No other word will do. For that’s what it was.
I recently had kidney-related reasons to sample the best and worst of what the American / British systems of healthcare have to offer. My conclusions are as follows: the British system is a bit like being dressed by Snow's White's tweeting bluebirds, the American system more like waking up in the middle of a five-lane highway. The NHS is regularly dismissed by U.S. critics of American reform as "socialized medicine." This is strange to trans-Atlantic ears. Most Brits don't think there's anything "socialist" about the NHS—it enjoys all-party support, including all right-of-center parties. The British Conservatives, who gave the world privatization under Margaret Thatcher, are totally committed to a national health service, tax-funded and free at the point of use (and Mrs. T never challenged these principles either). The parties disagree about how to run it—the Conservatives and the Blairites want less central control, more patient choice, less bureaucratic distribution of resources—but all are agreed on the basic principle behind it.And that's not just true of Britain. The fact is that all mainstream right-of-center parties across continental Europe regard some kind of national health service covering everybody and largely free at the point of use as not particularly "socialist." There is broad consensus on the left, right and center about this. Most people don't think of it as socialized medicine—just a key feature of a modern, rich, civilized society. When you try to explain this to those opposing a health-care overhaul in America, either they don't believe you or think you're making it up. It is striking just how far apart America's Republicans (and anti-reform Blue Dog Democrats) are from what should be their natural European allies, like the British Conservatives, the French Gaullists, and the German Christian Democrats on this issue.
The fact is health care on both sides of the Atlantic is rationed: in Britain, it is rationed by queue (though with the billions of pounds thrown at the NHS in recent years the queues are diminishing) and in America by price (no health insurance, no right to health care). Americans might like to ponder that it is better to be in a queue for health care that not qualify for any at all—which is the plight of those 47 million Americans who have no health insurance.
The Situation Room is a show on CNN, hosted by Wolf Blitzer, named after the room in the white house where the president goes to huddle with advisors and make important foreign policy decisions. Beyond that, all is confusion. On some occasions, Blitzer invites viewers to join him in the Situation Room, thereby implying that it is the studio in which he stands, boasting an impressive bank of TV screens. Very Situation Roomish. But on other occasions he will say to viewers "You're in the situation room," implying that the viewer is in the Situation Room, or maybe that the room is more a state of mind than an actual place. So which is it? The room in which Wolf is talking or the room in which I am watching Wolf talk?
There I was, thinking that my new kidney disease had allcomers beat. It's lifelong. Its rare. It put me in hospital for three days and the diagnosis features the word "sclerosis". You can't get more serious than that. And then I get home to find that my cat has cancer. Even I can see that cancer beats funky kidneys. I have been upstaged. Hannah is now the centre of attention, lording it up while we scurry around her, feeding and tending and petting. She's not nearly as alarmed as I would be if I woke up to find a strange tube up my nose, a big plastic collar around my neck, making me look like a futuristic Elizabethan, and my owners injecting me with strange-smelling fluids. She doesn't look at me with accusation in here eyes. She doesn't implore me to take the tube out or the collar off. She is either incapable of blame or causal reasoning (maybe the one comes with the other). She seems to regard our trips to the vet with much the same equanimity with which Chauncy Gardner regards the elevator in Being There: "This is a nice room". As far as she's concerned, it's just one of those things. Which means that not only does her disease beat my disease but her attitude is a lot better than mine too.
From the New Statesman: "soap-operaish predictability... tawdry prose.... not only is [Shone's] novel patronising, it is emotionally redundant, inaccurate and, worst of all, unamusing".
Publius is arguing that Bad is the best Michael Jackson album. I applaud the attempt to upend received wisdom, and I know how tempting and easy it is to bore of Thriller, but that's the point: just because we're bored of the front-runner doesn't stop it being the frontrunner. Therefore I must respectfully disagree. There are really only fourgreat tracks on Bad — the title track, The Way You Make Me Feel, Another Part of Me and Smooth Criminal — whereas you can't move for great songs on Thriller. Listen, too, to the production on Bad —all those tinny snares and over-reverbed bass drums, clanking away. Its cumbersome, angular, noisy production which clearly apes the more mechanical, ritzy sound made fashionable by Bobbie Brown — the first time Jackson and Jones had followed trends rather than setting them, and the beginning of the end. It's all knees and elbows when placed next to Thriller, or the first 16 bars if Don't Stop Til You Get Enough. But then nothing sounds as good as the first 16 bars of Don't Stop Til You Get Enough, except maybe the gathering hoofs of a stampede of unicorns.
