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| Pakistan official's house bombed Militants in Pakistan blow up the house of a local official, killing him and five members of his family, policed say. news.bbc.co.uk |
Tokyo Seeks Edge in Trading Race The Tokyo Stock Exchange is set to launch a high-tech replacement to it creaky trading platform after years of embarrassing trading gaffes. online.wsj.com |
Singh Vows to Allow Vote Abroad Indian Prime Minister Singh said he wants to give the millions of Indians who reside abroad the right to vote in time for national elections in 2014. online.wsj.com |
Rush Limbaugh enters race to the bottom on Haiti | DD Guttenplan That Rush Limbaugh could claim the Haitian tragedy was 'made to order' for Obama shows how crazed the US right has becomeIn the race to say something stupid about the tragedy in Haiti, the competition has been fierce. A proud British entry, John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, spent a full five minutes yesterday waffling on the Today Programme in response to an increasingly bewildered John Humphrys asking him how he reconciled belief in a loving God with the devastation. Then another man of the cloth, US Christian fundamentalist preacher Pat Robertson, weighed in with a history lesson: back in the 19th century, the Haitian people "got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, OK it's a deal."And while it is easy, and even necessary, for the sake of sanity, to remind ourselves that Pat Robertson is a deluded old man who also thought that the attacks on the World Trade Centre were divine retribution for the legalisation of abortion and gay marriage, and that Hurricane Katrina was just God's way of evening up the score after too much bonne temps roulez on Bourbon Street, the same can't be said of the most promising entrant so far in this dismal race to the bottom. Rush Limbaugh may be a recovering painkiller addict, but he's also the chief ideologue of the Republican party in the US. With his fellow shock-jock Glenn Beck, Limbaugh has waged a fierce and largely successful campaign to drive the few remaining moderates out of the party. So when he says that Americans should feel no need to contribute to Haitian Earthquake relief, since "We've already donated to Haiti. It's called the US income tax," it matters.Limbaugh has his own pathology, and you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to think that a man in whose luggage DEA agents found a bottle of Viagra on his way back from a trip to the Dominican Republic might have picked another way to express his disdain for the Haitian people than by observing last year: "Haiti? You can't even pick up a prostitute down there without genuine fear of Aids." But crude racism – the same crude racism that scotched Limbaugh's plans to buy the St Louis Rams football team – is only part of what's going on here.It's true that a certain kind of white person will never forgive the Haitians for freeing themselves from the French – just as another kind of person, white or black, will recall that same glorious history as one of the reasons not to write off Haiti or the Haitians. (And if you have any interest in the history, I urge you to read CLR James's great The Black Jacobins, published more than 50 years ago and still one of the best books about Haiti ever written.) But it's also a sign of how crazed the American right has become that Limbaugh could claim the Haitian earthquake was "made to order" for Obama because it would allow the president to "burnish his credibility … with both light-skinned and black-skinned" African Americans.Now there are plenty of reasons to be disappointed with Obama – we write about them every week in the Nation. But you'd need more than a serious OxyContin habit to think Obama needs any burnishing among African Americans. No, what Rush is really doing is what he gets paid for: speaking aloud the things his millions of dittohead followers would love to say, but know they shouldn't. Will this make some Americans switch him off? It would be pretty to think so. Even prettier to think that millions more will be outraged enough to give to Haitian relief.But you needn't remain a bystander in this fight. Limbaugh's employer, Premier Radio, is a subsidiary of Clear Channel, the largest provider of outdoor advertising in the UK. It would probably be unlawful to scribble "Shut Up Rush" on all their billboards, but you could certainly make your feelings known by telephone (+4420 7478 2200) to their offices at Golden Square – or via their corporate website.HaitiRadio industryUnited StatesNatural disasters and extreme weatherDD Guttenplanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
'I'm Scott Brown. I drive a truck' How the former Cosmopolitan centrefold became Ted Kennedy's Republican successorIn a different political climate, Scott Brown's history as a semi-nude centrefold model might have impeded his chances of winning a Senate seat, while his apparent fixation with his pickup truck might have marked him out as an unserious candidate.So it is surely a sign of the scale of the crisis facing the Democrats that the photos never posed any problem, while the truck — which Brown mentioned as frequently as possible during his notably substance-free campaign speeches — was apparently all he required to transport him to one of the biggest electoral upsets in recent American history."I'm Scott Brown. I'm from Wrentham. I drive a truck. And I'm nobody's senator but yours," he told supporters late on Tuesday, after becoming the first Republican elected to a senate seat in Massachusetts since the early 1970s. After that, it was a matter of hours before the rightwing gadfly Matt Drudge was asking "Now — will he run for president?" That was premature.But there was no doubting that in winning the seat formerly occupied by Ted Kennedy and imperilling Barack Obama's healthcare reform plans, Cosmopolitan's Sexiest Man of 1982 was once again looking, to Republican eyes, very attractive indeed.Brown's run was lent further glamour by the fact that he is married to a local television celebrity, Gail Huff, while Ayla, one of this two daughters, was a semifinalist on American Idol in 2007. He repaid his daughters' help during the campaign with a discomfiting comment at his victory party — "for anybody who's watching throughout the country: yes, they're both available" — before being reminded that one had a boyfriend. "Arianna's definitely not available, but Ayla is," he corrected himself.The 50-year-old Brown, currently a state senator, styled himself an "independent thinker", but most of those thoughts seemed to concern his 2005 GMC Canyon pickup. Coupled with stump-speech appearances in work shirts and jeans, it was a straightforwardly populist strategy, but it proved perfectly sufficient. When Obama, on a last-minute trip to the state, told a crowd that Brown had "parked his truck on Wall Street", Brown matched the president's wit: "When he criticised my truck, that's where I draw the line."He was vocal in his opposition to national healthcare reform, rightly spotting that residents of Massachusetts, who have near-universal insurance already, had little to gain and much to lose in the form of higher taxation. But he sought to avoid dwelling on his socially conservative positions — he has frequently enraged gay-rights campaigners, at one point describing an opponent's decision to have children as "not normal".He did cause anger in many quarters when he said that he did not believe waterboarding was torture, and argued that court trials of alleged terrorists were undesirable: "It's time we stopped acting like lawyers and started acting like patriots," he said. But he let the economic and political climate, and incompetent campaigning of his Democratic rival, Martha Coakley, do much of the rest of the work.With the wind at his back, Brown proved easily able to weave a childhood shoplifting incident into an uplifting campaign biography. After being caught stuffing record albums into his farmer's overalls in the town of Salem when he was 12, he said, the local judge gave him a stern-but-inspiring talking to, which kept him ethical for life. "I was kind of a jerk. I had issues," he has said, recounting a childhood in which his parents divorced when he was a year old. Each went on to remarry three times.A long-distance runner and former college basketball star, Brown's crowd-pleasing sporting prowess contrasted sharply with a gaffe in which Coakley appeared to scorn the Boston Red Sox, a crime without parallel in Massachusetts. Every other day or so, Brown told the Boston Globe, he rises at 5am, jumps in a lake to swim for a mile, "then [I] hop on a bike and do a quick 10 miles, and then run three." "You don't see anything — it's Cosmo, not Playgirl," he told the Globe when asked about the centrefold photos, for which he was paid $1,000 at age 22.Twenty-eight years later, as he prepares to drive his truck to Washington as Ted Kennedy's Republican successor, it is Obama and the Democrats who are left looking embarrassingly exposed.US CongressRepublicansEdward KennedyDemocratsUS politicsUnited StatesUS healthcareObama administrationBarack ObamaOliver Burkemanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |