• Ministers will talk to staff at a hospital in home counties • Nick Clegg rules out any moves towards privatising NHS David Cameron and Nick Clegg are joining forces with Andrew Lansley to launch the government’s “listening exercise” on the controversial NHS reforms amid conflicting signals from within the coalition. The three ministers will answer questions from medical staff at a hospital in the home counties as they seek to show that the government is responding to concerns about plans to hand 60% of the NHS budget to GP-led consortiums. Lansley was forced to take the rare step on Monday of making a statement to MPs, during the middle of a passage of a bill through parliament, to announce that the government would “pause” proceedings to listen to people’s concerns. Amid fears in Downing Street that Lansley’s failure to explain the reforms has provoked a damaging backlash, the health secretary said that the government would reassure voters in a series of areas. Ministers will show that the GP-led consortiums would be transparent, accountable, properly overseen and that the reforms would not allow private providers to “cherry pick” the most lucrative NHS services. Lansley appeared to indicate that the changes would not be far-reaching when he said the health and social care bill would be amended “in the normal way” when it is revived, probably in mid June. But Clegg made clear on Tuesday that major changes would have to be made. “This is a question of making substantive changes to the legislation at the end of this two-month process,” the deputy prime minister told Radio 4′s The World at One. “For example, we have talked about the governance of GP consortia. That is one area that we are clearly going to look at. But the other area where there have been concerns is the role of the private sector in the NHS. I absolutely do not want, and would never accept, any scheme which could lead to the privatisation of the NHS. We are not going to privatise the NHS. We are not going to flog off bits of the NHS to the highest bidder and we don’t want the private sector simply to cherry pick the easy bits, undermining the integrity of the NHS.” The deputy prime minister agrees with Cameron that Lansley is guilty of a spectacular failure to communicate a core message: that the NHS must be reformed to meet the twin challenges of an ageing population and tight budget settlement. This failure has prompted a backlash among Liberal Democrats who voted against the reforms at their spring conference last month. The prime minister fears that years of campaigning to persuade voters that the NHS is safe in Tory hands have been undermined. Clegg made clear that he supports the basic principle of the reforms. “Of course there is a lot of controversy. But the basic idea that GPs who know patients the best should be given more responsibility for the way the system works, I think that is relatively uncontroversial. What is controversial is the detail, and that is why we need to get those details rights, including increased accountability and scrutiny and transparency of the way in which they manage those responsibilities. It is a dilemma which we want to address. We think there should be proper transparency and accountability of the way in which GPs discharge this new role that they will have.” NHS Health Andrew Lansley Nick Clegg Nicholas Watt guardian.co.uk
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The news leaked out Monday that Katie Couric is stepping down from her failed experiment as the anchor of the “CBS Evening News.” People inside the news business greeted the news as shocking. But what’s shocking is that Couric didn’t get the boot years ago. CBS’s ratings cratered while she earned $15 million annually. Couric was once projected as the Great White Female Hope after Dan Rather’s involuntary retirement in 2005. His numbers in his last week had dropped to a last place 8.1 million nightly audience. But what did Couric deliver? The end may have looked near at the end of March, when CBS saw its lowest-rated first quarter among both total viewers and the prized 25-to-54 demographic since at least 1992 – as far back as Nielsen’s breakdowns for the show go. Couric was averaging only 6.4 million total viewers (and less than 2 million among viewers 25 to 54). That was way behind NBC at 9.8 million and ABC at 8.65 million. On NPR, evening anchor Michele Norris mourned that “when you reach back to the era of Rather and Jennings and Brokaw, it seemed like getting an anchor job in the past was much like a lifetime appointment, much like a Supreme Court justice.” Media reporter David Folkenflik answered that “holding one of these jobs is no longer being one of the highest priests of journalism because the notion of authoritativeness has been undermined. Even the New York Times does not command, in some ways, as absolute a voice about what is news and what isn’t any more.” It is refreshing that Americans today reject the notion that we should bow before the network TV anchormen as the most hallowed of political actors, let alone “priests of journalism.” In the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate period, the media asserted themselves as a fourth branch of government, abiding by left-wing urgings to resist being “stenographers to power.” So they struck their self-righteous blows against “risky” tax cuts and “foolish” wars and asserted their courage in refusing to wear flag pins. Now they’re surprised that more than half the audience has rejected them. So much for the high priests of authoritativeness. The media elite’s rhetoric about rejecting the “stenographers to power” label sounds most ridiculous when facing one of their heroes. There was perky Katie, grinning and bowing before President Obama on July 22, 2009.
