Attention Liverpool fans

Only months after the Texas Rangers baseball team got free -- in a bankruptcy sale -- of former owner Tom Hicks -- they manage a surprise victory in a playoff game against Tampa. Hicks -- whose Rangers ownership group once included George W. Bush -- went for quick results fueled by debt, with the consequences only becoming apparent through lapse of time and with others left to clean up the mess. George W. Bush would implement the same strategy on the entire country.

But there is life after the debt-dependent Texans, even for Texas. You'll never walk alone.

Photo: REUTERS/Scott Audette

It's not just in Private Eye

English journalism veteran Patience Wheatcroft writing from her new perch in the Wall Street Journal --

He [Tony Blair] has even established the beginning of his own potential finance house, setting up a business which has registered with the Financial Services Authority (please check)

The WSJ sub-editor, who is probably not called a sub-editor, forgot to look for the fact-check notes in her submission. Patience apparently doesn't fully trust a story that ran in Murdoch stablemate, the Sunday Times.

English Socialist

As US election season approaches, conservative thinker Stanley Kurtz has announced that he is reviving his 2008 argument that Barack Obama is a lifelong socialist and will have a book -- Radical in Chief -- setting out the case. He elaborates --

Community organizing is a big part of what makes American socialism distinctive, and this, of course, is where Obama comes in.

"Community organizing" is a bizarrely essential element of right-wing demonology about Obama and more broadly about the financial crisis; with regard to the latter, the narrative has it that community organizers forced bank loan officers to give trillions of dollars in mortgages to poor people, whose now-underwater mortgages nearly brought down the global financial system and forced George Bush to increase government intervention in the economy. It was amazingly clever of Obama to have set all this in motion in Chicago 20 years ago, but that's the thing about these nefarious left-wing plots.

But anyway, this obsession with community organizing is coming at a strange time in the Anglo-American currents, because here from just a few days ago is UK Prime Minister David Cameron setting out the philosophy of the government's Big Society initiative --

For a long time the way government has worked – top-down, top-heavy, controlling – has frequently had the effect of sapping responsibility, local innovation and civic action.

It has turned many motivated public sector workers into disillusioned, weary puppets of government targets. It has turned able, capable individuals into passive recipients of state help with little hope for a better future. It has turned lively communities into dull, soulless clones of one another. So we need to turn government completely on its head. The rule of this government should be this: If it unleashes community engagement – we should do it. If it crushes it – we shouldn’t.

And the speech later describes specific efforts that will be taken to support community organizers.

It's going to be fascinating to watch the intellectual gyrations required to make an intrinsically bottom-up and decentralized activity like community organizing into a socialist vanguard. It's more likely that Kurtz will -- as he did in 2008 -- rely on a web of guilt by association, with community organizing being depicted as something that old lefties now do. But the implication for how American conservatives think about freedom of association for disadvantaged people should be clear.

Sentences you won't hear in American politics

"I am not a man of faith" --

Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat leader, in the 2nd election debate this evening [just after the 37 minute mark].

Bad medicine

Charles Krauthammer today in the Washington Post --

Well, said David Manning, a former British ambassador to the United States, to a House of Commons committee reporting on that very relationship: "[Obama] is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience was of Indonesia and who had a Kenyan father. The sentimental reflexes, if you like, are not there."

I'm not personally inclined to neuropsychiatric diagnoses, but Manning's guess is as good as anyone's.

Charles Krauthammer's past diagnoses --

During 2004 election season: This [Democratic contempt for Dubya] is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is reelected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

Howard Dean: When he avers, however, that "the most interesting" theory as to why the president is "suppressing" the Sept. 11 report is that Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance, it's time to check on thorazine supplies.

Al Gore: -"Well, it looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again." (Fox News Special Report, 5/26/04)

... I'm a psychiatrist. I don't usually practice on camera. But this is the edge of looniness, this idea that there's a vast conspiracy, it sits in a building, it emanates, it has these tentacles, is really at the edge. He [Al Gore] could use a little help.

