My Tea Party friends in the US have never held Mitt Romney in high regard. Until the autumn of last year (coincidentally when the Republican presidential primary campaign began) his public rhetoric against the Obama administration was strangely muted and he has always retained an aloof distance from the tea party.

His ascension to the probable GOP nomination was strangely lacking in public warmth from ordinary voting Republicans. But it was certainly well organised with legions of surrogates doing their very best to undermine potential rivals even before the 2008 presidential election was over.

Romney didn’t win the campaign with love, but he did win it with money – and the support of a seedy coalition of GOP “consultants/strategists” , RNC hacks and those Washington/New York “conservative” media pundits apprehensive of the tea party and the new media which was beginning to break the old news monopoly.

But when I heard that Romney was coming to Britain ready to build bridges I thought maybe the guy had a bit of steel in his backbone

Members of the former Massachusetts governor’s foreign policy advisory team claimed that as president, he would reverse Mr Obama’s priority of repairing strained overseas relationships while not spending so much time maintaining traditional alliances such as Britain and Israel. …….
……..The two advisers said Mr Romney would seek to reinstate the Churchill bust displayed in the Oval Office by George W. Bush but returned to British diplomats by Mr Obama when he took office in 2009. One said Mr Romney viewed the move as “symbolically important” while the other said it was “just for starters”, adding: “He is naturally more Atlanticist”.

Then I read this

But he told US television there were “disconcerting” signs about Britain’s readiness. “It’s hard to know just how well it will turn out,” he said. “There are a few things that were disconcerting: the stories about the private security firm not having enough people, supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging.”
Nonetheless, Mr Romney questioned the enthusiasm of the British public. “Do they come together and celebrate the Olympic moment?” he asked. “That’s something which we only find out once the Games actually begin.”

For crying out loud – if that’s his way of building a bridge I think I would rather deal with some fruitloop from Iran….at least you know the guy is a viper right from the start.

If he knew us better he would realise that it is in our very nature to moan and complain until the event actually starts. We did that with the royal wedding and the diamond jubilee. Indeed a lot of us were never that enamoured of hosting the Olympics anyway. But now the thing has arrived our enthusiasm has already started to show….witness the crowds in every village and town to greet the Olympic torch. Why didn’t Romney’s crew do some research on that?

…and maybe Romney (as well as Allahpundit at Hot Air) forgot about the 1996 Atlanta Olympics

If International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Juan Antonio Samaranch’s address to the closing ceremonies of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games is remembered at all, it is for his unwillingness to bestow Atlanta’s Games with the honor of “the greatest in Olympic history” – that coveted rhetorical flourish lauding the host city’s organizing efforts. Unbridled commercialism, poor and unreliable public transportation, a deadly terrorist attack on Centennial Olympic Park: such significant failures shaped Samaranch’s verdict that these Olympic Games were “most exceptional,” but not “the greatest.”

Romney’s gaffe about the London Olympics, bad mouthing them even before they start is in itself of little consequence in the great scheme of things. But it does tell us something about the man…. say what you like about Sarah Palin she knows the difference between being forthright and showing good manners. Maybe Mitt Romney is really Edison Carter….

Max Headroom was shown to have been created from the memories of Edison Carter. The character’s name came from the last thing Carter saw during a vehicular accident that put him into a coma: A bar with a sign warning of low clearance, marked “MAX. HEADROOM: 2.3 M”.

Mitt Headroom, anyone?

Joe Scarborough goes Sherlock Holmes Plus over Aurora shooting – he doesn’t need evidence because he obviously has X ray specs and inner vision…

“You don’t want to generalize,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said today before saying that James Holmes, the suspected Aurora, Colo., shooter, was “on the autism scale.”
“As soon as I hear about this shooting, I knew who it was. I knew it was a young, white male, probably from an affluent neighborhood, disconnected from society — it happens time and time again. Most of it has to do with mental health; you have these people that are somewhere, I believe, on the autism scale,” said Scarborough, whose son has Asperger’s syndrome. “I don’t know if that’s the case here, but it happens more often than not. People that can walk around in society, they can function on college campuses — they can even excel on college campuses — but are socially disconnected.

