Author: Samuel Hooper

Sanford Wins

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Well, I was wrong.

Based on pre-election polling data, and an excess of trust in the wisdom of the electorate, I predicted that the Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch would defeat the Republican former governor Mark Sanford in South Carolina’s 1st congressional district election.

Politico reports:

In the end, the nail biter that late polls hinted at never materialized: Sanford crushed Colbert Busch, 54 to 45 percent.

A turning point in the race came two weeks ago, when Sanford held a mock debate with a cardboard cut-out of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, implying that the California Democrat — persona non grata in conservative South Carolina – was a stand-in for his Democratic opponent.

The former governor endured days of derision from the press for the move — Mark Sanford, once regarded as a viable potential presidential candidate, was debating a piece of cardboard.

But behind the scenes, Sanford’s aides grinned: Every time a reporter put “Pelosi” and “Colbert Busch” in the same sentence, the Republican was winning.

From reading this article it is clear that Sanford ran a far superior campaign to Busch. Tightly-controlled campaigns such as Colbert Busch’s, with handlers keeping the candidate away from any potentially awkward encounter with a real person, are almost never the best way to win, let alone the right way to behave, and yet that is precisely the model that Colbert Busch chose to follow.

Sanford, by contrast, ran an old-fashioned retail politician campaign, barnstorming the district, accepting every invitation for interview or appearance, and offering no end of mea culpas whenever he was asked about his chequered past.

The article continues:

This time, Sanford was, in a sense, running from scratch once again. Without the trappings of the governorship, he hop-scotched the Lowcountry in a black van driven by an aide. After spending a year in obscurity, he was reintroducing himself to voters — soothing the concerns of voters who still felt squeamish about what he had done.

In a district rich with evangelical voters, he adopted religious language to describe his personal journey, talking about a “God of second chances.”

“His strength of his campaign style is that he’s out there every day,” said Scott English, who served as Sanford’s gubernatorial chief of staff. “He loves being around people, and that’s the hallmark of his campaign.”

He ran a smart campaign because he knew how to run a smart campaign. Because he has been doing this since the age of 34. Because he is a career politician.

In South Carolina, the better candidate – but the worse representative – prevailed.

On Bank Holidays

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Tomorrow is a Bank Holiday in the United Kingdom.

We all get the day off work, which is thrilling and terrific. Apparently, the weather is going to be nice for this one, which will end an unbroken streak of rainy bank holidays stretching back to 1834. But something has been bugging me today, as I look forward to my day off tomorrow. What could it be?

Oh yes, it’s in the name.

It’s technically not a public holiday, as they would call it in America, it’s a Bank holiday (everyone genuflect † now).  Which, when you actually think about it, will make your brain explode. Because the idea of naming our precious days off after the one and only institution as odious as the Bank of England – or the special dispensation granted by Royal Proclamation to high street banking branches, letting them shut up shop on certain days – is a rather large kick in the teeth to everyone in, let’s say, less controversial professions.

Those who know me personally will note the irony in what I am writing now. Nonetheless.

Coal Miner holidays? Sure, that’s probably some serious hard work in a coal mine. Dangerous, dark, unhealthy. I would never go down one of those pits.

Nurse holidays, or Careworker holidays? The people who treat us in hospital, or look after our elderly, infirm loved ones, sometimes for little more than minimum wage? Hell yeah.

Inventor holidays, or Entrepreneur holidays? We could have Tim Berners-Lee Day and Dyson Day, folks, wouldn’t that be sweet?

Corporate Lawyer holidays? My Corp Law friend’s office has sleeping pods for the staff who work so late on a routine basis that they can’t make it home safely some nights. Sleeping pods, people!

Military Service holidays? COME ON! Who deserves the honour of naming our public holidays more than our military and our emergency services?

But no… We name our precious days off in honour of the people who open their shutters at 10AM when we are already at work, close them at 4.30PM before we have a chance to escape for the evening, who deign to give you an exhilarating crowd-packed 2-hour window on Saturday to conduct your financial affairs with a disinterested half-trained drone, who allow fraudsters from countries you have never even visited to make their Amazon purchases with your account but who stop your debit card on suspicion of fraudulent activity if you shop at Tesco and Sainsbury’s on the same day, who offer you the low, low fee of £25 to wire money from one country to another when it costs them nothing, who charge you £12 for going a penny overdrawn…oh yes, and who NEARLY BROUGHT OUR WHOLE ECONOMY CRASHING DOWN ON OUR HEADS.

