or not, this is simply not the case. Happily Norm Ornstein
Blair Donates Book-Lucre to British Legion
Smart man, Tony Blair: Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is to donate the profits from his memoirs to a sports centre for badly injured soldiers. A spokesman said Mr Blair would hand over the reported £4.6m advance payment plus all royalties to honour “their courage and sacrifice”. The Royal British Legion will receive the money,
Sunday
We Invented the Passing Game, You Know…
Good to see that Craig Levein, the new Scotland manager, has a sophisticated grasp of football tactics. As this note left in the dressing room last week demonstrates: Final score? Sweden 3 Scotland 0.
Saturday
Preach It, Mr President
According to Sarah Palin, it’s now the “9/11 Mosque” because, you know, of course it’s planned as a tribute to al-Qaeda and of course it’s perfectly reasonable to suppose that all muslims are really just the same and we know what that means don’t we? Of course we do… So, these were probably Barack Obama’s
Saturday Morning Country: Emmylou Harris
You can never have too much Emmylou and her appearance, backed by the brilliant Hot Band, on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977 is a joy from start to finish. Here she is with Making Believe – a Jimmy Work song that had previously been a hit for the great Kitty Wells too.
Friday
Hackwatch
Tom Scott – who I’m pretty sure I saw taking part in BBC4’s spiffing quiz show Only Connect – has been waging a mini-guerilla war against mediocre journalism. He explains his mission here and this is the kind of sticker he’s taken to leaving in copies of spare newspapers he finds on the Tube… Plenty
Blairism Eclipsed
Danny Finkelstein’s typically excellent column (£) this week argued that Blairism is dead and buried in the Labour party, not least because none of Blair’s followers remain in any position of authority in the party. Blair, he suggests, was a one-off and the party leadership contest has been, if not a sprint, then a trundle
The Terrorist Fetus Plot that Threatens America
Sure, if you were running a terrorist network you might think it worthwhile to smuggle pregnant women into the United States to ensure that their offspring, thanks to the 14th Amendment, could have American passports and be sent back to the US 20 years down the line to carry out their terrorist mission. But you
The Fall and Rise of the Brownites
At Labour Uncut, Dan Hodges has written a very good, very interesting piece on the demise of the Brownites and how, when the end came, Brown was compelled to rely upon Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell to scramble a strategy by which Labour might miraculously cling to power. As Hodges portrays it: As the battlements