Tony versus Denis: Some additonal facts

New York Times --

2 Irish Billionaires Clash Over Publisher’s Course

in which it is said of Tony O'Reilly--

He moved from rugby to dairy in the early 1960s when he became chief executive of the Irish Dairy Board, a co-operative of Irish farms, and then joined H.J. Heinz to become the first nonfamily member to run the business.

Well he did "join" H.J. Heinz in a package deal, as economic historian Cormac O'Grada politely explains --

Erin Foods ... specialise in lines such as packaged soup and processed vegetables ... [Mickey Joe] Costello resigned in 1966 and his successor, the youthful Tony O'Reilly set up a trading partnership with the H.J. Heinz Co. in 1967.

So Tony did a deal in which Heinz got access to Erin Foods' advanced food processing techniques, developed at taxpayer expense -- and then jumped over to Heinz himself.

Later on, the NYT explains the feud with Denis O'Brien --

The bad blood between the two began when Mr. O’Reilly, the former chief executive of Heinz, beat Mr. O’Brien in a battle for control of Irish telecommunications company Eircom Group in 2001. Mr. O’Brien did not take it lightly that someone who had joined the bidding contest after him and had less experience in telecommunications beat him to the punch.

No. The bad blood dates to when O'Reilly was in one of the losing consortia for the bid on Ireland's second mobile telephone licence, won by O'Brien. There is an O'Reilly grudge going back to that award and the non-Fianna Fail government which oversaw it -- a grudge that has had a major impact on Irish politics since then with his newspapers in effect campaigning against the 1994-97 coalition and doing major ball carrying duty for Taoiseach Bertie Ahern regarding his own much investigated but poorly understood financial dealings.

Incidentally, in that 2003 Eircom deal that O'Reilly won, the Irish public got fleeced.

The trouble with disputes between rich people is that you might have to pick one of them to cheer for. It's a clear choice in this case.

Ambassador for Hydrocarbons

White House announcement (done, like the "resignation" of Alphonso Jackson, en route to Ukraine) --

President George W. Bush today announced that Special Envoy to the European Union, C. Boyden Gray will also serve as Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy. Mr. Gray will engage directly with senior European, Central Asian, Russian and other political and business leaders to support the continued development and diversification of the energy sector.

That position as "Special Envoy" to the EU is in fact an extended recess appointment for Gray i.e. one done without Senate approval. It's not clear what the backstory is here i.e. whether there was nothing for Gray to do in Brussels given that he's not actually the US Ambassador to the EU or if there's some new wheeze involving oil or gas deals at work. But the US Senate needs to find some way to rein in this parallel diplomatic system, especially given how closely it seems to conform to the obsessions of George Bush and Dick Cheney with energy supplies. It's all too clear where that obsession has already led.

The status struggle in microcosm

The Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd) explains the deal in which U2 has agreed to have Live Nation manage its concerts and fan club and sell its merchandise for the next 10 years -- those concert ticket sales taking place through Live Nation's badly needed competitor to Ticketmaster:

Formed in Dublin in 1976, U2 remains one of the most potent live draws in the world. Its most recent tour was the second-highest-grossing concert tour in history, earning $389.4 million at the box office, according to data from Billboard magazine ... The deal may also offer ways for U2 to address problems that arose on its last tour. The band offered members of its online fan club, who paid $40 apiece to join, early access to tickets. But during the so-called fan-club presales, many would-be buyers encountered frustrating waits and a limited, expensive inventory comprising some of the worst seats in the house.

Ticketmaster had a hand in the presale fiascoes, inasmuch as its infrastructure couldn't handle the surge of ticket requests that flooded its computers. But people involved say the bigger problem was that there were simply too many members in the club to provide them all premium seats.

"We feel we've got a great Web site," U2 lead singer Bono said in a statement. "But we want to make it a lot better."

No wonder Bono likes African development projects so much. You really can promise masses of people that they will be free from malaria. You just can't promise them that they'll all have premium seats at the next concert.

