Where's The Beef?

Latest BBC Scandal

2009-03-24T12:15:00.000-07:00

Gentlemen,

I've long been a user of your services and up until now have always regarded you an excellent supplier of quality programming. I have every faith therefore that you will do what you can to rectify this problem.

Children cannot act and they should not be allowed on television. All the parts of characters who are children should be played by women or animals. Circus animals.

To resolve the problem I require you to reshoot the children’s drama The Story of Tracy Beaker with an appropriate cast, whilst reserving my right to claim against you.

I look forward to hearing from you and to a resolution of this problem. I will wait for 24 hours before arranging for this matter to be corrected by a third party at your cost.

Yours faithfully,

Angus Porterhouse

Voting like a child: Did the youth turn out and vote Obama?

2008-11-07T16:07:00.000-08:00

The Americans were voting Tuesday. But which Americans? Who was turning out? All eyes were on young voters in swing states.

There is no doubt that among the young there was, indeed is, an energy and excitement – and, I daresay, an optimism – about this election that other’s just haven’t produced.

Young people were asking each other, “Did you vote yet?” It was the only story in the media that night, but it was also the only story in the coffee houses and the campuses, it was the word on the street and the talk of Twitter. Obamuccinos were outselling McCain Mochas! ‘Happy Obama Day’ and ‘Gobama!’ were the memes of the moment.

The seeds planted in 2000 were coming home to roost: there has been a steady increase in youth turn-out since the high-profile controversy of that election. People don’t want to feel like their uncast vote could have changed an election. But this election’s youth turnout was to show a jump to higher than it’s ever been.

The assumption was always that this would fit nicely with the Obama energy and optimism and reward the attention to the young paid by his campaign. What's easy to forget now is that this was largely guesswork. Polls are conducted on landlines. The 30% of under-thirties that don’t have their own home telephone cannot be polled.

However, no poll was needed to take note of the young Obama Democrats dancing in the streets of U. South Florida, U. Maryland and U. Penn in celebration. In fact, nearly 7 in 10 voters under the age of thirty had supported Obama. This is the highest share of youth support since the exit polls began recording the age of voters in 1976, and 5 times better than John Kerry's performance with the demographic four years ago.

Since Iowa in January Barack Obama has know he could count on the much talked about youth vote and the data as well as the result suggests he wasn't disappointed. Well done, kids!

What does England think? British opinions on the US election

2008-11-06T09:06:00.000-08:00

As British networks filled time between polls closing, reporters are grabbed influential Brits to test the pulse of the Old Country.

Always ready with an opinion is Christopher Hitchens: “I think it’s a zeitgeist change. It’s an historic, seismic change. The middle-class has flipped hard against the Republican Party. On its watch all the important things about the American Dream have gone sour.”

Even comic Ricky Gervais had his two cents: “I’ve never been interested in politics. I rarely vote in Britain but I’ve been caught up in it. When I saw Barack Obama for the first time it was just amazing. He hasn’t put a foot wrong, except for being elitist and intelligent."

Comedian and actor Eddie Izzard had probably been drinking: “Looks like the BBC is already projecting Obama to win. It’s fantastic. The third millennium begins tonight – maybe in half an hour. Slavery is just over. Well, not over. I think it will be great for America. I think it will be great for the world.”

Simon Schama, historian looking to the future as the BBC starts to get carried away: “Obama is a world figure who, in an instinctive sense, is more likely to use diplomacy. You cannot possibly overestimate the way this will be seen as a new America because it has Barack Obama as President.”

What strikes me is the change in the commentators themselves. Hitchens is usually seen as a cynical realist and occasionally even a conservative for his agreement with the Party on Iraq. Gervais usually doesn’t care. Now these two, like so many others, are themselves a part of the seismic shift they are observing, as well as of the sense of idealism that pervades the Obama side of this election.

Barack Obama’s Acceptance Speech: full text

2008-11-05T22:48:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama spoke in Grant Park in Chicago, IL at 12:00am ET on Wednesday, November 5, 2008. He spoke thus:

Hello, Chicago.

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders whether the dream of our fathers is alive in our time, who questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours, four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must by different, that their voices could be that difference. It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled; Americans who sent a message around the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states, we are and always will be the United States of American

It is the answer that led those who’d been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

A little bit earlier this evening I received an extraordinarily gracious call from Senator McCain. Senator McCain fought long and hard in this campaign and he’s fought even longer and harder for the country that he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America than most of us cannot begin to imagine. We are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader. I congratulate him, I congratulate Governor Palin for all that they’ve achieved and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation’s promise in the months ahead.

