Don’t let’s crack open the champagne yet because there is many a slip twixt cup and lip but maybe we can allow ourselves a beer. Five polls out this weekend and if they represent a trend (and in this currently highly volatile and fearsomely unpredictable scenario that could be a monumentally gargantuan IF) then thing might be getting just a teeny weeny bit rosier for the Tories.

Mike Smithson at Political Betting reads the runes

Overall it’s been a good polling night for the Tories with the party well established in the mid-30s across almost the full range of surveys that we’ve seen.

Apart from MORI, which looks like a rogue, the Lib Dems will be delighted that they are still in there at around the 30 mark.

Labour will be quite concerned about those two surveys with them on 26% – well behind the blues with not many campaigning days left

However all these polls need to be taken with three significantly large grains of salt. Firstly remember that, despite the media fascination with messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg, we are not voting for a President. The election is for just over six hundred Members of Parliament and the Prime Minister and the bulk of his or her Cabinet will themselves be MPs who have managed to persuade a majority of colleagues to support their programme.

Secondly the polls are usually a nationwide sample of opinion but, over the last few elections, there have been quite substantial variations between different regions of the UK so those percentages might well camouflage localised shifts in voting patterns.

Finally a well supported third party like the Liberal Democrats could suck up votes from either of the other two “main” parties at different rates in every constituency making the final tally even more difficult to predict.

Of course those complications did nothing to stop a whole tranche of Hot Air commentators waxing lyrical on the unconservativeness of Conservative Party leader David Cameron at the tail end of an Allah post. The overall impression appeared to be that Cameron was a closet Marxist surrender monkey whose intention was to stitch a hammer and sickle in the centre of the Union Jack and use taxpayers’ money to erect a mosque on every street. He was even blamed (admittedly indirectly) for Obama’s 2008 victory because we Brits were even deeper in the tank for His Styrofoamness than the Americans.

Now I admit that even though I have been a Tory activist since the 1950 election (I was ten years old and my activism consisted largely of singing a rude song about the Labour Party in the school playground) and that when I die you will find the name Maggie engraved on my heart it is possible that some guy sitting on his porch in Hanksville, Utah is better informed about the UK than me. But for what it’s worth I shall make my stand and declare that Cameron is offering a decent, conservative programme.

Reduce spending to cut the deficit within weeks of assuming power.

Cut some taxes

Allow groups to open their own schools, funded by govt but outside local authority control

Give Head Teachers greater powers to run their schools with minimal govt interference

Every police force will be run by a locally elected commissioner to reflect public concerns

Much tighter control of immigration

Ensure that our forces are effectively equipped and better looked after

Remain in the EU but be much less cooperative when our own interests are threatened

There is more and all of it is driven by the recognition that government needs a new paradigm.

The top-down model of power that exists in Britain today is completely out of date. The argument that has applied for well over a century – that in every area of life we need people at the centre to make sense of the world for us and take decisions on our behalf – has collapsed. We now live in an age when technology can put information that was previously held by a few into the hands of the many. This is an age of personal freedom and choice, when culture and debate are shaped by a multitude of voices. But politics has not caught up with this new age. Instead of giving people more power over their lives, we have a government intent on taking it away.

Good stuff – certainly good enough for Glenn Beck’s favourite British conservative Daniel Hannan – and what makes it even sweeter is that a key henchman of Obama, John Podesta, (Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, head of Barack Obama’s Transition team and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential left wing think-tank in today’s Washington) has obviously been tasked with firing a warning shot in Cameron’s direction over his lack of enthusiasm for being told what to do by the Franco-German axis that currently dominates the EU.

Worryingly, under David Cameron’s leadership, the Conservative Party’s traditional Euro-skepticism has become more extreme. Consider, for example, his decision to have Conservative members leave the European People’s Party—the mainstream center-right grouping within the European Parliament that includes German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP—to form a new parliamentary group with a maverick collection of racist, homophobic, and xenophobic members of the European Parliament. Beyond the obvious political symbolism this entails—it is hardly good for Britain’s prestige when its European parliamentarians sit with those who have argued the election of a black U.S. president hails the end of civilization—the decision also illustrates Cameron’s willingness to forgo political influence to placate extreme elements of his own party.

