The Aged P

We have had another surfeit of apples so The Lovely Mrs P has made some more SPICED APPLE CHUTNEY……so here is the recipe we published in Sept 2009…

Makes about 2 or 3 250ml/9 fluid oz jars

• 500g/18 oz apples
• 1 medium onion
• 2 birds eye red chillies
• 250g/9oz Demerara sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground allspice (not mixed spice)
• 1 teaspoon ground cloves
• half teaspoon sea salt
• black pepper
• 1 heaped tablespoon chopped or grated fresh ginger
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 350 ml/12 fluid oz cider vinegar

1. Peel and roughly chop the apples and finely chop the onion.
2. Seed the chillies and chop finely
3. Put all ingredients in a pan and bring to boil
4. Cook over a medium heat for 30/40 minutes until mixture thickens
5. Spoon into jars and, when cool, place in store cupboard

With a cheese sandwich…..Nirvana……

The BBC is certainly maxing out on the evil coalition “cuts” with reverential softballs being thrown to strutting and strident trade union fatcats (all on £100,000+pa) and gut wrenching tales of woe from “randomly selected” families etc.

The mood music is clear, the narrative set in stone with helpful clues to remind of the last bloodthirsty regime which gleefully crushed the poor and the weak into the dust…..”…deepest cuts since the Thatcher years”

Mark Serwotka, leader of the Civil Service penpushers, poured scorn on the need to cut the deficit on BBC1 “Breakfast” this morning. He demanded an increase in government spending and when Simon Jack wondered where the money would come from Serwotka, economic genius, said we should borrow it. Mr Jack, instead of laughing in his face and giving him a pair of clown’s shoes, feebly accepted this cretinous nonsense.

It might seem odd to the average Martian that the Beeb should be helping to feed the egos of these latter day Savonarolas when it is having to face industrial action from it’s own Luddites over downsizing but remember that the BBC, like the Papacy, is always interested in the long term. So soon, just after the first reports of children and old people starving to death because of Osborne’s cuts, expect a full blown crusade, spearheaded by Stephen Fry and assorted Dimblebys and Attenboroughs, showing how the masses are suffering cultural starvation through the freezing of the BBC Poll Tax.

Two slightly different articles on Governor Palin appeared recently. One, by former editor of the Harvard Crimson Steve Chapman at the Chicago Tribune, got an excellent fisking from Stacy Drake at C4P. The other, about her planned visit to Iowa, from the left wing UK Guardian was surprisingly respectful – although it did end up with a caveat from Larry Sabato – who else! – that the Democrats were chafing at the bit for a Palin nomination because even a President on the skids like Obama would win by a landslide when faced by such a polarising figure…

(I must say that if the Democrats are so certain that she would be a walkover why do their media surrogates spend so much time dissing the woman rather than Romney, Huckabee etc…but I digress)

The one figure missing from both articles was our old friend the anonymous GOP Beltway Operative who for so long has been telling Palin to stand aside and let the real men get on with it.

Where has he gone? Maybe he has had to get a real job in which he does something useful – like a bus driver or a refuse collector….who knows? Who cares?

The fact is this rather mysterious woman panders to nobody, doesn’t care who she upsets on the left or the right and follows her own star. She has no influential family network or billionaire patron, no massive staff structure thronged with consultants and advisers, has for two years been ignored and/or despised by most media pundits, insulted and demeaned by third rate scribblers, cold shouldered by her own state party and ignored by her party’s national establishment.  Nevertheless she has become one of the most influential and powerful figures in American politics.

Don’t take my word for it – I’m just an old Englishman living thousands of miles away from the action. But have a word with Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post or Roger Simon, Chief Political Columnist at  Politico. Have a look at Real Clear Politics, or even the Daily Beast. Then read Chapman’s article at the Chicago Tribune once again, work out how much he must have been paid for such garbage – and then pour yourself a generous gin and tonic to steady the nerves…..

“Grandad, Grandma – there’s a rainbow outside”

We rushed onto the street, our daughter with her camera.

“Can we go to the end of it” asked, Harry, age 5

“Not now , dear” said Grandma “but perhaps after tea if it’s still there…”

My wife was a science teacher but she also knows that puncturing a little boy’s sense of wonder with the cold, hard facts of science can wait a little while longer….