“As soon as I hear about this shooting, I knew who it was”

Of course Mr S would be quite familiar with uninformed speculation via inner vision..

On July 20, 2001, at 8:10 AM, the body of Lori Klausutis was discovered on the floor of the North Fort Walton Beach office of retiring Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough of Florida.
One might have expected an intensive investigation but the medical examiner is the referee in the investigation of suspicious deaths. He concluded the death is accidental, and the investigation stopped.
However, It seems unlikely that a 29 year old girl could fracture her skull from a fall in an office.

The Aurora shootings and the aftermath have been media headline fillers here in the UK for several days. Our hacks and pundits love this sort of story because it allows them to pontificate on Americans and guns and how any wingnut is able to stroll into a hardware store and kit himself out with enough firepower to recreate the Battle of the Somme if he is so minded.

This then leads in to the issue of gun control and how sensible folk like President Obama and his liberal/left cohorts in politics and media would just love to wean their fellow Americans off their guns and become an unarmed community like Britain….well not exactly unarmed because criminals are quite heavily armed but hey, they just shoot each other, don’t they?

But wait a minute…..” any wingnut”….hold on that…our media prefers the shooters to be white and middle class and slightly creepy because central casting has lots of guys to fit that role.

Of course if you are Brian Ross of NBC white also equals Tea Party. If you’re Joe Scarborough of MSNBC white = autistic loner. the sort of people who never go to Tina Brown’s parties or read the New Yorker or ski at Aspen.

What the Americans need, according to our media pundits, is much stricter laws on gun ownership and gun carrying – except, as Prof William Jacobson points out there are more people shot by guns in Chicago in one month than were shot in that Aurora cinema…..

…and Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the whole of the USA

But of course you will never learn much about the bloody gun culture in “gunfree” Chicago because there are very few spotty white middle class nerds poncing about the South and West sides of the city. This is black on black crime and usually drugs related so not only does it have little news value but merely mentioning those facts would be declared a racist hate crime – and that would never so….

…..and, eeeeermmm, practically the whole Obama machine hails from Chicago…

BTW…if you want to keep yourself informed about the matters that are concerning American conservatives don’t use UK blogs like Conservative HomeUSA or the Spectator Coffee House – they’ll just retread stuff from NYT and WaPo. Go to Prof Jacobson’s blog at Legal Insurrection – it’s Tea Party friendly , easy to follow and 100% suspicious of the great and the good …..

Governor Mitt Romney, who is likely to be the Republican nominee against President Obama in the forthcoming US elections this coming November will spend the last days of July attempting to burnish his foreign policy credentials with visits to Britain, Israel and Poland.

The aim will be to introduce himself onto a world stage where the other players, on the surface at least, appear not to have bought into the disappointment and disillusion felt by large swathes of the US electorate. The myth of the transformational figure peddled by the US media in 2008 which presented a shallow Chicago machine hack as a latter day Moses who would lead his country and the rest of the world into a global era of peace and honey is still the official party line of the chattering classes outside the USA – except in Poland where Obama is seen as Putin’s poodle and Israel whose government is very wary of repeating the role of the Czechs against Obama’s Chamberlain.

So Romney wants to remind these folk that, come January there might very well be a new face in the White House with a very different world view. A lot of his foreign policy advisors could well be George W Bush retreads with a far more cynical view about resetting buttons and the faces in Warsaw and Jerusalem will be far more comfortable with that.

One would like to say that David Cameron and his London colleagues would also be keeping their fingers crossed for a Romney victory since Obama has been rather disdainful America’s closest ally with his pandering to Russia and Argentina – but, unfortunately, Cameron, like the UK media in general, is still infatuated with Obama the myth. Indeed, during his visit to Washington last March the British Prime Minister was so grovellingly obsequious to the president that Romney surrogates let it be known that they felt an election year line had been crossed.

Romney will be in London for the opening of the Olympics, reviving memories of his own connections when he was drafted in to rescue the Utah 2002 winter Olympics from corruption and confusion. However he will also take the opportunity to press some influential flesh
At his first stop, in London, Romney plans meetings with British Prime Minister David Cameron, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, Foreign Secretary William Hague, and Ed Miliband, who leads the opposition Labour Party. He plans fundraisers, where attendees will likely include bankers and others from London’s financial sector.

