The Weathermen issue (and Barack Obama’s links to Bill Ayers) have made it to the front page of the BBC website: Sarah Palin has accused presidential candidate Barack Obama of "palling around" with terrorists – referring to his acquaintance with a former member of the Weather Underground. So who were […]
Welcome Britblog Roundup 189 Visitors Here is a summary of the European Parliament’s latest pronouncement on the media (including bloggers). You’ll recall the original pernicious idea to ‘validate’ bloggers. The full text of the ghastly resolution – 4352 words long – is here. It is an exemplary Liberal Fascist document. […]
Anders Aslund is a direct, reasonable and perceptive analyst of Russia’s economy. He lays it on the line here: Russia’s isolating itself politically and you see this, this extraordinary crudeness [with which] Putin and [Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov talk to everybody. And that of course means that people are less inclined […]
Is Zimbabwe’s political power-sharing agreement good or bad for Zimbabwe? If anything is deemed to be better than total collapse, it might be seen as good (for the time being, until it isn’t). But it sets a wretched precedent. It has all the moral stature of a deal between a […]
A good piece about Stalinist persecution of a fine scientist whose views were ideologically inconvenient. And the long-term disaster this brought to Russia.
I previously linked to Christopher Hitchens and Michael Totten analysing why the Kosovo case is quite different from the cases of either S Ossetia or Abkhazia, rendering spurious/dishonest Russia’s recognition of the latter two as new states. Here for good measure is former US Ambassador to Zagreb and Belgrade, my friend Bill […]
Former Weatherman Bill Ayers explains himself – in a (not very) comic strip: Way to go cool 1960s’ Radical Left politics ("I don’t think violent resistance is necessarily the answer…") albeit a bit gaunt now. Need to work on the grammar of that final sentence, Bill. But he does manage […]
Brian Barder describes a failed attempt to pull together a letter to The Times from a group of British ex-Excellencies about ‘the profoundly mistaken policies of the British and American governments’ towards Russia/Georgia: … some of those who had occupied key positions in the area during their diplomatic careers, and […]
If you want to read online the FT’s distinguished Lex column, you have to pay for it. But at least Lex shares with us for free a nifty graph on the rouble’s fortunes up to and following the Kremlin’s Georgia intervention: Russia’s 1998 financial crisis, after which one foreign banker observed he […]
This morning on the radio I stumbled upon veteran UK broadcaster Katherine Whitehorn’s impossibly grand voice condescendingly calling into question the value of markets. Here, if you can face it, is the full text of her Point of View. Off she goes: Political correctness has long been condemned, often unfairly, for the […]