"It was a bold enough experiment, you have to admit, lasting the best part of a century, in which any suffering artist worth his salt was systematically deranging his senses before noon, getting into the kind of bar fights that make a man feel truly alive, before shrugging off his mastodon hangover the next morning to pound away at his typewriter..."
Toby Young, myself and Cosmo Landesman at the launch of my novel, In The Rooms, at Daunt's Bookshop on Fulham Road last week. It was a lovely evening, as they say in Jennifer's Diary. I saw a lot of friends I haven't seen in ages: the poet Craig Raine, Cosmo and Toby, with whom I used to work on The Modern Review, a contingent of the Sunday Times gang, headed up by my old boss Harry Ritchie, and a clutch of other fellow writers, most of whom have committed the cardinal sin of writing bestsellers, at one time or another, some of them repeatedly. I can only imagine how tiresome a string of unblinking megahits must get after a while, how insulated from the real world. Most of them have lost all sense of every day reality, and have only the scantiest grasp of basic right and wrong. Nick Hornby is a vicious, hooded creature these days, snarling over the top of his beer bottle at anyone who dares come near him, and Helen Fielding last smiled some time in 1992, I believe. As for Gavin Pretor-Pinney, who seems able to write popular science bestsellers almost at will — I believe his new book is a history of dust — the less said the better. To see the effects of fame and success in such vivid close up is... well, it's a salutary experience. 
"When will it come, Ma?"
I've only been back in London a few days but my overriding observation is how widespread — how humungously ubiquitous, how overpoweringly omnipresent, how gobsmackingly knock-my-socks-off pervasive — the use of hyperbole has become. Everyone on the TV is caught up in a competition to out-do one another with superlatives. Is the Michael Jackson story big? Its ginormous. How ginormous? Its massively, unbeliveably globe spanningly massive etc etc. The same goes for the Odeon cinema chain's boast of being "fanatical about film." I'd always assumed that went without saying: the enthusiasm of a cinema chain for the medium of film. But no. Everything goes to eleven now. I'm guessing it has to do with a forcible expulsion of the English reputation for understatement but its coming across as if someone at the BBC has sent around a memo instructing all presenters to give it a little more oomph, a bit more welly. There's something a little over-compensatory about it, to this Brit's ears, but then maybe I've been away too long.
"I know what side I'm on," McCain cut in. "I'm on the side of the people. I'm not on Ahmadinejad's side or Mousavi. I'm on the side of the Iranian people and I'm on the right side of history. And I'm not going to walk on the other side of the street while people are being killed and beaten in the streets of Iran."McCain seems genuinely oblivious to the propaganda victory he would be handing Ahmadinejad. But he can't be: he utilised that very same trick himself during the 08 election when he seized on foreign support for Obama as a sign that he was not to be trusted. Maybe that's why he isn't willing to acknowledge the tactic's existence. The possibility that America may be demonised is anathema to anyone who spends so much time demonising other countries. Its like swahili, bat sonar, birdsong — it just doesn't register.
"All I would say on the subject, besides the standard line that it was a highly regrettable incident, is that nothing is as it seems" — CNN broadcaster Richard Quest, talking to the Guardian about the incident back in April when he was arrested for possession of drugs after being found in Centra Park, after dark, with a rope around his neck tied to his genitals with a dildo in the boot of his car.
Tony Hawk takes a glide through the corridors of the white house. "Here is my exit," he tweeted. "Supposed to return at noon for the First Father's Event if they let me back in."