In other words he just cannot understand why the Tories are not having orgasms over belonging to a structure like the EU which currently is the epitome of a “top down model of power” run by shady deals in secret backrooms by groups of corrupt and self serving politicians and faceless bureaucrats – otherwise known as the Chicago style of government.

Sounds like Podesta sees a possible British Conservative administration as a kind of transatlantic group of tea partying rednecks getting all geared up to causing trouble at Brussels – and you know what? That’s exactly what we Tories (and many other Brits) want to happen.

Anything that annoys a left wing Obama mouthpiece like Podesta is just fine with me.

Watch this space for more messages from the bunker……

Imagine its three weeks before the November US midterms. Allahpundit at Hot Air has just done his usual business with the crosstabs and percentages from the latest generic congressional polls. He has posed his familiar exit question, posted the piece and then left the keyboard to feed his cats. As he looks out over Central Park all is right with the world of punditry as Republicans and Democrats spar with each other from sea to shining sea.

His cellphone rings – it’s Ed

“Allah – Salem has pulled your post..some new polls have just come in and you’re out of date”

“WTF” says Allah “has one of the parties surged?”

“Yes” replies Ed “but be prepared for a shock. IT’S THE WHIGS!!!!”

A fantasy – isn’t it? But not here in the UK where a shock wave has hit us with just two weeks to go before polling day. Several surveys now show that the party leading the field is one which last formed a government in 1910.

That’s right – for the first time in a hundred years the Liberal Democrats (aka The Liberal Party) now appear to be on course for an astonishing political upset.

The Conservative in me is bleeding. After thirteen wilderness years of having to watch as Blair and Brown and their Labour henchmen chipped away at Thatcher’s legacy I was confidently anticipating a Tory government which would roll back the centralising tentacles of the Westminster octopus. Cameron. of course, is no Thatcher and I have not agreed with everything he has done. But he has united his party after years of factional infighting following Maggie’s political assassination of and offered, a t last, a believable alternative to Labour’s innate assumption that Westminster knows best.

But I have to confess that the political junkie in me is pumping with adrenalin because the Liberal surge has put all the political pundits totally out of joint. Nobody predicted this and they have been slaughtering chickens to check out their livers as well has throwing their rune stones across the floor and they still don’t know what is going to happen come election day – it’s really cut these pontificating panjandrums of political prognostication down to size and might make their editors wonder if their one pound a word plus unlimited expenses price tag can really be described as giving value for money.

Up to last Thursday it was business as usual. The Tories were still ahead but slightly better economic news was putting a little bit more gilt on Gordon Brown’s Labour gingerbread and the Con/Lab gap was narrowing with Nick Clegg’s Liberals hovering, as usual, in third place around the 20% mark.

Then came the TV debate between the party leaders – a novelty for us but a familiar part of the US political scene for fifty years or so. Cameron and Brown concentrated on scoring points against each other but in what they perceived as a dignified “Presidential” way and the result was that neither of them particularly impressed. That gave Clegg the chance to come up from the inside and pose as the anti-politician, a straightforward kind of guy totally divorced from the punch and Judy politics of the two main parties – and he seized the moment. He came across as Mr Reasonable, the next door neighbour who would act the David on your behalf against the two political Goliaths – and it worked to perfection.

By the next day the media, which for years has been studiously ignoring Mr Clegg, had finally found a narrative in an election campaign that up to then had been fizzling like a damp firework. Cleggmania was born and suddenly being a Liberal Democrat was so…..NOW…..

However, while this Tory still bleeds at the prospect of a soft left bunch of “caring”, vacuous charlatans coming within an inch of the reins of power, my injuries are not yet life threatening and I remain optimistic – so do watch this space as I smuggle more messages from the bunker…..

Kathleen Parker has had enough.

For a long time she manifested a superhuman self discipline in the face of a continuous barrage of provocation from the demented screams and visceral howls of rabid demagogues. She has shuddered in distaste as multitudes of America’s unwashed crashed into the salons of the great and the good DEMANDING explanations from their congressional representatives about why they were going to vote for certain measures. Then this same hoi polloi, now calling themselves the Tea Party, flooded out of their urban hovels and rural shacks onto the pristine boulevards surrounding state capitols clutching crude banners upon which were scrawled vicious threats and bloodthirsty slogans.