Sport in wartime

The oddest moment at this evening's opening of the Washington Nationals new stadium was not the ceremonial first pitch by George Bush, but an earlier sequence in which military personnel in uniform carried out two huge stars and stripes flags.

The folded up flags being carried looked like body bags.

Add the half grand to the grand

The New York Times, in what seems like a spectacularly ill-timed travel section for the super-rich with global financial markets in the tank --

Nothing symbolizes the recent transformation of Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, better than the Merchant Hotel (35-39 Waring Street; 011-44-28-9023-4888; themerchanthotel.com; doubles from about $430). Besides one-upping the old Europa — once ‘‘Europe’s most bombed hotel’’ — the Merchant sells the world’s most expensive cocktail, a mai tai made with hand-cut Fijian ice and rare Wray & Nephew rum, for £750.

Nothing? No other symbol of the fewer dead people, the dismantled barracks, the mere fact that you can park on the street? Instead this tiresome shite about the "world's most expensive cocktail", a pure PR stunt, the reductio ad absurdum of trickle-down economics: the idea that one is supposed to feel good about drinking in the bar that serves such a cocktail.

The NYT also assumes, perhaps correctly, that readers don't care about the dollar conversion of that £750 price tag. It's $1500, and (with another 9 months of Bush to go) counting.

The grim reaper

George Bush, with Australian PM Kevin Rudd today --

And I haven't spoke to the [Iraqi] Prime Minister [al-Maliki] since he's made his decision, but I suspect that he would say, look, the citizens down there just got sick and tired of this kind of behavior ... And so I'm not exactly sure what triggered the Prime Minister's response. I don't know if it was one phone call. I don't know what -- whether or not the local mayor called up and said, help -- we're sick and tired of dealing with these folks. But nevertheless, he made the decision to move. And we'll help him.

But this was his decision. It was his military planning. It was his causing the troops to go from point A to point B. And it's exactly what a lot of folks here in America were wondering whether or not Iraq would even be able to do in the first place.

If ever there was a passage that signified too much protestation, this would be it. For one thing, why did PM al-Maliki look so distinctly unenthused when Dick Cheney popped up in Baghdad last week -- by pure coincidence, of course, right before al-Maliki is said to have decided on his crackdown on the Basra militias?

Second fiddle

White House --

President and Mrs. Bush will welcome British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Mrs. Sarah Brown to the White House on April 17, 2008. The United States and the United Kingdom share a special partnership that enables our countries to more effectively confront the key strategic challenges facing our two nations.

Beyond saying Thanks a lot for Basra, dude, it's not clear how much time George will have to devote to his special friend Gordon, since Pope Benedict will be in town. Sure, the main business between Bush and the Pope will have been done on the previous day, but Benedict will still be whizzing around Washington and the Methodist Bush will still be in one of his hazes from his chat with him the night before. Don't doubt for a moment that Bush looks for Signs in all sorts of ways --

[to eastern european reporter] Are they still talking about the "rainbow speech"? Were you there for that?
Q Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: It was an amazing moment, wasn't it?
Q Yes, it was amazing moment, yes.
THE PRESIDENT: I was giving a speech in the town square where Ceauşescu had given his final speech. And it was raining, and just as I got up to speak a full rainbow appeared.
Q Yes. And about bridge to a new Russia.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q You remember that?
THE PRESIDENT: I remember the rainbow most of all. It was a startling moment.

Can Benedict, let alone Gordon, match that?

Your Arsenal

Visiting the French team in the Premiership.

Photo: AFP/Pool/Matt Dunham

Not Denmark

As the Internets will be full of people looking for the Geert Wilders film "Fitna", which is easy to find, here instead is the reaction of the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende. With an eye to reaching the largest possible audience for his condemnation of the film, he speaks in English for a couple of minutes after the 2 minute mark.

The thinking appears to be that Denmark was too late in offering an official reaction to the cartoons, which seems to rely on finer distinctions between country and state than the loons might be willing to make. As the BBC religious correspondent Frances Harrison pointed out, other than showing images of the Danish cartoons, Wilders makes no new potentially "blasphemous" images in Fitna. So maybe this controversy won't have legs.