For most of this year David Cameron has been particularly gaffe prone. Let’s hope he isn’t stupid enough not to realise that, with the polls still too close to call, he might well be talking to the next US President and a man who almost certainly will have more respect for the special relationship than Obama and his Chicago cronies….

But you never can tell with Cameron. For all his Tory rhetoric you always get the feeling the man is essentially a fully paid up member of the metro elite who still hungers for approval from North London dinner parties and and the UK branch of Obama’s media “palace guard” at the BBC…and, with Michelle Obama heading the US Olympic delegation he might find her beady eye a little discomforting….

Mark Serwotka, leader of PCS, the trade union of Britain’s civil servants, is organising a strike of immigration officials at airports and seaports during the Olympics to highlight the the left’s campaign against the UK government’s austerity measures (or “cuts” as the BBC constantly characterises them)

To be fair he did organise a ballot of his members to endorse his actions and just over 50% supported him…..democracy in action, you might say, until you discover that only 20% of the membership actually voted.

Serwotka is one of the recognised leaders of British trade unionism in the 21st century – a movement which is virtually moribund in the private sector but highly organised, widely spread and extremely militant amongst public sector workers. Moreover these union men and women are no longer horny handed toilers in factories, workshops, docks and mines…..they are almost entirely white collar and they toil at filing cabinets, computer screens and photocopiers.

They regularly seed the audience at BBC Question Time, invariably railing against “cuts” and demanding more money, sharing, with Serotka, the quaint idea that you get out of recession by increasing the size of the public sector because this will then generate “growth” and help those private sector workers who have either lost their jobs or had their pensions devalued……a bit like infesting your dog with more fleas in an attempt to improve it’s health.

Faced with this 1960s sub Marxist nonsense the Great British Public appears surprisingly supine – so let me throw some petrol onto the barbecue.

public service unions would eventually create a new and powerful branch of local government presiding over fiscal matters. He warned that these unions would result in the loss of control of local budgets at the city, county and state levels of govern-ment. To support the ongoing commitments to these employees, other services provided by city, county and state governments would be severely curtailed or taxes would have to be raised.

No, that didn’t come from some hardnosed right wing blusterer but from Frank Zeidler that rarity amongst US politicians, an openly declared Socialist who was Mayor of Milwaukee during the 1950s.

When public sector workers go on strike who are they confronting, who are they fighting? Not some cigar smoking fatcat in an oaklined boardroom – they are striking against you and me, comrade, because the money that goes into their bank accounts comes from that perennial milch cow, the taxpayer. So when they say the government should pay them more they really mean that you and I need to dig deeper into our pockets to keep them at their desks shuffling paper.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the next time some whining public sector worker began to parrot their bleeding heart sob story from the union cribsheet the person next to them got up and in no uncertain terms told them that as a taxpayer and therefore their employer he expected them to cut the crap and do the job the rest of us were paying her to do….

Well, I can dream, can’t I?

Well we now know, courtesy of the Church of England, that last summer’s UK riots were caused by “society” and the arsonists and looters were not really accountable for their actions. The Bishop of Bath & Wells, Peter Price, echoing the words of the celebrated psychoanalyst Dr Heinz Kiosk declared that “we are all guilty”

The tragedy of our times is that, once again, we have a large population of young people who are desperate to escape from the constrained lives to which they seem to be condemned. Where hope has been killed off and with no prospect of escape, is it surprising that their energies erupt in anti-social and violent actions?
‘In a consumer society, is it surprising that lusting after high-status goods is seen as a way to find meaning?’

If, therefore, crimes are really a cry for help and “society” and more specifically, Government, needs to step in and reverse the “cuts” by providing (and financing) help then a more recent crime demonstrates an even greater need.

Sex toys worth £11,000 have been stolen by burglars who raided a mail order company, police said.

Obviously this is not a burglary per se but merely the actions of “people who are desperate to escape from the constrained lives to which they seem to be condemned”…..in other words they had to steal the vibrators because they can’t get enough sex. I am sure the Bishop of Bath and Wells would agree that the government needs to get its act together and provide them with a lot more

So Michael Gove, Secretary of Stae for Education has appointed a school meals Czar

For crying out loud..

