Concerned about political violence in the USA?  No problem –  the UK Guardian has it sorted. The   Fort Hood shootings, the Times Square bomber, the Pentagon shooter, Amy Bishop, the Beltway snipers were all the work of male, white, right wing Christian fundamentalists inflamed by the same sort of reckless rhetoric that swept America before the November midterms

The US already had a distinctive history of political violence in the modern era. The assassinations of the 1960s, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 and a series of attacks on abortion clinics have all been evidence of the readiness of a small but significant group of mainly male, mainly white, mainly rightwing, mainly religious conservative Americans to use lawless, lethal violence against real or imagined examples of political movements or institutions by which they deem themselves threatened. Now Congresswoman Giffords and the score of people who were shot with her in Tucson are their latest victims, gunned down in the 21st-century wild west.

Fortunately, says the Guardian there still are some sensible, level headed non political fellows around to lead us back to common decency

It is hard to disagree with Sheriff Clarence Dupnik in Tucson, who lamented after the shooting that “the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous”.

Ignore wingnuts like William A. Jacobson, Associate Clinical Professor, Cornell Law School who try to suggest the Guardian is indulging in reckless rhetoric itself – it’s a left/liberal newspaper therefore, by definition, it is never wrong and never distorts the truth.

Eric Holder – your time has come….

Personally, I’d be more reassured by a sheriff who concentrated on facts rather than over-heated, sweeping generalisations.

Thus Toby Harnden, of the UK Daily Telegraph demonstrates the art of the cold, disdainful put down that does more to cut the pompous self importance of blowhard Sheriff Dupnik down to size than the acres of of angry denunciations across the right blogosphere. It certainly needed to be done because Dupnik’s fevered speculation about the right being behind the attack on Congresswoman Giffords did more to raise the temperature of this topic outside the USA than anything else.

We have a fairly low opinion of our own British politicians and journalists and we assume that their US counterparts are bottom feeders of the same ilk. But when Dupnik appeared on our screens with his infamous vitriol statement people sat up and took notice because they assumed that your local sheriff would be, like our own chief constables, an unelected career police officer with no public political affiliation. Although such officers clearly have their own political views any outward manifestation of party political bias would mean instant dismissal from the supervising police authority. Initially our own media treated Dupnik as such a official, assuming that he was speaking from a position of strict political neutrality

Harnden took great pains to puncture this particular balloon

Even the local sheriff (a Democrat) has been getting in on the act.

The headline for Harnden’s piece says it all

The unseemly rush to blame Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and Republicans for murder in Arizona

He has obviously been trawling the right blogosphere (unusually for a UK hack) and picked up on the hypocrisy of the serpentine Markos Moulitsas who tweeted vicious hate rants about Sarah Palin and the Tea Party while at the same time quietly removing an attack piece against Giffords on his own site.

As he points out if you did happen to be a foaming at the mouth redneck militiaman constantly looking out for black helicopters and searching to vent your spleen on a politician who embodied everything you hated then the lady outside the Tucson supermarket would have been very low on your list.

Giffords herself doesn’t quite fit the likely victim of an enraged Right-winger. She is a Blue Dog Democrat, a deficit hawk and voted to lift the ban on guns in DC and voted against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. On Thursday, she took part in the reading of the Constitution in the House, reading aloud the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion, speech and peaceful assembly.
She’s certainly not the “progressive” that Hanoi Jane tweeted about and provoked as much anger on the Left as on the Right for her political stances. Just the other day, a blogger at DailyKos said that Giffords was “dead to me” for failing to back Pelosi.

I have not always seen eye to eye with Toby Harnden over Governor Palin in some of my C4P posts and no doubt in the future will have cause to criticise him once more but he deserves much respect for his calm and well reasoned reporting of this terrible tragedy.

This is a time for sombre reflection and a calming (rather than an escalation) of rhetoric. Sadly, however, some see it as another opportunity to score political points and vilify those they hate.