Finally they trooped to Washington, goggle eyed, initially, at discovering as they watched their betters going in and out of 1150 15th Street that not all women wore micro skirts and cowboy boots or that some men wore suits and ties rather than T shirts and baseball caps. But they soon forgot their place – and their manners. Orchestrated by the devious and sinister figure of Redstate’s Erick Erickson, the Huey Long of Georgia, they began to grunt and drool in anticipation as they waited for the object of their hate and derision – Kathleen Parker herself.

For Parker, in the twisted and psychotic minds of Erickson and his minions, has committed the cardinal sin – she has dared to consistently, albeit mildly, and politely, criticise their Warrior Queen, Sarah Palin, for cultivating a political atmosphere of anger and hatred.

The courage displayed by Parker in following this lonely path is immeasurable. While a timid and compliant media, bullied into subservience by Erickson’s militias, fawns obsequiously before this ignorant and ill educated hick from Alaska, Parker has made it her life’s work to break the hold of the Erickson/Palin mujahideen.

Thusly do hyperpartisans become mainstream.
It’s fine to be angry about bad policies; it’s fine to hold politicians’ (and journalists’) feet to the fire. But it is not fine to demonize dissent and cultivate rage. We should know by now where demagoguery leads.

Neanderthal nitpickers, doubtless clutching Murdoch’s silver in their grubby fingers, asked Parker to provide evidence of Palin’s encouragement of mob rule. This only serves to display their crass ignorance of world of the enlightened. The presence of Parker’s disdain is sufficient in itself. After all the lady won the H.L. Mencken writing award presented by “The Baltimore Sun” in 1993 and she is a regular guest of Chris Matthews – who on earth needs facts with a pedigree like that?

But now Parker has discovered that she is not alone.

Independents as a group outnumber either party, in other words. Yet, given the hyperpartisanship that began under George W. Bush — and has accelerated during President Obama’s first year, thanks in large part to the enabling mechanism of the Internet — one would think that America were divided into hard left and hard right.
We’re not. We’re a vast middle, slightly right-of-center nation. How is it that so many feel so disenfranchised by so few?

Parker has the answer – they need a leader and they are looking for their own Sarah Palin – a beautiful strong willed mother figure with long hair and flashing eyes. But she also needs to be intelligent and articulate and properly educated and, above all, experienced in politics – and that means real politics. Being mayor of a tiny village on the edge of some frozen mountain or governor of what is essentially a huge National Park containing about three hundred people and half a million caribou isn’t real politics – but writing about politics and meeting proper politicians is the real deal.

Parker at first couldn’t think of a candidate who would fit that profile – so she decided to reach out to those everyday, ordinary Americans who were maxed out by hyperpartisanship but cold with fear about challenging the Palin/Erickson reign of terror….and she found them.

I run into the politically homeless everywhere I go. Meet two South Carolina men named Joe with whom I chatted over the Christmas holiday. Neither plumbers nor six-packs, both are successful businessmen and lifelong Republicans now wandering the political desert. Fiscal conservatives alienated by the GOP excesses, they’re equally loath to identify themselves as Democrats.

Just two ordinary, everyday Americans, chatting over martinis in an ordinary, everyday country club….

Fast forward to the University of Pennsylvania, where I spoke to a journalism class a couple of weeks ago. I talked a bit about the wingnuttery that has hijacked politics and how some of us who consider ourselves moderates (otherwise known as apostates) have decided it’s time to denounce the harsh partisans who feed on polarization. It’s time to give independents a voice.

Those ordinary, everyday students of the media who will one day be going into proper, useful jobs (unlike plumbers or builders or flight attendants) were hypnotised by Parker’s message as she quietly deconstructed the ludicrous claims of Fox to be anything more than a propaganda machine.

