Read headlines with care

[RTE]: MCDOWELL MEETS FF TDs OVER DRINKS

Meaning that Irish Minister for Justice McDowell met Fianna Fail TDs to discuss alcohol issues, not (necessarily) that they met for drinks. Background on the issues -- in which McDowell's dream of a Parisian wine/coffee bar culture was blocked by vested interests -- provided here.

He must have skipped the exhibit on Partition

In today's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd) Jeremy Hildreth reports on his visit to the private Empire and Commonwealth museum in Bristol. It's another example of the tone of colonial nostalgia that infects much of American conservatism. And since the only real model any of these chaps have for their linen-clad witty expat-amongst-the-natives is Christopher Hitchens, there are bound to be howlers:

[after WW2] ... So, to its credit, and unlike, say, France, Britain did not fight to keep its colonies. Instead, it freed them on the best terms it could get. India was the first to go in 1947, Hong Kong the last in 1997

A case where a little knowledge is worse than no knowledge at all. Yes, France tried to keep Vietnam and Algeria but they let just about everything else go without a fight by 1960. And that departure of India "on the best terms it could get" worked out pretty badly for the millions of All-India residents killed or dislocated by creation of Pakistan (E/W) and present-day India.

And since it's on the bookshelves at the moment, note how this account also omits the brutality of the repression in early 1950s Kenya, which many people only know of via the sanitised expression "to mau-mau" -- ironically, something that victimhood-loving right-wingers usually accuse others of doing. In case you're wondering, there's no way we can mention Partition without invoking its Irish counterpart as another non-success story of the Empire, so in describing Hong Kong as the "last" colony, Hildreth shows his lack of familiarity with the fine people at 1169 and counting.

In fact, this recurring blindspot that the reactionary right has for Partition makes us think that they're preparing us all for a new map of Middle East.

Hands off my freedom-fighters

When reading Christopher Hitchens these days, one learns to ignore the sarcasm and bile (which apparently seems worth quite a lot on the lecture circuit) and focus instead on the more revealing incidental remarks. As we look back on our past posts about these -- a very non-apropos Heart of Darkness reference, the usage "Iraqis and Kurds," the description of Hamas as anti-Zionist, and a very G&Ts at the Club tone -- we see a weird mix of colonial attraction and repulsion on Hitch's part. Into this mix consider an odd Algerian sidenote in his latest Slate article:

Nor can [al Qaeda and affiliates] claim, as actual guerrilla movements like the Algerian FLN have done in the past, to be the future representatives of their countries or peoples. In Afghanistan and Iraq, they sought to destroy the electoral process that alone can confer true legitimacy, and they are in many, if not most, cases not even citizens of the countries concerned.

Hitch has tried this particular trick before, approving of the FLN's 1990s crackdown on electorally-potent Islamic radicals, notwithstanding that the viciousness of that battle seems to have been the cauldron from which even more virulent radicalism emerged. He also seemed annoyed at the deployment of The Battle of Algiers to show the obstacles likely to be faced by the US in Iraq. So Hitch feels a little sense of ownership about the one-time freedom fighters in Algeria and doesn't want that cachet in any way diluted.

And what of this supposed contrast between the nihilist al Qaeda and the constructive FLN? In fact, the FLN exhibits the classic cycle of terrorism, moving from atrocities and feuds with fellow groups to, yes, disruption of elections, to negotiations with the governing power and, perish the thought, victory:

[via Wikipedia] Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who became the FLN's leading political theorist, provided a sophisticated intellectual justification for the use of violence in achieving national liberation ... An important watershed in the War of Independence was the massacre of civilians by the FLN near the town of Philippeville in August 1955 ...

At first, the revolutionary forces targeted only Muslim officials of the colonial regime; later, they coerced or killed even those civilians who simply refused to support them. Moreover, during the first two years of the conflict, the guerrillas killed about 6,000 Muslims and 1,000 Europeans ...

the revolutionaries' coercive tactics suggested that they had not as yet inspired the bulk of the Muslim people to revolt against French colonial rule. Gradually, however, the FLN/ALN gained control in certain sectors of the Aurès, the Kabylie, and other mountainous areas around Constantine and south of Algiers and Oran ...

De Gaulle immediately appointed a committee to draft a new constitution for France's Fifth Republic, which would be declared early the next year, with which Algeria would be associated but of which it would not form an integral part. Muslims, including women, were registered for the first time with Europeans on a common electoral roll to participate in a referendum to be held on the new constitution in September 1958 ...

ALN commandos committed numerous acts of sabotage in France in August, and the FLN mounted a desperate campaign of terror in Algeria to intimidate Muslims into boycotting the referendum. Despite threats of reprisal, however, 80 percent of the Muslim electorate turned out to vote in September, and of these 96 percent approved the constitution.