Continue reading …Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer Photos of the April 4 Day of Action rallies via http://www.we-r-1.org/ Yesterday was the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, the third of four assassinations in fewer than five years of inspiring progressive leaders. Those years were the strangest combination of hope, progress, joy, grief, bitterness, and despair than any other time in American history. Those five years gave us the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the School Lunch program, Legal Services; and they gave us 500,000 troops in the most pointless and wrongheaded war in our history, and all the bitter divisions that resulted. They gave us the biggest landslide a progressive Democrat ever won for President, and the election of a dark-souled race baiting conservative who would be forced from office for blatant violations of the law. It brought us the rise of the modern feminist movement, the flowering of the biggest student movement in our history, and the ugliest reactionary backlash imaginable. The contradictions and battles of those intense years have never left us. Although hopefully with less violence, this moment in history is feeling like it has much of the same drama and contradictions, hope and bitterness, change and backlash. We elect as President a mixed-race man with an African immigrant father and a Muslim African name; we finally pass a comprehensive health care reform bill that puts us much closer to a system of universal coverage; we make the biggest investments ever in green jobs, public education, universal broadband, and a variety of other public programs; in spite of reformers being outspent more than 500-1, we passed a bill that has begun to re-regulate the financial industry. At the same time, we see the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and a bipartisan political class that still seems locked into conventional views on the unalloyed virtues of the free market; a vicious backlash and the coming to power of the most extreme conservative movement since the Social Darwinists in the 1880s; we see far too much compromise and capitulation to the corporate powers that be by the Democratic establishment; and with the Ryan budget, we see the most dangerous and far reaching attack on the fundamental gains of the 1900s — especially Medicare and Medicaid, which he wants to not only radically slash but totally destroy by his “restructuring” — that we have ever seen; we see the most radical attacks on the very idea of unions that we have seen since the flowering of the modern labor movement in the 1930s. What is most fascinating about the contradictory times we are living in is that both the extremist right-wing movement and the progressive movement are taking to the streets to an unprecedented level. We all saw the tea party movement capture the frame over the last two years, but progressives are now fighting back. Yesterday, on the anniversary of King’s death, our side took to the streets once again. There were more than 1,000 events yesterday — 1,000! — around this great country. People are fighting back in — to paraphrase Dr. King — every state and every city, every village and every hamlet, every mountain and every hill and every molehill of our great nation.
Continue reading …France steps in to oust Ivory Coast’s former leader Gbagbo, now negotiating his surrender
April 5, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media . I put a video of Glenn Beck’s weird discussion of the situation in the Ivory Coast up because it’s very illuminating. Apparently only the Muslim guy named Ouattara — who actually won the reunification election — is responsible for any bloodshed, because Laurent Gbagbo is a Christian guy, and he’d never plunge the country into this situation in the first place, right? When I began covering this tragedy, religion was never a part of who was right or wrong, but who won an actual election. Apparently winning a verified election doesn’t matter if you’re not a Christian to Beck, but this is the meme being driven by Pat Robertson and the religious right community. Below is what’s really happening there. The news coming out of the Ivory Coast is that the French and the UN have joined they battle and have taken over Gbago’s stronghold in Abidjan and are negotiating his surrender. The French government said Tuesday that it was helping negotiate the surrender of Ivory Coast ’s strongman, Laurent Gbagbo , a day after the United Nations and France struck targets at his residence, his offices and two of his military bases in a significant escalation of the international intervention into the political crisis engulfing the nation. French negotiators are demanding that, before departing, Mr. Gbagbo sign a document formally renouncing control of Ivory Coast and recognizing Alassane Ouattara , the man who beat him in elections last year, as the country’s legitimate president, the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said at a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday. The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon , had backed the French terms, Mr. Juppé