So to all of my British readers – tomorrow, as you enjoy your Bank Holiday †, take a brief moment to stop by your local bank branch and leave a little sign of appreciation for the people who work inside, so that they can look at it and smile when they open up shop at 10AM on Tuesday morning. A small bouquet of flowers, a cuddly stuffed toy, a votive candle in a jar, that kind of thing. It won’t go unappreciated.

Unlike the bailouts.

Thanks, guys.
Thanks, guys. Keep up the good work.

The complete and actual history of bank holidays can be read here.

Has It Come To This?

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Yes, it has.

How did we come to lose water? I’m not entirely sure. One minute our downstairs neighbour was doing some DIY, very lustily with a loud drill, and the next moment a fire engine pulled up outside the building, lights flashing and alarms blazing, some firemen hopped out, and they spent ages fiddling around with the water supply under the street. After an hour or so they drove off, and I went to brush my teeth. But nothing came out of the tap. That was two days ago.

I’m clearly no American “Patriot” worth his salt. I had no stored water, survival straws or water de-fluoridatisation filter system. And after two days with no potable water in the apartment, something needed be done. I had long since swung into action.

Various trucks and vans came and went, day and night. Thames Water. Camden Council. The black helicopters…

I talked to the plumber from Camden Council (who are responsible for the utilities in our part of London) when he came back this afternoon, and he was very courteous and personable, but he said that although the problem has apparently now been fixed (save a massive gaping hole in the street) he needed the agreement of everyone in the building – all six households – before he could turn the supply back on.

In case one of us had left our taps on and left the building, never to return, thereby potentially causing a flood.

Problem is, only myself and one of the other apartment owners are home. The rest are away. Probably because it’s a bank holiday weekend.

I’m not sure how often this happens in real life, if at all – that people lose water pressure and then turn all of their taps on full blast before sauntering away without a care in the world to leave their homes to flood – but it apparently the horrific prospect of this very specific eventuality caused the plumber’s remote manager at Camden Council HQ to make him stand down and leave without reactivating our water supply. He is supposedly coming back at 7pm, when he will reconsider his decision to deny us the life-giving gift of water.

But I’m supposed to be going out to meet friends, and I won’t be here to talk to the plumber when he comes back, or to remonstrate with the remote, faceless managers at Camden Council over the telephone.

So some proper British passive-aggressivism was obviously required.

Strongly Worded Letter
Strongly Worded Letter
Seriously, come on…
Because digging a big hole in the street outside our apartment building and then driving away again doesn’t really fix the ultimate problem.
Although maybe if I pour enough bottled water down into this abyss, I will be able to flush my toilet one more time...
Although maybe if I pour enough bottled water down into this abyss, I will be able to flush my toilet one more time…

There, that should do the trick.

“Patriot” Watch, Ctd. 2

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NEWSFLASH FROM INFOWARS – Throngs of black people, filled with anti-white racism by MSNBC, are forming mobs and going around targeting “domesticated, docile” whites and brutally attacking them in broad daylight. You can most likely see it going on outside your window right now, if you take a look. And of course, if you just see a calm street scene, it’s probably a fake, government-projected hologram beamed down from space to fool you into thinking that everything is normal while they ruthlessly take over the world.

From last Thursday’s show:

 

You want the segment from 2 hours 46 minutes onwards, in which our intrepid host Alex Jones, livid at the injustice he sees going on around him, fulminates:

But then there’s epidemics all over the country of black folks who have been so filled with racism by MSNBC that whites are inherently racist and evil, that groups of black people, like what the Klan used to do to blacks, are now beating up whites, who are so domesticated – on record, including newspaper people – they roll over and flop around on the ground, so I guess they deserve it in some way. And this is happening all over the country.

And the media have articles about ‘struggling with reporting it’! Cause maybe it’s… maybe we deserve it! Maybe whites should all walk out, in public, and slit their throats! Find a black person, then grab a big double-edged knife and then just go “cchhhuh-aaaaaah! Whites die! I’m evil! Bluuugh! Gluuurgh!” And then just spray blood everywhere, and go “bleeeeeh” and just bleed out, and then Chris Matthews will dance in the blood, and it’ll be a big celebration…

I mean, because… whites are being murdered, tortured, killed, attacked, all over the country, and there’s never going to be a candle-light vigil, the news won’t even say that it’s blacks doing it. And again, I love black people! But there are racist black people full of this whole thing, and it’s all the media trying to create division in this country.