I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode home with on the train to Delaware, the Vice President Elect of the United States, Joe Biden.
And I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years, the rock of our family, the love of my live, the nation’s next First Lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both more than you can imagine and you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the white house. And while she’s no longer with us, I know my grandmother’s watching along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight. I know that my debt to them is beyond measure. To my sister Maya, my sister Auma, all my other brothers and sisters. Thank you so much for all the support that you’ve given me. I am grateful to them.

To my campaign manager, David Plouffe, the unsung hero of this campaign who built the best, the best political campaign I think in the history of the United States of America. To my chief strategist, David Axelrod, who’s been a partner with me everystep of the way. To the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics, you made this happen and I am forever grateful for what you’ve sacrificed to get it done.

But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to; it belongs to you. It belongs to you. I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington; it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.
It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give ten dollars and twenty dollars to the cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy, who left their homes and their family for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep. It drew strength from the not so young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on doors of perfect strangers and from the millions of Americans who volunteered and organised and proved that two centuries later a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from the earth. This is your victory.

I know you didn’t do this just to win an election. I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest in our lifetime: two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage, or pay their doctors bills, or save enough for their child’s college education. There’s new energy to harness, new jobs to be created, new schools to build, and threats to meet, alliances to repair. The road ahead will be long, our climb will be steep, we may not get there in one year or even in one term. But America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision I make as President. And we know the government can’t solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years: block by block, brick by crick, callused hand by callused hand. What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice. So let us summon a new spirit, of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us one thing it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers. We rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let’s remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity. Those are values that we all share. And while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight we do so with a measure of humility and a determination to heel the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, “We are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.”

To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices, I need your help and I will be your president too. And all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular but our destiny is shared. A new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

To those, to those who would tear the world down, we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security, we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth but from the enduring power of our ideals, democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

That’s the true genius of America: that America can change; our Union can be perfected. What we’ve already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow. This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations, but one that’s on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She is a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election, except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is a hundred and six years old. She was born just a generation past slavery, a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky, when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons: because she was a woman and because of the colour of her skin. And tonight I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America: the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t and the people who pressed on with that American creed, yes we can.

At a time when women’s voices were silent and their hopes dismissed, she live to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dustbowl and Depression across the land she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbour and tyranny threatened the world she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the busses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma and a preacher from Atlanta who told the people that we shall overcome. Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin. A world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen and cast her vote, because after a hundred and six years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

America, we have come so far, we have seen so much, but there is so much more to do. So tonight let us ask ourselves, if our children should live to see the next century – if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper -- what change will they see, what progress will we have made. This is our chance to answer that call, this is our moment, this is our time to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids, to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace, to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth that out of many we are one, where we breathe we hope and where we are met with cynicism and doubt and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can.

Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

Obama Wins: BBC calls election for Obama.

2008-11-04T19:48:00.000-08:00

The 44th President of the United States will be Barack Obama.

11pm: East coast polling closes and states are officially projected for Barack Obama. California was called first. Washington followed seconds later, bringing Obama votes to over the required 270 and sending him into the White House.

ABC, CNN, NBC and the BBC have call the election for the Democratic candidate.

Victory marks the end of a momentous campaign. Mobilising thousands upon thousands of volunteers a much more democratic model of campaigning built support from the ground up, encountering wild enthusiasm among the young -- they have realised it is their time.

People who had never felt engaged by the political process before have become involved. The celebrations will be enormous, although they may be brief. The problems facing a nation in debt and at war are immense. So the honeymoon may be short, there will be one heck of a party tonight.

The crowds are cheering, the flags are waving in Chicago. Rev. Jesse Jackson is in tears. The people spoke tonight and they spoke loudly and clearly. And so did the world.

In Kenya, in a sleepy village in the early morning, there is dancing in the streets. In Chicago they will dance through the night; Kenyans are dancing into the morning; we are singing in our hearts.

BBC urged to call election for Obama; argument ensues

2008-11-04T18:49:00.000-08:00

Noted historian Simon Schama let his Obama support get the better of him when he interrupted a reptort to ask the show’s host,

“Aren’t you going to call the election, David?”