And everyone thought that the economic policy of the Democrats was pants because they were clueless about the real world….turns out there might be a perfectly rational explanation – perhaps they’re all stoned…….

A senior aide for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) was arrested Tuesday for attempting to bring marijuana into the Hart Senate Office Building, according to U.S. Capitol Police reports

The aide was Marcus Stanley, Boxer’s senior economic adviser….

h/t comment from “Bill” at Dan Riehl

Seventy years ago today 300 German bombers attacked London, killing over 400 people and leaving 1,600 badly injured – nearly all of these were ordinary civilians either in their homes or at their work.

In May 1941 London was bombed in one last massive raid, killing 1,500 people, again mainly civilians – including children, women and old folk.

During those eight months of the Blitz London had been bombed on a daily basis and several other cities had also been attacked at a cost of 43,000 dead and 51,000 seriously injured. Many urban areas had been reduced to rubble.

But after May ’41 the raids petered out. Hitler had received his first setback. His Luftwaffe bombers had caused untold misery, death and destruction – but there had been a price. Many German aircraft had been destroyed, thousands of aircrew killed or injured in what became known as The Battle of Britain.

During those few months the fate of Britain and the free world lay in the hands of a few hundred young men, pilots of Royal Air Force Fighter Command – and in those sunny September days of 1940 the ordinary people of South East England became witnesses of their bravery as they clashed against the enemy over sunlit fields…..

It was Churchill who hammered home the realities of Britain’s desperate situation once France had surrendered. Yet, without trying to cover up the risks, his speeches stiffened the sinews of his countrymen with a message of defiance against the odds – and also recognised the debt we owed to The Few, Churchill’s own description of those young men of the RAF who faced and pushed back the onslaught of what many others had defined as an irresistible force.

Today in quiet ground on the Kentish coast a pilot sits and looks out across the Channel to the coast of France. He is surrounded by the badges of the RAF Squadrons of Fighter Command involved in the Battle of Britain and, nearby, is a wall containing the names of those who made the ultimate sacrifice. This is The National Memorial to The Few.

It is a place for tears and also a place of hope for lessons to be learned – above all a place of thanksgiving for those who paid the highest price to save us from a long night of terror…. 

When you go home, tell them of us and say

For your tomorrow we gave our today

Alexandra Gutierrez, a left wing hack from Alaska, has been inducted into a highly selective Hall of Fame – but first some background……

Liberal website Slate needed a local take on the Alaska GOP Senate primary so they hired Alexandra Gutierrez, news director at KUCB, a non commercial Alaskan radio station to do some good, old fashioned shoe leather research. They reasoned that her background knowledge and contacts would provide a better feel for the way the race was going .

Alexandra didn’t disappoint. She cut to the chase by tracking down Ivan Moore, an independent pollster based in Anchorage and asking him his assessment of the contest between the Palin/Tea Party endorsed outsider Joe Miller and the incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Moore’s polling predicted that Miller was heading for a crushing defeat and the reasons were crystal clear. According to Moore Miller was being dragged down by his association with the Tea Party

“From the very beginning, he has positioned himself so far to the right of the ideological spectrum and attached himself to the Tea Party movement, which even in Alaska is perceived as being a pretty extreme right organization,”

But for Moore the biggest drag anchor was the Palin endorsement. Polling consistently showed that Alaskans did not think much of Palin, said Moore.

“When someone with those kinds of numbers endorses someone for public office, believe me, the effect is on the whole negative,”

Gutierrez agreed with that appraisal. In a separate article for “Prospect” she dismissed Palin as yesterday’s woman.

As Sarah Palin works to become nearly ubiquitous in the Lower 48, many of her former supporters in Alaska are trying just as hard to forget her. When Joe Miller loses the primary today, hardly anyone in Alaska will be surprised that Palin’s chosen candidate did poorly. Palin’s influence in the state started to slip when she agreed to be John McCain’s running mate in August 2008, and it only eroded further when she resigned as governor last July. Now, Palin is mostly a reality TV nuisance in the very state she’s always gushing about.