In fact, it's Krauthammer's bizarre description of Obama's foreign policy changes as "slapping" allies that merits a little time on the couch.

It must be the cannon

Although some defenders of the securocrats are claiming that the case of the Detroit plane bomber indicates that the problem is too much information, we now know that in addition to the critical information that the US government had on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and failed to piece together, there was one detail that should have clinched it --

As for off-campus activities, Mr. Rafiq said he liked to meet Mr. Abdulmutallab for Friday evening prayers at the Islamic Society’s campus prayer room, then walk to a nearby chicken-and-chips shop where they would eat and talk about their common enthusiasm for the Arsenal soccer club as well as Islamic Society business.

Who else was an Arsenal fan? Osama bin Laden. Case closed.

The talking point bust

It's the claim that keeps popping up in English newspapers and keeps being recycled by US conservatives. Here's the Telegraph's Con Coughlin in today's Wall Street Journal --

Soon after his [Obama's] inauguration, he sent back to the U.K. a bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had been loaned to President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. The sculpture had enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office.

Above, George W. Bush accepting the bust on July 16, 2001. Perhaps the spirit of Winston was trying to warn about an imminent attack but was being ignored.

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars

One of the mysteries with these politicians-on-the-front visits, as with Gordon Brown in Afghanistan, is why they insist on wearing the armour with a suit.

But the Little Heathrow thing is funny. One assumes that by virtue of having fewer terminals, the transfers are easier than at its namesake.

AP Photo/Matt Cardy, Pool

It reads better in an English paper

Note: this post has evolved a little from its original topic so we lay out the sequence for clarity: On DC Tea Party "9/12" Eve, conservative bloggers rubbish 2 million crowd prediction as liberal mindgames. But then lazy editors at Daily Mail (UK) use the 2 million estimate in a wire service compilation report; the Mail story is sent to National Review and Glenn Reynolds as a "why is this only in the British media" talking point, and it becomes an actual crowd estimate. Read on.

National Review Online's Mark Hemingway --

But [tea party] crowd estimates aside, I'm almost incredulous at that Daily Mail report. It's a fairly straight report, and it's fair! What American media outlet would print this:

"Richard Brigle, 57, a Vietnam War veteran and former Teamster, came from Michigan. He said health care needs to be reformed - but not according to President Barack Obama's plan."

Much as with the tea party crowd numbers, one can conservatively estimate that hundreds of American media outlets will print it. It's just the standard AP wire service report picked up by many papers, including the Daily Mail.

For some reason, the Corner people spend a lot of time reading the Daily Mail, or at least reading links that someone sends them from it.

Incidentally, Mark Steyn falls for the trick that he had just been warning us about, lazy foreign newspaper reporting based on unverified American sources. So he presents the Daily Mail's preposterous 2 million attendance figure ("You may be underestimating the numbers ... That's some astroturf") despite warnings from his own side that the 2 million estimate was just liberal prophylactic hype.

And Glenn Reynolds --

and this is priceless: “Many protesters said they paid their own way to the event – an ethic they believe should be applied to the government.” Why is the British press more honest in its reporting on this stuff than the American press?

That sentence comes straight from the AP. So they're all using the same Daily Mail cut-and-paste without checking it against any other source. That FreedomWorks news link service is pretty bad!

UPDATE: This 2 million thing is a media recycling classic. It's sourced to a memo from a US House of Representatives Democratic staffer, but he only presented it as the upper range of predictions that he had seen on the web. In advance of the event, conservatives were warning that the 2 million was hype. But then the Daily Mail sub-editors ("Mail Foreign Service") sitting in London included it in their story, and because Freedom Works (or other organizers) then sent around the Mail link to sympathetic bloggers, they're all now citing it as the actual number --

[Glenn Reynolds] HEADLINE: Up to two million march to US Capitol to protest against Obama’s spending in ‘tea-party’ demonstration.

So maybe I was wrong to be so skeptical. But cut it in half and it’s still a huge number.

Isn't that the same indifference to zeroes that they complain about when it's concerning deficits?