added. “What is going on are negotiations with Laurent Gbagbo and his family, to finalize the conditions of his departure,” he said. France hopes to see the United Nations and Ivorian authorities under Mr. Ouattara take charge of the “departure conditions of Gbagbo” once an agreement is reached, Mr. Juppé said… read on President Obama issued a strong statement against Gbagbo: President Obama said Tuesday that he strongly supported “the role that United Nations peacekeepers are playing as they enforce their mandate to protect civilians, and I welcome the efforts of French forces who are supporting that mission.” He added that the violence “could have been averted had Laurent Gbagbo respected the results of last year’s presidential election,” and that to prevent further bloodshed Mr. Gbagbo “must stand down immediately, and direct those who are fighting on his behalf to lay down their arms.” The US needs to do more because even though Gbagbo might finally give in, there’s a chance that many more innocent people could be hurt or killed and it appears as I’ve warned that Liberia could be in deep trouble: UN Refugee Chief Warns Ivory Coast Conflict Could Spill Over to Liberia The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, warns the conflict in Ivory Coast could spill over to Liberia and have a major destabilizing effect on all of western Africa. The refugee chief has just returned from a series of missions, including one to Liberia at the border with Ivory Coast. Guterres calls Ivory Coast one of the most dramatic displacement crises in the world. As of now, the U.N. refugee agency has registered more than 120,000 Ivorian refugees in Liberia and several thousand more in Ghana, Togo and Guinea. The LA Times reports that the Ivory Coast is a country in confusion: When the soldiers left their battle positions and the guns fell silent Tuesday morning in the Cocody neighborhood of Abidjan around Ivory Coast’s presidential palace, terrified residents didn’t feel safe enough to go outside. Bands of uniformed soldiers and militias in civvies roamed the city, the nation’s commercial capital. It was anyone’s guess whose side they were on and how dangerous they might be. The uniforms of the rival forces in the fierce fight for power are identical — and the allegiances of ragtag armed youth militias rampaging and looting shops and houses are equally unclear. Some back longtime leader Laurent Gbagbo, who plunged the country into crisis by refusing to relinquish power after his defeat last year in a United Nations -certified presidential election, while others support the internationally recognized new president, Alassane Ouattara. The intense fighting has left families trapped in their houses since Thursday, many of them desperate as they run out of food supplies or cooking gas. “The situation is really confused,” Isidore Kouadio, 24, a student staying with friends about 300 yards from the presidential palace, said by telephone. “There are some militias who have guns. Many people have guns.”… read on Also the ICC wants to look into possible atrocities committed in the ivory Coast : The International Criminal Court prosecutor said on Tuesday he is in talks with West African states about referring alleged atrocities in the Ivory Coast to the court to accelerate an investigation into the violence. More than 1,500 people are reported to have died in the Ivory Coast since Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to concede he lost November’s presidential election to Alassane Ouattara plunged the world’s top cocoa producer into civil war. ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said his office was concerned about reports of atrocities, particularly in the west of the country, and was looking into the violence, but declined to say who might be held accountable for the killings.
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Only eight A&E departments nationally offer alcohol harm reduction interventions for under-16s, Alcohol Concern says Hospitals are failing underage drinkers by not giving them enough help to tackle their problems, the NHS is warned in a new report. Too many accident and emergency units simply help teenagers sober up and send them home without trying to change their behaviour, according to the charity Alcohol Concern. An estimated 64,750 children as young as 11 attend hospital in England every year, of whom 36 a day are admitted for treatment, at a cost to the NHS of £19m. Denis Campbell Some have been found unconscious, many have been attacked or had an accident, and others have self-harmed after drinking. Responses by 128 A&E units to Freedom of Information Act requests from Alcohol Concern show that many offer little or no specialist support to teenagers who have come to harm due to drink. “We have found failings in the NHS’s system [for dealing with such patients],” said Tom Smith, the group’s youth alcohol spokesman. While 52% can refer young people to a specialist substance misuse service for under-18s, the other 48% cannot, which means “health staff are unable to direct young people in crisis to treatment, support or advice”, the report says. Although