Bertie Ahern is going. That’s the good news. The Bad news is that its going to take him a month to do so. He needs to project stability, by flying off to the USA to address the Joint Houses, and to meet and greet the Japanese Prime Minister.
A man who has been forced to quit as Taoiseach due to the overwhelming flood of information casting aspersions on his honesty and corruptability has decided we should pay him 26 grand plus expenses to swan off on a truimphal procession to the US and what have you. Hasn’t he already taken enough?
Sickening. Let the “national broadcaster’s” hagiographies commence.
Over the Easter period, I was reminded that its been a full year since I packed in the noxious weed. To be quite frank, I hadn;t thought of this as something particularly celebratory, but those I met who were aware of this were noisome ion their praises “Oh, you’ve done brilliantly” “Isn’t it great to be free of them?” “Your body must feel so much better”
In a word - No. In more words - Free of them? Are you kidding?
Every day I wake up wanting a cigarette. Every day I go to bed relieved that I haven’t done. The hours between are spent going about my daily business trying not to think about smoking. This isn’t helped by the incessant adverts for anti-smoking product, with their insipid characters and forced cheery optimism. I am cognizant of the fact that these ads, and the Public Information ones, need to characterise quitting as something which is done and then forgotten - telling people there is still a tomorrow and a tomorrow and a tomorrow is unlikely to help them today - but surely there should be a second-stage to the process.
Nicotine is such an addictive drug - helped by the companies who’ve made it more so - that this idea that you quit and forget is offensive, and lets them off the hook. Describing the impetus to start smoking again as “peer pressure” or “situational” is also complete tosh - as Bill Hicks said “Its a drug, I’m addicted”. Alcoholics get AA meetings and the Priory. Illegal Drug Addicts get appearances on Oprah, needle clinics and the Priory. Smokers get faux-cheer and shiny happy clappy optimism. To hell with that.
Not that smokers could have an anonymous program - call it the SA and see how far that gets you…
Hillary Clinton has been caught in yet another lie - this time she completely invented some fantastical story about her arrival in Tuzla under heavy sniper fire, causing her to dash to armoured cars to bring the message of peace to Bosnia. That there was footage aplenty of the sniperless armoured carless welcoming ceremony didn’t bother her, she substituted her PR for reality. When confronted about the lie, she fell back on her standard cant - the misstatement:
Problem is, calling this a misstatement or whatever is completely missing the point. Clinton’s claim wasn’t made in some beery reminiscence down at the Airport Lounge - it was made during what was billed as a “Major Foreign Policy Speech”. Just Like Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech on the issue of Race, Clinton sought to seize the initiative on the area of foreign policy. That speech would have been exhaustively parsed and analysed by her advisors. Her speech is available on her website and even the most cursory read can see that the Sniper Fire Imaginarium is fully part of the speech, both stylistically and thematically. It seeks to elevate her experiences as First Lady into some sort of Last Action Hero or Roving International Trouble Shooter, going to places which were “too small, too poor, or too dangerous” for Bill.
This is no misstatement - this was a simple lie. It was a clear attempt to deceive. The thing is - it was trivially simple to establish that this was a damned lie. This is the Voice of Experience Clinton claims to be bringing to the Presidency? I’m sure that if this lie had been exposed in the course of a general election, Clinton’s strategists would have accused their interrogators of Rovian Tactics, or Swiftboating, but the fact remains that, time and again, Clinton is being caught in such idiocies and doing further damage to her own image and the image of the party she claims to represent.
Just a shortie - Ken MacLeod wrote a great article for the Morning Star on the subject of Intelligent Design and Creationism. He’s now put it up at his blog - Early Days of a Better Nation - well worth a read.
It was with some huge amount of incredulity that I read this: Record firms seek to ban illegal downloads. Put simply, words utterly fail me. Actually, they don’t, just that the words which come to mind are so vile, so reflective of the pus-filled crania which must populate the boards of EMI, IRMA, IFPI and the like, so indicative of the sheer bilious loathing which I have for these limpid hands and the slime-coated chokehold they wish to implement against the entire population in service of their pathetic Mammon and their broken knackered business model.
I truly hope they are all smitten with plagues of festering sores.
Been a bit sick for the past two weeks, so didn’t feel like writing anything here. Today is the latest of the many $SUPERLATIVE Tuesdays in the U.S. Presidential Nomination process. It has now gone on so long that I’m sure people are dreading the actual General Election come November. While John McCain has all but secured the Republican nomination, and has gone on to attack his likely opponents, the farrago that is the Democratic Nomination process continues.
Barack Obama continues to lead the nominations, but the Clinton’s ain’t done yet. All of their racially-based attacks failed to strike a spark with the american people, as did their ridiculous posture that his speeches were too good. So now they’ve opened up the Can’O'Islam, in a further vicious spiteful drive to dominate the Democratic party. Stating that “Obama isn’t a Muslim, as far as I know” isn’t pushing the matter aside, its fanning the flames. It is preaching to the very worst type of people, in an effort to increase your own position.