FINAL UPDATE: The first claim of 2 million was from Michelle Malkin. That was the first instance of someone finding yesterday's junk and thinking it was new stuff.

What's the frequency Gordon

It's interesting to compare the Downing Street and White House versions of the Barack Obama -- Gordon Brown phone call. White House --

The President expressed his disappointment over the Scottish Executive’s decision to release convicted Pan Am 103 Bomber al-Megrahi back to Libya.

This is not mentioned in the Downing Street version.

Incidentally, here's the official Libyan account of a visit to al-Megrahi by representatives of the pan-African Parliament. It was pitched as revenge for a visit by Bulgarian nurses to the gallery of the European Parliament on 10 October 2007.

Not very assuring

One interesting angle in the decision of the Scottish executive to give compassionate release to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi is the part of the Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill's statement where he comes close to accusing the UK Home Office of lying --

The United States Attorney General, Eric Holder, was in fact deputy Attorney General to Janet Reno at the time of the pre-trial negotiations. He was adamant that assurances had been given to the United States Government that any person convicted would serve his sentence in Scotland. Many of the American families spoke of the comfort that they placed upon these assurances over the past ten years. That clear understanding was reiterated to me, by the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

I sought the views of the United Kingdom Government. I offered them the right to make representations or provide information. They declined to do so. They simply informed me that they saw no legal barrier to transfer and that they gave no assurances to the US Government at the time. They have declined to offer a full explanation as to what was discussed during this time, or to provide any information to substantiate their view. I find that highly regrettable.

I therefore do not know what the exact nature of those discussions was, nor what may have been agreed between Governments. However, I am certain of the clear understanding of the American families and the American Government.

Therefore it appears to me that the American families and Government either had an expectation, or were led to believe, that there would be no prisoner transfer and the sentence would be served in Scotland.

Note that a Home/Justice "assurance" has been a standard procedure in the controversial UK-US extradition cases, where they typically concern something that can't in fact be guaranteed or is already an option under existing law. Isn't there now enough evidence that any such assurances should be put in writing?

UPDATE: Just for the record, one curious angle is emerging on the release -- the possible role of Qatar in the process.

FINAL UPDATE: Just to collect a few more links. In this bewildering interview (which does serve as a reminder of how good John Humphrys is), UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband says that there were other issues with the use of the prisoner transfer agreement (as opposed to question of implicit assurances) but also that there was no role of the London government in the decision. But well-credentialed correspondent Kristofer Harrison tells Powerline's "Trunk" that the machinations were directed from the Foreign Office.

The damned spot of Lehman

Alistair Darling in an interview with the Sunday Times (UK) --

As the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers approaches, Darling has been reflecting on its impact. He believes that if the US government had stepped in to save the investment bank, as it did for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the American mortgage giants, the economic crisis that followed might not have been so dramatic.

“What I don’t think they realised was that when Lehman went down, people looked round the world and thought: well if Lehman can go down, and it’s one of the world’s biggest investment banks, then what else can go down? And that precipitated the crisis which finally manifested itself in October,” he says.

How much difference would it have made? “Well, if the Americans had stepped in, it would still have been necessary to recapitalise the banks. But the act of Lehman going down provoked a sense of crisis, which brought matters to a head much more quickly and severely than would otherwise have been the case. But then, hindsight’s a wonderful thing . . .”

Actual sequence of events as described by senior New York Fed official --

Barclays agreed to acquire Lehman after a syndicate of banks consented to backstop a new entity that would take over $55 billion to $60 billion of Lehman’s troubled assets, according to people familiar with the negotiations. The deal fell apart when the U.K.’s Financial Services Authority refused to sign off on the Barclays purchase that day and U.S. officials refused to take further steps to save the deal.

The New York Fed meeting then turned to discuss plan B [bankruptcy], Baxter said.

It's one of the continuing mysteries of the financial crisis post-mortems that critical non-decisions made by the UK government don't receive much attention.