the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommends that NHS staff should refer young drinkers to such services, the report says that “too often A&E departments are failing to protect the welfare of vulnerable young people by not developing this measure”. Almost three-quarters (73%) do not have an alcohol harm reduction strategy in place, while 76% do not employ someone specifically to tackle underage drinking. “Overall, only 12 departments (9%) appear to have in place comprehensive alcohol harm reduction interventions. This figure shrinks to only eight departments offering the same interventions to patients aged under 16 years”, it concludes, describing the NHS’s abaility to offer such help as “patchy”. Nigel Edwards, acting chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents hospitals, admitted more action was needed. “The amount of alcohol we consume is a society wide issue and the NHS can only be a sticking plaster for much more long term and ultimately more effective prevention measures. “Getting the response right requires co-ordination across different parts of public services and, Alcohol Concern’s report clearly shows that, while some areas already have the necessary strategies and services in place, more needs to be done to make sure excessive drinking in the young does not become a long term, much more insidious, habit. A Department of Health spokeswoman added: “Alcohol misuse is a major public health issue that teenagers can be especially vulnerable to so we welcome this report that suggests how local A&E services might address acute harms arising from teenage alcohol misuse. “Of course underage people should not be drinking and the we are working across government with voluntary, private and community sectors on a range of initiatives to prevent alcohol misuse amongst young people.” Alcohol Health NHS guardian.co.uk
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Workers stem flow of radioactive water into sea using mixture of sawdust, newspaper, concrete and a type of liquid glass Engineers battling to contain the crisis at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant appeared to have turned an important corner last night after they stopped highly radioactive water from leaking into the ocean from one of the facility’s crippled reactors. Workers struggling to halt the leaks successfully used a mixture of sawdust, newspaper, concrete and a type of liquid glass to stem the flow of contaminated water near a seaside pit, said the plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco). Earlier efforts involving cement, an absorbent polymer and rags were unsuccessful in plugging the leak, which was discovered on Saturday, while radiation of more than 7.5 million times the legal limit for seawater was found just off the earthquake-hit plant. In a sign of Tepco’s desperation, it breached its own regulations on Monday by beginning an intentional discharge of 11,500 tonnes of less contaminated water into the Pacific to make space for the highly radioactive liquid that was seeping out in an uncontrolled manner. The company still needs to pump contaminated water into the sea because of a lack of storage space at the plant and will continue to release the 11,500 tonnes of low-level radioactive water until Friday. “The leaks were slowed yesterday after we injected a mixture of liquid glass and a hardening agent and it has now stopped,” a Tepco spokesman told Reuters. A 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami hit Japan’s northeast coast on 11 March, leaving 28,000 people dead or missing and thousands homeless. It is the country’s worst catastrophe since the second world war. Samples of the water used to cool the plant’s reactor No 2 were emitting 5 million times the legal limit of radioactivity, officials said on Tuesday, adding to fears that contaminants had spread far beyond the disaster zone. Workers are still struggling to restart cooling pumps – which recycle the water – in four reactors damaged by the earthquake and tsunami. Until those are fixed, they must pump in water from outside to prevent overheating, and meltdowns. In the process, that creates more contaminated water that has to be pumped out and stored somewhere else or released into the sea. The government is considering restrictions on seafood for the first time after contaminated fish were found. India is the first country to ban food imports from all areas of Japan over radiation fears. Tepco has offered “condolence money” to those affected in the Fukushima region, but one city rejected the compensation and local mayors who came to Tokyo to meet the prime minister, Naoto Kan, demanded greater assistance. “We have borne the risks, co-existed and flourished with Tepco for more than 40 years, and all these years, we have fully trusted the myth that nuclear plants are absolutely safe,” said Katsuya Endo, the mayor of Tomioka. He was one of eight Fukushima prefecture mayors seeking compensation and support for employment, housing and education for the tens of thousands of evacuees. A total of 60,000 tonnes of highly contaminated water remains in the plant after workers poured in seawater when fuel rods experienced partial meltdown after the earthquake and tsunami hit on March 11. Japan disaster Japan Nuclear power Energy Ben Quinn guardian.co.uk