And all this time, one can imagine the equivalents of Hitch talking about how the FLN hates freedom, hates elections, hates France, and how it would be unthinkable to negotiate with terrorists.

UPDATE 27 JUNE: The Algeria meme migrates to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (free, reg. req'd):

Insurgencies that have prevailed in history -- Algeria, China, Cuba -- have all [unlike Iraq] had a large base of popular support ...

F.W.A.

From the Department of Pissing Off Allies, a story buried in the Metro section of the Washington Post:

A U.S. Airways flight headed from Orlando to Reagan National Airport was diverted yesterday to Jacksonville, Fla., where more than a half-dozen passengers were removed because of what was characterized as suspicious behavior. Those passengers turned out to be military personnel from the Middle East who were flying to Washington to meet with the U.S. Department of Defense, authorities said.

Flight 480, with 144 passengers aboard, departed from Orlando at 1:05 p.m. and was diverted at 1:55 p.m. after members of the flight crew grew concerned that the Middle Eastern men were communicating with one another verbally and with hand gestures and had gone to bathrooms at opposite ends of the 737 plane, authorities and passengers said.

If there was a single bit of idiocy to highlight from this, it would be the fact the men used different bathrooms that drew suspicion, since in other such scares, it's been congregation around the same bathroom that caused problems.

The Roast Rebate of Old England

We assume that some cartoonist, somewhere, has done a reworking of Hogarth's classic polemical painting to show Tony Blair or Jack Straw carrying a big hunk of euro-cash back to England.

Circle of Chums

There are various reasons why Alan Duncan won't be the next Tory leader. But his fate was sealed by the endorsement of Andrew Sullivan:

A GAY TORY LEADER? No, it won't happen. My old friend Alan Duncan knows he has a very distant chance.

Because there is a Curse of Sully: any Tory politician who receives the prefix "my old friend" goes down in flames. Consider the record. Boris Johnson:

An old friend, Boris Johnson, whom I remember as a young turk in the Oxford Union, is now a very grand personage in British culture.

Subsequently, Boris had a very messy affair with Petronella Wyatt disintegrate in full tabloid view. William Hague, former Tory leader:

Meanwhile, in Britain, my old friend William Hague has, by all accounts, got off to a flying start in the election campaign. Vowing to cut taxes, crack down on illegal asylum seekers, keep the pound, and resist liberal elites, Hague is widely predicted to lose terribly. Why am I not so sure?

Tony Blair didn't seem too worried back then and once again, the Sage of South Godstone (term property of Sullywatch) had struck out. But he wasn't finished:

My friend Nick Boles is running for parliament in the county I grew up in.

This was with reference to the most recent election for which we provided some context here, and anyway, Nick lost, although to be fair, very narrowly. Sully has a Britpop like ability to have collected a large group of chums over the years. But Damon Albarn's circle is a tad more successful than Sully's.

Every so often, the truth

Dubya, yesterday in Virginia:

See, prior to the attack [9/11], it was -- we kind of all went about our own merry way.

The Union of the Two Towers, Oirish style

While perhaps questioning our sanity, our longtime readers will surely be aware of one of our oldest themes on the blog -- the nexus of Oirishness that ties together developments in politics, culture, sport, and business, and not just in Ireland either, but anywhere that the Oirish set up shop. But, as Han Solo might say, sometimes we amaze even ourselves.

We'd had some fruitful correspondence with reader Andrew, an exiled Glasgow Celtic fan in the southern hemisphere, specifically concerning the plans of current and potential future owners of the club. We speculated that one outfit that would have to be watched is Setanta, the Irish sports broadcast company about whom we have ranted in the past (sadly, it seems that the US Federal Trade Commission was not reading us).

Anyway, Friday's Irish Times (subs. req'd) has word that Setanta is trying to hire a top executive from Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV; Sky currently owns the live rights to nearly all English Premiership matches, and there's speculation that Setanta getting this executive could be a prelude to them launching their own bid for the rights. Based on our experiences trying to watch Setanta broadcasts, we think this would be a bad move for the Prem and for the viewers.

But in explaining how a relatively small Irish company could amass the cash for a bid, the IT story drops this little nugget:

However, the giant US insurance company AIG is now an investor in Setanta.

Yes, that would be the same AIG company that sourced a very dodgy balance sheet manoeuvre in Dublin, one that has seen an Irish resident executive of the counterpart company cop a plea. And in the digging around that deal, it emerged that ousted AIG supremo Maurice Greenberg had structured his very own nuclear option so that a big chunk of AIG ends up being owned by an Irish charity if the wrong tripwires are activated.

So there you have it: the Oirish company that already owns Scottish league broadcast rights, and might add the English ones, is being backed the high-profile subject of the USA's financial scandal du jour. The prevailing culture in the Irish meeja though remains that we're supposed to view all these things as signs of success.

