On the road

For about the next two weeks, the entire BOBW team will be based amongst the fascinating native peoples of Meath and points west. Blogging opportunities will be at best sporadic so it'll likely be the last week in this month before any major posts. However, we suspect that the silly season is going to be shorter than usual this year both in the US and Europe, so there'll be plenty of potential material once we get near a keyboard. We have a sense that citizens of both the US and Europe have spent the last decade or so with comparatively low expectations of their elected leaders, but wonder, as the consequences of this sink in, whether that expectation will now change.

At an almost incidental level, we were amused to see in the Irish media today (here and here) the news that the Dail (Irish Parliament) bar is considering the possibility that it has broken the law since the foundation of the state by not having a licence to serve alcohol. The traditional view derived from Dubya's favourite doctrine, the separation of powers, which he and the Dail bar interpreted to mean that no other branch of government had jurisdiction over an internal government affair. Now at least the Dail bar sees this as untrammelled authority only in its ability to serve creamy pints of Guinness, and not in the ability to cook up an energy policy with Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay or detain prisoners indefinitely. So anyway, the Dail bar has decided (unlike Dubya) that it would be better if it was aligned with the law like everyone else. Until then, the pints come with a frisson of illegality, at no extra charge.