The UK spectator’s Coffee House blog sometimes comments about US politics from a supposedly right wing perspective but when I say that it generally references Brooks, Frum, Sullivan and Douthat probably guess the nature of it’s conservatism can easily be guessed.

Hence over the last two years the contributors have either ignored Sarah Palin or treated her with disdain. Similarly the well educated young chaps at the Coffee House completely ignored the town halls and other meetings that saw the birth of the Tea Party movement in 2009. Only in recent months, when GOP primary contests began to get under way did the movement become a topic of interest.

Now suddenly Palin appears at Coffee House as a person who could have a strong chance of getting the GOP nomination for 2012 – and regular readers must become puzzled for had not The Coffee House consistently dismissed her as an ignorant, uneducated irrelevance whose five minutes of fame fizzled out in November 2008 and totally evaporated a few months later when she resigned as Governor of Alaska?

Never fear for they have her measure. In a recent post resident superbrain Peter Hoskin gets us all the right stuff directly from the horse’s mouth – The New York Magazine (the natural home of all unbiased news and views on Palin) where John Heilemann wrote a strange article about Bloomberg running as a third party candidate, splitting the liberal/left vote with Obama and letting Palin win the White house.

Naturally this made Hoskin totally orgasmic because, like Heilemann and other pundits they are still hooked on meaningless favourability polls two years out of an election.

Two points to note. Heilemann is a liberal who thinks Obama has not been liberal enough. Secondly his claim to be a pundit whose words should be regarded with awe need to be taken with a pinch of salt because, in September, he poured scorn on Sharron Angle’s chances of beating Reid in Nevada, calling her a “nuthouse resident”…..mmmmm…checked the current polls yet, Mr H?

But then only someone like Hoskin at the Coffee house would assume that an article in The New York  Magazine would be a worthwhile gauge of anything Palin. But then I guess they would prefer something that reinforced their own prejudices rather than “Five Myths about Sarah Palin” by Matthew Continetti in The Washington Post ….I wonder why?

Jeremy Warner at the UK Telegraph has never been a particular fan of Paul Krugman  – “Nobel prizewinner and NYT columnist” (love how Warner makes that read as a put down…) but Obama’s pet economist has taken a step too far.

Not content with being the patron saint of the Pelosi/Reid/Obama deficit he has now turned his gimlet eye eastwards across the ocean and reeled back in horror at our coalition governments deficit reduction plan.

premature fiscal austerity will lead to a renewed economic slump. As always, those who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it

In fact Chancellor Osborne’s plan turned out to be a little less draconian than expected. Nevertheless over the next five years government departments have been told to reduce spending by 19% and a fair number of public sector jobs will be axed. The aim is fairly simple

To eliminate the structural deficit by balancing the cyclically-adjusted current budget over five years, by 2015-16. The coalition government have set a target of national debt falling as a proportion of national income by that same year – but will aim to do this one year earlier, by 2014-15.

As Warner points out Krugman is correct when he reminds us that in historical terms our UK public debt is not at a historical high. What he fails to reveal, however, is that those highs have almost always been at times of intense military struggle – the Napoleonic wars, the Boer war and, of course, the two world wars.

At the end of the nineteenth century Britain was still one of the world’s economic super powers. Germany and the USA were catching up fast but it is a mistake to assume that our economic decline was inevitable. However the burden of global war meant that victory was purchased at high cost

The big point missed by those who think elevated public debt doesn’t matter is that these periods of excessive debt utterly crippled the UK economy. Indeed, Britain’s decline through the twentieth century as an economic superpower directly correlates with increased indebtedness. Fighting wars is not good for economic health

Today’s massive public debt in both the UK and USA is not caused by excessive military spending. The current conflicts are marginal and, like Britain’s nineteenth century colonial wars, the costs recoverable once the issue is resolved. But if Iraq and Afghanistan were overnight to turn into models of peace and brotherly love the Krugman/Obama deficit would still be there, a baleful presence looming over American society – and for Warner that is indeed a chilling thought.

We cannot rely on demilitarisation to come to the rescue of the public finances, as it has in the past. Public debt is excessive for entirely different reasons – the excess in public spending is not on fighting wars but on treating ourselves – and unless America does something about it soon, the US will decline economically and geo-politically over the next fifty years as surely as Britain did in the last century.

Cameron, Osborne and even their Liberal Democrat coalition partners have grasped this cold hard fact and have bitten on the bullet. So indeed has Merkel and even Sarkozy.

Which leaves Krugman and his deficit denying pupils in Washington dancing America in the other direction looking for rainbows and unicorns.  But nothing will be found except the city in the valley of darkness and the gentle but inevitable disintegration of a once great nation.