I had hoped that Gove was impervious to all this nonsense. When you consider the dire straits of our educational system, the lack of attainment, the absence of a proper learning culture, the total waste of literally billions of pounds for nil effect the last thing we need to concern ourselves with is school dinners.

School meals at every level of education have always been crap because it is mass produced cooking for a captive audience. Added to that the natural gravitational pull between junk food and adolescents and it is obvious that any attempt to get secondary students to pig out on poncy colour supplement trendy cuisine must be doomed to failure.

But we live in a world where self appointed messiahs are just so eager to poke their noses into our own affairs by hectoring us about our sinful behaviour and an infantile media, unable to reverse its own decline, jumps on any bandwagon to scare us into demanding something must be done – and the current panic about school meals becomes flavour of the month.

Let’s get things straight. Schools and teachers are not parent substitutes. They should not be used as freebie child minders. They cannot heal the halt, the sick or the psychologically unstable. Their job is to enable a common cultural inheritance to be passed to the next generation by providing children with the basic tools to understand and add to that inheritance.

Give them the tools and the money to do that effectively for once and just outsource school meals to MacDonalds and Domino’s Pizza – and put gaffer tape around the mouths of every celebrity chef and chattering class food critic…

David Lammy is one of those smooth uber urban and expensive Labour politicians who is deeply into caring for the less fortunate. Shame then that on a crowded bus where several elderly passengers had to stand he remained glued to a seat where you are asked to give it up for the elderly/infirm/pregnant etc. The trick is, of course, if you know you should give it up and can’t be bothered you always find something absolutely fascinating outside the window…..

Pic taken by a follower of Eye Spy MP where we can all post comments about observing our wonderful politicians while they think they are outside the spotlight…long may it prosper….

h/t Guido Fawkes

Alan Bennett’s “Lady in the Van” was described by the Sunday Times as “One of the saddest, funniest and most distinguished offerings for years”

“It is said that charity begins at home. For Alan Bennett”, said the UK Guardian of an earlier production “it began at the bottom of his drive with a custard yellow van inhabited by an irascible eccentric who refused to budge for 15 years.

There’s a further psychological thread to which teases out the extent to which Bennett’s obsession with Miss Shepherd was a displacement activity designed to assuage nagging guilt about his mother’s dementia.”

There are only a few tickets left for the Horley Archway Theatre production of this brilliant play which will run for two weeks starting Tuesday July 17th – get them now before they are all sold…

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices….

That was Adam Smith’s perceptive dismissal of any trading cartel be it an association of manufacturers, retailers or trade unions because every one of them was constantly seeking to fix a common price for goods or labour to avoid the dangers of individual members lowering their prices and thus offering a more competitive market to consumers. Smith placed demand at the centre of any economic activity

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.

Any attempt to fix or manipulate price outside the mechanism of the market for the short term “common good” would in the long term produce distortions (business closures, repossessions, unemployment, shorages etc) that would cause even greater social misery.

Including the price of credit over the last decade says Steve Baker MP in the UK Spectator

Central banks held down interest rates to stimulate economies with new credit, to push impending corrections out of sight. Those artificially low interest rates discouraged saving and encouraged borrowing but banks can extend credit into existence to cover the gap. With moral hazard endemic, banks loaned recklessly, using derivatives to book unrealised cash flows as profit up front. Some individuals went home unjustly rich and politicians won elections as the system over-extended itself.

Such shenanigans have been blamed on relying too much on market forces and so recently there have been cries for greater degrees of supervision and regulation.

Cobblers

If there had been a truly free market for credit the corrections would have been self generating according to the ebb and flow of demand. Closer supervision and regulation merely makes it easier for powerful elites to impose “adjustments” to suit their own particular political/cultural agendas.

The really important question today is not whether the Bank of England encouraged manipulation of credit markets by self-interested rogues but why we tolerate systematic credit market manipulation by the central banks as a matter of policy: nowhere else in the economic system would we accept explicit planning of the price and quantity of a vital commodity. If it worked, we’d all be communists.

In other words – beware of the man with a plan because it will inevitably lead to your own true interests being subsumed for “the greater good”…as perceived by the man with the plan.

If a man has a plan use another four letter word to tell him where to go…..