That's another ratchet down in trust

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, meet Ray Donovan --

'The question is, should this indictment have ever been brought? Which office do I go to to get my reputation back? Who will reimburse my company for the economic jail it has been in for two and a half years?'' 

It's unclear if Ray ever got an answer.

This case is among other things a tradeoff between the common arguments "so crazy it must be true" and "it still doesn't add up".  We needed more weight on the latter.

Trust is for suckers

Slate's Jack Shafer, in praise of Wikileaks --

Why I Love WikiLeaks

For restoring distrust in our most important institutions ... The idea of WikiLeaks is scarier than anything the organization has leaked or anything Assange has done because it restores our distrust in the institutions that control our lives. 

Slate's Jack Shafer on Jose Antonio Vargas (via Mark Krikorian) --

I get on my high horse about Vargas' lies because reporter-editor relationships are based on trust. A news organization can't function if editors must constantly cross-examine their reporters in search of deliberate lies. I'm more disturbed with Vargas for lying to the Washington Post Co. (which—disclosure alert!—employs me) than I am about him breaking immigration law. 

To run with his latter example, reporter-editor relationships are based on trust, but local contact-US embassy staffer relationships are not?

He's Mister World

That book being carried by Nicolas Sarkozy as he enters the European Council meeting today (their photo) appears to be La Fuite de Monsieur Monde (Mister Monde Vanishes) by the Belgian author Georges Simenon, one synopsis of which offers --

Monsieur Monde is a successful middle-aged businessman in Paris. One morning he walks out on his life, leaving his wife asleep in bed, leaving everything. Not long after, he surfaces on the Riviera, keeping company with drunks, whores and pimps, with thieves and their marks. A whole new world, where he feels surprisingly at home—at least for a while.

Carla was not available for comment.

The Google is watching

Above, the options presented in a Google News search related to Ireland's oldest paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force.

Worth doing the homework

New York Times review of the Andrew Roberts book The Storm of War --

His nearly perfect sense of terrain and geography is marred only by his regrettable conflation of Russia with the Soviet Union, which leads to confusion about battlefield locations, German war aims and Soviet casualties.

National Review's Daniel Foster discusses the book --

 Jim Lacey has a great column  today on the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s ill-advised assault on Russia. I happen to be reading about the campaign in Andrew Roberts’ so-far great history of World War II, The Storm of War.

The "Russia" usage is made several additional times in the post.  It's a painfully elementary error, so elementary that one wonders if there's an agenda behind it.

Crisis, what crisis?

We're feeling more assured about Europe already.  After all, he's been in his job since 2004 so he's best placed to sort out the mess, right?

AP Photo by Virginia Mayo.

Hot hand

Not as clear as a screen grab would have been, but the US Golf Association uses the "banner" flag for Northern Ireland players.

Can the foreign troops take a summer holiday too?

Headline:

Afghanistan says will deal with IMF crisis after summer holiday

(Reuters) Afghanistan  said on Sunday it won't be able to address a key International Monetary Fund concern over a looming cash crisis, sparked by a corruption scandal at a failed bank, for more than a month because lawmakers are on holidays.

Golf Nation

New York Times website headline --

Northern Ireland Has an Outsize Presence in Golf

It's an interesting account of the lineage from David Feherty and Darren Clarke to the championship runs of Graeme McDowell and Rory McIlroy and reading it prompts the question about which of the identified factors are different from those that prevail in the Republic.  But anyway.

The article has a footnote --

A version of this special report appeared in print on June 16, 2011, on page B17 of the New York edition with the headline: Small Nation With an Outsize Presence.

Someone thought better of the description of NI as a nation.

When having a choice was bad

Icelanders argue about the validity of the Ireland-Iceland comparison.  The Finance Minister Steingrimur J. Sigfusson:

“People should be careful when it comes to drawing comparisons between Iceland on the one hand, and Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland on the other,” Finance Minister Steingrimur J. Sigfusson said in an interview in Reykjavik. “Iceland didn’t have the ability to save the banks. Trying to rewrite the events that led to that eventuality as some sort of an export product is irresponsible.” ... “Iceland should be humble and avoid advising other countries, especially when it comes to banking,” Sigfusson said. “What happened was an emergency situation which couldn’t be avoided.” 

Univ of Iceland professor Ásgeir Jónsson  --

Dublin faced the same predicament as Reykjavik in 2008, but it responded with a blanket guarantee that turned Irish taxpayers' money into collateral for Irish bank debts. Rating agencies and so-called experts hailed the move at the time, in part because Dublin had the euro and the mighty German state vouching for its credibility. But Iceland's experience of botched government takeovers and private-capital flight has also played out in Ireland—only much more slowly and, arguably, more painfully. 