Host David Dimbleby, who had earlier announced that Fox News wasn’t good enough for the BBC to report an Obama victory in Ohio, responded by questioning Schama’s credibility as an historian and chastising him for wanting to report the story before having all the facts.

Although at the time Schama was sitting next to the staunch Republican US Ambassador to the UN, an unusually quiet John Bolton made no comment. Even strong Republican supporters are beginning to realise that it’s over.

The silence didn't last long as the truth sank in. Bolton later demanded that the BBC fire one of its interviewers who was continually asking for reactions to the Republican defeat.

Obama takes Ohio

2008-11-04T18:07:00.000-08:00

It must be over now. This is Obama's night.

Finally, Georgia has been projected for McCain. But it took so long. It shouldn't have been so close. It shows the force of the Obama phenomenon even in Republican states. If Ohio has gone blue, Georgia's red is too little too late.

The Republican faces look depressed in Ohio. Fox News -- yes, that's right FOX -- has called Ohio for Obama. The Obama steamroller is rolling. If this call is right, we almost certainly have our winner.

FOX seems to be calling sooner than everyone else. Maybe they just want to get it over with.

Happy Obama Day!

Obama Cakes: accidental chocolate candicrepes

2008-11-03T20:58:00.000-08:00

Ingredients:
2 egg whites
120ml milk
120ml water
95g flour
25g sugar
30g butter
1 tbsp cocoa

Ingredients yield three crepes, no policies, and an endless supply of hopeful generalisations.

Directions:
1. Whisk and beat ingredients together.
2. Fry them.
3. Serve piping hot with American apple pie and so much cream that you can no longer see the chocolate.

Bon appétit! Swallow it all.

Countdown to Obamageddon: are these last days the Last Days?

2008-11-02T17:32:00.000-08:00

It’s the question that’s been on the tip of the brain of every serious political commentator for decades. It’s about time one of us came out and said it. As usual that someone will have to be me.

Is Barack Obama too skinny to lead the free world?

The free world is increasingly a fat world. An elitist beanpole risks alienating the fatheads of wobbly-middle America. He may be the thinnest, but he wouldn’t be the first.

The phenomenon of ‘Too Thin to Win’ was first noted by the celebrated political historian and social critic Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr. in the 1884 election of Grover Cleveland over James ‘Slim’ Blaine. Amid speculation of venality and anti-Catholic prejudice within the Grand Old Party, Schlesinger was the first to realise that weight may have been the decisive factor in his renowned Washington Post article, ‘Grover Cleveland ate all the American apple pies’.

When the beef asked Schlesinger he summed it up for us: “Masked as cookery advice and homemade pie recipes, a number of articles in the immediate run-up to that election carried the implication that ‘Willowy’ Blaine (as he was known) was a skinny white-bread meat-and-two-veg man whose delicate constitution could scarcely handle a slice of hot American pie. It’s no exaggeration to say that this cost him the White House”.

Much is often made of the fact that in US presidential politics the tallest man wins. Less well known and probably equally true is that the fat man always wins, serves two terms, and makes the word a better place. On top of that, Obama is youthfully skinny, schoolboy skinny.

It's getting late in the day to prove your worth, but for America's sack we need a November surprise: we need someone to pig out and put on the weight of the highest office.

Our last best hope may be found on our Last Frontier.

NaBloPoMo and the Big O

2008-11-01T23:13:00.000-07:00

A late night hello marks the start of my live as a NaBloPoMoer.
This post is the first of my National Blog Posting Month daily-post-for-a-month post posts.

<==== I am NaBloPoMo. And so can you.

Where's the beef? would like to take this historic opportunity to officially endorse blogging, voting and hoping.

Blog like a NaBloPoMo, vote Obama, and hope he can grow and learn.

Coming soon... Obamageddon: Why Obama Is Unpresidential

Spread the wealth like Obama

2008-10-30T19:58:00.001-07:00

With socialism and communism discredited, liberty and democracy conflated, the USA is imperial in her ignorance as she foists upon other nations words that she doesn’t understand.

Tell your population that the enemy eats babies. That’s the start. They did that in the First and Second World Wars. And they did that with the Covenanters in Scotland. They told us that they threw babies up the air and bayoneted them. First casualty of war is truth and all that – end justifies the whatsit. But sometimes when you daemonise the enemy, sometimes, it sticks.