"The demonstrators are fighting on their own, but they await just a word that America is on their side. And what do they hear from the president of the United States? Silence.... The Khamenei regime is deciding whether to do a Tiananmen. And what side is the Obama administration taking? None... Our fundamental values demand that America stand with demonstrators opposing a regime that is the antithesis of all we believe. And where is our president? Afraid of "meddling." Afraid to take sides between the head-breaking, women-shackling exporters of terror -- and the people in the street yearning to breathe free. This from a president who fancies himself the restorer of America's moral standing in the world." — Charles Krauthammer, Washington PostI've been listening to the chorus from the right demanding Obama come out with a stronger denunciation of the Iranian regime with growing incredulity. I have yet to find an expert on Iran who thinks that aligning ourselves with Mousavi would do anything but ensure his defeat — as well as unifying a crumbling regime, and retilting the balance of power back to Ahmadinejad. It would have the exact opposite effect to the desired outcome. On the plus side, of course, it might have some therapeutic value for those politicians wishing to let off some steam. It confirms what I have long thought about the Republicans when it comes to foreign policy: they don't actually want to win. They would prefer to sound good. Or rather: they start out wanting to win, but somewhere along the line, they come up against the competing desire to open their mouths. The speed with which they give in to temptation is almost comic.*
During the Bush years, Iran’s regime was able to coalesce support by uniting the country against a common enemy: President Bush, who called Iran a pillar of the “axis of evil” in a speech that alienated many of the very reformers whom the United States was trying to woo. For much of his administration, even as he strengthened Iran by toppling Iran’s nemesis Saddam Hussein, Mr. Bush struck a confrontational public line against the Iranian regime. The result, according to many experts here and in Iran, was that Iranians, including reformers, swallowed their criticism of the hard-line regime and united against the common enemy. Iranians with reformist sympathies even began advising Americans to stop openly supporting them, lest that open them to attack as pawns of America.This is why the Republicans actions seem to lend themselves to helping the the hardliners. On some level, they want them in power. When McCain shoots off about how evil the regime is he is not giving vent to anger so much as confirming his identity: I am the enemy of that. Ahmadinejad complete him. It's still self-defeating as a long-term strategy, of course, but the motive is a little more understandable.
What are the chances that Moon is a good movie? If I told you that it was a debut feature directed by David Bowie's son, Duncan Jones, its chances would have to sink sharply. First time director? Son of Major Tom? Working out whatever weird inter-planetary issues he has from the strange alienated, sci-fi infused childhood he surely had? If I tell you that the movie was financed by Sting's wife, Trudie Styler, the movie's chances surely drop off the chart. With the exception of Time Bandits, no movie funded by a rock star has ever turned out to be good, let alone the rock star's wife, who probably knew the kid when he was growing up and was happy to give him any money was lying around her husband's tudor mansion slash yoga studio while he was in the middle of one of his five-hour Tantric orgasms. It was with some perplexity, then, that I announce that Moon is not just a good movie, but a very good movie, beautiful and haunting and original — the best sci-fi movie I have seen since Blade Runner.
Uighurs Salahidin Abdulahat, 32, left, and Khelil Mamut, 31, go fishing in Bermuda, where they're now living after almost eight years in Guantanamo Bay.
I saw A.I. again on Showtime last night and finally realised the problem with it: you don't believe the mother loves the robot boy. We believe in Joley Haley Osmont's love for her, but never hers for him. It's hard to know what the actress, Frances O Conner, could have done exactly — the part pulls her all over the place. She has to first reject her surrogate son, then grow to love him, and then abandon him when her real son returns. The rest of the film — in which Osmont embarks on a long quest to be reunited with her — seems heartbreakingly misguided. Maybe that's why it feels so desolate. I doubt this was intentional: the final ten minutes, in which the boy finally gets to spend just one day with her, is one of the more heartbreaking ideas Spielberg has ever come up with. It's almost a complete movie in itself. I wish he had decided to make it.
We've now seen several different occasions when [Obama]'s been on the international trips, where he's not willing to say, flat out, 'I believe in American exceptionalism. I believe unequivocally, unapologetically, America is the best nation that ever existed in history, and clearly that exists today.' — Liz Cheney, CNNHmm. Most odd. I wonder why he didn't say that. I've generally found that reminders of one's innate superiority are the best way to start any conversation. Say I meet a stranger at a dinner party. They ask for my name. I tell them. They ask me what I do for living. I tell them, but before they can carry this inane conversation to its stultifying conclusion, I cut in, quick as a flash "I believe unequivocally, unapologetically that I'm the best person that ever existed, and clearly that exists today." It never ceases to get conversations off to a flying start. Frankly, I'm beginning to wonder if Obama is really as smart as everyone says he is.