So Gutierrez came up with a punchy headline for her Slate article

WHY THE CANDIDATE OF SARAH PALIN AND THE TEA PARTY EXPRESS IS LOSING IN ALASKA.

Whoops…..what a banana skin!

And the selective Hall of Fame?  Right beside Arthur Sears Henning, Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune in 1948 – DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN – and  Mohammed Saeed al-Sahar, Saddam Hussein’s Minister of Information in 2003 –    THERE ARE NO AMERICAN INFIDELS IN BAGHDAD. NEVER!

Oh and here’s a suggestion for Slate. Next time you want a prediction don’t waste a few hundred dollars on some hack from The American Prospect (“A fresh voice of committed, thoughtful, practical liberalism” – Sen. Ted Kennedy)….just do it the Roman way. Kill a chicken and look at it’s liver……..

So Sarah Palin attended a shabbaton and accepted a gift of a Jewish scroll. She spoke about her love for the Book of Esther.

The symbolism is electrifying.

Put her on the same list as Thatcher and Churchill.

Jew lovers – the sneer once again echoes across from pogroms of the past.

What’s that sound? It’s Andrew Sullivan’s head exploding.

Wait a minute. His head is still there. It’s another part of his body that’s gone.

It’s where Andrew Sullivan keeps his brains……

No more blogging for a couple of weeks. The lovely Mrs P and myself are hitching our caravan to the Toyota Verso and heading for Normandy via the Channel Tunnel. After a couple of days we head past La Rochelle and meet up at a campsite with our son and his family.

So plenty of wine, cheese and fish and, hopefully sun, sea and sand. We’ll try to take some pics to show when we return at the end of August…..meanwhile – the caravan….

and us in camping mode……

In the earliest days of the Obama presidency the UK press was as sycophantic and complicit as their colleagues in the US. But there are two important differences between newspapers in the two countries. A significant tranche of the British press is right wing and, more importantly, these papers dominate the market. Many more Brits read the Telegraph, Mail and Sun than any of the other titles.

In addition British hacks, even on the left, tend to be less obsequious to “the great and the good” and much more robust in uncovering their idiosyncrasies and misdemeanours. Politicians of all shades are generally classed on the same level as estate agents, car salesmen and lawyers – professional hucksters who will use deception and half truths to squeeze as much money as possible out of the pockets of the naive and unsuspecting.

Thus the clay like nature of Obama’s feet are beginning to be noticed over here.

The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Marbella and the complete disregard for public opinion and concerns over excessive government spending is symbolic of a far wider problem with the Obama presidency – the overarching disdain for the principles of limited government, individual liberty and free enterprise that have built the United States over the course of nearly two and a half centuries into the most powerful and free nation on earth.

The Pravda style tunnel vision of the US media in it’s attitude to the administration is also coming under the microscope…

While the liberal-dominated US mainstream media have largely ignored the story, it is all over the blogosphere and talk radio, and will undoubtedly add to the President’s free falling poll ratings. As much as the media establishment turn a blind eye to stories like this, which are major news in the international media, the American public is increasingly turning to alternative news sources, including the British press, which has a far less deferential approach towards the White House.

And the conservative backlash, initially ignored and/or belittled by the UK media, as it still is in New York and Washington, is beginning to be treated with a little more respect in London.

There is however a political revolution fast approaching Washington that is driven not by mob rule but by the power of ideas and principles, based upon the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. It is a distinctly conservative revolution that is sweeping America and is reflected in almost every poll ahead of this November’s mid-terms. It is based on a belief in individual liberty, limited government, and above all, political accountability from the ruling elites. The Obama administration’s mantra may well be “let them eat cake”, as it continues to gorge itself on taxpayers’ money, but it will be looking nervously over its shoulder as public unease mounts.

This doesn’t mean that the UK press has gone Tea Party or that every hack has sold their Obama stock. But there are slight shifts in the wind. One or two articles are even beginning to be a little bit less disdainfulof Governor Palin. Above all a newly crafted image of Obama is beginning to take shape – an empty, vacuous windbag, elevated to a position way above his experience or abilities by a claque of shifty snake oil salesmen and now spinning helplessly in the conflicting winds of gathering storms like a broken weather vane.

Here in the UK Obama might be starting to go Ozymandias……