The Debatable Land

How many types of libertarian can there be?

2009-01-08T19:03:31+00:00

Many, many, many. If the GOP increasingly suffers from a suffocating orthodoxy, the libertarian movement (if that's not an oxymoron) is amusingly/alarmingly/pedictably/irrelevently heterodox. As Brian Doherty explains:

Joining the former, and previous more or less useful classifications such as anarchist and minarchist, paleo and cosmo, utilitarian and natural rightsers, is the division between "policy libertarians" and "structural libertarians," explicated by Jacob Lyles over at "Distributed Republic."

Then again, since libertarianism is as much a sensibility as anything else, it's scarcely surprising it should be such a divided house.

UPDATE: Dave Weigel has a characteristically good - and entertaining! - review of "a thrilling and dispiriting year for libertarian politics" under the never-out-of-fashion headline Where Did It All Go Wrong?

The Limits of Reaganism

2009-01-08T16:14:22+00:00

At a recent debate, every single one of the candidates hoping to be the nest chairman of the Republican National Committee named Ronald Reagan as their favourite Republican president. In one sense this is hardly surprising, given the extent to which the Cult of Reagan - or more precisely, the Cult of the Idea of Reagan - has come to define the Republican party; still, Kevin Drum wonders why no-one dare stick their neck out and admit to admiring some other GOP luminary.

As Kevin notes, it is striking how many Republican presidents have been expelled from the Conservative canon. Eisenhower, Ford and George HW Bush are viewed with suspicion as "Republicans in Name Only," Nixon was a closet liberal too and, like Harding, a crook to boot. Teddy Roosevelt, for all that many Republicans admire his muscular brio, scarcely fits the modern conservative ideal and it remains, sadly, rather infra dig to admit an admiration for Calvin Coolidge. So Reagan it is and must be.

But the Cult of Reagan actually helps explain the mess the Republican movement finds itself in. It used to be that it was the left that specialised in writing dissenters out of the movement; these days, in America at least, that's become a conservative trait. The RNC debate was illuminating in this respect: in addition to passing the Reagan litmus tests candidates were asked how many guns they own. And that was more or less it. Tick those boxes and you're a proper Republican; waver on either question and you're subject to suspicion.

It's this sort of blinkered thinking, this elevation of ideology above the messy business of winning elections that has helped condemn the GOP to minority status. A two party system in a nation of 300m people demands that each party be a broad church. Reagan recognised this; his successors seem to have forgotten it.

Like Thatcherism in Britain, the Reagan revolution began as an internal insurgency that caught the party grandees by surprise. Neither was really supposed to win but desperate times demanded desperate measures. If external crisis and malaise helped them win the leadership against the odds, then subsequently they were fortunate in their enemies: Carter and Callaghan first, then Mondale and Foot. In each case, Thatcher and Reagan were looking to a revived future as their opponents seemed stuck in a dismal, best-forgotten past.

But it is an iron truth of politics that prolonged success sows the seeds of future downfall. Revolutions run out of steam. They cannot be permanent. More damagingly still, what begins as an unorthodox and surprisingly successful approach calcifies into a stubborn orthodoxy that brooks no dissent, even as times and circumstances change. The path to power is built upon compromise and flexibility: Thatcher always knew what she wanted to do, but she was also aware, in her early years, of how limited her room for manoevre was - not least because not everyone in her cabinet was on board. If progress was slower than she liked, it was also steadier than when, after 1987, she reigned supreme and hubris began to take its fatal grip. Similarly, Reagan was a vastly more adaptable President than current conservative folklore might have you believe.

In that sense, then. the troubles of Republicanism now and of the Tories in the last 15 years, were built upon their previous successes. The difficulty is that the second (or third) generation is rarely as talented or adaptable as the trailblazers who won power in the first place. Instead of finding fresh ideas and solutions, they inherit positions and prejudices that, because they worked once before, are assumed to be eternal truths rather than particular answers to particular problems at a particular time.