Clinton doesn’t need to do this - her media operation has somehow succeeded in persuading the press that a failure by Obama to win Ohio and Texas by double digits means that she is, yet again, the Comeback Kid. Two states that, back at Super Tuesday, we were told incessantly were her redoubts, the bastions whereupon she would stand and secure 300 delegate votes. Two states where the media story was that Obama was up against insurmountable odds in the form of Hispanics and Blue-Collar workers - people who were somehow immune to his charm. HE would founder upon those rocks and Clinton would sail on to her nomination.
The Irish media hasn’t been immune to this nonsense - in the two weeks since the last cluster of results, the Irish Times has printed nine Clinton-oriented pieces, each of them pushing the “She’s down, but she can come back” line. So the picture changed. Expectations of Obama were adjsuted higher than any bar he can hope to reach. When he fails to make that bar, a bar he has never claimed is attainable, the media story will be about Clinton’s amazing turnaround of a certain defeat to a razor-thin win, no matter that this is the opposite of what has actually happened.
In the event that Clinton does lose Texas, the spin is already prepared. Denis Staunton of the Irish Times was being interviewed on radio last night, and he started talking about “the popular vote” - as in “Clinton may win the Popular Vote in Texas, but the complex delegate rules mean she will almost certainly lose the delegate count - much as she has in the race itself”. Spoken like a true clintonian believer.
I really thought we’d seen the last of two money sucking zombies who charge back onto the news pages this afternoon. Charlie McCreevy, the former Irish Minister for Finance, the lobbyists’best friend, the champion stroke-puller extraordinaire, has clearly been sitting on one too many yachts lately. He is now the blood-sucking music industry’s bestest friend. 95 years of copyright protection on music. 95 years of adding the half pence to the shivering pence. There was once a time when these protections were to aid some mythical starving artistes, to stop them being ripped off by some huckster who would give their music to a more popular artist who would then make millions. Nowadays its just there to provide a never ending revenue stream to buy kiddie porn for Pete Townsend, drugs for Mick’n'Keef and rotten fruitless lifestyles for the rest of them.
Do yourself a favour - go off and download some bittorrent software or go learn about file-sharing networks. Download some of these shysters music and feel good about yourself - you will be enjoying a right which has been held by people for generations - to enjoy at little or no cost the entertainments of yesteryear. Stop feeding these leeches.
The BBC have announced iPlayer for Macs will launch before the end of 2008. Leaving aside the wriggle roomy announcement regarding macs - they’ll have it at some stage over the next eleven months - where’s the Linux release? The decision of the BBC Trust was quite clear iPlayer for all.
The results of the Super Tuesday US Primaries are now beginning to finalise, and there is much debate and haranguing to be found on the ‘nets and in the media. While the media, particularly that on this side of the pond, initially seemed to be presenting the results as a colossal victory for Hillary Clinton, the more mature reflection is portraying this as a statistical draw. What this fails to account for is the huge momentum which now seems to be gathering around Barack Obama. Clinton’s ‘winning’ of California was based, to a large extent, on absentee ballots - voters who made up their minds weeks ago to vote for the then candidate elect Hillary. Obama won states with low absentee balloting and in caucuses, his vote exceeded 70% in Idaho, Alaska and Missouri, with support above 65% in Missouri, Georgia and Colorado. This is all great news for his candidacy. This weekend the campaign moves into Washington State and Nebraska, with Obama leading all opinion polls by a significant margin.
The more I see of Hilary Clinton’s campaign, the more I am reminded of the Kerry campaign of four years ago. She speaks almost solely to her specific interest groups, she seems to lack the ‘vision thing’ in the same way John Kerry did. Most alarmingly, she appeals strictly to a subset of Democratic voters, with almost no appeal outside that group. That’s fine as she seeks the Democratic nomination, but, as we saw in 2004, that’s not much help in a general election. Most worryingly of all, the Hill’n'Bill routine of a few weeks back appears to have drastically reduced her appeal to african-americans, fatally wounding a putative general election campaign in the south. Some commentators see a Clinton-Obama dream ticket as a way to woo those voters back, but since Bill showed them out of the house, how likely are they to transfer those Obama votes to his nemesis?
On the GoP side, the no clear winner shtick is beginning to wear a little thin. John McCain now has 571 delegates, compared to Romney’s 250 and Huckabee’s 175. While Huckabee had some surprise wins last night, he is so far removed from McCain that his campaign is practically of novelty value only. Romney also had a bad night - he failed to win any surprises, he failed to draw in independents and he failed to mobilise the hard-christian vote against McCain. John McCain will be the Republican candidate on November 5th, I only hope the Democratic party has the nous to select someone who has a reasonable chance of success against him.