There was a chap I knew. A communist. Smart lad. Once he went on holiday down south. Met a girl eight months pregnant. And in his tenderheartedness he married her; to save her the social opprobrium and ostracism that went with a baby out of wedlock. They had a nice life together. A radical opinion doesn’t mean you’re evil or after blood -- nice fellow; big heart; happy life. Progressive views: he’d have “spread the wealth”. But no piano wire, no backs to the wall, no blood in the gutters

Communist can be good people. So can priests. Clergy may be closer to God than many but under their cassocks they are only men.

Our local priest enjoyed a drink. He’d be there on a Saturday evening after mass – he never paid for a drink in his life – drinking with the coppers. Most of the constabulary would have one with most evenings after we kicked out the Sassenachs. If they didn’t turn up you knew there was going to be a raid.

One night Father M. and I got to talking and he asked me about communism. I closed my eyes. I tried my best to get into it, the spirit of the thing. And I told him about Marx, global communism, world peace. Opened my eyes to see him nodding sternly; “What you’ve just described, that’s Christianity”, he said.

And it’s certainly true that in those days, before the Soviets went kaput, it was held by some as a religion. But it’s also true that, if realized, communism couldn’t be much different from the early Christian visions of ideal society. Thomas Moore’s original Utopia, with all its promise and all its problems, was a Christian socialist paradise.

Together back when, Christianity and socialism couldn’t be further apart in modern America, as adherents to the former crucify the latter on the altar of a broken Soviet Union. With socialism and communism discredited (mere synonyms to the ilk of Fox News) and liberty and democracy conflated, the USA is imperial in its ignorance as it foists upon other nations words that it doesn’t understand.

If Obama is a socialist (that he ain’t, and more’s the pitty), maybe that is what America needs. But whatever he really thinks he must distance himself from the word, and the debate suffers as a result. That perfectly functional political terms are rendered defunct and publicly unutterable by ignorance must dismay any scholar.

The main point, and this the one that the materialist aspirations of a universal self-defined middle class will always misunderstand, is not about money. If there was a bit more socialism in America then the lowest common denominator would not be so low and when presidential candidates condescended to appeal to it their stooping would not so appall the rest of the civilized world.

Alaska: Come to Palin Country

2008-10-29T10:40:00.000-07:00

Alaska is the America you all want to be. The 'real America', if you will (and any real American would). Every liberal has a secret hope for that final freedom. Every one of them wakes up at night in a cold sweat with a lonely vision of the frozen north and a longing to be so nowhere.

If you eavesdrop on your minds you’ll hear all sorts of noises that have nothing to do with who you are supposed to be. But sometimes it’s those noises that make you who you are. But Alaska is not only an important metaphor for your unconscious mind. It does other magic too. Whenever you that tingly pre-election feeling, that feeling that says 'heck, just vote crazy! Vote Republican', that is Alaska, my friend. That is the call of the wild.Smell the scent of a newborn lamb on a raining sunny afternoon -- that, my friends, is Alaska. Or a rotting elk in a snowy field: pure Alaska; pure as the driven Alaska snow.

Alaska is a State of the Union, a state of mind, and a statement of the key facts in handy bullet points, comme ça:

Alaska data that matter (aka AK Led Astray)
Here are Six Super Facts about ‘The Snowy State’:-

1. Alaska produces 3.5 percent of the USA’s total energy supply.

2. The whole state of Alaska has a smaller population than:
Ø San Francisco
Ø Jacksonville, FL
Ø Afghanistan’s Anbar Province
Ø the Union of the Comoros
Ø Texas’ 2nd congressional district
Ø the Church of Scientology
Ø Leeds
Ø half of Cyprus
Ø the adults in the Boy Scouts of America.
Ø the movie Ghandi (almost)

3. ~~Alaska Statute 39.52.10(a) clearly states that~~ [This ‘Super’ Fact has been removed as it was not in the spirit of superfun and was a thinly veiled leftwing-media-biased attempt at spoiling the fun of the election by implicating an ‘issue’ – Ed.]

4. The Governor of Alaska’s name is an anagram of ‘a liar has to punish a heel’, or, if you prefer, ‘Ha! I share to punish a seal’. [That’s better – Ed.]