UPDATE 29 JANUARY 2010: Hank Paulson has now confirmed that Darling blocked the Barclays takeover of Lehman.

Shadow boxing

There's something a tad strange about the Daniel Hannan Sean Hannity interview controversy. Consistent with much of the healthcare "debate" in the USA, the only alternative that the pundits seem able to comprehend for the US system is the NHS. But of course Barack Obama is not proposing any more government provision of healthcare than takes place already. Nor has Hannan said anything much different than he has said before. But anyway. Both the BBC and Sky editors seem to have decided to that the most outrageous quote from Hannan (since it's the one they keep playing) is --

How amazing to me that a free people, you know, citizens of a country founded on the principle of independence, independence for the citizen as well as independence for the state, should be contemplating, in peacetime, burdening themselves with a system like this, which puts the power of life and death in a state bureaucracy.

But he also said --

The idea that you'd want me to know go down this road to Cuban what North Korean system, is just extraordinary.

NHS = North Korea? Now that's loony. David Cameron should be able to come with something more than this oblique response. But in the big picture, the row is typical of the luck of those opposed to healthcare reform. They find a hackneyed but not entirely useless rhetorical tactic and carry it too far -- in this case turning it into an embarrassment for an overseas political party that should be their natural ally, the Tories. With enemies like these, maybe Barack Obama doesn't need friends.

The police compare notes

What exactly happened at the pre-summit G20 protests in London is still being sorted out. But there's a notable precedent for the police tactic of trapping protesters: the infamous Pershing Park protest in Washington DC in 2002. In that case, the police blocked in protesters -- and anyone else who happened to be around -- and arrested them all for an illegal march. The tactics achieved their intended purpose -- intimidation -- but later turned into a legal fiasco for the city. The new wheeze is apparently just to trap the protesters without ever actually arresting them.

UPDATE: One problem with the tactic of penning in protesters is that you have forcefully herd in anyone who happens to be around, like Ian Tomlinson.

This European Parliament actually says stuff

Here's a link to the transcript of Gordon Brown's session with the European Parliament on Tuesday. The session has attracted huge attention due to Dan Hannan MEP getting the opportunity that no backbench MP would get -- to deliver a sustained assault on Gordon Brown's record while Gordon has to sit there and listen. Now, one thing the transcript brings out is that Hannan had prepared his speech in advance, because amongst his accusations to Brown --

Who would have guessed listening to you just now that you were the author of the phrase "British jobs for British workers",

but Nigel Farage had already made sure that the listeners knew it was Brown's phrase before Hannan spoke. But anyway, the whole thing is worth a read -- the session was extremely lively and had a much more big picture context (Europe/G20) than a national parliament session would have had.

Sunday Telegraph says Colin Powell slams Obama

In a completely unsourced Sunday Telegraph story which would make Ambrose Evans-Pritchard proud and which will inevitably be amplified by Matt Drudge and The Politico (likely the intended audience anyway), Washington correspondent Tim Shipman says --

The Sunday Telegraph understands that one of Mr Obama's most prominent African American backers, whose endorsement he spent two years cultivating, has told friends that he detects a weakness in Mr Obama's character.

"The one real serious flaw I see in Barack Obama is that he thinks he can manage all this," the well-known figure told a Washington official, who spoke to this newspaper. "He's underestimating the flood of things that will hit his desk."

There is one prominent African-American endorser who made reference to a two year decision process: Colin Powell. But note that you have to read carefully to see that the Telegraph is not even quoting Powell directly, but someone else's version of what Powell allegedly said. So how about it Tim -- are you willing to name a single source for the story, or is the flood of links from conservative websites gratification enough?

UPDATE: Sister paper the Daily Telegraph seems to have a source close to Gordon Brown, specifically with relevance to the wrong region DVD fiasco. Note the link in theme between the stories is the perception that Brown was poorly received in the US.

