Free Republic

'To sneer at such events," cautioned The Sunday Telegraph apropos Live8, "demeans the generosity which they embody". Oh, dear. If you can't sneer at rock stars in the Telegraph, where can you? None the less, if not exactly a full-blown sneer, I did feel a faint early Sir Cliff-like curl of the lip coming on during the opening moments of Saturday's festivities, when Sir Paul McCartney stepped onstage. Not because Sir Paul was any better or worse than Sir Elton or Sir Bob or any other member of the aristorockracy, but because it reminded me of why I'm sceptical about...

Top strategists with John Kerry's presidential campaign are blaming his crushing defeat last week on bad advice from Clinton operatives who took over the campaign after Labor Day. "When [James] Carville and [Stan] Greenberg tell reporters that the campaign was missing a defining narrative, they forget that they were the ones insisting we had to keep beating the domestic-issues drum," complained David Thorne on Thursday. Thorne - a brother-in-law from Kerry's first marriage to Julia Thorne - was one of Kerry's closest advisors throughout the campaign. Thorne told political gadfly Arianna Huffington that because of the misguided Carville-Greenberg strategy, "We...