Another Bush speech

Before a messianic audience in Dayton, Ohio (added: link to speech)--

Delivered justice to Zarqawi in the form of two 500 lb precision guided bombs.

Tell that to Pope Benedict.

Nothing in the speech yet makes any reference to the chaos in southern Iraq and Baghdad today.

Now he mentions the chaos, but blames Iran. Iran supports SCIRI/Dawa which is part of the government, clamping down on al-Sadr.

A new refrain -- "the soccer, the soccer" (it used to be "the schools, the schools"). Odierno says he saw 180 games in one trip. McCain only saw 50! Is it the job of generals to be counting in-use football fields?

Is his audience deluded enough to think that Iraqi politics is just like US politics? Their President certainly is.

He refers to Iraqi oil production without making any reference to the huge pipeline blast today.

His audience probably doesn't understand the legal dance now going on in the speech: "strategic partnership" = a treaty he intends not to submit to the Senate for consent -- contrary to the constitution.

That "critic" he quoted is long-time war supporter, Tony Cordesman.

Two sentences in the speech on the actual current situation in Iraq -- which has almost nothing to do with al-Qaeda. And he asks others to keep an open mind.

Answer to his question (if not Iraq, where?): Pakistan. But Pakistan doesn't have oil.

Our man in Baghdad

What did George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Steve Hadley and "The Lombardis" think was going to happen?

One question lingers: why did the Iraqi government move against al-Sadr happen so soon after Cheney's visit? Did Dick stir up a battle that the government can't win?

Photo: AFP/Alli Al-Saadi

Wonders will never cease

The New York Times managed to find a Donegal vista without a bungalow perched on a hill in the background.

Photo: Sebastian Meyer for The New York Times

UPDATE: We'd done a similar riff before in connection with this Leitrim photo.

Four Nations Once Again

It's hard not to laugh. After insisting for decades, against geographic common sense, that "Ulster is British" -- while carrying passports labelled "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" -- the Unionists discover that Gordon Brown doesn't think that Northern Ireland is British enough to merit any mention in his British identity initiative, or to be included in the proposal to allow government buildings to fly the Union Jack whenever they want:

Mr. Peter Robinson (Belfast, East) (DUP): The House will have heard that the Justice Secretary [Jack Straw] believes that, when it comes to flag flying, the people of Northern Ireland should be treated as children of a lesser god. Will he tell the House the rationale behind the Government’s decision on this matter? Does he believe that the flag may not be universally cherished in Northern Ireland? If so, will that have implications elsewhere in the kingdom?

Mr. Straw: The reason for the Government’s decision is obvious, and it is not the one that the hon. Gentleman mentions. As everyone knows, the two communities in Northern Ireland have been seriously divided. The best advice that we received was that we should maintain the current arrangements for Northern Ireland.

Rather than go round in circles about the "British" debate, a better strategy for the Unionists would be to work with an alternative identity model: one which acknowledges that the UK grew out of 4 constituent nations and that each still provides a sense of place which makes living in each a little bit different from the others. Surely this is better than trying to manufacture a "British" identity along Gordon Brown's lines --

These values live in the popularity of our common institutions from the NHS, the BBC, to the Queen - and even more recently in UK-wide support for the Olympics, Children in Need, Comic Relief, Make Poverty History and action on climate change.

a list with nothing that pre-dates the 20th century and ends with finding an identity in the response to telethons. How could English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish be any worse? And while the Union Jack of course incorporates the 4 nations, it is as Jack Straw says, a bit inflammatory for some people. An alternative symbol of the modern UK identity is thus presented above.

Photo by Phyzome via Wikipedia

A global campaign

In what may be the reductio ad absurdum of the trend of generating "outrage" via comments from someone associated with a presidential campaign, there is nascent "outrage" over comments made by Niall O'Dowd regarding Barack Obama on Marian Finucane's show last Saturday.