Exhausted by her forays out of South Carolina and into Pennsylvania she returned, nevertheless, with a happy heart. For when she asked her two businessmen (and six media students) who could be the Sarah Palin of the Independents they cried out, in unison, KATHLEEN – KATHLEEN – KATHLEEN…” you are a beautiful strong willed mother figure with long hair and flashing eyes. But you are also intelligent and articulate and properly educated and, above all, experienced in politics – and that means real politics – and you won the H.L. Mencken writing award presented by “The Baltimore Sun” in 1993 and you are a regular guest of Chris Matthews!”

That’s why, very soon, Kathleen Parker will hold the inaugural meeting of the Arugula Party at the Camden Country Club in South Carolina (no plumbers, builders or flight attendants allowed) and, within weeks, millions of independents will be picketing Tea Party events waving their arugula leaves at the angry, contorted faces of Palin/Erickson sans-culottes in every corner of America. By the end of the year Palin will be driven back into the icy wastes of the north with her whole hillbilly tribe, Fox will have become a mere shopping channel for rednecks and, in a grand ceremony at the White house, Kathleen Parker will throw a collection of captured Tea Party banners at the feet of President Obama and crown him with an Arugula wreath…

“Independents of America unite – you have nothing to lose but your arugula!”

Cross posted at Conservatives4Palin

I haven’t posted so much recently because, as “David Copperfield” at The Archway Theatre Horley gets closer our rehearsal schedule intensifies. Last Sunday we did our first run through the two acts (previously we just rehearsed each act separately) and all this week we have a succession of dress rehearsals culminating with the final dress rehearsal next Sunday which will also be recorded on video for sale as a DVD – then we open on the evening of Tuesday March 23rd. We do ten performances, Tuesday to Saturday, over two weeks then strike set on the final Sunday – and that is it!!

We are all amateurs so we do it for love but we will probably fill our small auditorium (95 seats) to capacity for almost every performance. We do ten shows a year plus a pantomime and attendance rarely dips below 90% making us probably one of the most successful amateur theatres in the country.

Gary Andrews, one of our members, regularly writes and directs a big cast blockbuster based on the classics every 2/3 years (Henry V/VI, Les Miserables, A Christmas Carol). The dialogue is always true to the original but obviously stripped down to tell the story on stage over 150 minutes – a tall order but he hits the spot every time. I certainly would recommend his scripts to any group willing to undertake something a little more ambitious.

I became involved in amateur theatre almost by accident early in the 1980s. My wife had joined a group attached to the local church (to help backstage) but when she suggested I might like to get involved I wasn’t too keen. I had this image of amdram being full of frustrated “luvvies” thinking they were west end material and being very pretentious and bitchy.  A few weeks before their first show, however, an actor dropped out so I said I would do a one off just to get them out of a hole – the result? I was absolutely hooked – and it did me good….I had just been appointed to a senior post in a London school, things weren’t going too well (students were fine but many of the staff were neanderthal) and I was getting obsessed – amdram gave me an outlet from difficult times at work – and also brought my wife and I close together in a shared, and very sociable hobby.

We are both very much involved at The Archway, both onstage and helping with the less glamorous but vital administration and it helps to keep us busy in retirement. As teachers we also appreciate mixing with all age groups from nine to ninety – retirement can so often mean you’re surrounded by a bunch of greyheads forever moaning about how wonderful it was in the “old days”…never liked that when I was young and hate it even more in the evening of life!!!!

So, for the next three weeks or so I shall be Barkis, carrying young Copperfield to and from school in his cart and falling in love with Peggotty and always being willin’…………

“You don’t know what freedom is if you have never lost it.”

This lovely young lady was running a beauty salon in France in 1940. After the German invasion she could have sat tight and carried on with her business and waited to see how things turned out. Instead she risked her life distributing anti German pamphlets and, within months, had become an organiser with the Resistance, helping escaped Allied airmen, reporting German troop movements and supervising improvised landing strips.

In 1944 she was arrested and spent the rest of the war in concentration camps, ending up in Buchenwald. She was scheduled to be put before a firing squad on the very day that US soldiers liberated the camp.

After the war she met and married an Englishman and, a few years later, moved to Britain, settling in Bristol where she spent the rest of her life. This week she died, aged 105, in an old people’s home.