Ulster will fight, the town will be pronounced right

We were greatly impressed watching the 24 hour sports news channel ESPNews the other day and seeing a perfectly executed pronunciation of the name of the town Clones in County Monaghan. This was in the context of the Clones Cyclone Kevin McBride's bout tomorrow night against Mike Tyson. And unlike the word that appears in Attack of the ... or indeed in the title of a superb song from the most recent Ash album, it's said as Clo-Ness. Thus regardless of what happens against Tyson tomorrow, the Monaghan man has already gotten things further along for his town than anyone has for all those Irish girls named Ciara.

The unquiet Americans

Here's news of the fine job that armed private security contractors are doing to build support for the American presence in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The U.S. military is investigating 16 private American security guards for shooting at U.S. Marines and Iraqi civilians during a three-hour spree last month west of Baghdad, officials said Thursday ... Marines spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Lapan said Marines reported seeing gunmen in several late-model trucks fire ''near civilian cars'' and on military positions ... ''Three hours later, another Marine observation post was fired on by gunmen from vehicles matching the description of those involved in the earlier attack,'' Lapan said.

... U.S. forces later detained the contractors without incident and held them for three days in a military jail, but no charges have been filed. The American contractors are believed to have left Iraq, and a Naval Criminal Investigative Service inquiry is under way, the military said.
... Many Iraqis resent high-profile security details who speed along highways in sport utility vehicles brandishing automatic weapons.

Since the Pentagon has proven chronically reluctant to punish its own, and these contractors are likely ex-servicemen themselves, don't expect this "investigation" to go very far. Remember that private contractors have also played a role in the prison abuse scandals, and it was the brutal murder of private contractors that led to the Pentagon's decision to level Fallujah. So the private tail has certainly wagged the public dog.

A while back, we had commented on a prescient scene from Clear and Present Danger:

ambush [] in Colombia, in which hidden locals with guns and rocket-launchers expose the fallacious belief of the American tough guys that if you wear dark glasses and travel around in big SUVs, you're safe

It looks like in this case, the tough guys in sunglasses and SUVs decided to even the odds by firing at everybody, all the time.

One leader, one voice, two countries

Our regular readers will know of our occasional musings on the similarities between Irish and American politics. Recent events provide an excuse to expand on this a little. To begin a long story with a short one, our point is that what both systems share is a dynamic driven not so much by competition between political parties, as one might expect in a democracy, but by the complete lack of dissent within the ruling party: Fianna Fail in the Republic, and the Republicans in the USA.

Viewed in this light, the frequently expressed frustration in the blogosphere (or its Irish equivalent, the boggersphere) towards the immunity of the respective governments to endless evidence of mendacity and incompetence becomes clear -- no-one within either party is willing or able to hold the leadership accountable. An obvious point, but one brought to mind by Washington Post journalist Jefferson's Morley thoughts on why the Downing Street Memo has failed to take off as a political scandal in the USA. [for the uninitiated, the DSM is a high level contemporaneous account from senior British intelligence figures in the summer of 2002 that Dubya had already decided on war with Iraq]. Morley says:

But a big part of the problem is that there are no voices in the majority party demanding accountability.

If there was, they would have gotten going long before the DSM came into the mix. By the way, among these silent lambs is John McCain, before anyone starts to get too excited about him running as a different kind of presidential candidate in 2008.

And the identical diagnosis applies to Ireland. We've noted before the easily documented record of flat-out lies told by our permanent party of government. Wednesday brought more evidence: a parliamentary committee where the majority simply decided to cover for the scandal-implicated former minister for health, and a pathetic attempt by the minister for justice to blame the opposition, in power for a brief period almost 10 years ago, for a police scandal that covers his entire time in government positions. The newspapers and the bloggers will be outraged, but there won't be a single voice raised within Fianna Fail in protest.

One reason for the silence on both sides of the Atlantic is that FF and the Bush Republican party excel at what Sinn Fein might call electoralism: effective manoeuvres for advantage at the polls. It's very far from a solid basis for government, but it certainly keeps them in power long enough to royally f*ck things up.

Speaking of royally, consider this irony. Of the three governments in the Republic, the UK, and the USA that were returned to power in the last few years, the one with the least share of the popular vote, Blair, is the one running the most representative government. At least in the sense that Labour was returned with sufficient dissent within the party that Blair has to be more cautious in policy and is more vulnerable to scandal than Bertie or Dubya are or ever will be.

So what's the solution? Well, in the Irish case we've already outlined the bobw reform program and even with the heroic assumption that we're right, there's still the more serious issue of the flaws exposed in the US system by Dubya. There, we just don't know, although we have a sneaking suspicion that the USA might be just too big for efficient government. Much as others worked furiously on proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem, we have some scraps of paper here aiming to show that the optimal size of country is 50-75 million people. Proof coming one of these decades.