Read the rest of his piece here – and then look at his post on Christina Green’s father. This man whose beloved little girl was gunned down in the Giffords attack shows up the Krugmans and Dupniks for the opportunistic political vultures they really are.

Thank you, Mr Harnden, for introducing an element of reason and common sense into this fevered debate.

Michael Gove, the Tory Education Secretary in the coalition government, was a staunch Labour Party activist and trade unionist in his younger days partly because of his upbringing and a belief that working class children were being betrayed by the educational system.

He is now a leading conservative intellectual but still feels angry about the failure of our state schools to provide working class students with a decent education and the fact that children of wealthier parents who can afford private schools get a head start in life. But rather than the old leftist panacea of outlawing private schools and increasing taxes to allow local councils to spend more on “education” (including teachers’ pay) Gove came to the conclusion that the dead hand of the state education establishment (local education authorities (LEAs),teacher unions, education academics etc) was not keen on allowing any notion of competition to upset their cosy monopoly.

So one of his first decisions within days of entering office was to allow a wide variety of groups – charities, universities, businesses, educational groups, teachers or groups of parents – to submit proposals for setting up Free Schools, funded by the state but outside the existing LEA structure and, crucially, not subject to the cumbersome salary agreements negotiated through teacher unions.

Naturally the education establishment (and their chattering class allies at the BBC and The Guardian) are dead set against it – and their influence should not be under estimated. They did their best to undermine Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to reform them during the 80s mainly because she tried to work within the system and in 1997 they crowed in triumph when the new Labour Government put the education establishment back in the saddle. But now  they sense a whiff of danger because Gove is trying to set up an alternative system to compete with them – so the leading teachers union, the NUT, is acting as the spearhead of the status quo by pulling out all the stops to try and push the Free School bus off the road.

One of the classic ploys for any interest group is, of course, the “survey” which always (surprise, surprise) conveniently appears to buttress their own case.

A NUT-commissioned YouGov survey of 1,021 parents in the approved locations found 31% were against setting one up in their area, while 26% were in favour and 29% were neither in favour nor against.

In actual fact, given margins of error, those figures do not seem to indicate strong feelings either way but, of course, it’s the headline not the numbers that stick in the mind and Christine Blower, General Secretary of the NUT gave it both barrels

This survey clearly shows that parents are not clamouring to set up free schools, have no issue with schools being accountable to the community through democratically elected local authorities and absolutely reject the premise of their children’s education being handed over to private companies.
“Free schools are not wanted or needed. They are divisive and unaccountable. The teaching profession and parents know this. It is time the Government stopped playing with the educational future of this country based on nothing more than the fact they can.”

Unfortunately for Ms Blower and her cohorts another set of figures have come out which totally undermines the claim that change is not needed

The UK has more young people without work or education than even Romania and Bulgaria.
Only four of the 27 European Union nations have more poorly educated and unskilled young people.
In just five years, 12 EU countries have overhauled Britain and now have fewer youngsters adrift without qualifications or hope.
Among them are France, Germany, Belgium, Holland and Ireland.
Even the likes of Romania and Bulgaria have now overtaken Britain in terms of their proportion of young men and women with decent education and job chances, the EU research showed.

One reader summed up this disaster perfectly

We should be very angry with what the left dominated teaching establishment has done to our children. Through their dogma and child-centred policies they have managed to produce a semi-literate generation that will fail the next. I could weep.

No further comment needed…

Two Tory faces in this government.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley recently crowed “no more nanny state” by claiming that henceforward he would end Labour’s penchant for lecturing and hectoring us about lifestyles. Local councils and businesses would no longer be coerced into creating and financing battalions of jobsworths whose sole purpose was to preach to us about how stupid we were while stacking up mouth watering wads of cash from our pockets via our taxes.

Good news?

Fat chance….

Instead of being lectured we are going to be “nudged” (aka bribed) by vouchers and goodies partly funded by the food and transport industries. Children will be nudged into walking to school. Shoppers will be nudged into buying healthy foods – and (no surprise here) it’s all based on a book written by two US academics…maybe he was too busy reading the book to remind his officials to be prepared for outbreaks of flu this winter.