And the grandchildren will be paying the price….

• Advice for UK Coalition on helping the poor – find out what Obama’s doing – then do the opposite…
• Maggie hopefully recovering…
• Meet the Deficit Denying Dinosaurs..
• BBC boss says left wing bias OK – but be discreet when you tweet..
• Ken Livingstone and the Islamic Republic in London’s East End…
• UK Teachers Union trying to undermine school reforms using intimidation by stealth..
• Obscene? £200,000 per week for doing this …
• Everyone wants an Essex girl….
• and FINALLY……UK politician’s wife and mistress argue over pussy…

Glancing through Sheya’s recent C4P open thread I clicked on his link to Dan Evon’s interview with Mark Burnett, Executive Producer of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” and one of the biggest names in TV in the US and UK . By the very nature of the project Burnett and his crew became very close to the governor and her family and Evon was interested to get a take on his experience.

Burnett was keen to work with Sarah Palin from the moment she burst onto the national political scene in August 2008 and, interestingly enough, he was just one of hundreds who had similar ambitions even after the election when she became, to so many “experts” from the left and the right, an irrelevancy who would soon melt back into the arctic tundra. Hard nosed media operatives like Burnett obviously had a better grasp of her impact on America than the Frums and Parkers chattering away at their Beltway cocktail parties.

It’s a short chat rather than a full length interview but out of it come some interesting snapshots of life with the Palins so it’s worth a read. But two quotes particularly struck home.

On Todd Palin

Todd is like Captain America. This guy, this guy is super tough. He can actually do it all.

On Sarah Palin

And Sarah, you know, she makes comments because she’s Sarah. As you saw in that first clip, she’s just Sarah

She’s just Sarah.

In that short sentence Burnett gets right to the heart of the Palin mystery – something that still puzzles the sophisticates at Tina Brown’s soirees. Palin’s appeal is as much chemistry as politics and it is not surprising that Burnett, of all people, should get it because he also is a bit of an outsider. He is no limp wristed, arty farty pseud out of an expensive private school and ivy league frat house going all radical chic with the boyz from the ‘hood. He is the real deal.

Burnett is a Brit from London’s East End whose parents moved to Dagenham to work in the Ford factory. When he was seventeen he joined the British army and then spent four years in the Parachute Regiment. The Paras are one of the UKs toughest military outfits and Burnett rose to be a section commander serving at the sharp end in Northern Ireland and the Falklands. In the early eighties he left the army and flew to America hoping to get some freelance military work. Instead he worked as a nanny (!), sold insurance, peddled T shirts and did credit card marketing, accumulating a fair amount of money on the way.

One day in 1991 he read about a French survival competition, entered it with some friends and, realising the potential ,pitched it to TV companies. The result – “Survivor”, one of the most successful franchises on television and just the first of many other popular programmes.

So when Burnett calls Todd Palin “Captain America” that is praise indeed. Burnett is the sort of man who could survive in the wilderness on a diet of nails and chunks of concrete so I would guess he slotted quite neatly into the Palin household.

Mark Burnett and the Palins – somewhere in a bar on Mount Olympus Jack London, John Buchan and Mark Twain are looking down and appreciating the moment over their glasses of heavenly whisky.

And Sarah? She’s just being…..Sarah….

Further to my post yesterday about the rather odd political perambulations of the UK Telegraph, owned by the  Barclay Brothers, additional evidence of loosening screws at this ostensibly right wing newspaper can be found in the decision to provide a regular platform for Lindy West.
West is, apparently, the Film Editor at The Stranger described by the chaps at the Telegraph as “Seattle’s alternative newsweekly” – hands up those who are immediately thinking pretentious, self important, poseur, rich parents etc etc….

Want a flavour of The Stranger? Two articles will provide the encapsulated essence of it’s core values…..Stop The GOP and F### The South….job done, I fancy….
Add into the mix Ms West and there you have the ultimate Kos cocktail guaranteed to raise smiles at Styrofoam columns everywhere for she has planted her cultural flag squarely in the “conservatives are racist” camp by eviscerating the film “The Stoning of Soraya M”

The film, based on a best selling book written by Freidoune Sahebjam, a French-Iranian journalist , tells the story of a Muslim woman, living in an nameless Arab country whose husband concocts a tale of adultery which leads to her being stoned to death by a mob of villagers encouraged by the local mullah.