And because they're seen as eternal truths, any deviation from them is grounds for heresy. Thus, for instance, the Club for Growth would, it sometimes seems, rather see a Democrt in Congress than a "bad" Republican. Fair enough, they've got their wish and the GOP is a minority party in both houses of Congress. It's not all the Club for Growth's fault, of course, but the narrowness of their (fiscal) vision is parallelled by other forces within contemporary conservatism that have left the party older and whiter and more religious than America as a whole. In other words, the GOP is increasingly out of step with a changing America.

Witness, for instance, the party's hostility to gay marriage. That plays well with the base, but it's not something that's likely to endear it to the political future. It's a symbolic issue in some ways, but each year plenty of voters who agree with the GOP die while plenty more who don't are added to the electoral roll.

Style matters too. The Tory position on Europe in the 1990s (and on immigration and crime more recently) was more popular with the electorate than were Labour's policies, but the stridency and, to many, the ugly tone in which the Tories expressed themselves turned many voters off. Similarly, the GOP position on, say, immigration is not without its supporters but the manner in which a position is expressed matters almost as much as the position itself. And the GOP has seemed bitter and parochial - qualities with which the electorate is unlikely to wish to associate itself.

Another example? The Terri Schiavo affair: millions of Americans might have been conflicted as to what they felt in what was a horrid, ugly affair. But they knew they didn't like the spectacle of Congressional Republicans stomping all over the case in hob-nailed boots, abandoning any notion of Congressional restraint, let alone respect for States' Rights and due process. The party that says the other mob always want to interfere abandoned all pretence to principle to interfere itself. Voters can spot hypocrisy and while they may sometimes forgive it if its purusued with a modicum of subtlety or on grounds of expediency, more often they dislike it intensely when it seems a flagrant breach of promise or purpose.

Similarly, there's not too much wrong with wanting to cut taxes, but John McCain's tax plan was absurdly tilted towards the already-wealthy. Yes, the richest contribute an enormous percentage of federal income tax receipts, but "ordinary" working families - those struggling with increasing health insurance bills or rising college costs - could reasonably ask when exactly it was that the Republican party stopped caring about them.

Ironically, George W Bush seemed to recognise this. The talk of "compassionate conservatism" and of an "ownership society" (the latter entirely familiar to Britishers who remember the glory days of Thatcherism) was an effort to recast Republicanism in a fresher, more contemporary mold. Alas, neither really amounted to much, killed by the administration's carelessness, the swamping impact of 9/11 and Karl Rove's determination to bet the farm on militarism and wedge issues - a strategy that could only move the GOP away from the centre-ground. Such a strategy is fine for winning elections, but less useful for governing. Apart from anything else, abandoning the centre gifts an opportunity to the opposition; just as importantly it's only sustainable in good times or when everything goes well. When the worm turns, you find yourself excluded from the centrist-mainstream. Suddenly politics can seem a lonely, scary place.

Thatcher found this out for herself and it took her party 15 years to recover; so too the GOP today. Comparisons between British and American politics are rarely exact of course, but in each case we see (or saw) a narrowing vision of what conservatism ought to be. Instead of an orchestra of conservatism you have a string quartet: still capable of pretty music, of course, but less versatile, less popular and with fewer tunes to play.

But, as I say, the Idea of Reagan has overtaken the Reaganite reality. Consequently Republicans seem to have misconstrued the premises upon which they based their decision to sanctify Reagan in the first-place. The god they worship is not the god who actually existed. The apparent simplicity of the GOP mantra - strong national defence, tax cuts and, er, that's it - becomes a liability when the party faces an intelligent, charismatic, adaptable opponent who seems better prepared to meet the complex challenges of a complex world right now, not the challenges that faced the United States nearly 30 years ago.

All of which is to say, presumptiously for a furriner perhaps, that the GOP has an awful lot of work to do before it's likely to be ready for government again. Of course, in time the Democrats may over-reach themselves too, but no-one should assume that will happen in just four or even eight years.

