Nick Spicer

Forgive us, good people of Gainesville

And the sky darkened as we came, like a cloud of locusts, come to eat every last shred of your town’s reputation, we journalists and producers and cameramen of the world’s media.

And we lay in waiting outside the church of a man who would compare himself to Abraham (on the "Today Show," in fact): no less than the father of the three monotheistic religions.

And we kneeled before him as if to worship (but really to get out of the camera shot) and mostly asked him easy questions about if and when and how he would burn Quran (a project he has abandoned, he says, forever).

And we showed the world this political "prophet" as if he had something to say, although he had not actually read, he said, the book he was to burn. Ever.

Barack Obama: Where's the love?

As he campaigns for members of his beleaguered Democratic party, the US president can no longer fill a stadium with enraptured Americans young and old.

The magic of Barack Obama’s mythopoeic come-from-behind campaign in 2008 has given way to the grim reality of governing a conflicted country, one whose entire economic model has been found wanting by the greatest recession since the 1930s.

And, as Obama stays the course with some of George Bush’s symbolic overseas policies – continuing drone strikes in Pakistan, and largely maintaining status quo on the human rights of “war on terror” detainees - the disenchantment of many American progressives has veered into bitterness.

But as the president loses touch with much of his base, the very man once derided by his presidential rivals as a phony-Jesus, peace-and-love political cream puff is forging a new public persona: Barack Obama, the angry president.

And it's not without good political reason.<

British pinata and the oil spill

Out of the murky oil darkening the economic future, and shorelines, of the Gulf of Mexico comes, fittingly, dark humour.

What does BP stand for?

Certainly not “Beyond Petroleum.”

That’s just “greenwashing,” an American environmentalist recently told me in New Orleans.

The American blogosphere prefers these:

Broken Pipes.

Blackened Pelicans.

Beyond the Pale.

And, as BP’s CEO Tony Hayward heads to Congress to face questions this week, there’s a new BP sobriquet, tailor-made for the $4 million-a-year man theoretically in charge of the cleanup.