The crucial difference between Iceland and Ireland is that Icelandic taxpayers relinquished responsibility for their banks' bondholders, while their Irish counterparts are on the hook for their banks' crushing debts. Even worse, we may not have seen the full scale of the Irish banking system's losses, given that it remains on government life support.

The way to reconcile the arguments is to note that Ireland had better circumstances in 2008, but made worse decisions. It's not yet clear that official Ireland knows that.

United Nations evicts protestors from Bahrain office

Cryptic official statement from Bahrain News Agency --

Following a tip-off by Bahrain-based UN office, legal measures have been taken today against three women who entered the UN premises after the official work time and refused to leave when asked to do so, the Director General of the Capital Governorate Police Directorate said.  A police report has been written about the incident which is considered as a crime punishable by the law, he added.

The three women were intending to mount a hunger strike in protest at detention of political activists.

UPDATE: The New York Times has a good tracking of the events.  Also, the UN has produced a nicely on-point letter matching what the Bahraini police would have needed to break up the protest.  How convenient!

Just asking

Included in the Daily Telegraph's Ed Balls document dump is a "strategy document" for the Gordon Brown leadership campaign dated 21 July 2005.  It's essentially a to-do list.  There's a curious item at the end in the category Post (presumably post-successful leadership campaign):

General Election plan/campaigning (inc. Lou Suzman/Citicorp/Internet)

The Telegraph doesn't annotate this part of the note, so who is Lou Suzman? Well, it appears to be a mis-spelling of Louis "Lou" Susman, the current US Ambassador to the UK (appointed by Barack Obama) and a former senior executive with Citibank based in Chicago, but with no previous obvious connection to the UK in general and Labour in particular.  [note: here's another Telegraph article that identifies Susman as such but doesn't dwell on it].

So why way back in 2005 did he make it to Ed Balls' premature plan for a Gordon Brown-led election campaign?  One possibility comes from the fact that the papers make clear the level of infestation of American pollsters suffered by New Labour.  They may have been suggesting names of their favourite US bankrollers for the use of the Brown team.  It's not clear if it went anywhere.

How they calmed the tides of war

The Iceland versus Ireland debate is back on.  The above is a slide from a presentation that the then Irish Minister for Finance, Mr Brian Lenihan (RIP) delivered in February 2010.  Leaving aside the straw man version of what opponents of Ireland's banking sector policy were arguing for, the attitude reflected in the slide is revealing.  Only a crazy messed up place like Iceland tried taking over the insolvent banks early on, and if we had tried it, there would be no funding for the banks or the state.

Fact: Iceland just sold sovereign debt at a 5 percent yield, which is better than Ireland's interest rate under its IMF/EU program.  And the Irish state is about to be a majority owner in all its banks. 

Poor old "Iceland!"  Can we have what they're having?

Syrian shadows

Maybe it's the risks of reporting on a country that doesn't let in reporters, but ....

Item 1: BEIRUT – The existence of a blogger who claimed to be a Syrian-American lesbian came into question on Wednesday after a woman in Britain said photographs circulating on the Internet were of her, not the blogger supposedly in Damascus.



A representative for Jelena Lecic said the London woman first learned her likeness was being used on the Facebook account of a blogger known as Amina Arraf when her photo was linked to article about Arraf in the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday.

Item 2: PARIS – Syria's ambassador to France said Wednesday that someone impersonated her and announced her resignation on French TV amid increasing uncertainty about her country's future.



The apparently false resignation raised questions about how a respected French news channel, France 24, might have fallen for a hoax. France 24 said Wednesday that it is investigating that possibility.

There's always a camera

Wall Street Journal account of Barack Obama's meeting with the Crown Prince of Bahrain --

But the meeting, which an administration official said lasted just 15 minutes, underscored how skittish Washington is about appearing too close to Manama as Mr. Obama seeks to use his administration's diplomatic and financial muscle to help advance the "Arab Spring."   A number of Bahraini human-rights campaigners criticized the White House's hosting of the royal, arguing it could provide political cover for the ruling Khalifa family to continue its crackdown.

No photographs of the meeting were released, and the White House offered no platform for Mr. Obama or Prince Salman to deliver remarks. U.S. officials were so concerned about keeping Mr. Obama at a distance from the crown prince that the meeting was not even on the president's daily public schedule, as is customary.

