He doesn't do irony

 New York Times Tom Friedman --

As I walk around the streets of Beirut, that verse from “The Sounds of Silence” keeps rattling around in my head: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls ...”

Thus revealing his pre-1980s musical awareness. Fans of the latter vintage would know better the wordplay on those lyrics in Rush's Spirit of Radio. Its cynicism is more appropriate to the rest of Friedman's column.

No, Pope Benedict did not endorse the House Republican budget

Leading Republican "thinker" Congresssman Paul Ryan at Georgetown University the other day:

The overarching threat to our whole society today is the exploding federal debt. The Holy Father, Pope Benedict, has charged that governments, communities, and individuals running up high debt levels are “living at the expense of future generations” and “living in untruth.” 

The words in quotation marks have started popping up in the Googlesphere recently, which suggests that someone is e-mailing around the quotes. It's important to look at the source, which is a book-length interview of Benedict by the German journalist Peter Seewald:

Q: If it is a question of a good example, the State has not proved to be very exemplary either. Governments today pile up debts to heights never seen before. A single country like Germany spent no less than 43.9 billion Euros just on interest payments to banks; in other words, for the fact that despite all our wealth we have lived beyond our means. Those interest payments alone would be enough to provide food for a year for all the children in developing countries. Worldwide, since the onset of the financial crisis, government debt has increased by 45 percent—by now totaling more than 50 trillion dollars—inconceivable figures, and a completely unprecedented situation. In 2010 the member states of the European Union alone are taking out more than 800 billion Euros of new loans. The new debt in the United States government budget is pegged at 1.56 trillion dollars, the high point of all time. The Harvard Professor Kenneth Rogoff says, therefore, that there is no normality any more, but only an illusion of normality.Certainly generations to come are being burdened with colossal debts. Isn't that also an insanely big moral problem? 


A: Naturally, because we are living at the expense of future generations. In this respect it is plain that we are living in untruth. We live on the basis of appearances,and the huge debts are meanwhile treated as something that we are simply entitled to. Here, too, everyone understands in theory that it would require careful deliberation to recognize again what is really possible,what one can do, and what one may do. And yet people do not take it to heart. Above and beyond the individual financial plans, a global examination of conscience is indispensable. The Church has tried to make a contribution in this regard with the encyclical Caritas in veritate. It does not give answers that would solve everything. But it is a step toward putting things into another perspective and looking at them not only from the point of view of feasibility and success, but from the point of view that sees love of neighbor as something normative and is oriented to God's will and not just to our desires. In this respect impetus would have to be provided in this way so that a change of consciousness can really come about.

A few things to note. The question is as long as the answer. By the end of the question, economics professor Ken Rogoff sounds like the dudes who wrote The Matrix. Benedict's answer -- as Ryan's carefully worded excerpt acknowledges -- says absolutely nothing about budget deficits per se, and especially not anything about the right way to address them. It's as much, if not more so, a critique of private debts as public ones to the extent that it addresses Seewald's 10-clause question at all.

Anyway, Ryan should know better (but maybe he doesn't) to go before the Jesuits in Georgetown and start picking and choosing his Pope quotes. In other segments of the interview book, Benedict talks about off-limit topics for Ryan, like global warming and social safety nets. Indeed, bear in mind that Paul Ryan is a Republican from Wiscsonsin and consider this part of the encyclical that Benedict referred to his answer:

Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers, partly because Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labour unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome. The repeated calls issued within the Church's social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum, for the promotion of workers' associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honoured today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level.

Paul Ryan supports Scott Walker, the union-busting governor of Wisconsin. Why do they hate the Pope?

UPDATE: Washington Post's Dana Milbank with more about the Georgetown even.

Note to self

Never, ever, appear on the cover of Pilka Nozna. There must be a curse.

Note to self

Never, ever, appear on the cover of Time magazine. There must be a curse.

Would you trust these people with a nuclear weapon

Who said the following today?

We need to end Barack Obama's presidency before Barack Obama's presidency ends our way of life.

(a) Ted Nugent
(b) Rush Limbaugh
(c) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
(d) Reince Preibus

Although your reaction to (d) may be, Who?, he is in fact the Chairman of the Republican National Committee. And yes, he said it, at an event podium (15 minute mark) in Scottsdale Ariz. including Mitt Romney and John McCain, the two most recent Republican candidates for US president. Do they think about what the words coming out of their mouths actually mean?

Cool customer

The Saudi Ambassador to Yemen finds time to argue about his accent with an associate of Al Qaeda kidnappers phoning with a ransom demand:


Al-Shudokhi: The group (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) has some demands which you can convey as they are. I am entrusted with this mission as a sign that everything is alright. I have been directed to talk plainly and tell you who I am and what is my name, since the state (Saudi Arabia) knows me.
Ambassador: Since the state knows you, why do not you tell me your name?
Al-Shudokhi: My name is Misha'al Mohammed Al-Shudokhi.
Ambassador: Are you from Qassim?
Al-Shudokhi: Yes, of course.
Ambassador: It seems that you have forgotten the accent of Qassim people.
Al-Shudokhi: No, I did not. We were brought up in Yemen, and this has affected my accent.
Ambassador: Qassim people would never lose their accent.
Al-Shudokhi: I am from Buraidah, take it as you like.

Newt Gingrich says centuries of Irish rebels were wimps

Here's the video. It's his speech to the National Rifle Association convention. After inflicting his Presidential campaign stump speech on an audience that admittedly deserved such a fate, he decided to address the actual topic of relevance to the NRA and said, inter alia:

When the British troops arrived at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 expecting to force the peasantry into surrender, something they had done quite well in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England, they suddenly found they weren't up against peasants, they were up against Americans.

Later in the same speech, Newt promised that a President Gingrich will seek a global treaty establishing a human right to keep and bear arms.

The airport drive is the whole country

What is about European Central Bankers and Tom Friedman-style presentations of the airport road as representative of not just the nation, but deeper truths? Here's the ECB's Jorg Asmussen in Dublin yesterday:


Coming to Ireland yesterday was a very short journey for me, leaving my office in Frankfurt at 3 pm and arriving in downtown Dublin at 6 pm. On the way from the airport my Counsellor, who is accompanying me today, remarked that Ireland, however, has apparently come a long way compared to the time when she visited Ireland for the first time as a backpacking student almost 20 years ago in the early 1990s. While she recalled that her first impression of travelling from the airport downtown was rather sad, with run down warehouses and poor residential buildings, the picture has completely changed: modern office buildings and residential areas line the streets on the short trip from the airport to downtown nowadays. This is anecdotal evidence, of course, but I think it depicts in a nutshell Ireland’s truly remarkable economic development over the last 20 years.

Just in case you thought a BRICS world was going to be better

Soft-pedaling on Bashar al-Assad is just one aspect of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa concurrence. Here's a little revelation from a convoluted lawsuit concerning South Africa's MTN phone company and the lengths to which they went to get a mobile phone concession in Iran --

MTN prevailed upon the South African government to abstain from three votes on Iran’s nuclear energy program at the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in 2005 and 2006, according to the complaint. The Iranian communications ministry allegedly told MTN it was withholding its license until it saw how South Africa voted at an upcoming IAEA meeting.

Is this all they've got?

The Wall Street Journal editorial page -- demonstrating again the gulf with the FT page -- gives conservative novelist Mark Helprin space to run through a version of Mitt Romney's critique of Barack Obama: that Obama wants to make the USA like Europe. They must think it has some mileage, but Helprin is forced into some bizarre assertions and attempts at "humour" to make it work. It's all so painful that we can only handle two excerpts:

As a museum of culture, it has few competitors. Europeans make better movies; their cuisine is better (except in Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Scandinavia, England, Ireland, the Low Countries, Germany and Switzerland); and they do a better job of suppressing modern architecture, for which they are to be commended.

Note: through this phrasing, he appears to be claiming that Scottish and Welsh cuisine is excellent, while Belgian cuisine is terrible. Also, regarding the architecture remark, has he left the historical core of any of the European cities that he's visited?

No European air force except Russia's is superior to Saudi Arabia's.

So if it comes to a mano-a-mano duel in the skies between France and Saudi Arabia, he's taking Saudi Arabia? Good luck with that.

Other priorities

Dick Cheney has gotten a heart transplant.

10 days ago it was reported that Cheney had cancelled a speaking engagement in Toronto, citing the "risk of violent protest." Ticket holders were offered a refund or Mark Steyn.

Anyway, the fact that he got a heart transplant means that he was on the waiting list to get one. Being on the waiting list means that you could get a phone call at any time, and within a small number of hours, you have to be where the organ is. And yet he was proposing to travel to Canada in April.

Even in his seriously ill state, did he or those around him (i.e. his daughter Liz) decide to spin a medical cancellation of his Canada trip into some victimology? Do the lies ever stop?

We strongly condemn this event or product

EU statement --


Joint statement by President Barroso and the President of the European Council Herman van Rompuy following the tragedy in Toulouse

"We strongly condemn recent violent attacks against a number of religious communities in Europe and outside Europe. Any form of persecution and violent acts against religious communities have no place in Europe and, indeed, in the World!

Europe has fought a long and painful battle to achieve freedom of thought, freedom of religion and belief and the respect for the individual. These human and fundamental rights form part of the Charter on fundamental rights which is at the heart of our European values; the EU will continue to foster these rights."

You'd think that a bureaucracy so focused on elite recruitment would get better quality press-releases. Perhaps reacting to the mess that Catherine Ashton found herself in (when, in her defence, she departed from prepared remarks to explicitly condemn the Toulouse murders), this new statement from the EU heads is a condemnation of ... everything. And therefore of nothing. It only mentions Toulouse in the title (which did not appear in the original version), and the statement is self-titled as "following" Toulouse as opposed to reacting to it.

Since the end result is just a generic denunciation of bad staff, why bother issuing any statement at all?

Even the bankrupt rich have more money

The New York Times Sunday Magazine has a nice article about the Centria apartment building in midtown Manhattan as a parable for the Irish property boom. You go in thinking that it's going to be about the parade of suckers who paid too much for prestige real estate  (the "we flew the Tricolour over the Savoy!" mentality), but in fact it's about the resilience of the New York City property market. Although the Irish who bought into this building probably spent more than they should have, the apartments have held their value, are generating income, and there's a ready market in the latest wave of foreign buyers for those who need to sell. And those who need to sell are in trouble due to their balance sheets back home in Ireland, not because of their Manhattan apartments.

But of course the typical Irish boom-era overseas buyer (those apocryphal taxi drivers with 6 or 7 properties mentioned in the article) weren't buying in midtown. They were buying off-plan in Spain, Bulgaria or Dubai and now are saddled with places in busted property markets and, for the latter two, unfamiliar and even capricious legal systems. The people who could afford to buy in New York and London may have lost their shirts. They're still a lot better off than the average buyer.

Banksters owe royalties

Apologies for the light blogging recently but among other useless activities, we've been trying to find an uploadable version of the Merrill Lynch Wealth Management TV commercial that seems to air in the mornings on Bloomberg Television and which borrows shamelessly from this video (Rogue Wave: Lake Michigan) or at least must have done so at the pitch meeting for the ad. Anyway, even if you've never seen the ad, enjoy the song.

The beast has evolved

Impressive stuff. The Wall Street Journal editorial page dumps the 2012 presidential election campaign prospects and the Starve the Beast theory in one go, the latter being the idea that it's OK for Republican presidents to run up massive deficit-financed tax cuts (even at the expense of claiming that tax cuts will be self-financing) because the debt explosion will force future Democratic presidents to cut government spending. No longer, it seems. Now the debt is so large that precisely when a Republican president could implement the most miraculous growth-enhancing policies, the Fed would have to raise interest rates to stem inflation and the debt service burden would go through the roof:


If the economy gains steam—say, in a new Administration that reforms the tax code, cuts spending and reduces regulation—the Fed may have to raise rates to forestall inflation. But if it raises rates, interest payments on the debt will soar, the deficit may not fall from its Obama trillion-dollar levels, and pressure could build for a tax increase.


President Obama may not mind this outcome but Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum should, which is why they need to talk about this fiscal nitroglycerin that Mr. Obama and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke have created. The two Republicans might also take a moment to wonder how much they really want this job. The next Presidential term may be spent trying to defuse the Obama debt bomb.

Or at least make him pay for the space

The Wall Street Journal allows Karl Rove to use his weekly column to essentially argue that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum need to leave the presidential field open for Mitt Romney.

For all practical purposes, Karl Rove works for the Romney campaign. As usual, the WSJ only mentions his past work for George W. Bush.

They really do hate Silvio Berlusconi

Clear-as-can-be still shot from Sky Italia showing that Sulley Muntari's header in the AC Milan v Juventus match did cross the line. Also shows that the linesman should have had a clear view of it. At the England-Wales rugby, they were willing to wait several minutes to sort out whether a try had been an, er, touchdown. Would 30 seconds to sort out whether this was a goal have disrupted the flow so much?

Photo via the world's best sports newspaper, La Gazzetta dello Sport.

Global media typed up Iranian spin on naval visit to Jeddah

If you follow the Middle East, you read all over the place 2 weeks ago that two Iranian naval ships had stopped in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on the way to the Mediterranean.

AFP: Iranian naval ships docked on Saturday in the Saudi port city of Jeddah on a mission to project the Islamic republic's "power on the open seas," the Fars news agency reported.  The supply ship Kharg and Shaid Qandi, a destroyer, docked in the Red Sea port in line with orders from Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it quoted navy commander Admiral Habibollah Sayari as saying. "This mission aims to show the power of the Islamic republic of Iran on the open seas and to confront Iranophobia," he said, adding that the mission started several days ago and would last 70 to 80 days.


BBC: Iranian warships have entered the Mediterranean Sea for only the second time since the 1979 revolution.  The destroyer Shahid Qandi and its supply vessel Kharg have passed through the Suez Canal but their destination remains unclear ... The ships were reported to have docked earlier at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

There's just one problem: as described, the port call never happened. Saudi Press Agency explains:


First: On 18/01/1433H., the Iranian officials at the Embassy of Islamic Republic of Iran in Riyadh submitted through official channels a request for allowing two ships (Kharg and Naghdi) and a helicopter affiliating to the Iranian Naval Forces to dock at Jeddah Islamic Port during the period of 1-7/02/2012. The docking comes within a training tour for students of the Iranian Navy and within the framework of friendly visits. Such docking was approved by Saudi authorities.
Second: The Iranian officials at the Embassy of Islamic Republic of Iran in Riyadh submitted another request for allowing Bandar Abbas Ship, Alvand Ship, Alborz Ship and a helicopter to dock at Jeddah Islamic Port during the same period. These ships replace the two ships that have already requested to dock at Jeddah Islamic Port (i.e., Kharg and Naghdi). The purpose of such docking is part of a training tour for students of the Iranian Navy, rather than what has been stated by the Iranian Navy Commander Admiral Habibollah Sayyari who said the purpose of this visit is to communicate with the countries of the region, render false any Iranian threat, and show his country's capabilities in international waters and foreign ports.
These approvals come within the framework of a long tradition of naval forces throughout the world, allowing passage and docking within international conventions.
The approval of the Ministry of Defense of such a procedure stems from the keenness of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on sustaining strong ties of friendship with all brotherly and friendly countries as well as its commitment to the principle of good faith in order to uphold these relations based on friendship, respect, and mutual trust.'


Thus, the two ships cited in all the media reports did not stop in Jeddah, perhaps because the dwindling number of professionals in the Iranian Navy saw a conflict between the ships' later sabre-rattling mission to Syria and the use of traditional goodwill on the seas to get a stop in Jeddah. Other ships were sent on the original training call, but one Iranian clown couldn't resist a little buffoonery regarding the originally scheduled visit. Next thing you know, it's "news."

This one doesn't go up to 11

When the reports of particles travelling faster than the speed of light came out, conservatives rushed to proclaim that this showed that things that can seem scientifically settled are not, hence global warming could also be wrong. National Review's Planet Gore blog gloated "More Unsettled Science" while Jonah Goldberg offered

So much for “scientific consensus”

Well, indeed:

Today reports emerged that problems with GPS synchronization could explain away the anomalous neutrino  velocities, although specific details have yet to be confirmed. ScienceInsider s Edwin Cartlidge reported that a bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame but cited only anonymous sources familiar with the experiment.

Settled science is ready for its apology.

The limits of holy war

It's a common assumption that Islamist militants are always in search of the next battlefield struggle that can be labelled jihad. Indeed, this assumption formed the flypaper rationale for the US invasion of Iraq i.e. the claim that even if extremists weren't in Iraq under Saddam, they would come to fight the invasion so that we could fight them there so we don't have to fight them over here etc. It was dodgy at the best of times and now we have a test case: Syria --

BAGHDAD, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Two Islamist militant groups in Iraq have rejected a call by al Qaeda to aid Syrian rebels in their revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, saying sending weapons and fighters across the border would only worsen the conflict.


Sunni Islamist al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri has backed an increasingly violent revolt against Assad, who is from an offshoot of Sh'ite Islam, and is fighting to maintain his grip on 12 years of autocratic rule in mostly Sunni Syria.


The Islamic Army in Iraq, composed of Sunni Arabs and former Iraqi army officers, whose aim was to end U.S. military presence and influence in Iraq, said it would support the Syrians morally in their fight against Assad, but would not dispatch fighters.


"We are against sending fighters, money and weapons to Syria ... we are waiting for the Syrian people to decide their fate but we are supporting their aspirations morally," a senior leader, who declined to be named, told Reuters on Wednesday ... The Islamic Army leader accused al Qaeda of trying to "steal the revolution" and said if armed fighters were sent, Assad, who blames foreign-backed terrorists for the nearly year-old unrest, would use it as a pretext for his crackdown.


"We do not want to interfere so as not to allow anyone to steal their revolution as al Qaeda has done. We don't want to give the regime a pretext that can be used against the rebels," he said ... Sheikh Khalid al-Ansari, a senior leader with the Islamist militant al-Rashideen Army, said his group supported the fall of Assad but warned that arming Syria's opposition would create an increasingly sectarian conflict.

"We support the Syrian revolution 100 percent and the fall of the Assad regime," Ansari told Reuters. "But we do not accept sending weapons, money and fighters to Syria because this will lead to the creation of a sectarian war that will target innocent people similar to what happened in Iraq and we do not want to repeat the same experiment."

Yes these are militant groups. But they calculate their odds, anticipate how their participation will affect the overall situation, and they learn. That's not the usual portrait of these groups.

Not gone yet

It's always tough to read the body language in a still photograph but German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble in his interactions with Greek PM Lucas Papademos and finance minister Evangelos Venizelos does not look like someone who just lost a battle to shove Greece into default, as the Daily Telegraph claimed.

Photo from the European Council meeting today.

The incompetence alibi

New York Times article on what looks like one of several Iran/Hezbollah terrorist cells active in Asia --

Some terrorism experts expressed caution about what they called a rush to judgment. Will Hartley, the editor of Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center in London, said in an e-mail, “The attacks in India, Georgia and now Thailand have all been highly amateurish, and lack the sophistication that would normally be expected from an operation” by either Hezbollah or Iran’s external operations wing, the Quds Force.

The problem with this is that "amateurish" is an ex post concept. The attacks failed, hence they were amateurs. There was another bunch of amateur terrorists who made fools of themselves at strip clubs, got pulled over by the police, landed a light plane on a main runway at Miami, and made unduly complicated itineraries for themselves on their final escapade. That would be the 9/11 hijackers. But since they murdered 3000 people, nobody thinks of them as amateurs.

And anyway, if Iran was professional, it wouldn't have attached itself to a psychopath like Bashar al-Assad and his clan in the first place. From which they need a distraction, so they send out the clowns in Thailand, Azerbaijan, and India.

It's like Smith over there

National Review's Andrew McCarthy says that the preposterous yet very real blasphemy charge against the Saudi tweeter Hamza Kashgari is not being reported on Fox News. Fine. But when many of his posts on the topic of Islam (example) assume a comfort level with Arabic translations, if not Arabic itself, it is too much to expect that you'd get the name of the person central to your theory right? --

As I mentioned a few weeks back, the number two shareholder at Fox (after NewsCorp) is Alwaleed bin Talal, a member of the Saudi royal family whose bottomless pockets back various American projects designed to cast sharia law in a favorable light — such as Islamic studies programs at Georgetown and Harvard. In 2006, Accuracy in Media reported that Prince bin Talal had pressured Fox into downplaying the Muslim role in rioting in France. And it just so happens that, late last year, bin Talal plunked down $300 million for a stake in Twitter, the social media service that published the tweets that have Mr. Kashgari in such dire straits.

The first mention gets his name right but this clearly was an accident because then we get to "Prince bin Talal" which means just Prince Son of Talal. Talal (the famous "Red Prince") has a lot of sons. The 3rd mention repeats the error. bin Talal is not his family name. That would be al-Saud. But there are even more al-Sauds. Thousands of them. Prince Alwaleed works fine. Again the issue here is not being picky over the right version of someone's name. It's that if you're claiming an expertise in source texts that are in Arabic, you need to exhibit some rudimentary understanding of the most basic features of the language i.e. its structure of names.

The truth will out

So with Russia having threatened, allegedly, to nuke Qatar for being such a pest over their Russia-China-Iran backed Bashar al-Assad, isn't it time for the Qataris to tell us what really went on with the Russian ambassador to Qatar last December? What did he not want going through the X-ray machine in Doha?

No Second Grozny

Statement from the Gulf (GCC) countries on the day that Russia bought more time for the Baathist killing machine in Syria --


With deep regret and outrage, the GCC member countries are closely following the increasing rhythm of killings and violence in Syria in what could be described, in its least terms, as collective massacre against the unarmed Syrian people and the demonstration of the Syrian regime's brutal acts against children, the elders and women as well as no respect for human rights or humanitarian ethical feelings, the statement issued by the GCC presidency [Saudi Arabia] said.
The GCC countries suggest that the Arab countries ought to meet at the Arab League next week to take the necessary decisive measure to stop this dangerous escalation against the Syrian people after nearly one year of illusive tactics without any glimpse of hope in the offing, the statement added.
The GCC member states express profound pain and regret for the killing of innocent souls and the infliction of great sacrifice on the people of Syria as their governing regime was not defending the country against an external aggressor but, in fact, running a power-conflict game that never cares about the Syrian peoples dignity or freedom.


When the model is Chechnya, it's going to make the Saudis look good.  What did George Bush see in Vladimir Putin's soul?

Photo of Bashar al-Assad and Sergei Lavrov by SANA/Reuters.

So how that's new BRIC world working out for ya?

Remember when investment bank research houses wanted us all to be excited that the traditional global powers were being replaced by a rising group of large middle income resource-rich industrializing countries? Tell it to the Russia/China pro-Assad veto hand.

Buying time for the killing machine

In the middle of Russia's crocodile tears routine at the UN Security Council Syria debate today was the stunt of announcing a visit by the foreign minister to meet Bashar al-Assad to promote a solution to the crisis -- on Tuesday. At the current 200 people a day death toll, that's 600 more dead people before the meeting even gets started.  Is there any chance that the famous Reset button was really a detonator?

Everybody has lost, and all must have prizes

Mitt Romney says that the full sequence of his comments on poverty and the middle class are more favourable to him than the excerpted "I'm not concerned about the very poor" quote. They're worse. 90-95 percent of the population struggling and no government programs to help them. Really? Credit to Soledad O'Brien, who knew right away she'd heard a gaffe.

Bilingual

A few sentences from Leaders' Questions in the Dail (Irish lower house) yesterday --


Deputy Gerry Adams:       Chonaic mé ar an teilifís aréir go raibh an Taoiseach agus an t-Uachtarán Sarkozy mar buddy-buddy agus chuir sé déistean orm nuair a chonaic mé cé chomh amaideach a bhí an Taoiseach. [roughly, I saw on TV the PM and Sarko being buddy-buddy and it bothered me to see the PM acting the idiot]


Deputy Micheál Martin:       An cairdiúlacht is precious i mo thuairim.


Deputy Gerry Adams:       This was at a summit which noted that 23 million people are out of work across the European Union. Bhí an Taoiseach ag imirt an amadáin le Sarkozy [PM was acting the idiot with Sarko] - agus dúirt seisean go raibh an pobal as a gcloigeann. How much extra austerity did the Taoiseach sign up to last night? What extra cuts and tax increases on low and middle income families will be required to meet the new 0.5% deficit ceiling?


In his state of the nation - or state of the State - address before the budget, the Taoiseach said, “I want to be the Taoiseach who retrieves Ireland’s economic sovereignty and who leads a Government that will help our country to succeed”. Yet last night he signed an austerity treaty that hands significant new powers over to the European Court of Justice and the European Commission, which are unelected bodies that impose economic policies on democratically elected Governments and which impose heavy fines when they believe these policies have not been adhered to. The Taoiseach also doggedly refuses to give the people their democratic right to have a referendum. How can he talk of restoring sovereignty on the one hand, and at the same deny citizens their democratic right to have a say on this treaty where he gives away more powers to unelected officials in Brussels?


The Taoiseach:       For Deputy Adams to get up here above everybody else and talk about meeting people, when he himself was buddy to some very shadowy creatures over the last 30 years------


A Deputy:  Colonel Gaddafi.

Good luck with that

One of the above is a slide from a Powerpoint presentation from the Pentagon on their strategy versus Al Qaeda in Iraq. The other is from European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso's presentation to the informal summit of European Union Heads of State/Government today.

We're doomed.