Hell faces an energy crisis

Dubya today in Washington:

Do you realize we've got 250 million years of coal?

Only 250 million?

[UPDATE: Dan Froomkin also notes Dubya's 10⁶ misoverestimation]

How did they split the phone bills?

An odd common thread in descriptions of the lives of trendy musicians that we've read in the last couple of weeks: roommates. Consider first the formation of Damon Albarn's hip-hop/rock/cartoon fusion outfit Gorillaz:

Gorillaz got started when Blur's Damon Albarn and [graphic artist] Jamie Hewlett shared an apartment after each of them had long-time romance break-ups.

So: the productivity boost from having a roommate. And they weren't the only ones. In a short interview segment in Sunday's New York Times where a musician is asked what they are listening to these days, the playlist was provided by Feist:

After a decade of playing in rock bands, the Canadian singer Leslie Feist, who goes by her last name only, has been reborn as a chanteuse

and she was keen on M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam):

I met Maya Arulpragasam about four or five years ago in England when I was on tour with the rapper Peaches, who was also my roommate. We stayed with Justine Frischmann, from Elastica, and she and Maya were roommates.

Hard to keep straight: Peaches & Feist, Maya and Justine. They've nearly got a sitcom plot right there. And mention of Justine marks the fact that this is not just a weird coincidence of rock star roomies, because of course Justine and Damon used to be an item. Consider this description of the Elastica breakup:

[bandmember] Holland left shortly after the band's return to the Lollapalooza circuit, and about 18 months after her departure (and on the same weekend Frischmann broke up with longtime boyfriend and Blur frontman Damon Albarn)

We haven't quite pinned down the timing, but it looks like Damon moved in with Jamie soon after he hit the rocks with Justine , during which time Justine roomed with M.I.A. and entertained houseguests Feist and Peaches. Yes, the Damon-Justine breakup occurred at the nexus of the universe.

The aid budget and the Armalite

Not for the first time, evidence that it's impossible to parody the Wall Street Journal editorial page (subs. req'd):

The U.S. is already the world's most generous donor to the global development cause. According to the OECD, total U.S. official assistance in 2004 was almost $19 billion, nearly twice that of the next biggest givers, Japan and France. And for those who talk about "aid per capita," keep in mind that U.S. military spending that defends freedom is also a kind of development aid.

The ballot box and the Armalite, again

Jack Straw is a busy man these days. A day after putting the UK's EU referendum on life support, he went on a visit to Israel and walked into a row about meetings between British diplomats and Hamas representatives. The Israelis are unhappy for the usual reason of not liking the idea of terrorists gaining legitimacy:

Shuli Davidovich, spokeswomen at the Israeli Embassy in London, said: "Any dialogue will empower the extremists and not the moderates in the Palestinian Authority. "As long as Hamas continued to go through the route of terrorism we can't perceive it as a political organisation."

Straw's response is to note that the meeting only took place with elected representatives:

"We have a diplomatic job to do as others do, and our diplomats in the occupied territories - as anywhere else in the world - see part of their job, indeed part of their job is, to have contact with elected representatives.

"In the occupied territories it is de rigeur, it is required, that if a diplomat of whatever level goes into a town they go and talk to the mayor.

It strikes us that governments continue to walk into this rhetorical trap of saying "we don't have meetings with terrorists" but then of course find that there's no way round the need to talk to elected representatives. And of course the British government should know this from their dealings with the IRA and Sinn Fein. Things get even trickier if a transcript comes out but luckily that only happened in 1999, when much legitimacy had already been achieved by the Shinners.

Straw is not alone in this dilemma. As we noted recently, Christopher Hitchens and factions within the US government have fallen into exactly the same trap regarding negotiations with Sunni militants in Iraq. At one level, the phrase "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" is an empty formula, because it implies complete subjectivity. But terrorists with an electoral mandate are a very awkward proposition. Indeed, we don't believe that the Israeli government itself has never ever had its own feelers out to Hamas either.

Big Picture Bertie

Not for the first time, we see similarities between the approach to government of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Dubya. Both have clearly chosen to stick to chairman of the board kind of stuff and avoid the messy details of policies. So Bertie has kept an extremely low profile on the Gama and nursing home scandals, but pops up today with a carefully phrased tribute to Sean Doherty RIP, a man that could have easily found a place in the Nixon Administration:

After a promising early career in An Garda Siochána he entered politics and enjoyed a career that had it full share of controversy and that was seldom far from the centre of events.

Indeed. This is one approach to Doherty's role in tapping journalists' phones as Minister for Justice, but he did make the play for redemption 10 years later by revealing that then Taoiseach Charlie Haughey knew all about it. And the Soldiers of Destiny lived happily ever after.