Because, you know, when the public tires of the old tunes, it's time to learn some new ones. And I rather doubt whether that old-time Reagan religion is going to be enough.

But you know what? I'd like to know what Messrs Douthat and Salam, among others, have to say on this.

UPDATE: Unseen by me, Mark Thompson was labouring in these same vineyards a couple of days ago.

The Envy of the World

2009-01-08T14:03:42+00:00

Further proof that the British economy remains better placed than any other to weather this turbulent, tempest-ridden economic sea: the Bank of England cuts interest rates to 1.5%, the lowest rate in more than 300 years. Obviously that's a tribute to the government. Meanwhile, the government prepares to print some more money. This too demonstrates the extent to which the government has everything in hand.

I don't think you need to be an economist to sense that this mob - Brown and Darling, that is - are making it up as they go along.

Celtic Tiger De-clawed

2009-01-08T13:29:13+00:00

Tough times on the Emerald Isle: Dell is closing it's largest non-US manufacturing plant. This is not good news.

Established in Ireland in 1990, Dell employed more than 4,500 staff in Ireland at its height and is the country’s biggest exporter and second largest company.

It accounts for approximately 5 per cent of Irish GDP and last year contributed €140m to the south western economy in wages alone.

Who's next?

UPDATE: Should have realised this myself, but as Tim Worstall says, these figures seem very fishy. Not the number of jobs, the other ones. 5% of GDP? Hmmm. Anyway, it still ain't good news and, given how much Ireland has relied upon American inward investment in IT and electronics, this seems likely to be a harbinger of further gloomy news ahead.

Earth vs Moon

2009-01-07T23:11:34+00:00

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were defenders.

What's this, you ask? Just a map of the pair's wanderings on the moon, superimposed onto a football (soccer) pitch. As best one can tell the Moon XI liked to attack down the right-wing, forcing the intrepid astronauts to play a rugged, hoofing, defensive game. Aldrin never made it out of the Earthlings' half, while Armstrong only ventured a single foray towards the opposition penalty area. Of course, we were playing away from home and it always takes some time to acclimatise to, let alone deal with, the intimidating atmosphere at Moon Park.

James Hamilton - who, for reasons that remain a mystery, is still not writing about football for "Big Media" - draws the correct conclusion from the fact that NASA created this map.

There Probably Isn't A God But That's No Reason To Make A Song And Dance About It...

2009-01-07T17:29:09+00:00

Rod Dreher asks:

Why are the New Atheists so preachy

Well that's easy: because, on the subject of religion they are crashing bores. More so, in fact, than their religious counterparts. After all, the latter generally confine themselves to arguing that you are wrong (and, of course, damned) whereas Dawkins et al also demand that you acknowledge they are right. Worse still - and I say this as someone with a faith deficit - they insist upon going on and on and on about it. We get it, chaps.

Lessons on Taking a Compliment

2009-01-07T14:40:20+00:00

Yeah, even by writers' standards, John O'Hara could be touchy. Here's Alan Jacobs:

Anyway, when Pal Joey was a big hit on Broadway in 1940 a couple of friends ran into O’Hara at a restaurant and told him, “John, we just saw Pal Joey again and it was even better than the first time!” O’Hara replied, “What the hell was wrong with it the first time?”

Splendid stuff, you'll agree.

Just Like Old Times

2009-01-07T14:36:20+00:00

English cricket in shambolic farce. It's like Scottish football, except more important.

Clintonian Revisionism

2009-01-06T18:51:28+00:00

In a post that otherwise makes good points, Matt Yglesias writes:

The absence of giant blow-ups between the United States and our main NATO allies ought to count as a real accomplishment of the Clinton years.

