Month: April 2007

I might have written too soon. While Gordon Brown remains the heads-on favorite to succeed Tony Blair, there’s always a chance he won’t. One of his potential rivals is coping with a smear campaign – which is a good sign the succession isn’t settled yet. (In Britain, it’s decided by the party with the majority of seats in the House of Commons, if a prime minister quits between general elections.) If the unlikely happens, and some believe it will, Britain will have a 41 year-old prime minister, David Miliband, running against a 41 year-old rival, David Cameron. It might make reservations about Barack Obama’s age seem a little moot.

Outsourcing the war – in Iraq. Accountability? The U.S.?

The Great Debate continues.

A reader writes:

Andrew, it’s factually inaccurate to call Tennessee a white girls’ team (as you do in your Times article). Like Rutgers and all of the elite teams, they are majority-black. (I count three white players out of eleven in their team photo – and one of their starting five.) They have lighter skin and they straighten their hair, but that’s another story … that’s why Imus and co. were making their Jigaboos/Wannabes reference.

My terminology was too crude, and I was compressing the point too much, I guess, for a British readership. What I was reacting to was the video footage during the remarks when Imus was praising the Tenessee team just as a blonde, white woman was being hoist aloft. And the distinction he was making was a racial one – just not as stark as I made it out to be. Apologies and thanks for the correction.

In which we give Kim Jong Il $25 million as a carrot and he does, er, nothing.

It’s a Drudge classic. One quibble: our bees? In some cases, the more cell-phones the better:

With no criteria for what "improper" or "proper" could mean. Oh, and: I was just following orders, and keeping the paperwork moving on time. Gonzales explains himself here. I can’t believe it will hold up on Tuesday.

Frank Rich on Don Imus (TimesDelete). My column on the affair -translating it for Brits – can be read here in the Sunday Times of London.

You probably know very little about the man who will soon in all likelihood succeed Tony Blair. Here’s an interview with him from the Guardian. He’s even written a book called "Courage." Like JFK’s early, ghost-written tome, it features mini-profiles of courageous individuals. The selection is interesting:

Edith Cavell, the British nurse who was shot by the Germans for helping the enemy in Belgium in 1915 … Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant pastor who opposed the Nazis, Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish count who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Cicely Saunders, who founded the hospice movement, and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident.

Enough to give Dick Cheney the willies.

(Photo: Peter MacDiarmid/Getty.)

Great idea. Pity it doesn’t work.