Groan….

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles (a grand moniker for the man in charge of local government) says he is abolishing rules set up by the Blair regime forcing councils to charge high parking fees and restrict parking places in new developments all in the name of getting people to abandon their cars for public transport (something, of course, that no politician ever does, except for a PR photo op)

He is putting those decisions fairly and squarely back into the hands of local authorities and local councillors who will no longer be able to blame Whitehall when confronted by angry motorists and town centre retailers.

Moreover he is being aided and abetted by Transport Secretary Philip Hammond who says – brace yourself BBC Guardianistas  – “Cars are a lifeline for many people”

Lansley’s soft nannying “Nudge” programme will inevitably employ scores of busybodies to implement, organise and supervise. Pickles, by abolishing those parking rules will,hopefully, need fewer civil servants in his department.

Exit question – who is the real conservative?

BTW – if you like the sound of Eric Pickles then read this and you might like him even more. Indeed there are some people who are already wondering that if David Cameron ever got involved with a bus……

Naturally the BBC, like many other news organisations, likes to use the end of the year to make predict possible story lines for the forthcoming year. Seeing that our old friend Allahpundit used the recent CNN poll to rehash his regular monthly “Palin on way out” traffic bait (picked up by Telegraph hack Toby Harnden….surprise,surprise) and that neither of them deemed it worthy to notice the questionable nature of the conclusions drawn (from 1000 adults rather than registered voters..) I thought it might be interesting to look at some BBC crystal gazing for 2011.

Now the left leaning Beeb has never been a particular friend of Gov Palin but it has been less sniffy than the right wing Telegraph and Mail. So it was quite enlightening to see that of the five BBC correspondents who offered their predictions three of them, Stephen Sackur, Mark Mardell and Paul Mason mentioned her name as if she were a canny politician who has the potential to be considered a serious contender for the White House.

See what they said here – it’s not earth shattering but there is almost an element of respect.

Could it be that they didn’t get the memo from Politico?

Difficult to remember now that only a few months ago..

We were doing this

on a French beach

enjoying the sun..
E

with my wife

…..son…

…near a sand dune…

…where our grandson…

….did what boys do…

on a dune..

.

..while the kite flyer was up above…

Katherine Jenkins was due to fly out to entertain British troops in Afghanistan over Christmas alongside James Blunt (a former military man himself) but the flight was cancelled due to snow. However she gave an impromptu performance to some soldiers on the plane before they had to disembark.

Beautiful lady, beautiful voice and probably one of the best loved of carols…..

Rest easy all you old folk – one of the great icons of your youth is now saved for eternity or the last trump (whichever comes first)….the hallowed black and white tarmac on Abbey Road, London NW8, which graced the cover of the Beatles 1969 “Abbey Road” album, is safe.

John Penrose, the tourism minister, will announce today that the Government is to publish an order granting the crossing Grade II-listed status on the advice of English Heritage. A Grade II listing, the most common protected status, means that a building or monument is recognised as nationally important and of special interest.

So now it cannot be moved or transformed into another type of pedestrian crossing. Generations of Beatles fans can imitate their heroes forever – and all they have to do is cross a road
 

Sweet – and so nice for the old people to know that not all their 60s memories will crumble into dust.  Indeed, for the hardcore Beatlemaniac, they can watch the Abbey Road crossing in real time – a great way to keep grandad occupied and out of the way.

One more fascinating factoid – tell granny and grandad that “Abbey Road” is as far away from 2010 as “If I Had A Talking Picture of You” by Johnny Hamp’s Kentuckey Serenaders, one of the biggest hits of 1929, was from the Beatles…

But you didn’t hear much about the Kentuckey Serenaders in 1969…. 

