Six weeks.

That’s the length of an election campaign here on the other side of the pond – and even that’s too long for some people.

Furthermore we do not have zillions of professional “consultants” and “strategists” pimping themselves for campaign employment. Because there are quite strict UK laws governing electoral expenditure almost all our campaigning is done by amateur volunteer activists often working out of their own homes (a bit like O4P, perhaps….)

So the reports coming to us out of Hot Air and other political media (“Perrypalooza”) fifteen months before the actual election give us the impression of a nation in a state of stretched out permanent political hyperventilation. Ed and Allahpundit, bless their little hearts, descend in a frenzy upon every opinion poll and analyse each cross tab with the zeal of an augur in Ancient Rome examining a bunch of chicken livers.

They then present the findings as if they are tablets of stone from Mount Sinai itself.

But a few days ago Pollinsider provided a refreshing dash of ice cold water to dissipate the heat generated by the Bachmann/Perry feeding frenzy and the speculation about Governor Palin.

Believe it or not, in their quests (or probable quest in Palin’s case) for the GOP nomination both Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney are working under the same premise: No one is paying attention right now. Sure, some people are paying attention. But that “some” is probably you and me and maybe 5% of the rest of the voting population.

See his point? Only political junkies are paying attention at this moment in time. However much the media play it up (and after all they have columns and screens to fill) he hazards a guess that Ames/Iowa had very little impact on the consciousness of most Americans.

As Palin has said, most people are not interested in the primary process right now, most people are worried about their families, their jobs, their kids, and what to make for dinner tonight. She is right. Being the most politically interested of my family and friends, I nevertheless have many friends and family who fall into the 96% group. These are people who know and follow politics to a degree, but are not uber-involved in the process and what is going on.

The media especially gets all wound up over who is where and what he/she said. They are constantly searching for new angles….

All of these candidates announced at different times. All of them had a short time frame when they were the “it” candidate. The Media Flavor of the Month. Right now, Perry is the flavor of the month. Why? Because 96% of the population is not paying attention. Everything they know comes from passing, a brief blip on the tv or radio, or by word of mouth. And these are the people who are polled, and this is why the race changes so dramatically so often, with so many new and frequent “frontrunners” challenging Romney.

Read the rest here then just unclench those muscles and relax for a few moments. The circus is in town but it could be that most people are probably not paying too much attention.

Am I wrong or am I wrong?

BTW…maybe Sarah Palin has been reading these words from one of the greatest poems ever written

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting….

After all there might well be a definite need for adult supervision later……

That Robert Stacy McCain is a feisty young fellow and he lets us depraved and decadent Europeans have it with both barrels over sexualising young girls – and he has the pictures to ensure we know what he’s talking about.

With our vasectomies and birth control and taxpayer funded health services we are sooooooooo degenerate and Stacy never misses a chance to trawl through the UK tabloids to warn clean living Americans against the perils of the European primrose path to perdition.

After all you would never get this in America, or this…and no US retail outfit would do this.

And those Australians – they must be protesting against something seedy coming from Europe, not from Texas….

Meanwhile surely only European 14 yr old girls would ever be so blatant….

BTW JonBenét Ramsey would now be 21….

In answer to the current phone hacking accusations swirling around CNN’s Piers Morgan (aka Piers Moron in the UK) the old smoothie adopts his standard posture of injured innocence.

“Not me, guv – must be that other bloke”

Moron hopes that his cheeky chappy routine will once again provide the appropriate coating of Teflon to deflect all accusations so that any future employer will willingly decorate his court jester’s hat with even more golden bells.

And he might well be right for Piers sees himself as another Bill Clinton – someone who still walks high with the Cultural Elite despite seducing a young White House intern and ejaculating over her dress. He realises that the liberal/left media will give a pass to one of their own but cry havoc and release the dogs of war if any UK Tory or US Republican even thinks of placing his hand where it shouldn’t be.

Piers, you see, is a champagne Socialist, former editor of the left wing UK Tabloid (and circulation dropping) Daily Mirror – and ‘twas he who wrote that headline about Americans after W won his second term in 2004

How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?

The trouble is, however, that the BBC/Guardian/NYT left wing media nexus has made such a big thing of the Murdoch hacking story that they forgot it was part and parcel of UK press practice for years alongside blagging into someone’s personal details via identity fraud and paying off sundry police officers and public officials for information.

It’s also the third dark cloud to be swirling around our hero since the turn of the century.

The ramped shares.

The faked photo of British soldiers abusing Iraqis

Both times PM has slipped Houdini like from the black hole that often sucks in those who sail too close to the wind. But this is Morgan’s third little “difficulty”.

As Goldfinger famously observed to James bond
“Once is Happenstance. Twice is Coincidence. The third time it’s Enemy action”.

There are other pressures as well – to be beaten by Rachel Maddow must be particularly humiliating…

Has Piers been finally hit below the waterline?

My other piece of advice, Copperfield, said Mr. Micawber, you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and, in short, you are for ever floored. As I am!

Ah, Wilkins Micawber….if only you were in Washington to talk some sense to President Obama. The politicians might be able to conjure up some sort of last minute Debt Ceiling fix that can flatter the markets for a few microseconds but some would argue that it will really be like covering plague sores with heavy theatrical make up – and in a way the actor analogy is highly appropriate. Boston University’s Professor Laurence Kotlikoff sees the current situation as a piece of political theatre choreographed to distract the public from the cold stark facts of economic reality.

Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt. Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills.

Kotlikoff differentiates between the “official” debt of approximately 14 trillion and what he calls actual net indebtedness of 202 trillion. The true extent of the government’s liabilities have been hidden by a deft piece of legerdemain, that oh so useful tool of the crooked accountant – relabelling.