She was interviewed a year ago, still bright as a button, and she wore her medals with pride.  They included France’s highest award for bravery, the Legion d’Honneur, the War Cross with palm, the War Cross with purple star, the American Medal of Freedom, the Medal of the Resistance and the Liberation Cross.

“I was born with courage. I did not allow cruel people to find in me a person they could torture,” she said, as she marked her birthday with chocolates and flowers with friends on Monday.

 “I saved 102 pilots before being arrested, interrogated and tortured. I suffer still from that. I still have the pain.”

A lot of us talk about freedom because it’s easy to talk the talk. We also tend to slip rather too easily into using words like fascist and communist and dictatorship when the only unpleasant reaction would be a dirty look or an unflattering vocal response. Andree Peel spent five years of her life living within a real world of terror where the price of resistance was torture and death.

In our heart of hearts how many of us could be absolutely sure that we would react as bravely and selflessly as did the tiny beautician from France?

Bethan Myfanwy Hughes is a 28 year old professional harpist and singer from Wales. She has also been called an “Angel of the Battlefield” by battle hardened, tough as nails British and American soldiers. Why? Because she spends a lot of time in the UK and USA visiting wounded troops in hospitals and soothing their minds and bodies with her music.

There is evidence that the music of the harp – it’s unique vibration frequency and resonance tones –  eases pain and helps stressed patients to relax.

Bethan also works with cancer patients in hospices as well as the mentally ill but the soldiers are so special for her that she hopes to raise £25,000 for the charity Help for Heroes, supporting soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan by playing for customers in supermarkets all over Wales.

 “Through my voluntary compassionate care work with the British forces, I have seen a lot of badly injured soldiers.

“Seeing how brave they are and the courage they have, like the amputees and double amputees who still wanted to serve in the forces, has made me want to do this for them.”

From the military comments on her website her work is much appreciated

From OP Herrick 2008, Thank you so much for your support and your music. You truly are an ‘angel of the Battlefield’…WE WANT BETHAN IN THE MIDDLE EAST !! 

Hi Bethan, just wanted to say Thank you for adopting me through my deployment. Your letters,parcels and music helped me through the tough times. You are truly a forces angel and we are lucky to have you xxx 

Diolch or galon am yr cacennau cymreig!!
With fondest love from the field hosp, loving our welsh cakes and cd’s… xxxxx 

‘Our spirits will never be the same, by sharing your gift of music with us, you are truly and angel of the battlefield’  –  Capt Mendoza, US Army, Kuwait, 2005

‘I take care of many soldiers emotional and spiritual wounds, your harp music will help to ease the pain from here. Bethan words cannot describe how much you mean to my soldiers, you are truly their angel’ – US Military Chaplain, Iraq, 2006

…and this from a gruff British squaddie

Ha ha, Yeah Oli is miffed.We ate all his sweets, that you sent!!..
Cheers Beth for being our adopted angel.
Gazza
P.S you still need boots?? 

 In fact her soldiers have made such an impression on Bethan that she plans to switch career and go into nursing

It is for this reason that she hopes to join Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps. In preparation for his change of career, Bethan has become a reservist of the A Squadron, 203 Welsh Field Hospital in Swansea and is studying nursing at Swansea University.

Explaining her move from musician to nurse, she said: “Having seen so many injuries and the impact these have had on the soldiers and their families made me feel that I wasn’t doing enough. I felt I wanted to nurse them as well.”

Dedication to UK & US Armed Forces- Bethan Myfanwy Hughes

Bethan was recently interviewed on BBC Radio about her work – go into the clip at 8.33 and run it until 19.55 and hear more about this amazing young lady

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00r323s

Then finally listen to her playing “Fields of Gold”……

Thanks a lot, Mr. President. You insulted our Queen by giving her an iPod as if she were some primitive tribal leader wide eyed for magical technological totems. You treated our Prime Minister as if he were the boss of a small waste management  company touting for a drain clearing contract in some Chicago precinct  (I don’t like Gordon Brown but he is sending our young men and women to fight and sometimes die alongside your troops in Afghanistan). You also sent back a bust of one of our greatest heroes, Sir Winston Churchill, loaned to the White House since 9/11.