5. The time taken to work out Super Fact Four really isn’t worth it.

6. And for our final fascinating Super Fact, The Top Three Most Worrying Things That Have Been Said In Alaska are:
Ø "I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq." – Sarah Palin, Alaska Business Monthly, March 2007
Ø “I'm the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can't.” – Sarah Palin after giving her office a makeover courtesy of the city highway fund.
Ø "I think God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that." – Um, not sure who said this one -- let’s watch the video!

Distraught prank call victim blasts “shocking” BBC and “cruel sickos” Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross.

2008-10-28T20:51:00.000-07:00

As anger mounts over the antics of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, Georgina Baillie steps forward to publicly condemn the pair and the BBC for their actions.

Andrew Sachs, beloved star of the classic British comedy Fawlty Towers, was to be interviewed by churlish fad Russell Brand for the latter's radio show. But when they could only get hold of his answering machine, Brand and guest boor Jonathan Ross responded by making a series of lewd phone calls to the 78-year-old veteran actor impugning the sexual conduct of his granddaughter and suggesting his suicide.

They called Sachs again to apologise for the original comments, but instead sang a song repeating the allegations.

Responding publically for the first time, the subject of the claims, Sachs' granddaughter Georgina Baillie said that she and her grandfather were “distraught” and “devastated” by the broadcast. Brand had made comments suggesting her grandfather might hang himself, and it is these Georgina identified as the most distressing.

A half-hearted apology from Brand via voicemail had led her to believe that it went out live and she was later “shocked” to find out that the prerecording was transmitted unedited.

Branding the pair “sick” and calling for them to be sacked, Georgina concluded that it is “sad that this is what entertainment has come to on the BBC”.

The interview will appear tommorow morning in London's Sun newspaper.

Matt Damon v. Sarah Palin: Crazy realities, 'political purposes' & bad movies

2008-10-20T06:32:00.001-07:00

You’ll have all by now seen square-faced word-talker Matt Damon speaking words on Youtube. For those of you who have not, I’m here to help. Here is the transcript:

"Hi. I’m Matt Damon. Eurgh, oog, aww. She… I mean did she really …I need to know if she really… I want to know that, I really do I want to know, have you ever seen the rain? Dinosaurs…if she banned books we can't have that. I’m scared of mommy…goo goo ya boo wa waa…glug glug gloop pfffrrpthpuyup! Liberal dinosaurs.”

- Matt ‘Totally Absurd’Damon

Mmm, that’s good satire (not the sophisticated satire you were hoping for but pooh to you -- I’m a maverick.) Truth be told, I’m not sure what Matt Damon said; I couldn’t see his words past his massive Lego head. But the well manicured point is this: President Sarah Palin has captured the imagination and the hearts of the Yankee people in a way that Matt Damon could only ever come close to doing on screen. Like me, she’s a maverick and she’s gonna shake things up, just you wait. When the railroad comes to Alaska she’ll be blowing steam right there with it chugging along like a little bespectacled engine that could ride shotgun with Jesus into a new age of ~~New Age Reaganomic hokum~~ Christian homemade folksy natural political remedies. (Commas will have no place in this brave new world [Jesus never used them] – Sorry people this close to an election it’s all about the rant!)

And she’s not just a (said with an all-too-educated liberal sneer) "hockey mom", she’s the Daddy of hockey moms. Sure, as some tittle-tattlers have been gossiping (see the report), she may not do things ‘ethically’ and conform to your bigcityways. Sure, she killed a baby moose to refurbish her lipstick. But, dangnabit, given the choice between that and sipping latte enemas in a hippie tofu I’d be skinning seal pups in the Land of the Folksy Twilight faster than you can betcha. And, frankly Damon, she would, and probably will, make one heckuva film.

Oh, yeah, Damon! Bring it on! You think your joking, but that’s a movie I’d like to see! I can hear the deep velvety voice of trailer now:

Wildly maverick. Impossibly well-groomed. A down-home folksy rebel. For the first 40 years of her life, ~~Will Hunti...~~ahem, Sarah Palin has called the shots. Now she's about to meet her match…the world.

…hmm, this sounds familiarly trite and folksy and yet, underneath all that, cynically manipulative…Has Sarah Palin made movies before?…

Some people can always believe in themselves because they were never taught to ask questions, until some country believes in them…and makes them Vice President.

