Irish Political News

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bertie said it's worth more than Bear Stearns.

UPDATE: More Bertie captioning here and here.

Photo: AP Photo/Ron Edmonds

Bush could really use the gift depicted this year.

What is it about Bertie Ahern and White House visits? 5 years ago he was there in the midst of the start of the Iraq invasion and we all know how well that turned out. Today he is there with financial markets imploding and Bush preoccupied with trying to find more effective "soothing" words for the market than his disastrously detached Friday speech in Manhattan. Another argument for having a new face there next year.

UPDATE: Bush's soothing words include apparent amazement that people work on weekends --

And I want to thank you, Mr. [Treasury] Secretary, for working over the weekend.

Joe Lewis, pal of JP McManus and John Magnier, has apparently lost just about everything he invested in Bear Stearns. The Wall Street Journal says that JP Morgan will pay $2/share. He paid about $80/share.

Of all the possible aliases he could have picked from his acquaintances for his prostitution solicitation, why did Eliot Spitzer use "George Fox", the name of the founder of the Quakers?

UPDATE: One theory -- that Quakers are not guilt-ridden about sex. Slate's Tim Noah also notices the allusion.

Image source

Irish-born Samantha Power was due to appear in a RTE documentary called The Importance of Being Irish, a four-part celebration of the achievements of the Irish dispora. Presumably the spot has already been taped, although the series only begins to air during "St Patrick's Week". One wonders therefore how RTE will handle Power's loss of one of her job titles, as a foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama following the Scotsman's publication of her comment describing Hillary Clinton as a monster. Which, for someone who writes about genocide, is a strange comment to make.

Bill Clinton is coming to Ireland for the 10th anniversary observance of the Good Friday Agreement. That will be around 10 April (the religious calendar is very early this year). One wonders if Hillary will come. If she's still in the race, the last big primary will be in Pennsylvania on the 22nd. Conversely, will Bill want to risk being away too long in the heat of a race in a state in which he is popular?

On the other hand, it just might be that April 2008 will be the swansong of those who are still around from the 1998 deal, and very much in love with their collective involvement in it. Even by the personality cult standards of Fianna Fail, Bertie Ahern may finally have worn out his welcome, notwithstanding his ambition to be around as Taoiseach till 2012, unless he's already vaulted into the EU Council Presidency by then. His planned address to the US Congress on 30 April could be a valedictory speech.

By then, it will also likely be clear whether Bill is back in the White House from January 2009 -- with signs increasingly indicating not. So what might have looked like an interregnum in the era of Bertie/Bill backslapping may in fact be a farewell for both of them.

From a New York Times account of Bob Geldof's journey with George Bush on his recent African trip --

There was, for instance, the flight on Air Force One. Not in the crowded press cabin in the back, mind you, but up front in presidential splendor. There, by Mr. Geldof’s account, he and the president swapped stories about life on the road (Mr. Geldof was particularly interested in how the White House handles presidential laundry) and talked policy.


Unfortunately, Bob was probably sworn to secrecy on the answer.

One fascinating detail about the major drug gang bust in southern England yesterday is the range of nationalities apparently working well together in it --

Among the 22 people arrested are suspects with British, Israeli, Iraqi, Egyptian and Irish backgrounds.

Forget the beer and the gun. That's the same look.

AP Photo/Fars News Agency, Hassan Ghaedi

It's emerged that what looked like a standard unscheduled stop at Shannon airport yesterday for a medical emergency on board an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Heathrow was a little more complicated than that. Passengers say that the co-pilot had a mental breakdown and was "asking for God". Echoes of Air Egypt 990. Thankfully only echoes.

What sort of scarf is Bono wearing? Hard to tell from the script on it.

AP Photo/Michel Euler

Comedian Will Ferrell going to receive the "Joyce Award" for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence from the Lit & Hist at University College Dublin. In a rugby outfit complete with pulled up socks and slip-on shoes.

Among his quips --

"As I perused my leatherbound volumes of Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, standing in my mahogany library, a lot of feelings ran across my head, like, 'damn, I should have read these books'."

Photograph: Niall Carson/PA

In the above Bloggingheads clip, Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell (paired with Daniel Drezner) explains why it's not necessary to have read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism to criticise it, with the high point being the line that since Jonah pretended to research the book, at most one is obligated to pretend to read it.

As he says, there's a similar tendency of the Lyndon LaRouche supporters to claim that the truth is revealed if only people would read his books, yet one knows that it's only paranoid rantings in there.

