For liberals, Obama is a mixture of the Queen, Moses, and God - a BBC programme proves it

An English “artist” (if you’re wondering about the quotation marks, just look at Nicola Green’s “art” here) accompanied Barack Obama on the campaign trail back in 2008, from his nomination speech to his inauguration. According to her website:

Using the wealth of source material she gathered and inspired by what Obama's achievement would mean for her own mixed race children, Nicola produced seven iconic silkscreen images, entitled ‘In Seven Days…’.

Conservative man don't need her around anyhow - Madonna insults her fans

NEW ORLEANS — Madonna drew boos and triggered a walkout by several concertgoers after she touted President Barack Obama on her "MDNA Tour" in New Orleans.

Is Joe Biden mad – or is he just a horrible human being?

So your immensely brave US Navy SEAL son has been killed in Benghazi by evil Stone Age death cultists, while trying to protect the life of an American ambassador. At an event to mark the return of your boy’s body, the Vice-President of America approaches you, and, in a loud and boisterous voice, asks: “Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?”

My congratulations to Charles Woods on his self-control: the temptation to deck the unbelievably crude, stupid, insensitive sonofabitch must have been overwhelming.

“Ηeya i'm for the primary time here” - the weird and wonderful world of spam comments

I was just about to delete all the mail in my junk folder when I realised just how many were from spammers automatically posting pseudo-comments on my blog. Fortunately, Google removes most of them before they actually reach the Comments section at the bottom of each post, so my readers don’t have to wade through them. The vast majority consist of illiterate, non-specific praise for one's efforts:

Prеtty! This has been an extremely wonderful artіcle.
Many thanκs fоr ρгоviding this info.

According to the BBC, every economic silver lining has a dirty great big cloud attached to it

Stephanie Flanders, BBC Economics Editor: Terrible news on GDP!

BBC Economics Producer: What? It shrank?

SF: No, it’s gone up by one percent.

EP: Tory bastards – can’t trust ‘em an inch. Mind you, one percent. That’s not much, is it?

SF: No, but it’s better than expected. What are we going to do?

The plant that smells more like curry than curry

If you fancy a weird botanical experience, visit Kew Gardens on a relatively mild day when there isn’t much wind and stroll down The Broad Walk from the Orangery restaurant towards Victoria Gate. As you pass by the Princess of Wales Conservatory, the smell of curry will be so strong, you’ll be looking around for the Indian restaurant it must be emanating from.

Broadcasting's basic rule : if you've got a tricky job to do - hide behind some junior patsy

In a comment on a recent Jimmy Savile-related post (which you can read here), fellow-blogger David Moss quotes the 2008 recollections of a former radio producer on the perils faced by editorial staff dealing with front-of-camera “stars” at the BBC. Jenni Russell’s Guardian account of how senior executives will happily sacrifice more junior members of a production team rather than confront poor performance or unacceptable behaviour brought back some decidedly unpleasant memories:

How Alfred Hitchcock went from zero to hero in the 1930s

I’ve spent far too much time over the past few days watching black and white movies on YouTube. This came about because I was watching my all-time favourite entertainment film, Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, on TV the other day  (for at the least the 30th time – maybe 35th), and not for the first time wondering how the fat little Londoner had ever come to produce something so astonishingly perfect. I’d always assumed that his genius must have been evident in his earlier movies - but realised, just as Hannay was standing up to demand "What are the 39 steps?" that I'd barely seen any of them.

Jimmy Savile, Panorama, Newsnight and the smoking gun question

As a former BBC TV News employee, I watched tonight's Panorama on the corporation's handling of the Savile scandal with enormous interest - and it certainly confirmed some of my suspicions.

Romney is a commie - be warned!

Caroline Glick shreds Obama's "childish, irrational" posturing over the Middle East

You have to feel sorry for Lebanon. Yesterday, its tourism minister was threatening to sue the makers of the American thriller series, Homeland, for its "serious misrepresentation" of Beirut as "a city of Kalshnikovs and war" - only for a car bomb to explode near the offices of the anti-Damascus Christian Falangist party earlier today, killing eight people and wounding 80 more. The assumption is that Syria - or its supporters inside Lebanon - were responsible, and there are fears that this could be the start of yet another war. 

15-year old Angus Whittall was the victim of an unprovoked attack – guess what happened to his attacker

So, you’re a 17-year old walking down a country lane in Northamptonshire. You see a younger boy coming towards you on crutches (he’d just had a knee operation). Unprovoked, you attack the boy, beating him so severely with his own crutches that he needs 12 stitches for a gash in his mouth. The police arrest you and charge you with actual bodily harm. Just before your court case, the CPS decide that prosecuting you would “not be in the public interest”, and you’re given a “final warning” by the police instead.

At last - the second half of my list of rockabilly favourites!

It’s been almost three years since the world learned the identity of my ten favourite rockabilly records (check the list out here). At that time I promised to reveal the next ten, but never got round to it. Well, the time has come (mainly because I’ve got a streaming cold and my brain has turned to mush). I’ve excluded the obvious names entirely this time – no Elvis or Carl Perkins, Charlie Feathers or Johnny Burnette. While the following performers are dead famous in rockabilly fan circles, it’s extremely unlikely you’ll have heard of any of them (you can thank me for introducing you to them later).

Is Leftism the world's most dynamic religion? I think Dennis Prager may be on to something

Dennis Prager

The most annoying thing about being right-wing is that despite our side having been demonstrably correct about most things for decades - education, immigration, the economy, crime and punishment, Europe etc. - the Left still controls everything (apart from our thoughts, and they’re working on that). Worse, when these serial bunglers put forward their latest bonkers proposal, they behave as if everything they’ve previously advocated hasn’t resulted in disaster when implemented. What is it that allows them to maintain their self-belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

Lucky, lucky Ilfracombe - they'll spend the next 20 years staring at Damien Hirst's pregnant monstrosity

I'm definitely going private next time 

Why is a public sector agency advising us to spend money on stuff we really can’t afford?

The current list of the top 30 things I'd like to see banned

Any further mention of the Hillsboro disaster.

Films featuring sexually active old people. (I mean - why?)

Leaving flowers at the scene of tragedies.

The Tuskegee Airmen - the black WWII American fighter pilots who proved they had the Right Stuff

I can’t recommend the fourth episode in Lord Ashcroft’s series about WWII fighter aces, Heroes of the Skies, currently on Channel 5, highly enough. The whole series is terrific, but the tale of the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black squadron which did an effective job protecting US bombers flying over Occupied Europe was genuinely stirring. The programme is available here (I have no idea if it can be viewed abroad – apologies if it can’t).

The Jimmy Savile Memorial Library - rot in hell, you evil bastard

And that's not the only one...

"Lament for a Cricket XI" - Kenneth Allott's haunting poem about a universal fascination

Crescent Cricket Team, 1905 (copyright: Irish Jesuits)

Jimmy Savile and Peter Sutcliffe - possibly the creepiest picture I have ever seen

Hat-tip: Telegraph blogs (read full article here)

If this is a Rothko, it's the only one I've ever actually liked

A doctor running for a senate seat gives Obamacare a full rectal examination

Oh please let's have Boris Johnson as PM - at least we'd go down the tubes laughing!

Michael Deacon's parliamentary sketches are the best laugh our newspapers have to offer

Michael Deacon -star!

The Telegraph is hanging on by the skin of its teeth in the Grønmark household. If it ever loses its pocket cartoonist, the incomparable Matt, and its parliamentary sketch writer, Michael Deacon, Mrs G might just end up doing the crossword online. Mind you, until last November, when Deacon was promoted from writing about TV and books to replace Boris Johnson’s biographer  - the nice but rather dull Andrew Gimson - only Matt was keeping our subscription alive. But as long as we’re practically guaranteed two laughs to start the day, the future of this raddled old bag of a newspaper is relatively safe around these parts.

Jeff Lynne is one of Britain’s greatest songwriters and deserves a knighthood

The New Left Dictionary - so conservatives can tell what the hell liberals are droning on about

It's become increasingly apparent to me that many of us get confused when listening to left-wingers on Question Time, Newsnight and the Today Programme, or when reading the New Statesman or Guardian, or when talking to acquaintances of a liberal disposition. The problem is that they use many of the same words we do, but they seem to mean something completely different by them. Therefore I'm proposing to produce a new dictionary to help us understand what these enlightened beings are talking about. Here are a few sample entries:

God, how I loathe Microsoft!

Wanker-in-Chief

So I decide to watch a Sky Sports channel on my Mac (the Twenty20 cricket final, as you ask) and a message pops up suggesting I update my version of Silverlight, the Microsoft application (plug-in? application? who cares?) that enables users to watch Sky TV channels live on a computer. My heart sinks.

The extraordinary prescience of Clint Eastwood

The Left controls our national culture - which is why we're screwed

 Les "Access" Ebdon

I’ve become somewhat obsessed over the years by the almost total control the Left exercises over our national life - its tenor, its timbre, its essential culture. The Left now controls broadcasting, organised religion, the art establishment, the literary world, the music business, comedy, the film industry, schools, universities, the civil service, the social services, and the criminal justice system (including – bizarrely - the police). I assume that it doesn’t yet control the military – but you never know.

Apparently the real reason Obama lost the first debate is ... HE'S BLACK!

I suspect Obama lost the first debate because he’s bone idle

Doesn’t he want another four years in office? Has he been too worn down by the cares of his office to spend time preparing for the occasion? Is his record simply too abysmal to defend? Is he ill?

Why is everyone rushing to praise the Marxist Eric Hobsbawm, an apologist for mass-murderers?

A "great" supporter of mass murderers

I'll admit to being perplexed by the sycophantic encomiums from all parts of the political spectrum being lavished on the Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm (or Frogspawn as I seem to remember he was known at Cambridge). I foolishly thought that right-wingers and conservatives would be united in their disdain for an academic who escaped Nazi oppression only to wind up claiming that, in order for communism to succeed, it would have been worth the death of 10 or 15 million people (as opposed to the minimum of a hundred million who actually died).

Why do perfectly innocent letters from the Inland Revenue almost give me a heart attack?

Whenever I receive a letter from the Inland Revenue, I shrug casually, set it aside for a few days, and then, when I’m good and ready, open it calmly, half-smiling to myself, read it through carefully, decide what needs doing and then, whistling cheerfully, go and do it. There you go. Sorted. If only!

We've been living with my wife's dragon for the last seven weeks

Jimmy Saville, Gay Marriage, Ed Balls and Keith Vaz MP – well, blow me down!

Some days, the world seems to tilt on its axis before you’ve had time to make it through your first cup of tea. This morning’s paper was full of reports which – should they prove to be true – would seem to make a nonsense of so many of the beliefs that underpin our national life.