Letterman offered no apology, but more of his usual postmodern, I'm goofy; feel sorry for me; "got the wrong daughter;" I'm Dave after all junk. The fact remains that in three separate references he slurred the female governor of Alaska and her 14-year-old daughter on a recent visit to his New York. And when he tried to contextualize it, all he did was make it worse by suggesting that he meant instead Governor Palin's 18-year-old daughter, who recently delivered an out-of-wedlock child.
'Travolta's Ryder is not your average villain. He’s that modern type: the brainy sicko, an all controlling puppeteer who uses his vast knowledge and power to manipulate others into jumping through a series of ever more difficult hoops. Frequently, he calls out of the blue, using the public payphone system to pose a series of bizarre riddles to the hero. It normally ends with a mad race across town in the middle of rush hour. Cultural critics are in disagreement over the precise roots of this phenomenon — the plunging Dow, the rising tide of alienation and anomie in today’s cities — but agree that it allows audiences a good working knowledge of what it is to go to lunch with Ari Emanuel.' — From my piece for the Daily Beast about OCD villains
A finished copy of my novel arrived in the post yesterday. I opened the package, took it out, placed it on the chest in the living room, and haven't moved it since. Occasionally I will go and have a look, like a caveman creeping up to a refrigerator, give it a poke, cry "oogga-boogga" and flee to a safe distance to peer at it again. I'm not sure why it should fill me such primordial dread but it does. It's like someone has sent me a chicken foot in the post, or a set of nuclear codes. Clearly I am going to have to pull myself together before promoting it in London later in the month. It's not so bad, really. The cover looks great; the pagination is neat; the dimensions, to my mind, just right — not too onerously long, not too skimpily short. My worries about it looking too dialogue-heavy have been eased; inside it I find pages, sometimes whole consecutive pages, of uninterrupted text, just like a normal book. And yet it makes me feel like a perfumed imposter — like Inspector Closeau in that Pink Panther movie, grinning and gurning his way through a Bluebeard impression while his fake nose slides down his face.
The Heavy metal band Anvil, immortalised in the movie Anvil! The Story of Anvil! will open for AC/DC when it performs at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Mass. on July 28 and at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on July 31. This is excellent news — maybe not as important as Obama's speech in Cairo, or the subsequent defeat of Hezbollah in the Lebanese general election, or the decision by the Pacific archipelago of Palau to take in the 17 Uighers in Gitmo, but still: one of the weeks better pieces of news I've heard this week. Those who are as obsessed as I am can check out what the band got up to in Cannes here.
"The week following the Rhine crossing got a bit hectic because the army was advancing fairly rapidly into Germany and we flew every day sometimes to attack German front line positions to soften them up for the army and other times on sweeps deep into Germany to attack the trains and road vehicles that were bringing supplies to the German troops. We much preferred the attacks on front line positions, there wasn't any flak there because it was always pulled back when the army got too near. I had had a couple or so small holes in my aircraft when I was hit by small shell fragments or by the odd bullet but nothing of any consequence. That all changed on 31 March 1945 when I was one of eight aircraft that were sent from where we were in Southern Holand on a sweep to the North to attack the German transport that was retreating from Holland into Germany.From my grandfather's account of his time flying Typhoons for RAF Squadron 137. Derek was 17 when the war broke out, 18 when he enlisted and 22 when he was wounded. He carried the shrapnel around in his body for the rest of his life. When I was 7 or thereabouts, a piece of it worked its way out of his knee. I remember being very impressed by that piece of metal's journey, also by how unfazed he seemed to be about the whole thing. Was there any more? Didn't he want to get it all out? What happened if he walked past a very strong magnet? When was the next bit coming? Which bit of him would it choose to come out of? I definitely knew I had something special on my hands after that. Nobody else that I knew had a grandfather with odd bits of aircraft fusillage floating around their bodies. Just mine.