Gordon Brown's speech to Congress

It's not bad. He gave a slightly more qualified statement than Bertie Ahern about the state of the peace process: "Northern Ireland is today at peace" whereas Bertie had presumed to speak for the island. Guido observes that they needed seat-fillers in the crowd. Bertie needed them too. But there's an eyebrow raiser --

But how much safer would everybody’s savings be if the whole world finally came together to outlaw shadow banking systems and offshore tax havens?

Outlaw is a pretty strong word. "Shadow banking system" is generally taken to mean the creation of various assets that might seem more liquid than they really are. But the financial industry creates asset vehicles all the time and no one is likely to be taken in by claims of liquidity that might attach themselves to such assets at this stage of the crisis -- at least not without doing some real research first. And which tax havens is he talking about? The UK dependencies? The Caribbean? The Republic of Ireland and Luxembourg?

It'll be interesting to see what exactly he's proposing to outlaw. But nothing in the potential list addresses the question of what should be done about policymakers who watched financial sector balance sheets explode for ten years, 1997-2007, and did nothing about it.

Did he declare that ego in customs?

There was a Gordon Brown interview on American National Public Radio this morning, done live from the UK Embassy and linked to Brown's visit to Barack Obama today. The critical point was 5 minutes in where the interviewer pointed to the fact that Brown had been in charge of the economy for 10 years as chancellor during the time at which consumer and corporate debt was piling up. This was Brown's latest chance to show a little acceptance of responsibility.

Instead he seized on the imprecision of the reference to corporate debt: "our corporations were certainly not borrowing too much", which is disengenous because he knows quite well that the claim is only correct for non-financial corporations; as Martin Wolf has repeatedly pointed out, Britain's financial corporations were on a massive debt spree.

Brown then went on to repeat his claim that the real problem of the last ten years is that other countries hadn't done what "we" (i.e. he) had wanted to do in terms of international supervision of the financial sector.

7/16 changed everything

The reliability with which US conservative blogs feature "outrageous" items sourced to UK newspapers such as the Telegraph and Mail suggests that there is a service which e-mails the links to likely users. The blogs get a faux-authoritative rhetorical casus belli and the UK papers get links and hits.

Step forward National Review's K-Lo stirring outrage with Telegraph news the Obama White House is "sending back" a bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the Bush White House. Now leave aside that Obama would be quite right to dump a symbol of the historical preening that went on with his predecessor. How much of the story (cited uncritically by Josh Marshall) is true? --

A British Embassy spokesman said: "The bust of Sir Winston Churchill by Sir Jacob Epstein was uniquely lent to a foreign head of state, President George W Bush, from the Government Art Collection in the wake of 9/11 as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship.

The above is a picture of George Bush accepting the bust -- on 16 July 2001, nearly 2 months before 9/11. So the part about the bust going back as the end of a loan is probably true. The part about how the loan started is false. And the truth is that the loan was a personal choice of George Bush, before 9/11, and one which suggested that he had in mind being a wartime president well before 9/11 became the excuse for it.

UPDATE: As regular as clockwork, the "outrage" pump has been cranked--

Obama Throws Churchill Out of Oval Office [Nile Gardiner] ... The bust was loaned to the White House in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks as a demonstration of solidarity with the United States. Obama’s surprise decision to send Churchill home is both wrong-headed and crassly insensitive towards America’s closest ally, coming at a time when nearly 9,000 British troops are fighting alongside their American counterparts in Afghanistan ... Nile Gardiner is the director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation.

Who knew that the Special Relationship could be derailed by a bust?

FINAL UPDATE: 10 months after the original story, Nile Gardiner is still shopping it to a receptive John Steele Gordon, including the factually incorrect claim that the bust was given to the White House after 9/11.

When we knew he was up to no good

The emerging addition to the global financial crisis this weekend is the apparent implosion of Allen Stanford's financial empire. Missing in the US coverage of him is any reference to to how many cricket fans will always remember him, as explained in this Sky News clip above.

UPDATE: The Securities and Exchange Commission shuts down Stanford, alleging an $8 billion fraud. Is sports sponsorshop the leading indicator of financial doom (even in Ireland)? Incidentally, it appears that Stanford had investments with Madoff!