Hang on a minute! The Sarah Palin Story isn’t a bad Disney movie! – it’s a bad Matt Damon movie! ‘Good Moose Hunting’, anyone? I’m just planting seeds. But for those of you still convinced it needs this Disney treatment, this trailer has got the right idea on that one.

This week 'Long Island's Very Own' Angelo has given his regular Monday post one of those nifty footnote-singnature things, just like a real columnist.

Meanwhile, back in Blighty...

2008-10-17T19:49:00.000-07:00

How to Get Noticed in America

2008-10-15T08:33:00.000-07:00

Top tips to help Uncle John McCain see if he can't put the McCain back into 'election campMcCaingn' as we limber up to Long Island and D3.

Stand out from the crowd with the Top Three 3 Sure-fire Steps to the reaction you deserve.

 Be a hero. An American hero. America loves a hero.
 Accept your party’s – chose one – nomination for President.
 DO NOT under any circumstance BE JOHN MCCAIN.

That last one’s toughie, but it’s essential.

I’m down in Long Island to see if Drunk Uncle John McCain can refocus the focus of this increasingly folksy election focus by focussing on the issues that matter to ordinary American folk -- us. Yes, us – you and me – we, the people, need to reengage with this election on the level of substance rather than gloss and cheap shots. This will be a tall order for either candidate at tonight’s ~~debacle~~ debate. If you’re not convinced about how bad it’s gotten, just read the superficial dross that even I am spouting.

Oh, don’t look at me like that. Please, not with those big old prison camp puppy dog eyes. It’s a mess of your own making. You got us here and now you’ve only yourself to blame. You chose her. Your little stunt worked too well. And now the weather report shows that it’s hailin’ Sarah Palin! And I’m not complainin’.

If you’ve formed an exploratory committee, sussed out your options, and it turns out that there’s no way around it – you are Sen. John McCain, then, well, then there’s only one thing for it: you could have a go at grabbing back some airtime by being Noticeable Matt Damon as well.

This might seem at first like an even tougher call. Being two people is something you’re not used to doing; it might seem difficult. No need to worry: Matt ‘Noticeable’ Damon himself has been two people for years: Matt ‘Notable’ Damon, the fair-to-middling (should that be 'meddling'? - Ed.) 'Thespian' who needs a prompter to soliloquize anything longer than his own name, even when he himself wrote it; and yet at the same time the astute political genius Matt ‘Look at Me!’ Damon, who can use elected officials as sounding-boards for his own ignorance and America will act like he matters.

Down-home truths

2008-10-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

The cold and the frost are here, and as I watch the 2008 United States vice-presidential debate the temperature drops below freezing; Sarah Palin sends a shiver down my spine.

As the nights draw darkly, temperatures tremble in the breeze, and dawn won’t break till morning I can begin to feel the creek in my bones that signals the onset of another cold Alaskan winter. This afternoon I moved my bed into a warmer room. I wedged it up against the stove with a chair. If I don’t have it jammed it squeaks and rattles and frightens the life out of me. The thought struck me that in this respect it couldn’t be unlike a Sarah Palin presidency.

Palin comparison
Although there’s a certain economy of discourses of truth adhered to at these events that is not to my taste, I watched the 2008 United States vice-presidential debate. Perhaps the cold was making me hungry, but the exchange reminded me of nothing more than fish. Joe Biden shark-smiled teeth like razors, but the thriller from Wasilla too proved she’s more than a minnow: Alaskan king salmon are popular for sport because they put up a good fight when you get them on the hook. Palin might sometimes look like a fish out of water but her Last Frontier pioneer spirit we see her through a ropey start to the bitter end, whichever way this tough cookie crumbles. Or put another way, there’s that small-town parochial partisan pettiness that’ll keep her fighting all the way. (One of her first acts as Wasilla mayor was to fire the police chief who’d supported her opponent.)

Whiter shade of Palin
Wasilla is also the name of the Ossetian god of storms. So it is in a way appropriate that Palin should cause a storm in a teacup on entering politics and a furor on her ascent to the national stage. However, the town’s name actually commemorates a Dena' ina Athabascan Indian Chief whose name meant “breath of air”. Whether this was fresh air or hot air was not specified. There might have been a lot of the latter down in Whitman County Thursday, but it’ll be an ill wind blowing in Washington if there’s a Palin Vice Presidency in the wind, and then we’ll all be left to twist in an extended metaphor that’s worn thinner than the Sarah Palin end of a regressive and ignorant conservative wedge.