Riiight. Apart, that is, from the major disagreements in the Balkans - ie, a pretty important foreign policy issue of the time - which resulted in Blair and Clinton falling out rather severely and, among other things, saw a British general disobey an American general's direct order on the grounds that he wasn't comfortable with the idea of "starting World War Three" there weren't any "blow-ups" in the Clinton years. NATO in fact came perilously close to cracking-up altogether during the Clinton years.

But of course, in the end, it just about held together, even if its purpose was increasingly questioned as the 20th century drew to a close. More importantly there's nothing too much wrong with these disagreements: friends should be able to disagree! If they're not then the value of the friendship is dramatically over-stated and you're talking about a relationship between an Imperial power and it's vassal satellites, not a friendly alliance between a big lad and some smaller, but still independent, chaps.

Back on the "Special Relationship" Merry-go-round

2009-01-06T18:27:24+00:00

Sure as eggs is eggs, the arrival of a new American president heralds fresh fretting in the British press over the precise state of the so-called "Special Relationship". Today's text comes courtesy of Rachel Sylvester, writing in the Times. It's worth considering in some detail:

The inauguration of a president who is adored by the British public could ironically spell the end of the special relationship between the UK and the US. Just as the voters in this country decide that it is time to get up close and personal with America, so the Yanks are losing their passion for the Brits. Just as the Prime Minister decides it is time to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US president, so he may find the cold shoulder turned on him.

This is partly but not entirely about Mr Obama. Certainly, the President-elect will be the least Anglophile American leader in living memory. Unlike Bill Clinton, who was educated at Oxford, or George Bush, who kept a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office, Mr Obama has no innate affection for this country - in fact, his grandfather was imprisoned and tortured by British colonialists in Kenya.

This isn't quite true. Or rather, it's a rewriting of history. Clinton may have been a Rhodes Scholar but he didn't hugely enjoy his time in Oxford. More to the point, when he came to power there was much talk in Washington about Germany replacing Britain as Washington's Best Pal in Europe. (The fact that the Major government had, foolishly, acceded to the Bush campaign's request for any dirt from Bill's time in Oxford didn't help.) More pertinently, with the exception of Kennedy (who got on well with Macmillan) Democratic presidents have tended, initially at least, to be less enamoured of the specialness of the "Special Relationship" than have Republicans (Nixon excepted).

Indeed, if memory serves, there's a passage in George Stephanopoulus's memoir of the Clinton White House when, prior to Clinton's first meeting with Major, his aides reminded him of the importance (to the British) of mentioning the magic phrase. "Ah yes" Clinton chuckled, "the Special Relationship". Well, he said the right words and everyone went home happy.

“The UK is part of the Bush baggage because of Iraq,” says a senior Foreign Office source. “Obama is not going to be emotional about the transatlantic alliance. He's a free-thinking politician, driven by science and facts. The UK and Europe look less significant than Asia and Latin America and even over here Europe seems a better focus than the UK.”

Well, yes. The post-Cold War era necessarily brings with it a decline in the central importance of the Atlantic Alliance. Equally, Obama doubtless appreciates that there's a limit to how much more Britain can do in, say, Afghanistan. No wonder he may ask for more from other European countries. Still, we swam in these waters in 1992 too and, as Macmillan put it, "events, dear boy, events" helped ensure matters turned out rather differently.

The British position has not been helped by Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the Ambassador to Washington, a career diplomat educated at Oxford, whose pin-striped demeanour does not fit easily with the open-necked attitude of the Obama camp. A memo, leaked last year, in which our man in DC described the President-elect as “aloof”, “insensitive” and lacking a track record did not go down well with a politician who already suspected the British of having a superiority complex.

Is this true? The memo was as controversial as a Financial Times profile. That is to say, it was not at all controversial and could have been written by any half-decent UK correspondent in DC. More to the point, in terms of future policy, the British do often seem to have a "superiority complex". We keep banging on - in the press at least - about how much smarter and more sophisticated our approach in Iraq and Afghanistan is than that favoured by those drop-a-cluster-bomb-first-ask-questions-later heavy-handed Yankee cowboys. This rather flatters us and, I suspect, often falsely so. The days of pretending to play Athens to Washington's Rome should be over.