Above, a photo on the Bahrain News Agency website story about the meeting.

Tough competition

It's a challenge to find an entity more amoral and mercenary than the "realist" foreign policy types looking the other way as Syria and Yemen implode, but step forward the ruling elite at international sports organisations as Sepp Blatter demonstrates the gulf between public opinion and bureaucratic manoeuvering and the International Automobile Federation shamelessly reinstates the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Bahrain.  It might be time for the people who actually generate the cash upon which this parasite class lives -- the soccer players and the car drivers -- to make their views known. 

Trouble in Paradise?

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are normally inseparable, both from each other and from symbols of US military might.

So a little strange then that McCain is spending the US Memorial Day holiday in Bangkok, while Graham is spending it in Qatar.

Spillover

If Libyan dictator Gaddafi had billions of dollars sitting at Societe General and huge amounts of AIG bailout money were channeled to Soc Gen, that means that American taxpayer money was put on the line to save the Gaddafi wealth.

Those crazy foreigners

A CNN International report just now described hawala as "an ancient banking system that relies entirely on trust." The reliance on trust was meant to be taken as a remarkable feature.

As opposed to modern banking systems, in which people place paper currency in well-supervised financial institutions that could never possibly go completely pear-shaped.

Name that corporate logo

Answer in 24 hours.

UPDATE: It's a Krispy Kreme in Salmiya, Kuwait.

War and change

David Brooks writes in the New York Times from London reflecting on British history  --

In 1920, Winston Churchill’s mother held a dinner for M. Paul Cambon to celebrate the end of his 20 years as the French ambassador to Britain. One of the guests asked Cambon what he had seen in his two decades in London.  “I have witnessed an English revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself,” Cambon replied. “The governing class have been almost entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.”

Buried in that answer is a picture of how politics should work. Britain faced an enormous task: To move from an aristocratic political economy to a democratic, industrial one. This transition was made gradually, without convulsion, with both parties playing a role.



The problem is that the period 1900-1920 includes World War I.  Now you can still make the claim that the political system showed remarkable stability given the convulsions around it, but to isolate a highly militaristic 20 years of British history and claim it as an example of progressive domestic political change is a stretch.  Indeed the War itself was a contributor to those changes, through increasing the role of government, mobilizing more people into the workforce, and undermining the faith in the elite that had made such a shambles of the war. 

And of course the War was critical to Britain's relationship with Ireland, necessitating yet another qualifier on 1900-1920 as a period of peaceful revolution.  Finally, that's a cagey reference of Brooks to "both parties" because in Britain (again ignoring Ireland), there were three: Conservative, Liberal, and Labour.  Yes Labour was not yet in power, but as a social movement it was already exerting influence.

In short, if you wanted to pick a period of British history as involving constructive political quarreling, you could do better.

Own Goal

Those ugly ramps that embassies put at their gates to deter oversized suspicious vehicles did an excellent job of keeping in President Obama's car at the US Embassy in Ballsbridge, Dublin.
Photo: Katie MacArdle

John Edwards and Arnold Schwarzenegger

Even by the standards of blogging, this post is a complete waste of time, but anyway.  Here's supposed Democrat and one-time candidate for US Senate from California Mickey Kaus explaining why it was so relevant to keep peddling those true stories about a John Edwards love-child --

4. Irresponsibility: How irresponsible was it to seek the party's nomination knowing that this scandal was lurking around, ready to explode? What if he'd won? Are we sure it wouldn't have been discovered by the McCain campaign before November? Rock stars get to behave this badly because they're only rock stars. Worst that happens is the band breaks up. What if Edwards actually got elected--and then the scandal was discovered when he was in office? Did Democrats enjoy the Lewinsky years?
5. The Coverup: If the scandal is true, it almost certainly means that during the campaign Edwards presided over an elaborate coverup involving at least a) having an aide wrongly claim paternity and b) having other aides go out and lie to reporters. It probably also included payments of money to cooperating parties and various familiar slurs on the character of the 'other woman,' Rielle Hunter.

Now here's Kaus explaining how great it is that we already know all the bad stuff about his one-time hero, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger --

In a perverse way, I think Schwarzenegger's character defects may even serve as a valuable protection against the dangers of his ascendancy. It's not just that he will be on his best behavior toward women, or that he will take special care not to come across as an authoritarian who disrespects the "little men" and "losers." It's that the defects in all their ugliness are now visible to everyone--they've done their damage, making it impossible for him to think about building the sort of cult of personality his Nuremberg-rally fantasies might otherwise tempt him to build. We know he's a pig. We're not going to love him. If he's going to keep our loyalty it will have to be by producing actual results: a slimmed down government, a balanced budget, better schools, a better business climate, etc.