One of the new wave of British entrepreneurs unleashed by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s Sir Martin Sorrell has built up WPP into the world’s biggest advertising company and now employs 140,000 people across the globe, so, unlike many politicians – and academics  – when he talks about business it is worthwhile listening to what he has to say. However I don’t think the Obama administration (which has very little collective business experience) will be particularly enamoured with his words

With 2011 coming into focus, “for the first time in a long time you can feel bullish about the UK in the medium-term”, Sir Martin believes. “What the UK is doing is the envy of people in Washington.”

He’s talking about David Cameron and his coalition government’s attack on the massive deficit inherited from Labour which involves quite drastic public spending cuts.

“The Coalition’s economic policy has a lot going for it,” Sir Martin said. “They’ve done the tough stuff and they’re dealing with the deficit.”

Not that it will have an easy ride. The recent angry and sometimes violent demonstrations against the increase in university tuition fees are merely the forerunner of a series of protests, not only in the streets but from the left leaning BBC and a whole swathe of academics. Cameron, however, has, at present, the advantage that, in general, the ordinary voting public appear to support the need for a period of fiscal prudence. Once the cuts start to hit home, however, he needs to be able to convince the electorate that it is a shared enterprise and therefore everyone, including the political class, needs to feel the pain – so he has to lead from the front in a mode that echoes Churchill in 1940.

And he needs to have nerves of steel to face down those of his colleagues who will flinch under fire – surprisingly they might well be from his own party rather than his Liberal Democrat coalition partners.

But at least Cameron has raised his banner and set his troopers on the march. America, led at the moment by a posse of seedy, economically illiterate hacks is rudderless in a dark and threatening world. The next President would do well to pencil in an early meeting with David Cameron not so much get some tips on what worked and what didn’t – though that in itself could be useful – but to gain the reassurance from knowing that someone else has been in the trenches….

…..and, of course, to restore a certain bust of Sir Winston Churchill back to its place in the White House.

When Hugo Chavez assumes plenary powers in Venezuela where are the cries of outrage from leftist heroes Michael Moore, Ken Livingstone, John Pilger and Sean Penn when you need them?

Apart from my friend Cubachi and Fausta Wertz  the only chorus of disapproval being heard around the mean streets of the media both here and in the US comes from a crowd of crickets – I wonder why?

Venezuelan lawmakers granted President Hugo Chavez broad powers Friday to enact laws by decree, undermining the clout of a new congress that takes office next month with a bigger opposition bloc.

But it was this that gave me a vague feeling of déjà vu

Chavez has argued he needs decree powers to fast-track funds to help the victims of recent floods and landslides, and also to hasten Venezuela’s transition to a socialist state.

Where had I heard that before? And why did the Chavez regime’s Social Responsibility Law also start bells ringing in my head?

Another measure under discussion Friday was the revised “Social Responsibility Law,” which would impose broadcast-type regulations on the Internet and ban online messages “that could incite or promote hatred,” create “anxiety” in the population or “disrespect public authorities.”

Then it struck me….

Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich = Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation

 Adolf Hitler 1933

In February 1933, a few weeks after being appointed Chancellor of Germany, the NSDAP leader, Adolf Hitler, promulgated the Reichstag Fire Decree (Reichstagsbrandverordnung) as a response to the recent arson attack on the Reichstag building in Berlin. Simply stated it suspended all civil liberties in German. The actual text was brutally brief and wide ranging.

Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice. It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom [habeas corpus], freedom of opinion, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Warrants for House searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed

Hitler claimed that the fire was merely the opening salvo of a Communist insurrection and and he needed these special powers to cope with the threat.

One month later, after a general election which gave NSDAP and it’s allies a slim majority in the Riechstag, Hitler introduced the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz) which allowed his government to introduce laws without the permission of the German parliament. Between them these pieces of legislation provided a legal (if not moral) basis for the exercise of totalitarian power. To all intents and purposes Germany, within four weeks, had become a legal dictatorship.

It is interesting to observe that both decrees were ostensibly temporary in their nature yet were never rescinded.

So Chavez is going Hitler.

No doubt the United Nations, Hamas, Ahmadinejad and Sean Penn will soon be on the case……chirp chirp chirp…