Equally, Gordon Brown's claims to have "saved the world" in the current economic crisis have not been endorsed by actual events and, quite reasonably, have irritated everyone else who might reasonably ask why they should take lectures from the man responsible for leaving Britain less well-placed than any other major power to deal with these frigid economic conditions.

Perhaps most important of all, the military alliance between Britain and America - which has cemented the political alliance since the First World War - is beginning to crack. I am told that a report circulating at the highest level in the Ministry of Defence concludes that there are now serious doubts in Washington about the effectiveness of the British Armed Forces. Senior military figures are said to have been surprised, and shocked, by feedback that arrived in Whitehall last month. Described as “highly sensitive”, it raised questions about the worth of the UK contribution to US-led operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It showed that the Americans don't value us much,” one source told me. “Britain's military ability is no longer rated as highly as we thought it was.”

“The US generals think the Brits need to be taken down a peg or two - that we have not performed well in Basra and Helmand province - and that has trickled up to the Pentagon,” says a Foreign Office insider. “It's not terminal but it's an important warning to us that if we are going to trade on our military partnership we are going to have to raise our game.”

This too seems fair enough. Given the appallingly under-funded, under-equipped nature of the UK armed forces it's entirely reasonable for the Americans to wonder if the advantages of the political cover Britain provides are beginning to be outwieghed by the shortfall in British military capability. Having spent a decade refusing to fund the armed forces properly, this is a situation for which Brown is largely responsible himself.

Then again, to be fair to the former Chancellor, he was only adhering to the long-standing British tradition of trying to do too much with too few resources. Even in times of Great National Effort we have routinely sent the boys into battle with lousy equipment. This is not a new phenomenon: in the Napoleonic Wars many, perhaps even most, of the Royal Navy's best ships were captured French and, especially, Spanish vessels that were better-built than their British counterparts built shoddily and cheaply in dockyards (both Royal and private) in which penny-pinching and corruption were the norm not the exception. So not much has changed.

Mr Obama won power promising change. Mr Brown wants nothing more than to bask in the reflected glory of that. But it looks as if the Anglo-American alliance will be one of the first targets for change. One minister says the “specialness” in the special relationship will be diluted. It may not survive at all.

Well, maybe. I'm all for Obama sticking it to Brown, but it would be nice if the transatlantic relationship weren't quite so humiliating and that we learnt that there's a price to be paid for fealty to American leadership, one, moreover, that is not necessarily in Britain's own national interests. As against that, the nature of things is that, regardless of press speculation, London and Washington are likelier than not to remain closer than Washington and most other capitals around the world if for no other reason than the intelligence and military experience they share is likely to remain a valuable resource for both parties. Nonetheless, on balance, it's a good thing if there's also better relations between Washington and Paris (and Berlin). That necessarily undermines the primacy of the DC-London axis, but that may not be a Bad Thing either.

Celebrity Big Brother

2009-01-06T17:15:38+00:00

Mr Eugenides keeps up with the latest news from the ghastliness so you don't have to.

The Scottish Tory Dilemma

2009-01-06T16:44:04+00:00

Someone needs to tell Tom Harris MP that the "Unionist" in the "Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party" referred to the Union with Ireland, not that between Scotland and England.

Equally, the fact that the Conservatives (in London) and the SNP (in Edinburgh) sometimes seem to be reciting similar talking points should scarcely come as any great surprise: the Labour party is their common enemy. True, the Conservatives oppose the Nationalists north of the border but as far as the UK party is concerned that's a secondary front and one, more particularly, on which there's little need for a fresh offensive this year.