Except now we know that Arnold was sitting on an Edwards-like secret all these years, one that he got away with while running for, and holding, office. That Edwards-era "irresponsibility" and "coverup" sounds like the kind of thing that might have kept the Governator from fulfilling the expectations that people like Kaus had him in. But not being a Democrat, there was a blind spot.

Remember Mickey when he said he'd balance the budget? He lied.

UPDATE: The current Kaus strategy is to claim that the Schwarzenegger revelation is old news, though that's not backed up when you follow his link.

Free fact-checking

The Wall Street Journal Europe finds Lizzie's Windsor's visit to Ireland pleasing:

Queen Elizabeth II will visit Ireland today, the first state visit by a British Monarch since the founding of the Republic in 1921. 

It'll come as news to custodians of the memory of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (Lizzie's mother) that Ireland became a Republic in 1921.  It was in 1949.  Just so you're ready for that trivia question: Who was the last King of Ireland?

DSK: A Theory

Since everyone is offering their interpretation of the Dominique Strass-Kahn accusations, here's ours, taking the NYPD version of events at face value.  It wasn't about the sex.  It was about the anger -- the anger that the lowly hotel maid had disturbed him in his US$3000/night suite.  The assault was the expression of anger, not yet another manifestation of supposed Gallic lust.

This could yet be the fiasco that might have been averted through use of a Do Not Disturb sign, although the underlying psychological issues were probably going to explode eventually.

Warning signs

IMF Managing Director and likely candidate for President of France, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  Finding himself in the custody of the actual Law and Order: SVU.  But go read this story from France Soir last week (run through your favourite translator if necessary) -- written before this bizarre development.  There were problems for someone on a public sector salary: the apartment in central Paris, the place in Marrakesh, the Porsche, and the fixer Ramzy Khiroun, the kind of fixer that famous people with a tendency to land in sticky situations might need.  It seems there was a lot of stuff about DSK hidden in plain sight.

Argentina without the wine

Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Marian Tupy --

Now, in grabbing for retirees' savings, Irish leaders are attacking the very notion of private property. Dublin's new tax is intended to fund the government's "job creation" program while still shrinking its deficits. But even those who have confidence in the ability of governments to create productive employment should be concerned about the ethical dimension of expropriation, which is on par with Argentinian President Cristina Kirchner's decision to nationalize private pensions in 2008, when her government faced bankruptcy.


Now it's true that there's an element of lunacy to the policies forced by the European Union's still unresolved debt crisis, but a 0.6 percent temporary tax on private pension fund assets -- whose contributions earned tax deductions -- doesn't seem on a par with expropriation.  Especially when the National Pension Reserve Fund, which was set aside to meet public pension obligations has already been fully raided to meet the black holes in the banking sector. 

Tupy correctly focuses on the eurozone as an elite-driven project.  But Ireland's problem isn't the single currency per se, but the insane banking sector policies that come with it.

What not to do

Wall Street Journal --

Yet Spanish officials are anxious to avoid a situation in which they take over a bank, or purchase banks' bad assets, as Ireland has done. Ireland's National Asset Management Agency bought commercial-real-estate assets at severe discounts, forcing steep markdowns across the sector and creating further capital holes that had to be filled largely with taxpayer money.

Gradually people are realizing that Ireland wrote the book on the worst possible way of handling a banking crisis.

UPDATE 17 MAY: 2nd news article --

"I think, very rightly, the government [of Spain] has no intention of creating a bad bank," said Luis Arenzana, managing partner of Shelter Island Capital Management in Madrid. "The case of Ireland proves it's a terrible idea."

The conspiracy-theorist in chief

The Daily Beast features "the 6 wackiest Osama bin Laden conspiracy theories."  And it's wacky stuff.  Kate and Wills were tipped off.  He's not dead.  He was a CIA plant etc etc.

But one problem -- there's one truly wacky conspiracy theory not on the list.  That Osama and Saddam Hussein worked together, up to and including 9/11.  And instead of tabloids and crazy Internet users, that theory was held by George Bush and Dick Cheney.

The actual destruction that resulted isn't so wacky.

Random Spongebob Irish moment

In the episode Yours Mine and Mine, a subway train features the destination Ballymun.