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Once again, liberals have bought into American power as a force for good. But it’s just another ugly, expensive war we now own The world works best when America leads. – The late US diplomat Richard Holbrooke One night, when I was editor of a news wire service on the graveyard shift in downtown Los Angeles, a respectable, middle-aged man in a neat business suit, calling himself Mr Wilson, approached me with a strange tale. We overnighters on duty alone at United Press through the long hours were used to being accosted by drunks, dopers, homeless people and a taster’s menu of southern California lonely souls with their story. Mr Wilson, cleanshaven and persuasively reasonable, told me he’d just been kidnapped by aliens from Venus, had sex with their Queen (“the best of my life”), and then been safely deposited on Venice beach next to Santa Monica. He was so plausibly likeable that I was almost convinced. So I drove him out to the ocean where, indeed, he was able to point out undeniable scorch marks in the sand where the Venutian ship had blasted off, plus three deep indentations where the tripod-shaped landing-gear of space vehicle had stood. Right then and there, I thought it possible I’d had my first encounter, if at second hand, with a real UFO. I felt the same way when listening to Barack Obama’s 28 March speech about his reasons for invading Libya on behalf of the anti-Gaddafi “rebels”. For just a moment there he had me. “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different,” he told the nation. In that UFO moment, a part of me wanted to believe that high-penetration US Tomahawks, which by some accounts are coated with extremely radioactive DU (depleted uranium), would be killing bad Libyans to save good Libyans and that our flying torpedoes would know the difference. A significant section of what passes for the American left seems to share my fleeting suspension of ethics and political memory – by backing Obama’s war against the third Muslim nation that did not attack us. This is the first war he did not inherit from George Bush (although he’s done his best to make Afghanistan all his own). He has shown exemplary courage in facing down a fourth-rate tyrant with a fourth-world army with a toughness he has never shown against out-of-control Republicans at home. If you’re afraid of the big bully in your own block, it’s smarter to find a smaller one to fight over yonder. Liberal hawks never seem to learn that you can’t get healthcare, decent schools and less unemployment by bombing smaller nations. Military adventures trump domestic rehab every time. We Americans have a very long history – going back to Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba and Woodrow Wilson in the first world war – of progressives going to war for the best, most irreproachable, humane, idealistic reasons, whether that meant saving Belgian babies from fiendish Hun bayonets or rescuing Benghazi civilians today. It’s extraordinary to watch progressives like NBC’s Rachel Maddow, the New Republic’s John Judis, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, Juan Cole and many others cheerlead the “Obama doctrine” of humane intervention – that is, meddling militarily at “low cost”, usually ending in disaster for all concerned. Such liberal war hawks have serious records of fighting for good domestic causes. But what a disconnect! You have to sleepwalk, or be in serious denial, not to grasp the blood-link between union-busting in Madison, Wisconsin and bunker-busting in Tripoli, Libya. It’s not subtle. We are no longer an infinitely rich country. Our bridges, dams, pipelines and roads are falling apart. Our people are on food stamps and can’t find work. Spilling our money on the desert renders it positively reasonable to cut, slash and degrade – that useful military euphemism – help for the poor and middle class. Obama’s $75bn foreclosure prevention programme is a bungle due to “lax oversight”: translated, that means there’s been too much sucking up the mortgage-holding big banks that evict homeowners often illegally. And Obama takes this very moment in our rising-poverty-so-let’s-go-to-war crisis to cruelly, mindlessly, cut $3bn from LIHEAP , the federal government’s energy assistance (heating oil and air conditioning) to the poor. The arithmetic is brutal. Each Tomahawk cruise missile fired from a sub, ship or land costs roughly $1m, and we’ve probably shot over 200 of them onto Libya, killing Gaddafi’s military, paramilitary, civilians, hospital patients and – now we learn – our guys, the rebels, too. That’s a $200m bill, straight off. The Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates that the Libyan operation costs the US between $100m and $300m per week , so we’re heading toward the $1bn mark even if, as advertised, we pull back marginally. Let the jobless or disabled poor freeze their asses off this and next winter. We on the left often accuse our ideological adversaries of “triumphalism” – a know-nothing superstition that America is and always will be “different”, superior to all other nations, creeds and peoples. If we do it, it’s right and moral because, well, we’re Americans and we mean terribly well. And if you believe that, I have a UFO I want to sell you. US military United States US politics Obama administration US foreign policy Libya Middle East Arab and Middle East unrest Muammar Gaddafi Public finance Clancy Sigal guardian.co.uk