If, as Alan Cochrane hints, the Scottish Tories have dropped "Unionist" from their name then fine, even if they might actually be better off dropping the "Conservative" bit. That remains a tainted, even toxic, brand in Scotland - not least because the electorate doesn't care that the Tories have spent the past decade on their knees begging forgiveness for their supposed sins. As is so often the case, the Bavarian model is the attractive one here.

Cochrane asks how the Tories are supposed to win back support if they don't distinguish their attacks from those salvoes the SNP are hurling at Labour. Well, the easy answer is that they can't and so they should concentrate on a) incremental gains and b) winning the Battle of Ideas. That means having some.

Since it is the nature of the electoral map that an SNP-Tory alliance is the safest, most natural way of defeating Scottish Labour, the Tory agenda should concentrate on developing policy ideas that, if implemented in coalition with the nationalists (a trick the Tories missed: Salmond is happier alone than he would have been in an SNP-Tory coalition) would move the governance of Scotland to the right and, theoretically, therefore in an encouraging direction.

Sure, there's the constitutional question, but the Tories ought perhaps to have some faith in the people: there might be some desire for the devolution of additional powers to Holyrood, but there is no massive groundswell of support for outright independence. At least not yet. But that's a battle and an argument for another day. The bottom line is that the Tories can't fight Labour and the Nationalists simultaneously. That means they need to be opportunists, shamelessly so in fact and take their chances wherever they arise.

I maintain however that the Scottish Tories should prefer a Nationalist ministry in Edinburgh to a Labour one. It presents greater opportunity (not least because there are, after all, quite a number of Tories inside the SNP, whereas there are none in the Labour party.)

Harry Reid's Miracle Cure

2009-01-06T15:03:42+00:00

There's something rather charming about the way the United States Senate names its bills. Granted, there's something laughable about it too, but let's focus on the entertainment for now. Here, for instance, are some of the first ten pieces of legislation Harry Reid plans upon bringing to the Senate floor in the new Session:

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
Middle Class Opportunity Act of 2009
Homeowner Protection and Wall Street Accountability Act of 2009
Cleaner, Greener, and Smarter Act of 2009
Restoring America’s Power Act of 2009
Returning Government to the American People Act
Stronger Economy, Stronger Borders Act of 2009

Well, that was easy wasn't it! By the end of the year the United States will have recovered, the middle-class will have opportunity restored (what about the poor old working-class?), Wall Street will be accountable and every home will have its own firearm (are you sure that's what they mean?), everything will be cleaner, greener and, above all, smarter, Captain America will ride again and the people will have their government returned to them (by whom?). Not content with that, there'll be a stronger economy and stronger borders!

Once all that has been achieved they'll be able to cancel the next three years and just go home. Right? On the other hand, this sort of blowhard triumphalism has a certain consequence: folk look at Congress and see their representatives promising all these marvellous goodies and miraculous cures and then they look at their own circumstances and discover that though there may have been some, marginal improvement in their circumstances, the promised political rapture still seems some way off. No wonder they may feel that they're being cheated by Washington and, consequently, they may hold Congress in some contempt.

Memo to politicians: don't promise massively more grandiose treats than you have any right to expect you'll be able to deliver. If you do, don't complain when the punters come to despise you.

Kids These Days...

2009-01-06T13:39:48+00:00

Coming to a Christmas cinema screen near you next year.

It is a dream that has been shared by lovers across the centuries – the chance to elope to exotic lands. But few would have been as bold and spontaneous as six-year-old Mika and his five-year-old sweetheart Anna-Bell who, after mulling over their options in secret, packed their suitcases on New Year's Eve and set off from the German city of Hanover to tie the knot under the heat of the African sun.

The children left their homes at dawn while their unwitting parents were apparently sleeping, and took along Mika's seven-year-old sister, Anna-Lena, as a witness to the wedding.

Donning sunglasses, swimming armbands and dragging a pink blow-up lilo and suitcases on wheels packed with summer clothes, cuddly toys and a few provisions, they walked a kilometre up the road, boarded a tram to Hanover train station and got as far as the express train that would take them to the airport before a suspicious station guard alerted police.