Bertie's other move lately has to been to play the Good European and claim that the Republic will proceed with a referendum on the dead-and-buried EU Constitution. Our guess is that he is going for point-scoring as the smug-faced one at the imminent EU Summit, leaving the insertion of the stake through the heart to one of the Slayer countries (most likely the UK). In the meantime, Bertie gets to enjoy favourable coverage in Le Monde:

l'Irlande a décidé de maintenir le sien. "Oui, nous allons le faire", a déclaré mardi le ministre des affaires étrangères irlandais, Dermot Ahern, interrogé par la BBC, à la question de savoir si le référendum irlandais était maintenu

The story even has a nice picture of the two Aherns signing the Dead Parrot last year in Rome. One wonders if Bertie's fan club in Paris gets him a complimentary tailored shirt from Charvet?

Again with the Doku

A modest request to the American media: Please stop "discovering" Su Doku. The most recent offender: the June 6 issue of New York mag, where Jim Ledbetter writes that the insanely addictive Japanese-Anglo number-box puzzle has arrived on our shores... er, that is, arrived on our shores in April, in the New York Post. (Nice "news" item, Jimmy!)

But dudes! We've been hoarding issues of the London Times since it launched Su Doku last November. And we only bother doing the "fiendish"-level puzzles. Which is a lot trickier than contriving lame-ass trend stories...

The Liffey and the Potomac

A little while back we noted that a Dublin-based insurance executive seemed to be doing the financial equivalent of "helping police with their enquiries" i.e. that they had their man but hadn't managed to clinch the case yet. Well now they have. The Wall Street Journal website (subs. req'd) reports that:

An executive at Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s General Re unit agreed to plead guilty to a charge of criminal conspiracy in relation to the company's transaction with American International Group, and will cooperate with the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission in their investigation of nontraditional insurance products, according to the executive's lawyer.

John Houldsworth, who headed General Re's reinsurance unit in Dublin, faces as many as five years in prison for his role in a 2001 transaction between insurance company AIG and General Re. Mr. Houldsworth agreed to plead guilty to helping AIG mislead shareholders and auditors with the transaction, which improperly boosted AIG's reserves by $500 million.

While in theory he faces 5 years, one suspects that if he dishes sufficient dirt, it could be much shorter than that, not least because his lawyer sounds relatively optimistic:

"John is cooperating fully with the U.S. [Justice Department] and SEC and accepts full responsibility for his role in these matters," Mr. Byrne said in a written statement. "He deeply regrets his actions in working with others to assist in this scheme. John wants to put these regrettable matters behind him and looks forward to returning to the quiet life he shares with his wife and children in rural Ireland."

Now, we thought we read somewhere that he lives in Kinsealy which isn't exactly rural Ireland, but maybe he has fled the sophisticates for a more rustic pad. Perhaps he has in mind the Ireland of J.M. Synge, where a little criminal background just added to one's lustre.

Legacies

Two edgy areas of discussion in the blogosphere at the moment. First, the old minefield of Jews and intelligence, or at least particular kinds of intelligence, was made a little safer by articles in the New York Times and the Economist. Dan Drezner summarizes, which prompts an incidental observation: Drezner's blog features a plug by Andrew Sullivan and Drezner has substitute-blogged for Sully while he was on vacation. And yet Sullivan would benefit from reading Drezner's blog more carefully than he seems to, because Dan observes that one of the authors of the paper linking Jewish genes and intelligence

has also advanced the idea that, "homosexuality is caused by an infection."

The theory is explained more fully here. And yet for Sully, the debate is just another excuse to rehash his Bell Curve antics:

Eventually, the empirical links between intelligence and genetics will be unable to be denied. But sit back and watch people try.

On a different note, but in a debate likely to attract many of the same participants, is Tom Sowell's thesis that dysfunctional social behaviour of African-Americans is due to the proximity of their ancestors to the Ulster-Scots:

The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.

A very different take on the influence of the Ulster-Scots on America than that which we had posted about a few months back. A book topic for David Trimble, now that he has some time on his hands?

The Irish Times gets Astroturfed

Who amongst us doesn't like a quick read through the Letters to the Editor page of the Irish Times to get a sense of what the ordinary grassroots readers are thinking? But in Saturday's page (subs. req'd) there's a very strange letter that should have caught the Editor's attention, because it makes no specific reference to any IT story, nor to any running issue in the letters or opinion pages. It's a letter from a US soldier from Corvallis, Oregon (are there some Oregon State University fans on D'Olier street?) that sounds way too precious from the opening sentence:

The other day I was enjoying the comfort of my home when I looked out the kitchen window and saw my old friend the cherry tree in the backyard.