For one reviewer the film was beautifully constructed

There’s a lovely elegance to the sparse interiors of these pale-stone houses, painted in glorious shades of turquoise and mustard yellow, which somehow makes the subject matter even more ghastly. Sunflowers grow in the meadows; flocks of birds rise above the nightmare below

Not so for Lindy West

Now, I’m not sure if you know what it looks like when someone is stoned to death, but this movie will inform you: First they tie your hands behind your back. Then they bury you in the ground up to your waist. Then everyone you know (your dad, your kids, your husband, the mayor) throws rocks at your head until you are dead. The stoning scene is long, detailed, bloody, and unforgiving, recalling nothing so directly as The Passion of the Christ. And it’d be no surprise if the same Christian extremists who evangelised Passion attach to this one just as fiercely: it demonises an entire religious group while purporting a message of equality. Gross

So you see, folks it’s all those Christian extremists (clinging to their guns and religion) who are the real villains in this piece by daring..DARING…to use facts to criticise the cultural practice to be found in certain areas of the Muslim world. Stoning is nasty, wails Ms West but Christian extremists alluding to it are even nastier.

Would she say the same thing about “The Crucible” by the left’s favourite writer Arthur Miller where 17th century American Protestants hang (and in one case stone to death) fellow townspeople in a crusade against witchcraft? I wonder….

Why has is the Telegraph paying her thousands of dollars to pump out her meanderings? Who knows – but at least if you look at the comments on her post Telegraph readers are not impressed…indeed the prickly Lindy appears to be one of those pontificating lefties who love to dish it out but who are far less keen to ride the punches when they are thrown back at her.

“Oh, Telegraph commenters. You are like aliens to me.” she tweeted as she banked her five figure cheque from the Telegraph…

On the very day the liberal/left UK Guardian, to it’s credit, gave a platform to US right wing and pro Tea Party and pro Palin media star Tammy Bruce the so called conservative UK Telegraph gave the nod to their US based hack Alex Spillius to sneer at Palin for her Tweet mistake which she corrected ten minutes later. He then used this as a hook to question her suitability for office and linked this to so-called “gaffes” by Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell. The implication was that the two Tea Party endorsed GOP candidates, dubbed “Mama Grizzlies” by Palin, were just too dense for higher politics and such mistakes would not be made by the Republican “reliables” favoured by the Beltway strategists, consultants and lobbyists  who are messing their pants at the prospect of a new wave of deficit reducing, pork busting small government radicals ready and eager to clean up Washington.

Notice that the eagle eyed Spillius just missed out an an even bigger Palin gaffe that sent scores of liberal/left US tweeters howling with derision – the ‘Cudah’s cry to party like 1773 at a Tea Party/Angle rally in Nevada. They scoffed, Spillius-like, at her “ignorance” assuming she had meant to say 1776 (the year of the US Declaration of Independence)…what the missed, however, was that she was referencing, at a Tea Party rally, the year of the Boston Tea Party….1773.

The counter attack was withering – the best takedown was at the Perfunction Blog where lots of kind people noticed that the leading left wing blogger, Markos Moulitsas, founder of The Daily Kos had led and orchestrated the anti Palin sneers. Twitter has since been swamped by #KosHistoryQuiz where helpful hints were suggested to Markos as guidelines for his understanding of US history.

But nothing of this from Spillius.

It appears that the powers that be at the Telegraph look more towards David Brooks than Sarah Palin for their definition of “the Right Stuff” and Spillius is dancing to their tune. If so then then maybe of of the comments following the piece has possibly hit the nail on the head…

Question is more is Alex Spillius ready for prime time election reporting than are the prime time grizzlies ready for office.

C’mon, Alex! I usually give you a break but this oh-so-studied “bad cop’ routine is getting old. You no longer fool anybody. Well, at least you no longer fool me.

As the story of the rescue of the Chilean Miners unfolded I realised that behind my hope that it would be successfully resolved lay an ever deepening dread – that the BBC would somehow find a convoluted way of placing the blame on Augusto Pinochet, one of the key figures in the BBCs pantheon of evil.

Watching Friday’s Newsnight my fears were vindicated when a breathless Wark interviewed Ariel Dorfman, an American/Chilean writer who proceeded to wax lyrical on the darkness of the mine being symbolic of the dark days of the Pinochet regime and the return to the surface as Chile coming to terms with its political past. Naturally there were clips of the Presidential palace being attacked by Pinochet’s soldiers during the coup against the extreme left wing and KGB funded President Allende in 1973 – though, of course, no mention of the protests and strikes against Allende’s policies during 1973 or the Chilean Supreme Court’s declaration of illegality of many actions of Allende’s government and it’s paramilitary formations. No mention either of the fact that Dorfman was an adviser to Allende.

Although the effusive Matt Frei and sundry other BBC hacks filled the airwaves for three days with a veritable Chile Fest two important pieces of information were either underplayed or scarcely mentioned…….the Christian/Catholic piety of the miners and their families and the fact that President Pinera, who impressed all with his handling of the whole crisis and his conduct during the rescue, was the first elected Conservative Chilean president for over fifty years….