The weather was pretty foul, the visibility was not much more than a mile and the cloud was 8/8 at 2,000 feet. We had to fly lower than that which meant we were sitting ducks for German flak. Because of the bad visibility the formation leader led us over a German airfield which he hadn't seen and they always had a lot of guns. There was flak everywhere and I was very quickly hit on the starboard wing. I climbed into the cloud to get away from it and when I was clear of the airfield I descended until I was below cloud. There was no sign of the rest of the formation and our orders were that if one was alone one went home very quickly because it wasn't very safe to be a single aircraft over German territory. I turned and headed for home flying very low so as to make it difficult for anyone to hit me, until I saw some of our army vehicles. Thinking I was now safely away from the Germans I climbed to about 1500 feet and started looking at my map to find out where I was. It wasn't as safe as I thought because there was suddenly flak all around me and I was hit in the port wing and behind the cockpit. I felt a thump behind my right shoulder as if somebody had punched me and a number of holes appeared in the perspex cockpit canopy. At the same time I saw what looked like smoke streaming back from the port wing.... My shoulder began to feel a bit funny and I could feel something trickling down my back so I realised I had been wounded. It took about 15 minutes to get back to Helmond and by the time that I got there I couldn't move my right arm and had to do everything with my left hand. It was a bit difficult to reach the undercarriage control lever and the flap lever because they were low down on the right hand side of the cockpit but it was a case of reach them or do a crash landing and I didn't fancy doing that. I figured that I had had enough risk for one day."
A strong contender. June, certainly. Two standout tracks: Girlfriend and Countdown.
Moral equivalence — how everyone hates it! I'd never really come across the term before but have soon learned that the quickest way to defeat an argument in American politics is to accuse your opponent of moral equivalence, then sit back and watch them unwind. So what is moral equivalence and how can I avoid it? Apparently Obama's speech in Cairo was full of it: Another example of moral equivalency: “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians.” That is accepting the (false) narrative of the Iranian Revolution, which holds that America’s role in overthrowing Mossadeq more than half a century ago — a development that would not have been possible had the leftist prime minister not lost support in the Iranian street — is just as bad as the campaign of mass murder and kidnapping that Iran continues to support at this very moment.
"Remembering the lipstick, he doubles up laughing, “I was so bad at it. At duplicity.” But he wasn’t, he was very cunning. There was a dinner at a Greek place in Charlotte Street with Clive James and the critic Lorna Sage, when I thought that Martin and Lorna were doing more than just sitting side by side, and after picking up the fork I’d dropped, had my suspicions confirmed. Tears and recriminations later were a waste of energy, because Martin’s defence tactic was to turn the tables of blame, attacking me for making an issue out of something so unimportant. This was Martin at his worst—nasty, facetious and belittling—and I didn’t have the confidence then to know that his behaviour was unacceptable, not mine.... His notes to me from this period until the end of the year are almost all alibis. All-night poker sessions with Tony Hard-On [Anthony Holden] were the most convincing, provided his tracks were covered (eg,“Don’t tell Rob abt poker ’cos he’ll bitch abt not being asked”)."
— from Julie Kavenagh's piece in Intelligent Life about being romanced and deceived by Martin Amis. The current issue also contains my article on great writer drunks but they haven't posted it online, presumably because their sales would plummet unmercifully if they they did.
Here's a great idea: a website advising the public on the best time to go for a pee during a movie. Its called Runpee. As someone with a weak bladder and an unerring instinct for a dramatic lull, I was intrigued. For Star Trek they locate no fewer than six pee moments, which me as a little harsh. For Angels & Demons, RunPee advises a single dash at around the 70 minute mark when Hanks is in the archives and the power goes out. Amazingly, this is the only moment they recommend. One of the reliefs of that movie for me was I knew I could happily go anytime and not miss a thing. That said, I chose well and came back from the toilet to find Ewan McGregor a delivering a long speech about the unseen glories of the Catholic Church.
— "Why did he invent that frequency transmitter and then not use it?"
"Empathy triumphs over excellence." That was the headline of one of the articles announcing Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. "Empathy" was one of the qualities he said he was looking for, throwing everyone for a loop. There was a rash of learned articles about why empathy was a terrible thing in a judge, how it really meant activism, and so on. It was all very surreal. To my untrained eye they might as well have been headlined, "Compassion is For losers," or "Goodness, go screw yourself". Personally, I like empathy and consider it a great quality in just about anybody. I liked bus conductors if they are empathic. I like policeman if they are empathic. I like scuba-diving teachers if they are empathic. It follows that I like supreme court justice possessed of the quality of empathy is a good thing. Obviously, it's not the only thing. I'd like them to have some legal training. I'd like it if they knew what a gavel is, and how and when to bang it. Imagine! And empathic too! Put it this way: I tend to avoid people from whom the quality of empathy has been expunged. I wouldn't like an empathy-free bus conductor, for instance. Imagine the hit 'n' runs he'd get into, or the old ladies he'd get caught in his doors, all the prams he'd kick into the street. Same goes for judges. The article that ran under that headline "Empathy triumphs over excellence" was written by none other than John Yoo, the lawyer who told president Bush that it was okay to crush the testicles of a small child if he deemed it appropriate in the fight against terrorism. His answer, if memory sereves, was that it would depend on "why the president felt he needed to do that." A more empathic person might have inquired into the child's feelings on the matter.
