King’s College, Cambridge: political ructions

This made my day. Absolutely hilarious.
Firstly, this:
Dear all,
I am writing to you concerning the general election campaign in Cambridge. I hope this is not inappropriate, but this list seems to get the best way to get in touch with everyone.
I am currently helping to campaign for the Conservatives in Cambridge and I am writing to [...]

Michael Foot, Soviet Agent?

In the aftermath of Michael Foot’s death, Charles Moore gives Oleg Gordievsky’s story of former Labour Party leader Foot’s role as a Soviet agent:
This week, Gordievsky gave me his full account. At the end of the 1940s, he said, when Foot was editor and managing director of the Left-wing paper Tribune (he continued in the [...]

The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged?

Under the title “The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged”, the New York Times has a column by Frank Rich in which he risibly tries to tar the tea party movement with the actions of a suicide murderer.
Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying [...]

Communism has failed, let’s try communism!

From the Guardian of course:
I’m no art critic, but I was fortunate enough to be able to look at this ­exhibition from an informed, leftwing perspective – and I was very impressed. Named after the Soviet Union’s secret cosmonaut training city, Star City: The Future Under Communism brought together work by artists (from Russia and [...]

The Berlin Wall: Show me the money

1992, Mean Real Gross Income in Euros:
West Germany: 26,408
East Germany: 15,928
Source: 20 Years of German Unification: Evidence on Income Convergence and Heterogeneity by Tilman Brück & Heiko Peters
Meanwhile, income inequality across Germany as a whole actually decreased after reunification because of Easterners getting richer:
While income inequality in West Germany has generally not altered in an [...]

The Berlin Wall: Apparently a good thing

Yesterday I suggested that a few people had a bizarre belief in the moral equivalence of the communist countries and the liberal democracies. I now realize that I was mistaken. There was no moral equivalence at all: per someone called Bruni de la Motte writing in the Guardian, the communists were better…

East Germans lost [...]

…and if you don’t agree with me, you’re probably a racist.

American Pravda The New York Times picks up the tired idea that opposition to Obama is racist and runs with it in an op-ed by some guy called Bob Herbert who basically recites a bunch of nasty things some people you’ve never heard of have said about Obama, including I kid you not, a quote [...]

JFK was killed by a Communist, full stop.

At NRO they are commenting again on the curious affliction of the left in thinking that JFK was killed by “the right”.
The fact that Oswald was a communist quickly changed from an inconvenience to proof of something even more sinister. How, liberals asked, could a card-carrying Marxist murder a liberal titan on the
side of social [...]

American stuff

Good banter in Nordlinger’s “Impromtus”:

We’re reading a lot lately about “right-wing rage.” As I say in my NR piece, funny how you never hear about “left-wing rage.” Could be that “left-wing rage” is not alliterative, as “right-wing rage” is. Or it could be that dominant commentators think of left-wing rage as mere righteous indignation.
Orwell observed [...]

Sometimes a newspaper column can only be described as evil.

This is the face of a deeply despicable person.
I take it as granted that most people who write opinion pieces for newspapers are total idiots.  However, there is still a difference between your standard idiotic idiot and an evil idiot writing an evil column.  Here we have the latter with some disgraceful man going [...]