As Private Eye would say…shome mishtake here surely….

Footnote: No mention either of Dorfman’s role in the Duke University rape scandal of 2006

Dorfman is one of the group of 88 professors who, in the wake of the Lacrosse players scandal, signed a controversial letter thanking protesters for “making a collective noise” on “what happened to this young woman” – assumed to be rapeThe letter, which was later published as a full-page ad in local newspapers and reprinted across the country, has been widely criticized as a prejudgment; later it was determined that no sexual assault had occurred. The charges against the players were eventually dismissed and the District Attorney who prosecuted the case, Michael Nifong, was disbarred and jailed.

cross posted at Biassed BBC

Andrew Marr of the BBC thinks bloggers are lowlife knownothings

“A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people,” he told the Cheltenham Literary Festival. “OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk”.

“But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.

Andrew Marr, of course , is paid a substantial six figure salary that comes directly out of the wallets and purses of the citizen journalists he despises since the BBC is financed out of a poll tax.  He is a great champion of the freedom of the press except when it comes to his own affairs….

Forbes Magazine has just published its list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. They claimed that the list was based

less on traditional titles and roles and more on creative influence and entrepreneurship

mmmmm……so they put Michelle Obama at #1? That doesn’t quite fit into the 21st century narrative, does it? The list is packed with female CEO’s, Judges, Government officials etc (though sadly only one woman, Angela Merkel, who actually runs a country) so, for good or ill, they do wield power in terms of management, authority and the impact of their decisions. But, one has to ask oneself, would Michelle be on top of that list if she had not caught young Mr Obama’s eye and allowed herself to be led to the altar?

There are also quite a few media figures – Oprah (3), Ellen DeGeneres (10) and – pass the sick bucket, Alice – Kate Couric (22) on the list which is rather strange because we are supposed to be talking about The World here and, believe me, here in the UK only Oprah has any name recognition so, in that respect, the list seems a little Americocentric.

I suppose that “creative influence” leads to the inclusion of Lady Gaga (7) and Beyonce (9) – though surely Lady G could be described as a brilliant entrepreneur on the basis of having created a business empire out of minimal talent and infinite self advertisement.

But the atmosphere amongst all those bright scribblers in the Forbes editorial suite must have been funereal when they realised that the ‘Cudah had to be slotted in to the top twenty at #16. Nevertheless, apart from a couple of obligatory mini snarks the blurb about her was reasonably balanced….

Unofficial hostess of the Tea Party, Palin has brilliantly exploited traditional as well as social media to fan the flames of discontent–and forced the GOP establishment to embrace the insurgency. As a political commentator on Fox (with a $1 million-a-year, multi-year contract) and deft user of Twitter (260,000 followers) and Facebook (2 million-plus fans), she has largely bypassed traditional media to blast the press and the president

In terms of name recognition across the world, of course, Sarah Palin should be much nearer the top of that list because, outside the chattering classes of most nations, more people would have heard of her than, say,Nancy Pelosi (11) and others in the fifteen names above her. What’s more, should they suddenly be pitched out of their jobs, very few of the top twenty would be wielding much power at all.

So the key factor to bear in mind is that all the other nineteen in the top twenty are there because of their positions – First Lady, CEO, TV host, Performer etc. Palin is the only one in the top of the list who is there because of herself. She has no official post, no gargantuan PR team, no political machine, no influential family or billionaire eminence grise behind her – she is just Sarah Palin.

What she does have, however, is the loyalty of many ordinary American people, not just because of her political views, though they are important, but, like Margaret Thatcher in the UK in the 1980s, her character and spirit and integrity.

Sarah Palin – one of the most powerful women in the world…

Not bad for a has-been……

cross posted from Conservatives4Palin

 Just read this Hot Air post by Allahpundit on Nevada…

Am I the only one to notice that many other US bloggers on the right will use either contacts or inside information in their posts but AP, though a brilliant wordsmith, often appears to tell us nothing that we couldn’t find out from reading stuff ourselves. RSM would jump into his Kia (pre deer attack) and drive to Nevada and hang out with various Runyonesque characters, Ed would interview them, Ace would be fed tips from a whole swathe of informants and Dan would just go Sherlock Holmes, processing data like a piranha then planting down his flag saying “here I stand”.

I live in the UK – was last in Nevada for a few days 10 years ago – yet I get the feeling that after I had googled Angle/Reid I could have written this post though my prose would have been far clumsier.

Exit question – is AP just a one man News Aggregator who weaves his words with style and grace but who appears not to use too much shoe leather to find out what is happening behind the scenes?  I think we should be told…