This story, over at the Daily Dish, has me trying to work out why the biggest online news aggregator in America, The Drudge Report, is right-leaning. I don't mean the personal reasons why it's editor, Matt Drudge, leans to the right but why it might be that a news-website that leans to the right might be more successful than one that leans to the left.
Whenever someone asks you why I am in New York, tradition dictates that I reply with a sentence that uses the words "dream" or "opportunity". If pressed, I point to the fact that I was offered a job here, although the magazine I came out for is no longer in existence and the number of stamps in my passport tells you I was headed here long before that. America has been in my head for as long as I can remember. The simplest and most truthful answer to why I am here, in fact, is, "the sidewalks." 
There's a moment near the beginning of the new Tom Hanks film, Angels and Demons, when Ewan McGregor, who plays a young priest, explains that he once joined the Swiss Gaurd and was trained to fly a helicopter. There's no reason for the speech except to set up the denoument in which McGregor leaps behind the controls of a helicopter and saves the day. The filmmakers were presumably worried that the sight of a priest piloting a copter might otherwise prove incongruous. What's incongruous to me is that they bothered at all. I mean what was it about that detail, in the blizzard of bullshit that is the rest of the movie, that cried out for their urgent attention? It's weird what some people get hung up on. Far more pressing to me, for instance, was how the clues to a current-day terrorist plot happen to be contained in a number of prominent Roman tourist sites dating back several centuries — St Peters, a Bernini sculpture, the manuscripts of Galilleo. Did the criminals nip back in time and plant the clues, just on the off chance that someone would want to solve the mystery, a few centuries later? Why would they do that? Wouldn't they want to get off scot-free? This movie is bonkers. I spent most of it staring at Tom Hanks hair, as I tend to do these days, impressed by his implants but certain they were beyond my price range. Why can Nick Cage not afford hair like that?
What would happen if the rule of law were to be suddenly admitted to Guantanamo? Most likely, the innocent would go free, some of the guilty would be prosecuted, but many would walk, irregardless of guilt or innocence, because the case against them was so tainted my the torture used to extract it. They might even have legal recourse to sue the people who had tortured them and the Bush officials who facilitated that torture. That will not happen of course. No sitting president can risk the possibility of freeing terrorists who later return to the battle field. Therefore, it follows, the rule of law can only be partially, or incrementally, applied. It's a little like like a drunk that is trying to get sober: sometimes, a drink is even necessary to stop someone dying of withdrawal. That's the best argument I can come up with as to why Obama has seen fit to re-instate, with modifications, the military tribunals established by Bush: the system set in place was so thoroughly corrupt, that to suddenly go cold turkey would most likely kill the patient.
I am proud of my abysmal record in picking the winners of America's Next Top Model. Season after season, my pick gets booted off by Tyra often for the very same reasons I liked them. Seeing as Tyra is a maniac, this feels like vindication. "She was too good for them," I think, as they skip gaily off the stage to better lives for themselves far away from the snarling bearpit that is the judging panel. But this season I excelled myself, picking Natalie and Fo as finalists, with Fo winning. Naturally, Natalie went out four weeks before the end, followed by Fo a week later (for her height!?). Feeling like I had done pretty well for myself, I decided to cave and meet the Tyra halfway. I would play by her rules, just to show that I really could pick the winners — I was just choosing not to. Out of the remaining three girls — Allison, Aminat and Teyona — I picked Aminat to win. She was the first to go out. Now it was down to two: I chose Allison. She lost to Teyona. That means I got three seperate chances to pick the winner, with increasingly favourable odds, and I got it wrong every time, right through to the end. Only the end of the compeititon — the sight of the winner, Teyona, standing there, weeping — stopped me from getting it wrong again."More recent presidents have had trouble making their labels stick. Mr. Clinton called for a New Covenant in a series of speeches at Georgetown in 1991 as he ran for president, but pollsters turned thumbs down and he largely dropped it. George W. Bush championed an Ownership Society when he ran for re-election in 2004, but that also made little public impression.New foundations has problems: it's hard to imagine giving a building a new foundation. New foundation means new building. You can't just let it hang in the air while you slip in and replace only the bottom. It's like taking a card from the bottom of the deck, or removing a tablecloth while people are still eating.
