Month: June 2011

In Britain, the flamboyant but engaging toff, Boris Johnson (yes, I knew him at Oxford too) faces a tough re-election for mayor of London. But he's also positioning himself to succeed Cameron if he wins. I'll be there next month and hope to catch up with the Tory-Liberal experiment. Meantime, some inside Tory political gossip.

Steel in stop-motion:

I fear I may have been tempting fate. It seems clear that there are enough votes to pass marriage equality and religious freedom in the state senate, but that the decision on bringing it to the floor for a vote is what is holding this all up. That decision belongs with the GOP conference; and they appear to be near breaking point on the matter.

Ruh-roh:

Security officials say 57 militants, mostly from al-Qaida, have escaped from a prison in southern Yemen. They say the 57 were among 62 inmates from the Mukalla jail in the Hadarmout province who escaped Wednesday through an underground tunnel. Bands of gunmen attacked the prison simultaneously, opening fire on the guards from outside to divert their attention away from the escape.

Scott Lucas calls the prison break "a major setback for the war on terror, and potentially another complication for the Arab Spring." Jane Novak smells a conspiracy:

The escape is one part of the state’s plan of generating al Qaeda chaos. There is a high likelihood that the escape was arranged by the head of the security forces like Ahmed, Saleh’s son or one of the nephews. These officials are also the US’s important partners in counter-terror efforts and have been the recipients of millions in counter-terror funding.

Matt Taibbi tears into Michele Bachmann with his usual bravado:

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

Dan Drezner is underwhelmed by grand strategies:

If grand strategies are so overrated, why the furious debate? For two reasons, one petty and one substantive. The petty reason is that everyone in the U.S. foreign policy community secretly hopes to be the next Kennan. When a commentator bewails the failings of the United States' grand strategy, it is usually because he has scribbled down his own set of musings on the topic. Indeed, complaints about grand strategy have plagued every U.S. administration since the end of World War II for precisely this reason. Grand strategies are easy to devise-they are forward-looking, operate in generalities, and make for great book tours. Whenever a foreign policy commentator articulates a new grand strategy, an angel gets its wings.

Yantoucun, China, 12 pm

Christopher Shea flags some studies rubbishing the supposed advantages of British English over its American equivalent:

The main significant effect found in this study was that people who'd lived at least three months outside the US rated the English accent significantly lower than people who'd only lived in the US. In fact, Americans who had not lived abroad considered the English-accented person to be much more intelligent than themselves, but the people who had lived abroad rated the standard American accent more intelligent than the standard English one.  My preferred way of interpreting this (a bit tongue-in-cheek) is that Americans are happy to rate the English as more intelligent than themselves up until they actually start meeting and talking to the English.

Couldn't agree more. The accent is a curse in some ways. I remember my first months in Harvard classrooms, gob-smacked by how my contributions, however lame, were invariably treated with respect because my accent framed them. I never consciously tried to retain it; it just surrendered slowly vowel by vowel. But I did feel relieved at having this burden of faux-erudition lifted.

"There was a report that just came out last week that the worst subject of children in American schools is — not math and science — its history. It’s the worst subject. How can we be a free people. How can we be a people that fight for America if we don’t know who America is or what we’re all about. This is, in my opinion, a conscious effort on the part of the left who has a huge influence on our curriculum, to desensitize America to what American values are so they are more pliable to the new values that they would like to impose on America," – Rick Santorum.