Sunny Hundal says this YouGov approval tracker is “the graph that has the coalition worried”. Up to a point. It would be worrying if there were an election this autumn. But there isn’t and there won’t be. If, as the coalition hopes, we’re four and a half years away from an election then this polling,
Government wants to steal milk from children! Coalition wants to ban playgrounds! When-oh-when will the government call off its War on Kids? Well, that’s been the hysterical tone of much of the coverage in recent days. Even allowing for the feather-headed excesses of August this is becoming silly. No-one disputes that there will be some
How many Americans know anything about David Cameron? Well, back in early July not many of them – or at least not many of those sampled by Pew – could identify the Prime Minister of Great Britain*. On a multiple choice question. When the other choices available were: Richard Branson, Tony Hayward or Angela Merkel.
Meanwhile, in other Glasgow news the city’s evening paper makes its readers an offer they can’t refuse. I believe this exhausts my annual quota of posts making gentle fun of Glaswegians. [Hat-tip: Kevin Schofield]
If Jimmy Reid, who died overnight aged 78, hadn’t existed he might have had to be invented. For 40 years now he has been the image of a certain Scotland. The “dignity of labour” is a much abused phrase that often drips with sentimentality, but you didn’t have to share Jimmy Reid’s political views
Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of our drug policies, I hope we may agree that they’re much less important than drug policy in the United States or the countries that produce narcotics. Nearly 30,000 people have been killed in Mexico since the “War on Drugs” was re-militarised in 2006. Now former President
As a Michigan man, Jon Chait naturally takes a great interest in monitoring life in the World’s Worst State the great state of Ohio. Hats-off to him for alerting me to this story that, with its elements of absurdity and obsession, bloody-mindedness and defence of free expression is, in a small way, a quintessentially American
But not because of the argument Iain Dale makes here: Just a thought on the graduate tax. We already have a graduate tax. It’s called income tax at 40 per cent. This is an off-hand comment, sure, but it would also be a better argument if it were true. There are about 31.7 million taxpayers
In one sense, yes it is. The Senate may be the world’s most exasperating deliberative body. As with it’s Roman counterpart there’s a growing sense that the Senate has outlived its usefulness, that it can no longer function effectively and that there’s no reason to suppose anything will change for the better. In Washington folk
No, not that kind, the vote-winning kind. Despite the fact that the party itself has honoured or at least admired warrior queens (in the members’ estimation) such as Winnie Ewing, Margo MacDonald and even Nicola Sturgeon, the fact remains that women are much less likely to support the SNP than men and, furthermore, this gender
Sensible opponents of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” have been careful to argue that it’s not the idea of the mosque per se that offends them but the sensitivity of it’s location. Not everyone bothers with that distinction: In Murfreesboro, Tenn., Republican candidates have denounced plans for a large Muslim center proposed near a subdivision,
Obviously it’s from Western Nevada County, California: SWAT Team Requested for Violent Midgets Details, alas, remain sketchy but here’s what we have so far: At 12:32 p.m., a caller from West McKnight Way reported steroid-using body-builders from Reno had beaten up the caller’s son and might have killed him. Midgets from Fulton Avenue had been
This is good: the Daily Telegraph has published Simon Heffer’s back-catalogue of style notes in which, with exasperated patience, he points out the paper’s mistakes. Read too many of them and you might form the impression that the Telegraph no longer employs sub-editors. Nevertheless, Heffer’s advice is mostly good and, I’m pleased to see, the
A good number of readers – or those readers who left comments* – didn’t much care for my post on the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”. Revolting [and] symptomatic of the imbecilic scramble to dhimmitude widespread in liberal circles… The Muslim colonists push and the gutless West meekly gives way, as usual… It will be seen
He’s not named it Henry yet, preferring to speak of it as “the alien”, but Christopher Hitchens on his cancer is worth your time and, perhaps, that of anyone you know with any of those diseases: Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside
Was it Warren Buffett who said investors should be wary of any company that decides it needs to spend huge amounts of cash on swish new corporate headquarters? If it wasn’t the Sage of Omaha then it was someone like him arguing that this is often a warning sign of a company behaving recklessly
As Pete says, Danny Finkelstein’s column (£) today is characteristically excellent. The problems facing the Liberal Democrats now and, perhaps, at the next election are problems caused by success, not failure. The Lib Dems had three options after the votes had been counted: do a deal with the Tories, try and cobble something together with
A remarkable headline in the New York Times today: Oil in Gulf Poses Only Slight Risk, New U.S. Report Says, The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil rom the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is
Yes, when I first read about plans for a mosque “at Ground Zero” my initial reaction was to wonder why, whatever the merits of an Islamic Cultural Centre in Lower Manhattan, such a project had to be built in such a location. It seemed likely to cause offense even if none were intended. The reaction
All will be quiet here this week. I’m heading offline and, more importantly, to Ireland for a week of cricket. Six games in six days across three provinces is a punishing, even optimistic schedule. Then again, it can’t go any worse than it did on Saturday when my two overs were walloped for 29 runs.