A half-century ago, my mother baked a cherry pie and I threw some cherry seeds into a flower garden in the backyard. The cherry tree has grown from a tender shoot into a sturdy tree that has weathered many storms through the years and now graces the backyard with its lofty presence.

While I was admiring the cherry tree, my thoughts returned to my recent tour as a soldier in Baghdad ... Late at night, a sniper fired a bullet that just missed me by inches. My close call with death made me realise that the American mission to plant the seeds of democracy in Iraq is a noble, but dangerous undertaking ... They will trample underfoot the seeds of democracy at every opportunity ... However, with the passage of time, freedom, justice and equality will take root in the hearts and minds of the people. The seeds of democracy will flower and bear fruit when the time is ripe for change.

Sgt. RILEY KING, Corvallis, Oregon, USA.

Cherry tree in backyard = Iraqi Democracy. Geddit? This is instantaneously recognizable as our old friend from the Bush-Cheney campaign, the fake grassroots (hence Astroturf) bombardment of newspapers letters pages with propaganda. Here's a website that was tracking pro-Bush versions last year. And here's a tip to the people at the Irish Times -- when you see a suspiciously generic letter like this, just Google the dude's name and see what happens:

The Oregonian newspaper Letters to the Editor:

Democracy in Iraq will bloom
Saturday, April 30, 2005

The other day I was enjoying the comfort of my home when I looked out of the kitchen window and saw my old friend the cherry tree in the back yard.

A half century ago, my mother baked a cherry pie and I threw some cherry seeds into a flower garden in the back yard ... etc

It's the same letter. And like those cherry seeds from 50 years ago, God knows how many other offshoots from this cut-and-paste operation have sprouted. The Pentagon already has an in-house propaganda operation. They don't need one from newspapers as well.

Polythene Scam

The perfect symbol of Ireland's transition from agriculture to high-tech:

[RTE] Gardaí in Co Meath have uncovered what they believe to be the biggest DVD counterfeiting operation ever found in the country.

Polythene tunnels that were originally erected on a farm to produce mushrooms were used by a criminal gang to produce up to 600 DVDs an hour - up to 3 million a year - on 20 DVD burners and printers.

Friday fact-check

Remember when we said we'd this would be our last post about France for this week? We lied. Because the gloating of the American Right over the failed EU Constitution is occurring within their usual fact-free zone. So consider Jonah Goldberg's first two concluding observations in this column:

Of course, there were other reasons the constitution failed so spectacularly, including: 1) The French political system is scandalously undemocratic, and the French people felt they hadn’t been consulted. 2) This may have been the last chance voters had to express their fears of Turkey joining the EU.

He's left himself a couple of outs via vagueness, but nonetheless, let's note that

1) Besides having just said No in, like, a democratic referendum, "scandalously undemocratic" France has whacked Chirac over the head in regional and European elections last year, put him in the office when faced with the only alternative of Le Pen in 2002, and is chomping at the bit to get rid of him, should they get the chance, in 2007.

2) The referendum is indeed the last chance to express their fears of Turkish membership, except for the referendum that they'll get when any actual proposal for Turkish accession is on the table.

Does he get paid for writing that column?

Longford says No but Luxembourg says Yes

The Grandy Duchy of Luxembourg, population 200,000, currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. Showing that he's a good European, Prime Minister Juncker has decided that his citizens will vote on the EU Constitution referendum next month, despite it having been rejected by two of the EU's Original Six.

Meanwhile back in Ireland, the mid-west is awake. Mae Sexton, a TD [MP] in the Soldiers of Tax Dodging/Progressive (sic) Democrats (sic) coalition government has called for the referendum to be canned:

Ms Sexton says she feels it would be perceived as a waste of money if Ireland was to proceed with a referendum on a constitution voted down by two founding members of the EU.

In their news report, RTE pairs these two items, which is actually a funny if perhaps unintentional commentary on the lunacy of how the EU is currently run. Because Ms Sexton represents a constituency of 82,000 people, not a whole lot different than that of EU President Juncker. Who is now trying to steamroll the UK into holding its own lost-cause referendum. Which reminds us of why we endorsed the constitution in the first place.

Taking the Swift Boat to Douglas

Friday's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd) has a detailed report on the use of Isle of Man tax shelters by Texas businessmen Sam and Charles Wyly. The pair have made hundreds of millions of dollars from investments in tech firms and retail operations and not satisfied with the already low taxation of capital gains in the US, arranged transactions via Bank of America to dump assets into Isle of Man trusts where the capital gains would then accrue tax free. As with many such trusts, getting the paperwork through is usually just a matter of pulling someone of the street to sign a few oul forms, as they say in Ireland:

Officials provided Mr. Morgenthau [NYC district attorney] a dossier on more than 20 Wyly-linked entities such as Devotion Ltd., a holding company with two directors and no employees. Corporate filings with the SEC and in the Isle of Man show it is run by an Isle of Man resident who lives on a small farm and another in a row house who signed the paperwork for a $25 million loan from Bank of America in 2002.