Such as

The anti-democratic bureaucratic managerial overclass that liberals seek to install at home and abroad is grotesquely elitist. The divinization of a Supreme Court that is allowed to sift through foreign laws to discover new meanings in our own constitution; the arrogance of the transnational elites at Davos and the Clinton Global initiative, the constant desire to outsource our sovereignty to the UN

Except that's not LaRouche. It's Goldberg defending his book from David Neiwert, in one of the most ADHD-afflicted screeds you'll ever see. But he's a serious intellectual whose editor is Saul Bellow's son. These collapsing financial markets don't know the half of what has happened to the USA.

Andrew Sullivan's Clinton-hating is getting ever more preposterous. The Atlantic pays for this stuff? Here he is building on an item from the thinking man's Drudge Report i.e. the Politico --

The second is that Clinton now automatically uses the second person plural. It's not the Royal "we". It's an empirical "we":

"The facts are that he has said in the last week that he really liked the ideas of the Republicans over the last 10 to 15 years, and we can give you the exact quote etc etc [more 'we' usages]"

Yes, this "we" implies a team behind a candidacy.

A few things. "We" is the first person plural. Second, it's easy to search the transcript (which Sully never bothered doing, since he had his point) --

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN: I'd like to follow-up with Senator Obama. It was just a few days ago that Senator Clinton asserted that she was the strongest candidate when it comes to fiscal responsibility.

She says that the new programs that she proposes she essentially can pay for. She says that you have failed in that regard in the tune of some $50 billion worth of new programs that you cannot account for.

How do you respond to that charge?

OBAMA: What she said wasn't true. We account for every single dollar that we propose.

The fact is that Obama, Clinton, and Edwards all mix Is and Wes, presumably depending on part on whether they wanted to indicate their campaign team, not just spouses, or themselves personally. Clinton derangement is also leading him to get his English history metaphors all mixed up, as he variously refers to a Clinton "Restoration" and Obama as the "Pretender". You'd think a self-styled Irish Tory could keep his Stuarts together.

bonus link to Jonah's appearance on The Daily Show

In today's Liberal Fascism moment, Jonah Goldberg says --

For many socialists and progressives, socialism was racism and racism was socialism. Nazism was socialism for a race. The Nazi view was uglier and more extreme than anyone else's, but it was not philosophically so distinct from the views of many progressives in America and socialists in Britain ... An excerpt from the book:

[quote] Just as socialist economics was a specialization within the larger Progressive avocation, eugenics was a closely related specialty. Eugenic arguments and economic arguments tracked each other, complemented each other, and, at times, melted into each other.

Sidney Webb, the father of Fabian socialism and still among the most revered British intellectuals, laid it out fairly clearly. “No consistent eugenicist,” he explained, “can be a ‘Laissez Faire’ individualist [that is, a conservative] unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!” The fact that the “wrong” people were outbreeding the “right” ones would put Britain on the path of “national deterioration” or, “as an alternative,” result “in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews.” [end quote]

Using the miracle of Google, one comes across this post by Duncan Money explaining the context for the Webb quote: widespread concerns about Irish Catholic immigrants in Britain. And yes, such sentiments did merge with "theories" of prominent statisticians of the day (remember the "proof" that we would all end up the same height?) to produce some weird pronouncements.

But -- what do we expect given the circumstances? All of today's concerns about immigrants depressing wages and integration of a different religion magnified many-fold, and all in the context of what was then the UK's "Irish Question". Yet the UK never got to the point of putting all Irish people in concentration camps.

So Goldberg's classification is that any left-wing figure of the day who had concerns about immigration was a fascist, and different only in degree and not type from the Nazis. But because right-wing anti-immigrants aren't socialist, they're not fascist. Got it?

The New York Times on the tricky issues with Nicolas Sarkozy bringing his apparent fiance but not wife on international visits --

With Mr. Sarkozy set to visit India in two and a half weeks, some of the news media there are predicting a protocol crisis if Ms. Bruni goes along. “The top model cannot receive the same consideration as the president because a girlfriend is not treated like a wife,” the daily newspaper Indian Express quoted an anonymous Foreign Affairs Ministry official as saying.

In fact there is a protocol crisis with Saudi Arabia brewing sooner than that --

The Saudi diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Sarkozy should leave Bruni behind for "religious reasons" when he visits the kingdom on Sunday.

One thing that Sarko should know is that the expert on official visits with a non-spouse companion is Bertie Ahern, from his time with Celia Larkin as his "life partner". Even if Bertie can't provide tips on which countries are OK with it, he could always offer an official visit to Ireland to the happy couple.

The Christmas Day fiction on the New York Times op-ed page is from Roddy Doyle and the poetry is by Paul Muldoon. Somewhat strangely, the Muldoonian wordplay is actually easier to make sense of than the mysterious Doyle story, which has no resolution.