Palin to insignificance
Regardless of which way the vice-presidential wind is blowing, the wind in the land of the midnight sun is very definitely cold. The doors bang and the windows rattle and the wind gently rocks the dilapidated cabin. I close my eyes for a while and listen to the chill wind shrieking around the old relic. It's a John McCain of a house and a wind that’s not unlike the Sarah Palin candidacy.

Folksy tales from the brave new world

2008-10-02T19:47:00.000-07:00

I know it doesn’t matter – and you know it doesn’t matter – but if he didn’t quote The Tempest with quite such a simpering smile I wouldn't find myself wondering whether he can bowl as well as Obama.

But Joe Biden did. And while he does, and being of the old Wilde school of not attributing his sources, Palin’s modesty to misattribute her quotes is all the more notable. Those given to Anglo-American comparison should note that it was with something more subtle than the way our own Chameleon Cameron crowbarred a Thatcher salute into an otherwise rather progressive season of political party conferences, Sarah Palin's shining city on a hill was calculated to give the illusion that she’d quoted Ronald Reagan twice, and almost made you think that she’s read more Reagan than Winthrop. This illusion meant that she could court the Reaganites of the grand old party faithful without outraging the moderates, a reconciliation whose Tory counterpart Chameleon Cameron has still to fathom.

Unlike Cameron’s speech, in which they were both crammed uncomfortably into his one person, the 2008 United States vice-presidential debate saw accommodation and partisanship healthily apportioned between the two candidates, but at times with equally comic results: the beautiful and (genuinely) moving family-guy Biden emotion was sadly undermined by his repeated claim to “love” Sen. John McCain.

The Third Man

2008-10-01T12:06:00.001-07:00

Lately, Chameleon Cameron has shown all the symptoms (in my medical opinion) of a man trapped in a Graham Greene novel or two.

It began with a friendly smile and as few policies as he could get away with – as long as nothing happens anything is possible. Like Our Man in Havana, he talked a good game, painted castles in the sky, but when you actually looked closely for the policies you saw that it was all really an elaborate vacuum. As with Noel Coward in the film adaptation, one found his style mildly amusing yet couldn’t but wonder whether he was at all capable of the seriousness the role demands.

In the old Tory days the heartless Thatcherites could swallow hard, close their eyes, tick the box, and think of England because they at least knew what they were getting. There was something secure in its vulgarity. You could appeal to them as you could to an English policeman, because you knew their thoughts. But Chameleon Cameron is a stranger bird. With a man in search of a character the road to Conservative policy is a journey without maps.

And yet – and yet – just recently, in the rubble of our financial institutions (where it is not too early for some to speculate on the death-throes of capitalist decadence), has he found one? With his newfound seriousness could he have gone from hug-a-hoodie wetness to his very own metaphoric megaphonic climb-the-debris-and-hug-a-fireman moment?

Remember when Tony Blair really started to get into the war. To properly loose himself in the role. When his matey straight-guy stuff got supplemented with sub-Churchill grandiloquence. Well, all of a sudden the heir to Blair seems to have been taking the same hubris pills and has begun to strike statesmanly poses. Chameleon Cameron approaches a season of political party conferences like one might a state funeral. Poseur he may be, but reaching out pseudo-bipartisan hands to a plodding and doddering Gordon Brown is such astute political flimflam that when he slaps on a serious haircut and concernedly pursed lips one hardly notices that he admonishes D. Miliband for claiming there’s no such thing as society in the same speech as thanking heaven for Thatcher.

But, at this point, however dishonest the mockery – or perhaps the praise – one fears that the brute fact of D. Miliband might be enough. While Brown may have gravitas to spare there’s no doubt that Chameleon Cameron can out-solemnise the pretenders. When you add to that the specific fact that he looks more and more dignified every time D. Miliband shows his gurning phizog in public you can’t help fancying his chances.

Fattening up for jolly old Christmas

2008-09-30T07:10:00.001-07:00

The weight of leadership makes political posturing hard on the knees. To hold sway when the fat is in the fire it’s important to be a heavyweight. So I’m growing my very own potbelly.

The first phase of my plan to get fat got underway last night with a double helping of mince and potato, followed swiftly by a crunchy, oaten apple crumble and washed down with three – yes, three – tall glasses of cool milk. And I’m drinking milk as I type.