Unfortunately, unlike their Irish tax dodger equivalents who also love all things Manx, the brothers seem to have been done in by their lack of familiarity with what the Isle of Man is: a posession of the UK that is displaying increasing cooperation with international regulators. Hence the information flow back to the US on the dodgy deals, which may have involved tax, securities, and money-laundering violations.

And finally, amongst the place the proceeds of this tainted wealth showed up: the Bush-Cheney campaigns. Because:

[the Wylys] have donated more than $1.3 million to political campaigns in recent years, Federal Election Commission records show. Almost all of it went to Republicans. The Wyly brothers also gave funds to two groups, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and Republicans for Clean Air, that ran ads favorable to President Bush in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

In keeping with our recent rants about Irish politics (which we promise, we'll stop soon), we can't help but notice the parallel between the current state of Irish and American politics: an efficient electoral machine maintaining a political power monopoly with the connivance of offshore wealth.

One more post about France

Notwithstanding growing unease amongst some of our readers about the extent of our France-related postings, we'd like to end the week with one more look in. The impeccably tanned PM Dominique de Villepin announced his new cabinet on Thursday. Why is that a country the size of the France can be run with 32 ministers, including junior ministers, exactly the size of the ministerial team in the much smaller Irish Republic? Remember also that the Irish ministers come from the very small pool of elected representatives, whereas a French Cabinet minister can be chosen from anywhere -- which is just as well for de Villepin since he has never run for elected office.

We note the arrival of a new Chirac protégé, François Baroin, the minister for the overseas territories; there's always a point in the news reports where the person gets described as Jacques' "son that he never had." What the poor sap may not realise is that being tagged like this is the political equivalent of that dude you've never seen before in a Star Trek episode who's told to "go look behind that rock." And you never see him again.

The list of holders of this position so far includes Alain Juppé -- found guilty of illegal party financing and now out of politics, Hervé Gaymard -- he of the 14,000 euro a month pad on the state's tab, and de Villepin himself, landed with the PM's job at a very difficult juncture. Perhaps Nicolas Sarkozy realised 10 years ago that the key to political success was not being taken under Chirac's wing, therefore the logic to pissing him off as quickly as possible.

Indeed, let us conclude by wondering whether Jacques Chirac is in fact a Sith Lord. Because Palpatine was equally happy to cycle through aspiring Darths until he got to a young one that could last him a long time, Anakin. So Chirac pursues his most insidious plot of all, amidst all the disposable ministers in Paris, by his unusual interest in Leo Blair. That's right, Tony and Cherie's young son.

Bucharest gives Brussels a headache

A point we've raised before: if one is looking for a reason why EU citizens might be disillusioned with the eastern enlargement process, there's no need to consider the very down-the-road prospect of admission of Turkey. The admission of Romania, arguably the most loony of the Communist dictatorships, is just 18 months away.

While the European Commission is a bit upset about their steel subsidies, the concerns take on a more practical aspect for the Irish government, which is still receiving and then generally deporting asylum seekers from Romania. The latest manifestation of the problem arose yesterday:

A seven-year-old boy has been left behind in Tralee, Co Kerry, after his parents and four-year-old brother were sent back to Romania as part of a mass deportation late last night.

It's not clear whether police couldn't find the kid or if he might have been born in Ireland and is thus a citizen under pre-McDowell rules. Now there's a legitimate argument that the Republic's attitude to immigrants flies in the face of its past benefit from other countries' laxness on this score, but leave that aside for now. How can Brussels possibly make the judgement that Romania, capable of generating this level of unhappiness amongst its citizens, is just about ready to join the EU (except for the steel subsidies)?

Freedom lovers versus Communists in 9 innings

Washington DC's brand new baseball team, the former Montreal Expos, is owned by Major League Baseball. They want to sell it and various private groups are interested. But inevitably, deciding which group one would like to succeed has political overtones. On one side, there's the Friends of Dubya group. This includes the gutless Colin Powell -- the man who made Dominique de Villepin look like the Man of the People with their duelling performances at the UN Security Council. The same group includes Fred Malek, the Dude Who Counted Jews for Richard Nixon.

We therefore endorse the bid of a rival group, which includes George Soros (via Roger Ailes). Soros of course has pumped his private money into anti-Bush causes over the last few years, triggering a predictable War on Soros in which anti-Semitism was never far below the surface. Unfortunately we fear that the Dubya group has many advantages, such as the willingness of his UN Ambassador nominee John Bolton to use the state intelligence apparatus for personal spying needs. The Soros bid won't have any secrets.

