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Sitting having a drink last night and who should pop by but those crazy boys from RESPECT, in what I think was once called a 'battle-bus'. Funnily enough just out of shot on the right of the picture was a large group of London4Ken supporters.
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Via Harry's Place (comments) I saw reference to this startling article by Nick Cohen back in 2002 where he says the claims of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress to left-wing support were more than that of the ANC. It appears therefore not just half of Washington but also our foremost investigative journalist was taken in my Chalabi, who basically it appears was giving US secrets to the Iranians (there are obvious claims and counter-claims about his behaviour, but if you read (say) Josh Marshall you get the idea that most of the main claims are true).
Worse still, if this Nick Cohen (and it might not be, but it's bylined London and Observer) is the same Nick Cohen (who at the time retained a critical eye on the actions of the US government ) who said:
Which makes it very strange is that the US government, in the shape of the State Department, is currently doing all it can to shut down the only reliable pro-Western source of intelligence on Saddam’s dictatorship; the clandestine information collection programme run by the Iraqi National Congress (INC).
Some minor comments.
1. Ronald Reagan. I imagine history will think much less of Reagan than it appears now, but on the whole I had rather a soft spot for him. Obviously after 1986 things went downhill, and he probably should have been impeached over Iran-Contra, but until then he managed to avoid making any huge mistakes. On most issuse I, like most Europeans, tend to emphasise too much the President's power and not enought those in Congress, and in the domestic field it's hard to really think of anything particularly bad or good that you can hold Reagan responsible for. Brad De Long suggests his deficits cut growth by a non-neglible amount, but there's too many 'what ifs' to make much of this, I would think.
In foreign policy a President has more power and here is record is decidely mixed. In Lebanon he behaved in exactly the way American conservatives (wrongly) charged the Spanish with behaving in the face of terrorist attacks - he cut and run. In Latin & South America his policies were particularly poor, and over Iran-Contra criminal. That leaves his big moment, which was victory in the cold war. Again this has probably been overstated, with the benefit of hindsight the Soviet Union was always going to be in trouble in the 1980s and 1990s, with its economy grinding to a halt. Nevertheless Reagan deserves some credit for sticking to the simple prescription of freedom vs evil (however flawed that was) and not making a bodge of things when arms control offers were made.
Finally of course no-one can fail to be touched by Nancy Reagan's devotion to her late husband over the last ten years (and before) and one can only hope that once the great sadness of the present has lessened she can now have a fulfilling life in the years remaining to her.
2. The death of a BBC cameraman and the serious injuries sustained by reporter Frank Gardiner in a shooting in Saudi Arabia. This terrible news reminds us again, as we sit typing away in the safety of our homes, the risks that foreign correspondents face just doing their jobs. It also reminds us that though I like to laugh at those on the Right whgo believe journalists should be tortured (professionally IIRC) merely for disagreeing with them over the best way to fight terrorists, it's actually not a laughing matter.
3. Barcelona is possibly my favourite city in Europe (except British ones). The idea of plonking a huge city next to a beach is audacious, and brilliant.
Bob, Nick, Dave and Richard (update: and Peter - five, oh yes!),
I'm going off to sunny Spain (British air traffic control permitting) for the weekend so there'll be no posts. Apologies an' all that, but that's just the way it is.
Yours
Matt
Nick Barlow notes that Matthew Yglesias has finally solved the mysteries of George W Bush:
As in physics, where quantum field theory and general relativity coexist uneasily, we yearn for a grand unified theory of Bushism that would put the two halves of the agenda together. Now, at last, with the revelation that Ahmad Chalabi has been passing intelligence information to the regime in Iran, the opportunity presents itself to construct just such a unified theory. The truth, hard as it is to accept, is that Bush is an Iranian agent.
Melanie Phillips, who believes that every educated person in this country who opposed the invasion of Iraq believes it was 'cooked up by the Jews', now explainsthe story of Ahmed Chalabi. Approvingly quoting another website,
'In a way, the Americans and the Iranians used Chalabi for their own purposes. The Iranians used him to screen information from the Americans more than to give false information. The Americans used him to try to convince the Iranians that they had a sufficient degree of control over the situation and that it was in their interests to maintain stability in the Shiite regions. At this point, it is honestly impossible to tell who got the better of whom. But this much is certain. Chalabi, for all his cleverness, is just another used-up spook, trusted by no one, trusting even fewer. Geopolitics trumps conspiracy every time.'
Unfortunately, the ideologues, fellow travellers and dupes of the anti-war lobby have got this precisely the other way round.
Now the UKIP fight back. Howard is "stop gap" leader and the Conservative party is "tired", with as many "cranks" as the UKIP.
Where will it all end? This dreadful poster? (Note by the way the strange logic -- we are members of the EU, our unemployment is much lower than (a selective) set of EU countries, so we must leave). .
Another in an occasional series which notes with shock (not!) about how the pro-war types are trying to blame the left for the Iraq debacle.
Today "Phomesy", commenting on a post on Harry's Place:
"Part of the whole problem was that in the lead up to war much needed discussion on the post war reconstruction simply never happened because the argument was about whther to go to war in the goddamn first place. "
Have you heard the latest madness, on a par with banning bananas for being too curved? Victorial plums have to be 38mm in size, unmarked, with a stalk. If they don't meet this, despite being perfectly edible they are 'graded out', and thrown away, a proportion that often accounts for 35% of the total.
Over at Harry's Place, Marcus Laughton takes issue with a recent Polly Toynbee column linking obesity with inequality. In particularly, citing evidence from another blogger, he notes that there appears no relationship between inequality and obesity, with the most unequal societies in Latin America and Africa often the least obese, and with a handy little chart to show this.
Well go figure, but the argument is obviously not about developing countries. Inequality in such countries often means going hungry, so it's not surprisingly the incidence of obesity is somewhat low. The argument, based on (amongst other things) access to cheap junk food, is clearly about rich countries.
Running the data only on what used to be the OECD, and now I think is the "core OECD", things look a little different. 
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The relationship is certainly not perfect, but there does seem to be a weak one. It's somewhat skewed by the extremities, with the most unequal country having the most obese people (America, as Toynbee says) while the least unequal with the least obese people (Japan). The former obviously supports Toynbee's argument, while the latter probably doesn't.
But no-one was saying that there weren't other factors involved, as Japan's position implies. It is worth remembering that inequality data (and I imagine obesity data) is pretty inaccurate. And there has been published academic work which supports and refutes Toynbee's position. But let's deal with the argument, rather than a misrepresented one.
Telegraph editorial today criticises John Prescott for saying "we need" half a million new houses, saying that this is socialist planning akin to incomes policies and the three-day week. It notes that Ministers do not say how many cars we should manufacture (did they ever?) but they still feel we should do this with housing.
All fair enough, one might think. Then however it says that the solution is devolution to local communities, where they can weigh up the claims of affordable housing and preey hedgerows.
But of course this is MORE government intervention, just at the local level. What the Telegraph should really be calling for, it if believes its opening paragraph, is for removal of all planning regulations. Currently due to them building land sells for £2.76m per hectare, 300 times more than the value of agricultural land, which fetches a mere £9,122. Remove them and you would see what the market would do with the land, and I can tell you that it might be a somewhat extreme version of what the Telegraph says:
"has been a sudden and irreversible transformation of our landscape, with large parts of Kent, Surrey, Susses, Berkshire and Hertfordshire becoming a more or less continous metropolis"
Clearly there are good reasons not to do this totally, but spare us the lectures on free markets please!
Untruths varnished