Congress has been very careful over the years to label most of its liabilities“unofficial” to keep them off the books and far in the future.

But unofficial or not the liabilities are already there, dark clouds on the horizon that will never clear but will eventually blacken the whole sky.

Why?

We have 78 million baby boomers who, when fully retired, will collect benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that, on average, exceed per-capita GDP. The annual costs of these entitlements will total about $4 trillion in today’s dollars. Yes, our economy will be bigger in 20 years, but not big enough to handle this size load year after year.
This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck.

This isn’t just a problem for America. It’s a problem for most of the western world. It’s the eternal confidence trick that promises rainbows and unicorns with just one rub of the genie’s lamp.

We shake our heads at the tortured self destruction of Amy Winehouse. We congratulate ourselves they we have never been weak enough to become enslaved to the drug dealers haunting the other side of the tracks. But in reality the massive amounts of debt carried by western governments are the symptoms of our own society’s addiction to robbing the future to pleasure the present.

Read the rest of Kotlikoff’s piece here – it paints a chilling picture but implicit within the message is the desperate need for political leaders who have the courage to tell the truth to their fellow citizens and the steel to confront the pied pipers of the Obama left or, as Jeff Randall of the UK Daily Telegraph calls them

media dons, Princeton’s Paul Krugman and British-born David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, championing fiscal incontinence as the route to salvation.

In 1940, when Churchill promised the British people nothing but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” it was the first time for decades that they had heard a politician treating them as adults by telling them the truth. They responded, not with despair but with a grim determination to confront the harsh realities of the present with a shared sacrifice so that future generations could live in peace and freedom.

That was leadership.

Where are the Churchills of the 21st century?

Celia Walden at the DT tells us all exactly what we want to know – how Hollywood awaits Will and Kate with bated breath and botoxed cheeks.

It really is a toss up as to who writes the the biggest amount of Polly Filla guff in the Daily Telegraph….Celia Walden or Bryony Gordon. Of course perhaps neither of them actually exist. Instead there might be an IT programme called “Breathless Brown Noser” originally developed at CNN towards the end of 2008 for items about the Obamas and Clintons.

The programme generates well worn adoration clichés by itself – all the operator has to do is insert specific “celebrity” names which then appear to imply that the “writer” is also a regular at these events while we, the ordinary public, are like the poor kids with our noses pressed against the window watching the gods and goddesses at play.

Maybe Celia and Bryony aren’t real people getting paid six figure salaries for scribbling crapola. Instead – given the massive downsizing tsunami accompanying the Telegraph’s transformation into the Daily Mail for Waitrose shoppers – it’s all being done by a seedy, sweaty tabloid hack on a supermarket shelfstackers wages.

The tragedy is that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge do appear to be a genuinely nice young couple, attractive and lively who have caught the imagination of millions across the globe.

In a world often overshadowed by grim economic forecasts and the threats of death cult fanatics they symbolise the portents of an alternative more optimistic future.

Of course they are not Ordinary People Like Us. Kate was once but she is now in a different world.

Of course the photos and TV clips are embellishments of artifice – but so is almost everything else we see in the media. It’s a World of Spin, folks where even Guardianistas like Polly(Tuscany villas) Toynbee pretend to be against the toffs.

But put it this way –who would you rather see your kids and grandkids take as role models for their future, the royal couple or the narcissistic posturing PR puffed nebbishes of Hollywood and the right hand sidebar of the Daily Mail?

They deserve better than airhead Walden and her Hello style ramblings. But, let’s face it, the once mighty Daily Telegraph has followed along the primrose path to perdition by converting itself into a gossip rag. Thank goodness I gave up wasting money on buying this dross and just peruse it online for free. Rumours of a DT paywall still float around. It would indeed give me a perverse feeling of delight to refuse to contribute to the household accounts of dimwits like Walden and Gordon.

During the late 1940s and early 50s my dad would sometimes buy a copy of the Saturday Evening Post from our local WH Smith in South London. It was a much better deal in terms of pictures and articles of interest than anything published in England at the time. I particularly remember being astonished at the advertisements for food and drink – this at a time when food continued to be rationed in a rather run down dilapidated post war London suburb, still pock marked with bombed out buildings.

As the years rolled by and prosperity returned Hollywood and Rock n’Roll crafted part of my own cultural outlook. As a history teacher and politics nut I developed a fascination for the American scene but never imagined crossing the pond for real, only in my imagination.

Then in 1990, browsing in a local discount bookstore I picked up a copy of “Exploring The West” by Herman J Viola and there, on page 240 was this picture, “Open Range”, painted by Maynard Dixon in 1942…..

‘

I was hooked. I just had to go out there and see that for myself – the big sky, the majestic mesas, the sandy, scrubby landscape. I wanted to sense it, feel it, drink it in with my eyes. Moreover I wanted to stand in front of that painting which the book said was part of a collection of western art near the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. So in the mid 90s we booked a fly drive and I took the car east across the Rockies to Denver, checked into the Brown Palace that night and, bright and early next morning, sauntered out of the hotel to where the gallery was supposed to be and – no gallery, no collection, no picture….apparently the whole project had been closed a few months before and the paintings scattered to the four corners of America.

So I have never seen the painting.

But we did see the landscape. We have driven all around Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. First year we drove from Flagstaff to Bluff, Utah and alongside Monument Valley and I saw it for real.

A few days later we drove to Moab and I stood at Grand View Point in Canyonlands – thinner and with more hair than now – and wanted time to freeze for ever……

….and I so much want to return.

Thank you, Maynard Dixon….

BTW – a few years later we did see many of his paintings at a glorious exhibition mounted at Brigham Young University…..but that painting, sadly, wasn’t there…..