"What struck us was that the little ones were completely on their own and that they had lots of swimming gear with them," said Holger Jureczko, a police spokesman. He described Mika and Anna-Bell as "sweethearts" who had "decided to get married in Africa where it is warm, taking with them as a witness Mika's sister".

Anna-Bell told the German television station RTL: "We wanted to get married and so we just thought: 'Let's go there.' "

Mika said: "We wanted to take the train to the airport, then we wanted to get on a plane and when we arrived we wanted to unpack the summer things and then we wanted to go for a bit of a stroll in the sun."

Of course, Hollywood will doubtless botch the whole thing.

[Hat-tip: RF in NJ, via Facebook]

The Toughest Quiz You'll Tackle All Year

2009-01-06T01:16:22+00:00

Lost amidst my Christmas hiatus was the annual brain-hurting attempt at the King William's College (Isle of Man) end of year quiz, thoughtfully published, as always, by those nice people at the Guardian. It is almost certainly the hardest quiz you'll attempt this year. Find the entire list of questions (all 180 of them!) here. Just for fun, here's a sample of what it's like:

9) Journeying on what, between which termini, might one's thoughts
turn to:
1. sleepwalking?
2. elliptical orbits?
3. the quintessential libertine?
4. a soldier without a passport?
5. the founding father of the EU?
6. the royal prisoner of Sönderborg?
7. Judith and three mute wives?
8. clothed and naked versions?
9. the mount of Bellerophon?
10. melting clocks?

Have a crack at the entire thing (without Googling!) and let me know how you get on. Me? I need more pondering time before I admit defeat.

But Sometimes Change is Real

2009-01-05T17:55:20+00:00

Matt Yglesias correctly suggests that these photos are the Obamas attempt to reduce the "National Cuteness Deficit." But there's something else too: besides being charming, it's striking how these photographs of Malia and Sasha preparing for their first day at a new school are both so very ordinary and yet also a reminder of howit really is momentous thing that this is the next First Family of the United States of America. The ordinary reveals and, in a sense, reinforces the extraordinary...

NB: Close examination reveals that the President-elect is not in fact making a somewhat dismissive gesture to his daughter. Three fingers, not two.

The Further Adventures of Lance Armstrong

2009-01-05T17:03:08+00:00

When he finally gets off his bike (again), does Armstrong see a future in politics? Looks like it. Interviewed by the Daily Beast he puts it like this:

If you feel like you can do the job better than people who are doing it now, and you can really make a difference, then that’s a real calling to serve, and I think you have to do that. I felt a strong desire to come back and race right now because I felt we had a place and I could have a real impact and that’s why I’m doing it. I don’t think you want to enter political life unless you really think you can really have an impact. Don’t do it for a bet, or a dare or for your ego. Or for any other competitive desire you have. Do it because you can get in there and change people’s lives. That’s why you do it. So, there will come a time, or not, that I say to myself, “You know what, I can help affect change.” And if that day comes, then absolutely.

Here's a rather miserable confession: one of my fears for 2009 is that Armstrong's return to the peloton will be successful. Doubtless that makes me a heel. Sure, one admires his fund-raising for cancer research, but I'm less impressed than some by Armstrong the cyclist. As I've written before, the great failure in his career was to never even attempt the Giro d'Italia-Tour de France double.

Guess what? This year he's riding the Giro! Yikes! If he wins, I'm going to have to reconsider and, most probably recant, some of my Armstrong-scepticism and, however grudgingly, admit that he probably is one of the three greatest bike riders of all time. So to keep my prejudices intact, Alberto Contador needs to take a grip on Team Astana and make it clear that he's the boss these days...

This Britain

2009-01-05T16:06:10+00:00

Since coming to power in 1997 Labour has created 3,605 new ways for you to break the law. That's an average of 320 new offences a year or, to put it another way, more than one new offence is created every day Parliament is in session.