Relevant quote of the day

In view of the Dutch No to the EU Constitution:

Nigel Powers: All right Goldmember. Don't play the laughing boy. There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.

Goldmember: What? Take the fahza away! Dutch hater! And now, it is time to say goodbye. Dr. Evil's orders. Which, for you, is bad news bears.

The Gurrier of Paris

Seeing new French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin described by Le Monde as having been "l'un des premiers guerriers du president" caught our attention because of the resemblance of that [warrior] word to gurrier, the fabled young brats of Dublin streets -- such as in the upper part of this still from U2's video for Pride.

This source plausibly claims that the latter word hails from the former, but we doubt that the aristocratic enarque would be pleased to hear of the association. For one thing, the gurriers could never manage anything like his impeccable tan.

Cherchez les Oirlandais

In which we show the seamless web of Oirish connections underlying so many different f*ck-ups. We've already argued that the EU Constitution was doomed from the moment it emerged from the blizzard of smugness that was the Irish Republic's tenure with the EU Presidency a year ago.

Consider another legacy of that era. As part of Bertie Ahern's compromise that saw the host of the Iraq War Council summit get elevated to the Presidency of the European Commission in Brussels, Bertie was able to land the premium job of Internal Markets Commissioner for his then Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy, a likely pretender to his throne that Bertie was keen to move sideways. In fact this period of strategery was a sign that France's influence was already waning within the EU, because Chirac could only get the boring Transport portfolio for the French Commissioner. When you're being out-manouevered by Bertie Ahern, you should know there's a problem.

Anyway, part of McCreevy's new job is to ensure that governments aren't meddling too much in the location of private industry within the EU. As we noted before, in this capacity he met with the current Irish finance minister to discuss the status of horse-related tax breaks that he had presided over to benefit his buddy John Magnier -- one of the duo who sold their stake in Man Utd to Tampa Bay Bucs owner Malcolm Glazer. So don't you see how the antics of these cronies have global geopolitical implications?

But we're barely started. There was another pet McCreevy tax break -- a dodge giving big income tax deductions for investments in private nursing homes (.pdf). So if unlike Magnier's Man Utd partner JP McManus, you're a rich person actually choosing to pay tax in Ireland, just park a bunch of your income in a nursing home, and your tax rate goes way down. This is typical Irish government policy -- never do anything direct like provide health care or build a road when you can rig the tax system to the benefit of your cronies who'll do it much more indirectly and expensively.

Anyway, the predictable consequence of a tax dodge in nursing homes was a flood of investors building them but a shortage of people to operate them, leading to the scandal exposed by a RTE undercover team of shoddy care for the elderly at a home in north Dublin. As noted by the blog GUBU a couple of days ago, Ireland's permanent party of government, Fianna Fail, has a remarkable ability to sound like someone else has been running the country all these years. So the ministers from Bertie on down are demanding investigations and regulators and all the stuff that, like, the government is supposed to do. Such as ensure that migrant workers are getting their duly earned wages.

As it happens, when we Googled to get some information about these tax breaks, the first link that came up was from the Irish operation of the Bank of Scotland promoting nursing homes as a good business investment:

Tax Driven Partnerships
Over the past few years, the pool of investment opportunities governed by tax breaks has been growing smaller. Nursing home investments remain one of the few opportunities.

Which is all innocuous enough until, with our set of obsessions, you make the link: Bank of Scotland (Ireland) -- chairman was Bertie crony Phil Flynn, until he got linked to an IRA money laundering investigation and quietly dropped his many high profile positions in the public and private sector. Phil had particular problems explaining why he went on a business trip to Bulgaria with some dodgy associates, but argued that as an impending EU member Bulgaria had some good investment opportunities. How nice for Phil then that his pal Bertie was moving the enlargement process along as President of the EU Council of Ministers.

One final thought (we promise). The Original Cronies Magnier and McManus have indeed gotten out of soccer with the sale to Glazer. But perhaps seeing the lucrative nature of the industry in the Republic, they are now ploughing cash into British nursing homes. Our advice to our British readers -- before putting Granny in that seemingly nice nursing home, be sure to do some research on any potential Oirish ownership hovering in the background.

UPDATE 3 JUNE: Friday's Irish Times (subs. req'd) reports:

Charlie McCreevy is to take on new responsibilities within the European Commission, deciding all competition cases that the competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, cannot handle because of conflicts of interest.

The logic being that unlike Kroes, McCreevy has never been remunerated by a firm that he might be investigating. But given his own conflict of interest on Irish tax cases, has he swapped those with Kroes? We doubt it.

2nd UPDATE 7 JUNE: A followup on the Magnier-McManus nursing home consortium, Barchester. It's the lead bidder for the group that owns the Priory Clinic in Roehampton -- a very different establishment than Leas Cross.