Month: May 2010

HarperCollins announces Palin's latest book, "America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag." Mudflats is nauseated:

Yes, boys and girls, just in time for that money making holiday the liberals are trying to destroy, you too can buy a collection of stuff other people have written, with comments that Sarah Palin’s ‘collaborator’ has written, that Sarah Palin herself read, probably, and approved. 

Ben Smith looks at the timing of her book tour with the election cycle. I'm just cock-a-hoop. I may even have to put out a little book at the same time.

Alex Massie:

The government is…likely to be less influential on the international stage than its predecessors. As a Tory-Liberal alliance could be broken by arguments over the European Union, Britain’s relationship with Brussels will be placed in cryogenic suspended animation with the label, “Do Not Waken Before 2015.” And a Tory-Liberal partnership will need to compromise on Afghanistan. Both want the mission “clarified” and agree that the commitment cannot be indefinite.

Andrew Sparrow:

I'm going to go through the coalition agreement section by section. I won't summarise all the points, because you can read the whole thing for yourself here, but I'll just note the points I find interesting.

On deficit reduction, the document says both parties are still committed to cuts worth £6bn this year. But it introduces some "wriggle room" that could be used to justify amending this target. It says the £6m figure is "subject to advice from the Treasury and the Bank of England" on the feasibility and advisability of the cuts.

Renard Sexton:

One element that will be curious to watch will be the strategy of Labour, as the party revamps and retools. Will they go the route of the Canadian Liberals and aim to keep a snap election from occurring, in order to give David Cameron and Nick Clegg the pleasure of taking credit for the inevitable public belt-tightening that will have to take place, the swoop in with avengence in 2 or 3 years. Or will they quickly name new leadership and set to work lobbying the leftist bloc of the Liberal Democrats, who may be less than pleased to be in cahoots with the Tories.

Alastair Campbell:

If Cameron proves me wrong, good luck to him. I mean that. He has taken on an enormous job, with tremendous capacity to do good. But I do not believe his Party has the values or the understanding of the modern world to make the most of it, and certainly not for the benefit of people who most need an active government on their side. And I don't believe the Liberal Democrats can either. Otherwise they would not have shepherded a right-wing, unchanged Tory Party – that hates Europe, has crazy policies on schools, wanted to help the richest first, wants to bring back hunting and all the other paraphernalia of a backward-looking non progressive force – through the door in the first place.

Janet Daley:

While Labour implodes – torn between the inclination to become a public sector union lobby group and the determination to maintain the myth of New Labour – there will be no effective opposition at all. Even the anti-Tory media camp will be in disarray: the Guardian, after all, backed the LibDems. Surely that means they must support them now that they are in government? Hopefully, the Conservatives will be able to get through at least one Budget and one Public Spending Review before the confused ranks of what the Opposition is going to be, manage to get themselves together.

Hopi Sen:

[T]he changes the Lib Dems negotiated are real.

I’m pleased about that – a more moderate Conservative government is a far better outcome than the one were were offered at the start of the General Election campaign. In effect, the voters, the Lib Dems and the presence of an alternative  have forced the Conservatives to deliver the great centrist move that Cameron always failed to quite complete.

Yet this is the danger for the Lib Dems…

Tyler Cowen:

Britain should avoid proportional representation.  Classic parliamentary systems are good at making big changes in a hurry, when the major party knows which changes are needed, and that is Britain's current position.  It's no accident that Thatcher and Roger Douglas — both of whom operated under extreme Westminster systems – were two of the major reformers in the late 20th century.  PR gives too much power to minority parties in the ex post electoral bargain and it works best when there is extreme consensus at the social level, combined with the need to bring certain co-optable minorities into that consensus.

Thoreau:

Less than a week after an election that yielded no clear winner, they have resolved the matter. I actually like the result, first and foremost because Labour lost. Say what you will about the Conservatives, but I believe that 13 years is long enough for any party to hold power. The Conservatives may or may not deserve to win, but any party in power for 13 years probably deserves to lose.

The Spectator:

The Lib Dems are left with prestigious-sounding non-jobs like Scotland Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister. To adapt Boris Johnson’s metaphor, we have been served up a sausage government and it is never edifying to see how sausages are made. But the meat in this sausage is most certainly Conservative. The Lib Dems are the gristle.

Hertzberg:

The irony is that center-left political reform types like me suddenly have a stake in the success of a, yes, Conservative government. An unfamiliar sensation, but not a wholly unpleasant one.

(Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty.)

A memoir of Britain's new chancellor.

It seems to me that a judgment of the Goldstone Report is perfectly possible without an attempted character assassination of the author. But it is very telling that this tactic – a central one among those fanatically defending the policies of the Israeli government – is so swiftly deployed. One key weapon of those attempting to police and stifle debate on the Middle East is the personal smear. The sheer viciousness of the way in which the anti-Semite card is played is testimony to a position that endures in part by bullying – a sign of its essential weakness. But the Yediot Ahronoth smear of Richard Goldstone as some kind of racist Afrikaner really did up the ante. It was not news; and it is not in any way salient to the critique of Israel's and Hamas's war crimes in Gaza. But it is made especially absurd by the obvious fact that if one is going to judge people on the basis of their former positions on apartheid, Goldstone is a human rights icon compared with the state of Israel, which propped up the sanctioned racist regime with arms sales.