Heroes in the armchair

There's an event going on the American Enterprise Institute with the key intellectual backers of the invasion of Iraq and then the surge discussing the future of the US occupation. Not surprisingly, they've all zeroed in on the concept of the "second election" (which doesn't come for another 18 months) being more important than the first in a new democracy -- and thus the need for troops to stay at least that long -- notwithstanding all the cheering about purple fingers that went on after the first one.

Anyway the panel is Fred Kagan, Michael O'Hanlon, and Ken Pollack. Kagan went through a list of benchmarks and declared most of them "done". O'Hanlon declared that the group of war architects like the panel and David Petraeus deserved a group name -- not Vulcans, but Lombardis, after the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers. That's quite an honour to bestow on themselves. Vince Lombardi had won three NFL titles in a shorter time than the war in Iraq.

O'Hanlon seems surprised that things got worse in Mosul during the surge. He never mentioned that troops were reallocated from Mosul to Baghdad for the surge -- and dastardly al-Qaeda moved in the opposite direction. Meanwhile Ken Pollack is complaining that the success of the surge is creating a demand for more troops in the south. "Overstretch through success" or something. He's also claiming that the surge turned Iraq around much more quickly than British military operations in Northern Ireland.

Vince Lombardi had many quotes. O'Hanlon clearly likes the ones about persistence and attention to fundamentals. But Vince also said --

We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.

Someone is going to have blow the final whistle on the war, even at the risk of the "Lombardis" thinking that they could have won it.

UPDATE: Things are getting wackier. Fred Kagan is demonstrating that if you can use even slightly technical terminology, everyone thinks you're genius. He was talking about the reduction in brigades in terms of a "delta". He said that each reduction in brigade strength from 20 has exponential effects on military capabilities, so that by the time you're thinking about going from 15 to 14 brigades, the loss is 10⁶. 1 million times less effective? Nobody asked.

FINAL UPDATE: Think Progress has the clip of O'Hanlon's Lombardi discussion.

New York Zombie

New York Fed, on its role in the revised JP Morgan bid for Bear Stearns --

The New York Fed will take, through a limited liability company formed for this purpose, control of a portfolio of assets valued at $30 billion as of March 14, 2008. The assets will be pledged as security for $29 billion in term financing from the New York Fed at its primary credit rate.

JPMorgan Chase will bear the first $1 billion of any losses associated with the portfolio and any realized gains will accrue to the New York Fed. BlackRock Financial Management, Inc. will manage the portfolio under guidelines established by the New York Fed designed to minimize disruption to financial markets and maximize recovery value.

So JP Morgan dumps the toxic $30 billion Bear Stearns assets into a separate company, gets to borrow against them from the Fed at 2.5% and only bears the first $1 billion of losses on the assets. Meanwhile the assets sit there, potentially for years, as exposure of the NY Fed, but BlackRock collecting nice fee income for managing them (or have they been promised some of the upside too?).

You would think that with part of the credit crisis being Special Purpose Asset-Backed Entities blowing up in people's faces, there might be some reticence about using them as a solution to the crisis. But the virus has mutated.

All hell on the eastern front

The New York Times is giving Nicholson Baker's book, Human Smoke, the star treatment. Two reviews -- one very negative, one very positive, the latter by Irish writer Colm Toibin. A profile of the author. A free excerpt of the book. The headline on Toibin's review, Their Vilest Hour, accurately captures the deeply anti-Churchill message of the book. And of course, there's plenty to be against. For example, the bits of Churchill that Jonah Goldberg glossed over when looking for evidence of 1920s Liberal Fascism --

Winston Churchill visited Rome. "I could not help being charmed by Signor Mussolini's gentle and simple bearing, and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers," Churchill said in a press statement. Italian fascism, he said, had demonstrated that there was a way to combat subversive forces; it had provided the "necessary antidote to the Russian virus."

"If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism," Churchill told the Romans. It was January 20, 1927.

But anyway, the main business of the book is as Toibin says --

an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified

and in particular the effectiveness of the bombing of cities. Baker says it didn't even achieve its stated purpose, let alone meet any moral standard:

the bombing served to kill and maim the civilian population, yet the survivors did not blame the Nazi leaders, who used the bombing as a further excuse to inflict suffering on the Jewish population, claiming, for example, that evictions of Jews were “justified on the grounds that Aryans whose houses were destroyed by bombing needed a place to live.”