You obviously prefer to bow low to the Emperor of Japan, placate Vladimir “Il Duce” Putin of Russia and not get too overly fussed about the savage repression of pro democracy demonstrators in Iran – but somehow we’re beginning to get the feeling that we Brits don’t really mean all that much to you.

Washington refused to endorse British claims to sovereignty over the Falkland Islands yesterday as the diplomatic row over oil drilling in the South Atlantic intensified in London, Buenos Aires and at the UN.

Despite Britain’s close alliance with the US, the Obama Administration is determined not to be drawn into the issue. It has also declined to back Britain’s claim that oil exploration near the islands is sanctioned by international law, saying that the dispute is strictly a bilateral issue.

But what about that insignificant little sideshow in 1982 when an Argentinian  army  invaded and illegally occupied the Falklands?  Some of the newly elected President Reagan’s advisers, like UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick , tried to argue for strict neutrality. They, and many others, including the Argentinian military junta, saw Britain as weak in will and conviction – there might be angry words and vague threats but eventually there would follow a series of diplomatic manoeuvres ending in some sort of facesaving device that awarded Argentina a foothold in the islands.

But they reckoned without UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She was determined to use this incident to show that Britain was no longer going to play the part of the world’s punchbag. Within weeks a task force was assembled and despatched to recapture the islands – and if anyone doubted the steeliness of her will the sinking of the Argentinian light cruiser “General Belgrano” proved beyond doubt that that the pundits had made a massive miscalculation. But Ronald Reagan was not surprised – he knew the lady’s measure and also how she spoke on behalf of the vast majority of British people.

But President Obama and his Cook County cronies have little feel  for history.

Senior US officials insisted that Washington’s position on the Falklands was one of longstanding neutrality. This is in stark contrast to the public backing and vital intelligence offered by President Reagan to Margaret Thatcher once she had made the decision to recover the islands by force in 1982.  

Instead the administration appears more concerned with appeasing the radical left wing Latin American regimes aligned with President Chavez of Venezuela. The bizarre State Department mishandling of the recent political upheaval in Honduras was an early symptom of this behaviour. It seems that now Obama is more concerned with getting credit with the Kirchnerist regime in Argentina than supporting a long standing ally.

Kevin Casas-Zamora, a Brookings Institution analyst and former vice-president of Costa Rica, said that President Reagan’s support for Britain in 1982 “irked a lot of people in Latin America”.

The Obama Administration “is trying to split the difference as much as it can because it knows that coming round to the British position would again create a lot of ill will in the region”, he said.

The Falklands today are very different from the isolated and old fashioned community that existed in 1982. It is a thriving, energetic power house rich with natural resources – which, of course, is the reason why the Argentinians have once more begun beating the tattered “Malvinas” drum. However there is also a far stronger military presence in the area which means that their sabre might be rattled but is unlikely to be withdrawn from the scabbard.

The graves of British servicemen at San Carlos Cemetery reflect the price paid for the eviction of the Argentinian invaders. Not even the gang of shifty and self serving confidence tricksters who make up the current Labour government would dare to renege on such a compact.

Britain and America will not always see eye to eye – it is in the nature of families that disagreements will arise. But surely the bonds of friendship between us, sealed with blood and bone, should signify a little more to Barack Obama than the desire to elicit a grunt of approval from the likes of Chavez, Kirchner and their fellow posturing, prancing, left wing clowns…..

In 1915 John Glasson Thomas, a teacher  – Tommy to his friends – met Miss Gertrude Brooks at a London church social. A few months later he volunteered to join the army. During his  few months training in England they were able to meet up several times but in October 1916 his unit was sent to the Western front. Over the next few months they corresponded by mail and their letters became less formal and more loving and clearly they were both desperate to meet each other again.

But it was never to be. Tommy was killed in August 1917.

Miss Brooks never married and later told family she would die ‘still loving and remembering Tommy’ and eventually passed away in her 80s.

Relatives have only just discovered the letters and the family has passed them on to the local library where, over the years, Miss Brooks was a regular visitor.