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If you want to avoid the crowds, here’s where to head for St Ives in Cornwall has been voted Britain’s best beach resort by Trip Advisor users. But what if you want to avoid the crowds? Here’s our pick of the UK’s unspoilt beaches: 1 Luskentyre Beach, Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides: a sweep of Maldives-style white sand 2 Great Bay, St Martins, Scilly Isles: beautiful, remote, subtropical 3 Oldshoremore, Sutherland: two miles from the nearest village, fringed by marram grass dunes 4 Porthcurno, Cornwall: gorgeous cove near Land’s End 5 Barafundle Bay, Pembrokeshire: no vehicle access, crescent of white sand 6 Bamburgh Beach, Northumberland: huge, with a castle 7 Brancaster Beach, Norfolk: desolate but stunning, in an area of outstanding natural beauty 8 Oxwich Bay, Gower Peninsula: three miles of golden sand dunes to run down 9 Lannacombe, South Hams, Devon: tiny but lovely – and barely visited 10 Portstewart Strand, Northern Ireland: you can always find a quiet spot on this long stretch Gemma Bowes guardian.co.uk
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Click here to view this media There were so many ugly moments on Fox Monday night I wasn’t sure which one to pick as the highlight, or whether to pick one at all. But you know, this is the kind of junk we have to put up with from them, 24/7. No issue can be a serious one, no discussion can be devoid of snark and nastiness. So I’ve made a collection. Ask Granny next time you see her how she feels about these little moments and whether she really thinks Fox News has any semblance of fairness. Or balance. We begin with Michael Scheuer, who wins my “Sexist Comment Un-Masked” (SCUM) award. In this segment, they’re nattering over Afghanistan, and how the mean Muslims seem to be the only Muslims over there, and how it’s the fault of the mean Muslims that Americans died after the scum on this side of the ocean burned the Koran, giving the Taliban an excuse to go on a murderous rampage. Here’s the key line from Scheuer, at about 60 seconds in: No US Marine should die so Mrs. Mohammed can vote. You know, there’s a lot of arguments for why we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan. I can think of many, and if it had been up to me, we wouldn’t be in Afghanistan. But Scheuer’s remark just leaps right out of the screen and slaps every woman in the face. See, it’s all about MISTER Mohammed’s right to vote, because we are always pro-democracy as long as it’s a male-dominated Christian, shut-the-women-the-hell-up kind of thing. He is deserving of my SCUM award, and now he has it. Click here to view this media Now on to Hannity. You know, I so want to slap that stupid grin off his face. That smug, nasty, self-righteous, small-penis grin. It’s got to go. At about 50 seconds in, we get this idiocy, with regard to that ONE BILLION DOLLAR meme and Obama’s re-election bid. HANNITY: You know, you follow history. Can you name a single time, a single incident, either somebody running for the Senate, Governor, or the Presidency where somebody could buy an election? Don’t you have to be elected on your record, re-elected on your record, your success? Dick Morris’ response is just hysterical. After trying to calm Hannity down a little bit, he says, you know, the media coverage is so intense, and well, WE have all that free coverage here on Fox News. (1:26). Of course, this does not satisfy Hannity, who comes back with his question another way. HANNITY: Doesn’t he need to do a good job? Like for example, watch this video. Nobody is citing any great success he’s had. Reagan had an incredible record after 4 years… HISTORY REWRITE ALERT. Sound the air horns, because Hannity just rewrote the entire Reagan presidency. For a little bit of history about how the 2008 financial meltdown can be pointed directly back to Reagan, go read this interview with David Stockman , his former budget director. Or Will Bunch’s book, Tear Down This Myth . Reagan’s record was hardly stellar when he left office, and Obama’s approval rating is higher than Reagan’s at this point in his first term. But Hannity is undeterred by facts, and the segment ends with Morris predicting that Obama will be beaten in 2012. I take comfort in knowing Morris is 100% wrong all of the time. Glenn Beck was full of spew, too, but there were just too many stupids to pick only one clip. All I’m going to say is that he trashed the attackers on the UN while belittling their reaction to the Koran burning. And somehow it all comes back to Israel, because that’s where Beck always goes. And Bill Ayers. And Code Pink. And of course, Cass Sunstein. That man is nuts.