But one could turn that around and note the implied pathology of the wartime German population -- that just about any event could be used to rationalize the Holocaust.

And there's another issue. Before there was the large scale allied bombing of German cities, there was the war in the east with the invasions of Poland and then the USSR. Battles in which the Nazis initially had little opposition. And still they set about killing everybody. Jewish people first of course, but Slavs didn't rank highly for Nazi Germany either. Hitler's Germany was evil. The Allies were not, at least not intrinsically. The pacifists had no answer for how to save the non-German eastern European population.

UPDATE: A conversation with the author on the website of Haverford College.

It's been a long time

Dick Cheney, with Israeli president Shimon Peres today --

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: I want to thank you, Mr. President, for welcoming me back again to Israel. I remember when we first met many years ago, when you were Defense Minister --

PRESIDENT PERES: Both of us.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Both of us, yes. This was before I was defense minister. This was Rumsfeld's first time as defense minister.

A reminder of the deep roots of the Iraq fiasco. The photo is Cheney with Gerald Ford and Don Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld was Ford's Chief of Staff. Rummy was later moved to the defence position and Cheney took his Chief of Staff job, which is when he first met Peres.

A problematic portfolio

In what seems to be standard procedure -- and what must drive the neocons up the wall -- a Bush administration visitor finds himself underneath a picture of Yassir Arafat. But, in an indication of the lack of grounding of the de facto partitioned Palestinian state (by Arab standards), the best that Mahmoud Abbas can do is be under a picture of himself.

Go match yourself

OK, it's not quite up there with his Auschwitz parka, but Dick Cheney couldn't coordinate his jacket and pants to receive his Islamo-sash and al-bling from Custodian of the 400 Oil Wells, King Abdullah?

Republic or Province?

George Bush has "issued" a statement on the Taiwan election, although since he's probably mountain biking around Camp David, the statement has actually been waiting to go for a few days with an {insert victor name} field once the result was in. And quite a diplomatic dance it is, especially for someone with zero willingness to confront China over Tibet. Of particular note --

Once again, Taiwan has demonstrated the strength and vitality of its democracy ... Taiwan is a beacon of democracy to Asia and the world. I am confident that the election and the democratic process it represents will advance Taiwan as a prosperous, secure, and well-governed society.

As in, not like the other place.

It falls to Taiwan and Beijing to build the essential foundations for peace and stability by pursuing dialogue through all available means and refraining from unilateral steps that would alter the cross-Strait situation.

No reference to "China" at all. Just Beijing. Two places disputing a single title.

The maintenance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and the welfare of the people on Taiwan remain of profound importance to the United States.

Not "people of Taiwan" (a usage shared by the State Department). But on balance, a pro-Taiwan statement. Yet, is there really anything that the US could do if things got ugly between China and its "renegade province"? And one hopes Bush doesn't think this compensates for his silence on Tibet.

Hillary and The Peace Process, again

Interesting New York Times (via The Confluence) roundup of opinions regarding the role that Hillary Clinton played in the Northern Ireland peace process, the most celebrated peace process in recorded history. There's a hint that Bill Clinton's non-attendance at the commemorative event next month has less to do with a specific clash on the Pennsylvania campaign schedule and more with not wanting to draw further attention to the controversy over Hillary's role. And yet most of the actual quotes in the article are favourable to Hillary, including from non-obvious sources like Peter King (although one could guess that King, a McCain supporter, prefers Hillary to Obama as a general election opponent).

On the other side, there's the David Trimble quote contesting her importance (and don't forget Trimble's love-in with the neocons; he's not a disinterested observer). Yet much of The Peace Process was indirect, since the protagonists often refused to talk to each other. Intermediaries were important but not every intermediary would have interacted with every party. Furthermore, the White House has always had a large role in outreach to nationalists, since the Unionists had their channels via the UK government to the US State Department. Remember all the uncertainty that used to surround whether Sinn Fein leaders would get a visa? What you saw depends on where you were sitting.

Army of God

George Bush's Easter radio address --

On Easter, we remember especially those who have given their lives for the cause of freedom. These brave individuals have lived out the words of the Gospel: "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." And our Nation's fallen heroes live on in the memory of the Nation they helped defend.

Those Gospel words are from John, with Jesus explaining to the Apostles his own impending sacrifice for them, and by extension, all of humanity.

So death in Bush's war of choice is now equivalent to the death (if not Resurrection) of Jesus? One wonders if Pope Benedict, in Washington next month, has an opinion on this bit of theological interpretation.

Passport snoopers: good news and bad news

The good, or at least weird, news is that the one of the two companies involved in the peek into Barack Obama's passport file has as its chairman and CEO a Barack Obama adviser, John Brennan, of The Analysis Corporation. The bad news is that this corporation and its parent (SFA: "national security solutions provider") sees its main business line as counterterrorism, meaning the same securocrats are probably looking through all sorts of other intelligence information on Americans and US residents.

UPDATE: The Analysis Corp, unlike the other company Stanley, has yet to fire the snooper -- the delay at the request of the State Department. And Brennan has disagreed with Obama on retroactive immunity for telecom firms under Bush's modified foreign intelligence surveillance program. Looks like his own company has just become the case study in what happens when private companies start trawling through personal information.

Incidentally, Internet searches for the other company, Stanley, get more precise if you use its NYSE ticker symbol, SXE.

UPDATE: It took 24 hours from when you read it here first for the media to figure out the Brennan angle. But as usual, they try to go with a faux scandal and not look at the underlying issue of privacy and government information-gathering.

How long before a mysterious Congressional fire?

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, in a particularly ill-timed rant coming on the evening of news about George Bush's securocrats rummaging through Barack Obama's passport file --

This exercise [blocking "Protect America Act"] shows that the Democratic left that runs the House is a danger to American security.

Privacy for the little people

The White House/Republican spin on why State Department contract employees were snooping into Barack Obama's passport file will be: well, they got caught, right? But they got caught because --

of a computer-monitoring system that is triggered when the passport accounts of a "high-profile person" are accessed, he said. The system, which focuses on politicians and celebrities, was put in place after the State Department was embroiled in a scandal involving the access of the passport records of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992.

i.e. if you're not a politician or celebrity, anyone with access to the system, including those pesky "contract employees" could snoop as much they want and no red flag would ever pop up.

Where are the libertarians?

Not a gay blitzkrieg

It'll take someone who knows Polish language and politics to sort it out, but in its report on how Polish president Lech Kaczynski used this picture of Drogheda man Brendan Fay (left) at his Canadian wedding to argue against the Lisbon treaty, the New York Times says --

The Polish president also showed a map of pre-World War II Poland, linking his anti-gay oratory to historic Polish anxieties about German encroachment.

But wasn't the president arguing, separately from the gay marriage issue, that the Lisbon treaty could allow Germans who owned property in what is now western Poland to initiate legal claims for the property on the basis that it was part of Germany before 1945? Maybe Kaczynski's speech was weird enough to have linked the two issues, but it read like they were completely different arguments.

Needed in Pennsylvania

As we said a while ago, the logic of Bill Clinton coming to Northern Ireland less than 2 weeks before the Pennsylvania primary was never clear. He has now cited "changes to his schedule" in withdrawing from the April 10 event marking the Good Friday agreement 10th anniversary.

Freedom cabbage

Future generations will find many aspects of our culture bizarre, one surely being why it was that visits by the McCain-Lieberman '08 campaign to Iraq required a stop at a fruit and veg market (in Iskandariyah) as an index of progress.

Bush's 5th anniversary speech

It's very strange. No one told him that "Concerned Local Citizens" were rebranded "Sons of Iraq" to sound less like vigilantes.

Here's an old post on this "weak horse, strong horse" quote. It's amazing that Bush admits that Osama bin Laden has guided his strategy.