I suppose Courtney Cook would see this as very odd and unliberated. She posted a piece at Salon entitled “How to Leave a Soldier” describing how she made the decision to leave her military husband for a  “lithe, blue-eyed Marxist”  who had been an anti-war activist

You’d be surprised how easy it is to leave a soldier on deployment. You can do it with a letter. (He can’t argue with you. He doesn’t have a phone.) If you lay the groundwork early, saying to the soldier before he leaves, “This will be the end of us, we might as well admit it,” it’s that much easier. The letter won’t even come as a shock.

There will be no moving truck, no boxes, no house torn asunder. The soldier is peeing in a bucket as you pack. He doesn’t care who gets the couch.

I wonder what Miss Brooks would have thought about Courtney Cook? Of course one could always argue that if Tommy had survived the war the strains and stresses of married life might have taken their toll. But it was never to be and they both died with an idealised image of each other imprinted on their very souls – unless Miss Brooks had suddenly taken a fancy to a someone else by the summer of 1917 and written a “Dear John” to Tommy which he read just before he met his death in the trenches….

But somehow I don’t think Miss Brooks would have been that sort of woman…..

The Ivy League Professor charged with the Alabama shootings incident is not unfamiliar with firing guns according to the Boston Globe

The University of Alabama biology professor accused of opening fire and killing three colleagues at a faculty meeting Friday shot and killed her teenage brother more than two decades ago in Massachusetts, according to authorities

Another interesting little factoid…the local DA involved in the Massachusetts incident was Bill Delahunt, now in the US House of Representatives and a cousin of Robert Delahunt who was Andrew Sullivan’s lawyer when it was decided not to bring Sullivan to court on a drugs charge, much to the annoyance of the judge.

If you have a brush with the law then Massachusetts seems a great place to be…..for certain people. I wonder, however, if the same would apply if your name was Palin – or Bush…

Meanwhile, over in San Francisco, Sherlock Holmes is alive and well and posting from The Chronicle’s SFGate blog and he thinks he might have cracked the case  – it’s those pesky ignorant rednecks at southern universities who just hate anything intellectual….they could have provoked her with their country music and confederate flags…

But what’s clear to this blogger is there’s a weird “Southern” issue with a “Harvard-trained” professor. The Alabama media stuck that tag as if to imply it had something to do with her alleged shooting of the three faculty members.

A bulb just switched on at HuffPo, thanks to Joan Williams.

Williams is an out and out Obama supporter but she deserves a tip of the hat because, though not sharing Governor Palin’s politics she has considerable respect for her as a politician.

Addressing the Tea Party, Sarah Palin wrote three notes on her hand: “Energy, Taxes, Lift American Spirits.” Why? She already had notes in front of her on the podium. Surely she could remember three simple themes. Why write notes on her hand?
Here’s my take on why: she knew that they would be visible when she gave the speech. And she knew that she would be made fun of — as so stupid that she needs to write notes on her hand. And that’s one of her most effective tactics — to be made fun of. It’s an integral part of her strategy of standing in for hardworking, Middle Americans, derided by the condescending, know-it-all liberal elites.

I must confess that I am tempted to agree with the Williams view of this affair – the way she glanced at her hand in the Q&A session was perhaps a little too obvious? She possibly knew the media would take the bait – and they did, including the London Daily Telegraph’s ponderous hack Toby Harnden, the UK’s leading purveyor of Palin “airhead” graffiti (how I wish I had his job – paid a fat salary just to regurgitate WaPo and NYT talking points…)

Then the President’s Press Secretary, Robert Gibb got in on the act with his own feeble imitation which did nothing to undermine Palin but was in effect a public declaration of how much she is getting under Obama’s skin…

Thus the White House became a vehicle for Palin’s narrative of the snooty elites who think they’re better than average Americans.
Palin is a brilliant strategist. First, note that I just repeated Palin’s key talking points: Palin has even us fellow travelers at The Huffington Post repeating, “Energy, Taxes, Lift American Spirits.” Talk about earned media.

I know it’s painful but it’s worth entering Arianna’s dark and brooding mansion just to read the rest of it here….you won’t agree with everything but it is surprisingly honest….

h/t Susan W of Team Sarah