American actor Clarke Peters (Mandela, The Wire) was on Adam Boulton’s Sky show this morning.  He cracked a joke that would have had Sunny Hundal putting Guido up on a thought-crime charge if it was first cracked here on the blog:

“People used to say ‘pigs would fly’ if we had a black president. Well 100 days into Obama’s presidency, swine flu.”

On a sadder note, Jack Kemp has died after battling cancer.   Guido wonders how different the world might have been if  the former NFL quarterback had been the vice-presidential running mate of Bush senior instead of Dan Quayle.  If  the libertarian-conservative Kemp had then succeeded the original President Bush, we might never have had Presidents Clinton or Dubya.  Instead after nine terms as a Congressman for Western New York, from 1971 to 1989, he served as Housing Secretary in the George H. W. Bush administration.

Kemp an advocate of low tax, supply-side policies was until recently still active in the Washington think tank world.  He was conservative on abortion and libertarian on immigration,  with Chicago school economic ideals.  His crucial contribution to the Reagan agenda was as architect of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, possibly the greatest tax reduction in American history since the Boston Tea party. The world sorely needs more Jack Kemps.