Pro-Israel fanatic, Ron Radosh, offers the following defense of Israel's enmeshment with apartheid:

The truth is that all governments have and do make alliances of necessity that many find objectionable.

What made the Israel-South Africa alliance under apartheid one of "necessity"? Sasha Polakow-Suransky, who has written a book on the Israel-apartheid alliance recalls a quote from a former editor of Yediot Ahronoth in 1985 while visiting South Africa:

"Give the blacks the vote very slowly. See how it works. Bit by bit. If you see that your bit by bit approach is not working, change it. But make the world believe you are sincere. You have to be hypocritical to survive."

Sounds eerily familiar, no? But Goldstone Delendum Est.

Michael Wolff assesses David Cameron:

Cameron was the clear winner in this race. Whatever instincts and prejudices he might harbor, he had, with great doggedness and ambition, transformed himself into something recognizable and, nearly, reassuring.

Cameron and I chatted with requisite interest and enthusiasm about Obama, but, like California, Obama actually seemed, I thought, quite foreign to him. Cameron’s interest in the president was more dutiful than natural.

His real interest, the point at which he picked up the story, where the story became about him, was when the conversation turned to Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, those artful dodgers, those all-things-to-as-many-people-as-possible men, those consummate politicians, those yuppies, those salesmen, those deft orchestrators of the modern psyche (stop me, please). Indeed, David Cameron, I’m sure, is utterly convinced he has the unique touch—the charm, the empathy, the savvy—to hold a coalition together.

In this David Cameron is no doubt distasteful to left-wing and right-wing partisans. But to me, and I’ll bet to other no-wingers, he is very familiar and, I am tempted to believe, one of ours, for better or worse.

Oddly, I have never met him, and only heard from those close to him. I believe he has done an immensely difficult thing – he has tried to transcend his social class out of a sense of patriotic duty that is, in many ways, a function of his social class. And this, I think, is a deeply Tory instinct – where the elites take their broader responsibilities seriously, and act out of decency. I was moved by his gracious words yesterday about 13 years of Labour. He said the country had become fairer and he was glad for it.

And here is where he reminds me a little of Obama. Class in Britain is what race is in America. Cameron never denied his past and even engaged in some of its more obnoxious practices. But he loves his country, and endured great prejudice, as well as great privilege, because of his class. Yes, Etonians can be victims too. He both owned his identity – all of it – and yet sought to transcend it.

And his Toryism is also deeply connected to a pragmatic adjustment to modernity, rather than a furious and ignorant reaction to it. He takes climate change seriously; he understands the vital priority of fiscal responsibility; he seeks to limit the state by encouraging personal responsibility and civil society; he has not just talked the talk on inclusion of gay people, he has walked the walk, bringing a whole new generation into Tory politics. He has shown so far no enmity, no nastiness, no mean streak, although, in true British fashion, he has bashed his opponents in the Commons to a nicely-blended pulp.

I think he represents the future of conservatism, as well as the best of the Tory tradition of Disraeli and Butler and Baldwin. I think he is where the GOP will one day have to be, once they slowly find out the sheer depth of the abyss they have hurled themselves into.

(Photo: Prime Minister David Cameron (R) and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg hold their first joint press conference in the Downing Street garden on May 12, 2010 in London, England. By Christopher Furlong – WPA Pool /Getty Images)

A reader writes:

Thanks for reminding us in the closeted world – in my case the world of teaching in a Catholic High School for twenty six years – of the insanity of our positions.  Every single kid knows I am gay.  I'm fifty five and unmarried.  I teach English.  I love plays.  I get along with women.  Of course, I'm gay.

But on the other hand, you came up against the real world, Andrew.  It doesn't matter what the kids know.  The adults don't want me to tell.  They would make a big thing about it if they could.  I've done a world of good for the gay community, except in being out.  It's the world I lived in.  It's not your world.  It's not the world of the kids below you.  But it has been my world.  And it has been a wonderful one, for the most part.  Four more years, and others younger than I can take over.  I wish them well.

 

You, dear sir, are the BEST.  I am not.  Neither are most of us out here. 

 

But we worked hard on it.  For a LONG time.

Lexington says they are not what they seem:

So long as Americans do not reduce their consumption of oil, refusing to drill at home means importing more of the stuff, often from places with looser environmental standards. The net effect is likely to be more pollution, not less. Nigeria, for example, has had a major oil spill every year since 1969, observes Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation, a think-tank. Putting a price on carbon would eventually spur the development of cleaner fuels, and persuade Americans to switch to them. But in the meantime, oil is both useful and precious. Extracting it domestically, with tougher safety rules, would bring a windfall to a Treasury that sorely needs one. When the current crisis is past, Mr Obama may remember this.

Clive Crook's skeptical eye-brow rises.

An open-sourced tumblr. Money caption:

New tub of Desitin + new tub of Vaseline + new container of powder + extra long “nap” = reminder to get a tubal ligation