The great thing about drinking milk is that it fills you up and gives you energy; dairy fats prepare the belly for a night out, which means that I was able to happily chase it with a few pints of heavy and a pub quiz to work on the beer belly. I can see it shaping up nicely into a jolly old Christmas paunch.

As we all know, a man of a certain age should be fat. This is true in all situations in all walks of life, either side of the pond: Chameleon Cameron struggles (however admirably) after the gravity that Gordon Brown has in spades; for all his Presbyterian prudence, the latter carries more weight because he carries more weight; likewise, Obama’s greatest danger is that he is literally a lightweight.

If one can’t muster statesmanly rotundity, one must at least try for a mild podginess, an ambassador’s paunch; in order to properly lead a political party, let alone a country, one should be a plodder, a clunker. A deep booming voice supported by an expansive diaphragm can stir the souls of nations and plumb the depths of the hearts of men. It speaks to them, rather than squeaks at them (like a certain country mouse candidate generally expected to shrill her way through the 2008 United States vice presidential debate on a untried wing and a divisive and arrogant prayer who shall remain nameless).

This is the hope that Obama’s wet-eared youth must promise – and, in the old country, it is everything that D. Miliband isn’t. The Chameleon Cameron has more chance, but he must root himself, plant his feet firmly and stand tall (shoulders back) – and try to look as if his Eton-fag frame could support the weight of governmental office. When he understands this he’ll understand that the least he could do is to put on a few pounds.

If jolly old Christmas (my target for achieving fatness) teaches us anything it is the Kriss-Kringlesque manliness of jolly fatty-men. Jovial hearty fatty men may be a cliché. (There are plenty of angry fatties, and a really angry one, red faced and sweating, isn’t at all pleasant.) And we’ve all been told depressingly how Santa Clause would be ill if he was real. But the happy flipside that proves the stereotype is rarely mentioned. Angry fatty men get heart attacks and die, leaving only the jolly ones to chuckle with us as life’s black comedy.

Besides, when fatty men are merry they are merry. A moment’s thought will confirm that you know the fat drunk party animal is much more fun than the drunken skinny guy in any barroom (even if only because his stagger is augmented with a wobble factor). So eat and drink and pile on the pounds and one day you – yes, you – will be President of the United States.

Facing Them Down: head-on or roundabout?

2008-09-23T06:38:00.000-07:00

Two weeks, two political party conferences, two leaders' speeches. The Liberals’ watery tax and loose end waffling and wandering left it to Labour to raise the bar by standing still and speaking the common sense of our age.

A week ago, Nick Clegg, already lacking gravitas, had abandoned the dignity of the lectern to waltz the podium. If you think it didn’t look absurd that’s down, quite literally, to media spin – the pan and tilt of the camera, hovering over him, always close enough so we can’t quite see the edge of the stage and that he’s got nowhere to go. Watching on TV we could entertain the idea that he might be moving toward something instead of plodding aimlessly, an illusion his speech mirrored rather less effectively.

To get an idea of how much of this is for the camera’s benefit (short of actually going to one of these things), picture it stripped down: no big screen backdrop, no mood lighting; a small stage in a dark room in a village school. In fact, imagine your own last school assembly. The headmaster is wishing a fond farewell after your GCSEs and best of luck to you in the big old world out there.

Now imagine him doing that while turning in circles looking like he’s dropped his keys. Do you think, “Wow! The talk and the walk! He’s got my vote”, or, “Always seemed like a nice chap, but why’s he prancing about like that?”

Watching Gordon Brown is quite different and it occurs to me that headmaster isn’t quite the right metaphor for the new breed of downstage ramblers. For Brown, maybe. But for all these young lads who can’t stand still, head boy is more like it. And with D. Miliband even that’s a stretch. He’s not a wanderer; he’s a fidget. That wide-eyed wonder, that naive arrogance, the clumsily presumptuous political manoeuvring of the most childlike forty-odd-year-old in politics make him a third former. A geeky one. Perhaps he’s the ‘Harry Potter’ Brown was referring to and that odd jokey bit was sending a message to his heir apparent. The “no time for a novice” bit surely was: that the sorcerer’s Blairite apprentice should keep his flapping Mickey Mouse ears to the ground and his bootlicking mouth shut.

About

2008-09-20T10:20:00.000-07:00