Really, we should have a better anthem than Flower of Scotland. It's a pretty rotten and, in some senses, sentimental dirge. Just occasionally, however, it aspires to be something bigger and better than that. March 17th 1990 was one such day:

This weekend, for sure, the stakes aren't nearly as high. Defeat merely means yet another infuriating and pedestrian championship. We've been here before. Even victory, mind you, hardly transforms the season even if, despite results, there are signs Andy Robinson is making some progress. As for England? Well, who cares? Sure, if any]]> Alex Massie 2010-03-12T13:26:48+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/5835401/the-hurt-locker-the-fast-show-and-david-cameron.thtml Think Defence has some fun with this video, suggesting that it's a British version of The Hurt Locker. But actually, it's also a mini-exemplar of some of the debates currently being heard in Tory circles. From the perspective of the Tory grass roots and true believers, the officer in charge here not only looks like David Cameron, he proceeds with the same degree of muddling caution they find so frustrating.

The Hefferite and chuntering wing of the party is more in tune with the "Sod this" type of robust approach - especially, though far from exclusively, when it comes to cutting public spending. But getting away with this in a Fast Show sketch isn't quite the same as getting away with it in a real-life general election campaign...

As we were driving in, I was saying, boy, it's just good to be back in the Midwest, this is about as close as I've been to home in a while.  And part of the reason it's just good to be back is because Washington is a place where tax dollars are often treated like Monopoly money -- they're bartered and traded, and they're divvied up among lobbyists and special interests, and where waste -- even billions of dollars of waste -- is accepted as the price of doing business.  When we proposed, by the way, those $20 billion in cuts last year, we were ridiculed by the press, said, "Ah, that's just a spit in the bucket."  Now, I don't know about here in St. Charles, $20 billion, that's real money, isn't it?

Instead, the papers and the teevee have been dominated by Ashcroft and the Tory wobble. In a sense this was a verdict on the government too: since few people expected Labour to win, it's sensible to tak a long look at the opposition. But this leads to a yo-yo situation: the more the polls narrow the more attention must and will swing back to Labour and, thus, to the Prime Minister himself. At which point my guess is that the Tories will begin to pull away again...

It's not obvious that Gordon is a Labour asset. When the Prime Minister starts arguing that:

"I have heard people say it is about policy and I have heard other people say it is about

Subjects that interested him [Gordon Brown] - such as welfare reform, employment and poverty- received enormous attention. Ministers in areas which did not engage him, such as financial regulation, barely saw him. Ruth Kelly, a young and abl junior miniter put in charge of the City, was labelled a Brownite by the media simply because she worked at the Treasury. In fact the City minister had one ten-minute conversation with Brown a fortnight after her appointment and then did not have another one-to-one conversation with him for two years.

If the Tories aren't compiling a "Rawnsley Dossier" cataloguing Brown's errors, character flaws and general dreadfulness then, well, they really should be.

Meanwhile, I'm somewhat perplexed by her estimation of American power. She writes:

And why, once again, is a final solution being imposed by America upon democratic and beseiged Israel, while the administration of which Biden is such an ornament refuses to take any effective measures against the genocidal Iranian regime which is already responsible for countless American deaths and of which Israel is the present and potentially future victim, and which threatens the safety of the western world against which it has long declared war?

[Sir Christopher] Meyer [then British ambassador to Washington] had done his best to cultivate relationships with the Bush team. Karl Rove, Bush's senior political strategist sent both encouragement and a warning, via Meyer: "You're going to start with a blank sheet of paper. By your works shall ye be known."

It's going to be an awful campaign, awful. Yesterday we were at Labour HQ (they still have a smart new building in Westminster, but after the election they may move to a scout hut in Streatham) to see a video.

It was introduced by the home secretary and by Harriet Harman, glossier than ever. Her eyes were like French-polished lentils. I spoke to colleagues afterwards, and we agreed that she seemed to be staring balefully at each of us. Like a very cross Mona Lisa, her eyes follow you round the room.

Alan Johnson has been buried deep in the Home Office for months now. Few politicians ever emerge from that Bastille oubliette, and if they do get out, they gibber about wanting to live naked in the woods, eat wild fungi, and weave baskets from osiers.

But Mr Johnson looked perky – and even shinier than Ms Harman. He had shiny white hair, a shiny grey suit and a shiny silver tie. He looked like the host at an ice-dancing contest.

They wanted us to look again at Tory policy on

Defections from Blue Dogs in Red States are one thing; threats from safely-ensconsed left-wingers for whom the bill doesn't go far enough are quite another. Verily, there will be much lamentation if the left kills the bill and thoughts will quickly turn to vengeance.

So will the damn thing pass or not? Jonathan Bernstein says he thinks it will, Karlyn Bowman says it would be remarkable if it does, given the ferocity of the opposition to the bill, leading Megan McArdle to act as umpire:

They're both right!  Where does that leave us?  At a defining moment in American legislative history . . . the Mothra v. Godzilla, irresistable force v. immovable object, rock v. hard place of policymaking.  It can't pass and it can't fail.  Yet it must do one or the other.

Helpfully, Mark Benjamin has a piece at Salon explaining how it really works:

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out