Harry's Place

From the side of a paper cup from Popeyes Chicken and Biscuits:
The Legend of the Po’ Boy Sandwich
The Po’ Boy legend started in the 1920’s in New Orleans when streetcar workers went on strike. A local restaurant wanted to help these men out when they visited the restaurant and provide a lot of food for [...]

In the wake of all the French-bashing, American in Paris Adam Gopnik has a revealing piece in The New Yorker about (among other things) the French intellectuals who have, to one degree or another, defended the USA and the war to oust Saddam Hussein:
“No completely defensible cause has ever been so poorly defended as this [...]

It’s nice that even conservatives can look back now on the August 28, 1963, March on Washington and feel warm and fuzzy about it. (They didn’t at the time.) But with all the justified attention to Martin Luther King’s great speech, I’m afraid other features of that historic day have been forgotten.
For example, it was [...]

I like the idea of people transforming advertising hoardings into political statements, especially if done with a bit of imagination and wit.
But this example from Bristol, where anti-war protestors altered an IKEA ad, sums up pretty neatly what was wrong with Stop the War.
Saddam’s Iraq, the peaceful land of plenty.

Christopher Hitchens on the Ten Commandments - and the other ones.
One is presuming (is one not?) that this is the same god who actually created the audience he was addressing. This leaves us with the insoluble mystery of why he would have molded (“in his own image,” yet) a covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying, and adulterous [...]

Blairista is the first to respond to my open question – ‘what does it mean to be on the left?’ I hope others will rise to the challenge.
Andew makes a very succinct and I think highly pertinent point:
If you want to know what it means to be ‘left’ now then just think back to why [...]

The Conservatives will close down the BBC’s website and some of the new digital channels if they win the next election, the Guardian reports.
The party’s culture spokesman, John Whittingdale, said he was not persuaded of the case for a public service website nor that “the BBC needs to do all the things it is doing [...]

Left-wingerMatthew Turner’s blog has improved in my eyes immensely since he signed up for the Conservative Party. He now has his Tory Party membership card and discovers that Iain Duncan Smith is predicting a Labour victory at the next election - well, kind of.
Matthew’s reasons for joining the Conservatives were outlined here. In short - [...]

Once was a time when the Samizdata blog provided some useful food for thought. Of course I have never found much to agree with their ultra-libertarian, anarcho-capitalism nor their silly swastika on the flag approach to the EU, but at least the blog did provide a taste of what the leftovers of hardcore Thatcherism were [...]

Oliver Kamm from London has left blogspot behind and now has a smart green new home.
His admirers will be glad that nothing else has changed though - two of his first four articles on his new site are about the Liberal Democrats.
That seems to be becoming Oliver’s specialist subject. I am noticing this with [...]