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Adele has just smashed Madonna’s record for longest spell at the top of the album chart for a female artist – and looks likely to beat Bob Marley’s all-time record Back on 16 November last year, someone going by the helpful name of xxxxWGDxxxx played a small part in shaking up the music world. That was the date they logged on to YouTube and uploaded a clip of Adele singing her new track Someone Like You on Jools Holland . The video was soon being passed around feverishly by music fans, normally with some accompanying text saying something along the lines of “wow”. There was something about the way the 22-year-old stood there and sang, displaying diva-like confidence yet wearing her heartache on her sleeve, that proved she had matured as an artist since the modest success of her debut album, 19. Suddenly, people became very interested in hearing more from the follow-up. Since then, that understated song has helped cause a whole lot of noise. On Sunday, Adele’s second album, 21 , smashed Madonna’s record for the longest consecutive weeks spent at the top of the album charts by a female solo artist . It also looks likely to beat the all-time record held by the Bob Marley and the Wailers compilation Legend. And her Brits performance of Someone Like You was deemed to be the highlight of the night by most critics who watched the ceremony. Adele’s success isn’t settling for owning the UK either – 17 European countries have had their album top spot hogged by 21, as has the US. So why has Adele’s star risen so swiftly and why is it connecting now? Yes, she has got a great voice and decent songs – but clearly there’s something special going on here that sets her apart from the crowd of white female soul singers she was originally lumped in with (Duffy, Joss Stone, Pixie Lott et al). What is it? The answer involves a myriad different factors but perhaps the best place to start is with her record label, XL Recordings. They spotted in Adele not just a singer with a great voice but an artist who could be developed as her career progressed. That’s why she was given the freedom to pick who she worked with, choose which tracks to release as singles and have a say on how her records were marketed. XL even trusted her to make the potentially damaging decision not to play music festivals (most record labels would have had a fit at this). If Adele initially struggled to stand out from the crowd, it was her decision to sign with XL that eventually helped her stake out ground as a credible artist. Suffice to say, you probably would not see her cycling around a TV studio singing about Diet Coke. Despite these creative freedoms, it would be unwise to make out that 21 was pushing any musical boundaries. The focus is on big, piano-led ballads, each one transformed by a devastatingly huge soul voice. People can crow at the lack of innovative sonic ideas on display, but they are not what find you an audience, from NME-reading teens to aunties humming along to Radio 2. It’s also worth bearing in mind that people like clinging to “safe” sounds during times of turbulence, making 21 something of a comfort blanket in the midst of a recession. “Adele is one of those increasingly rare artists who has the talent and appeal to reach beyond her typical fanbase and connect with a much broader audience,” says HMV spokesman Gennaro Castaldo. “She’s now enjoying a wonderful virtuous circle where her continuing success feeds in to more coverage and even greater word of mouth, which, in turn, keeps the sales clocking up.” Of course, having such wide appeal is bound to inspire criticism, and plenty of people find Adele’s sound too middle of the road to be truly inspiring – some critics like to use the term “A-dull”. But that jibe misses a key point – that Adele packs a personality as big as her voice. This is something NME editor Krissi Murison credits her success to. “When you look at the British female songwriters who have been really successful in recent years – Amy, Florence and Lily – the one thing they have in common is their huge characters. Adele is similar in that she’s incredibly hypnotising when you meet her in person. She’s also pretty normal. She doesn’t have a crack habit and she doesn’t look like she grew up with wolves in an enchanted forest. It’s that essential human-ness that so many people love.” She may have attended the Brit School, but she is as far from the dead-eyed, all-singing, all-dancing stage-school desperado as imaginable. Her cockney accent does nothing to soften the fact that she’s not one for airs and graces. During a recent Observer interview , for instance, she broke the ice with the journalist by discussing her struggles with irritable bowel syndrome. When asked how she felt minutes before wowing the Brits crowd, she answered simply: “Shat myself.” In a world where record labels are constantly trying to find the new Lady Gaga, it’s perhaps obvious why people would warm to a size-14 girl from Tottenham in north London who prefers her language, rather than her photoshoots, to be racy. Adele’s way of presenting herself is at odds with many of her flesh-baring peers and nowhere is this demonstrated better than through her TV performances – where the music, rather than the outfits, unleash her smouldering sexuality. On this front her TV plugger – Craig McNeil from Beggars – has played something of a blinder. It would have been McNeil who got Adele on to that Jools Holland show and who also secured her the Brits slot. Her music has also made its way on to all sorts of emotional TV montages, a particularly memorable one being a tear-jerker on this year’s Comic Relief. The internet era may have made music accessible to all, but only on TV can songs be given the kind of emotional backdrop to unite such a broad audience at once. You get the feeling even XL weren’t prepared for this . After all, Adele’s upcoming tour will see her playing such enormodome venues as, er, Shepherd’s Bush Empire and Leicester’s De Montfort Hall – hardly venues fit for a star who has just knocked Madonna off her perch. Still, this just adds to the Adele story – an ordinary girl genuinely shocked to be living the kind of “dream” that shows such as The X Factor promise but can never truly deliver. It is perhaps this unexpected nature to her success that makes it sweetest of all. Adele Pop and rock UK charts Celebrity Tim Jonze guardian.co.uk
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