I read with great interest that the Guardian thinks that Barack Obama “Risks sounding cocky” by outlining his plans for Presidency. This despite it being a tradition for plausible participants in a presidential election declaring “When I am president…”

Now the only difference is that McCain is not within that category.

Endeavour, comrades, to find some pity for that most wretched of creatures: the intellectual conservative.

The excellent Glenn Greenwald notes the GOP suddenly watering down their former favourite line. The loss of old standards can cast a political party adrift at the best of times {just witness the woe that has befallen the Conservative Party now their “small state” rhetoric is the exact opposite of what the public desires} but when it is one as widely despised and intellectually vapid as the Republican Party it is hard to imagine any way back out of the wilderness. To propose another Buckley as required would be an understatement and clearly insuffecient. They seem more in need of a Bernstein.

McCain supporters take on…Some McCain supporters.

Glad to see that the more rational side of McCain’s campaign are purging the nut-jobs. I wonder, though, what it is that attracted them there.

Oh yeah, and the long pause when they were asked to support their accusations amused me.

As you can probably tell, I’m not getting a lot of spare time here. Certainly not enough to write much worth reading, but neither enough to follow politics as closely as I once used to. One of the rare sites still worth delaying essays for is fivethirtyeight, which I really can not commend highly enough. They are a mixture of hard stat crunching and annecdotal excellence, of the sort you can only get from a website that has taken to both carefully analysing and amalgamating figures and sending a team all around every swing state in the country.

The results are passages like this:

So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”

Accompanied with the best consideration of the latest polling you’ll find anywhere on the internet.

I imagine that I’ll give up on them for at least two years after November but for the time being they’ve got a machine nobody else can match.

Campbell Brown attacks the root. Something that has occurred to me too.

Things are getting interesting in local government (yes, you read that correctly).  It seems as if upwards of 20 councils have money stashed away in Icelandic banks, and are going to have some difficulty accessing their deposits following the nationwide banking collapse.

I am amazed that councils deposit money in foreign banks.  There is clearly benefit in not putting all of your eggs in one basket, but a decent spread around the British banks would surely be as safe?  More safe, even, I would argue, than investing abroad.  There is little that the government can do about deposits in Iceland, whereas should the British banks suffer in the same way the government could quickly step in and bail out council deposits if nothing else.

It will be very interesting to see how the councils resolve this severe problem, but retrospective thought should at least consider keeping money in the UK.

The Scribo team (or, rather, I on behalf of the Scribo team) apologise for the lack of posting recently.  Doug and James headed to University on Saturday, and I went up on Sunday.  Freshers’ week and general business have pushed blogging slightly off the agenda, but not off the radar.  Once the lectures and work begin, diversions will doubtless become highly desirable and blogging will return.  Until such a time, allow me to spend a brief moment considering the quandary George Osborne finds himself in.

George Osborne is a conservative and he believes in small government and low spending and economic freedom.  But he is a politician and he wants to win an election in just over a year’s time.  To attempt to seek a public mandate on the back of tax cuts is always a brave move, especially when the electorate is as skeptical as we are today, but to attempt to cut tax while the economy is tanking is folly.

Like it or not, when the economy begins to crumble the electorate wants to see leadership and good government.  This, in the eyes of skeptical voters, is not adequately achieved by tax cuts and slashes to regulation of any and every sort.  Like it or not, the Tories have been forced into a corner of accepting an escape-route to the crisis that fully contradicts their fundamental beliefs.  But there is nothing else for it.  Should they oppose the government line, they would be vilified by every other party in the Commons.  And they would also be contradicting the public perception of leadership in a crisis, looking instead like they would allow the economic situation to deteriorate.  Osborne may be a conservative, but he wants to win an election.  This aim trumps all else in such a fractured time.  He is on uncomfortable ground but his position is fully understandable.

The Met are in open revolt.  Does this mean that they see Boris Johnson as an opportunity for change?

Douglas and James leave for university tomorrow; Ali also goes shortly afterwards. Posting may therefore be light for a while - we’ll try our best to keep up, but that may be overly optimistic.