Time to dust off an old and favourite proposal: every new offence or law should be accompanied by the repeal of an old one...

The Kennedy Interest

2009-01-05T14:01:50+00:00

The conventional wisdom seems to be that Caroline Kennedy is, as Nick Confessore puts it, "too big to fail" in her quest to succeed Hillary Clinton as the junior Senator from New York. Perhaps so. There is, of course, one person who could decide that it's not in the public interest to bail-out the Kennedys. With just two phone calls - one to David Paterson, the other to Kennedy - Barack Obama could put an end to this and suggest that New York have, like, an election or something shocking like that...

But conventional wisdom also says Obama will do no such thing, not least, or perhaps largely, because he owes Clan Kennedy for Teddy's early and enthusiastic endorsement of the upstart challenger to Queen Hillary's throne. Maybe so, again. During the campaign Obama spent a lot of time lambasting the "special interests" that were, apparently, running and ruining Washington. This would Change when Hope returned to the Capitol.

Well, what are the Kennedys if not a Special Interest? Now, granted, Obama meant that he disapproved of special interests bar those goals he shares, but I can't help but feel that permitting Kennedy to glide into the Senate is not exactly the sort change We Can Believe In that we were promised.

Conversely, there might be a political upside to stiffing the Kennedys: it would send a message that even the new President's friends should not take his friendship for granted; nor should they presume to abuse it. The good old days of stitch-ups and back-scratching are, outwardly at least, gone... Or something of that sort.

And no, I don't really believe this will happen either.

I am Michael Common*

2009-01-05T13:06:52+00:00

And so it continues. Not content with discovering "passive" smoking, the health boffins have now discovered something called "third-hand smoking" - all the better, presumably, to drive the last remaining smokers into the mountains (be they the Rockies or the Western Highlands) where, armed with only our wits, a lighter and a dwindling supply of contraband tobacco, we shall slip from cave to cave, lair to lair, all the while pursued by an army of "health professionals" hell-bent on saving us from ourselves...

*The hero of Michael Heath's long-running Spectator cartoon strip, The Outlaw, Michael Common is the last, still-persecuted, smoker in England.

Chump of the Day

2009-01-05T12:32:15+00:00

The National Gallery of Scotland needs to raise £50m to prevent the sale of Titian's Diana and Actaeon from being sold. The painting, part of the Bridgewater Collection, has been loaned to the gallery for decades but is now being sold by its owner, the Duke of Sutherland. Well, £50m is quite a lot of money. Then again, it's a pretty nifty painting (though my own tastes run a little later - to Caravaggio and Velazquez in particular).

Anyway, it's hard to imagine there being any discussion in France or Italy or Germany of the rights and wrongs of committing public money to the fund-raising effort. And while I have some sympathy with the notion that the arts should be self-supporting or rely upon private patronage, frankly I'd rather see the government lavish millions on the arts than on many (most?) other areas in which they currently squander billions.

None of that seems to really concern Labour MP Ian Davidson, however. In a display of provincialism startling even for a paid-up member of the West of Scotland Labour mafia, Mr Davidson told the BBC this morning:

"It is difficult to argue that this is part of Britain's cultural heritage when it's a picture by a long dead Venetian - it's not as if it's Jock McTitian...Very few people will ever have heard of Titian, many will have thought he was an Italian football player. What is the point of wasting this money in this way?"

Now there's an endorsement of the education system north of the border...

UPDATE: Mr Eugenides weighs in too.

Good News* from Somalia

2009-01-04T22:58:03+00:00

For once. Also, for once, good news for a newspaper. Colin Freeman, the Sunday Telegraph's chief foreign correspondent has been freed 40 days after he and his photographer, Jose Cendon, were kidnapped by Somali pirates. BBC report here; brief piece by Colin here.

*Granted, if you're actually Somali the news is, generally speaking, probably as lousy as ever.