Robert Dallek, a presidential historian, suspects Mr. Obama’s expression may suffer the same fate.“I’m not sure what it means,” Mr. Dallek said. “The successful slogans tied in a convincing way to current events. T.R.’s Square Deal, F.D.R.’ s New Deal, J.F.K.’s New Frontier and L.B.J.’s Great Society all resonated because they summed up what their presidents intended and what the public was eager for at the time. I guess you could say the same for the New Foundation, but foundation doesn’t strike me as a word people will comfortably take to.” — NYT
"You know you've arrived when, at the tender ages of 32 and 29, your films merit their own 'ism'" — from my interview with Ryan Fleck and Anna Bode, the directors of Sugar, in The Guardian
Some of the photographs that Obama just suppressed have, nonetheless, come to light, courtesy of the Australian news channel SBS. Warning: the pic to the left is the least dismaying. Meanwhile, evidence continues to accumulate that Cheney ordered "enhanced interrogation techniques" to be used, not in order to stop further attacks, but in order to prove a non-existent link between Al Qeada and Iraq, as the pressure to justify the war reached its high-point. From McClatchy:Interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.Cheney is probably right to bet that popular opinion will come to his rescue all the time that torture is justified by the 'ticking-time' bomb scenario; but the possibility that he ordered it to prop up the teetering casus belli for the Iraq invasion will not, I believe, be looked on so kindly. Fighting terrorism is popular; the Iraq war is not.
During the same period, two alleged senior al Qaida operatives in CIA custody were waterboarded repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed at least 183 times.
A U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Paul Burney, told the Army Inspector General's office in 2006 that during the same period, interrogators at Guantanamo were under pressure to produce evidence of al Qaida-Iraq ties, but were unable to do so.
"The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results," Burney said, according excerpts of an interview published in a declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report released on April 22.
Scorsese has announced plans for a Sinatra movie, prompting a flurry of speculation as to cenral casting. Nikki Finke has Johnny Depp as the front runner but he's too pensive-technical for my tastes. My wife just came up with the perfect suggestion: Daniel Craig. It gets better the more I think about it; just the right mixture of knuckled intensity and powder-blue smoulder power, plus he brings his own tux. And while we're at it, for Dean Martin: Michael Madsen. Ava Gardner: Ashley Judd.
My novel appears to have found an American publisher so naturally I'm petrified. It has American characters, you see, and American settings and American pop culture references, the whole works. There's only one patch of Englishness in the whole thing and that's the hero. And while this was fine all the time it was only being published in London, where nobody really knows the names of the girls on America's Next Top Model or which team made it to the Superbowl in February of 2008 and whether they did so by means of a 28-yard touch-down, the chances that I have made some egregious error, and maybe even insulted my host country, have just increased exponentially. Obama is president — I got that much right.
"A former CIA high-value detainee, who provided bogus information that was cited by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, has died in a Libyan prison, an apparent suicide, according to a Libyan newspaper.
Libi was captured fleeing Afghanistan in late 2001, and he vanished into the secret detention system run by the Bush administration. He became the unnamed source, according to Senate investigators, behind Bush administration claims in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to al-Qaeda operatives. The claim was most famously delivered by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his address to the United Nations in February 2003.
Libi made up the story about Iraqi training after he was beaten and subjected to a "mock burial" by his Egyptian interrogators, who put him in a cramped box for 17 hours. Libi recanted the story after being returned to CIA custody in 2004.
"I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. "He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war."
The Libyan newspaper Oed reported Sunday that Libi was found dead in his cell after killing himself, but added that friends of the 46-year-old former preacher, who ran a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, questioned the alleged cause of death" — Washington Post
One of the ironies of Cheney's position these days is that he is beholden to the opinion polls which he once affected to despise. From a legal standpoint he is probably guilty of war crimes. His one hope is that even if he is guilty, the American public are not in the mood to see him tried. And so he must double down, take to the airwaves, to acquit himself in the court of public opinion.
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