Alex Jones from InfoWars.com, acting out the dystopian vision of MSNBC
Alex Jones from InfoWars.com, acting out the dystopian vision of MSNBC

The thing is, Alex Jones actually is not a racist. I have now watched many hours of his show, and I do not believe him to be racist at all. In many ways, he’s probably actually quite a good man. He’s just either a) batshit insane, or b) a masterful…entrepreneur (to be charitable) who convinces himself of the worthiness of his own rhetoric enough so that he can sound sufficiently authentic to wring money from the wallets of his gullible subscribers with his rants about the coming New World Order.

But yes. White people sacrificing themselves in front of black people, and Chris Matthews from MSNBC coming to dance in the blood. This is totally about to happen all across the country right now.

Be prepared.

 

UPDATE (16:56, 05/05/2013) – How can you not love this picture of Chris Matthews and Al Sharpton, taken from the LA Times?

( Scott Eells / Bloomberg / April 27, 2013 )
( Scott Eells / Bloomberg / April 27, 2013 )

UKIP Panic Sets In

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Nigel Farage UKIP voting

 

Yesterday I wrote about the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and the way in which they have transformed themselves over just a few years from being an upstart fringe party full of “fruitcakes and closet racists” (thanks, David Cameron) into a populist, compelling electoral force to be reckoned with.

I set out the reasons why I think that UKIP offer a compelling manifesto, and how they may well escape the usual fate suffered by smaller parties in general elections, i.e. falling back into obscurity, single-digit vote shares and zero parliamentary representation.

Evidently other people see the writing on the wall for the traditional Labour/Conservative/LibDem trifecta too, and none do so with more trepidation than loyal-but-ideologically-compromised traditional Conservative supporters, who rather than re-examining and changing their own faulty policies would rather destroy the newcomers who make them look bad by comparison.

Cue this hit piece from Mary Riddell, writing in The Telegraph. She thunders:

So consider, this morning, what a Ukip Britain would look like. it would be a locked-down land, armed to the hilt, where good foreigners were repelled and bad ones expelled, no questions asked. It would be a country concreted over for extra jails (though never for high speed rail lines). It would be a quaint place – an old curiosity shop of matrons and smoking rooms.

It would be a nation of wild spending, of derisory taxes for the rich and – not least because all talk of climate change would be abandoned – a country programmed for ruin. Welcome to Mr Farage’s Britain.

That future should not only alarm Ed Miliband. It should horrify us all.

More insidiously, she continues the old-guard Tory attempt to paint UKIP as the British National Party in a pin-stripe suit disguise, warning:

Moreover, today’s results are the first sign that Britain is far from immune to the lurch towards extremism that has shadowed other European countries and been exacerbated by recession. For sure, Ukip is no Golden Dawn and Mr Farage no dangerous rabble-rouser. Even so, his party’s performance invites comparison with the progress made by Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France.

If UKIP is no dangerous party and it’s leader no Jean-Marie or Marine Le Pen, why is Liddell then inviting comparison with those very same people and entities? Such a heinous accusation, so innocuously put. And of course the answer is as obvious as the motive of her rhetoric is tawdry – you can put two groups together in the same sentence and protest loudly that you are not comparing one with the other, but all that people will take away and remember is that UKIP and the far right are somehow associated.

Note also the total lack of any evidence to back up her words. Is Mary Riddell being serious? From where is she conjuring this nightmarish dystopia of a UKIP-ruled Britain? Certainly not from their own manifesto, which reads like a broadly libertarian (though a touch too socially authoritarian) set of policies that many Tories and centrists could get behind.

If she is choosing to smear UKIP based on some of their whackier supporters or representatives, she should remember that less mature parties have a harder time screening their candidates as they work to develop a national presence, and that there are plenty of thoroughly cringeworthy people in the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat ranks, too.

I was a UKIP doubter once, but now I’m not so sure. Their advocacy of smaller government, more competition and less regulation in both private and state sectors, and a flat tax are all very appealing to me. If the Conservative Party and their allies in the right wing media want to keep my loyalty and win my vote at the 2015 general election, the surefire way to fail in that task is to tell me that I am an ignorant reactionary being seduced by a borderline nationalist outfit favoured only by curtain-twitchers, closet racists and little-Englanders.

Mary Liddell and her ilk would do well to remember that.

 

UPDATE (16.25PM) – I took a closer look at the article byline and realised that Mary Riddell is actually a Labour supporting journalist, so my mistake. Of course, she has her own reasons for wishing to bash UKIP. What actually makes my misunderstanding funnier, and even more pertinent, is that her words could be so easily confused with those of any right-leaning journalist or commentator wringing their hands at the rise of UKIP.