President Obama jumps the Sinn Féin shark…

One of the benefits of being a US President in your final year in office, as well as getting to decide who can and can’t come to your party, is the freedom to say what you really think – even if President Obama continues to appear to be mis-briefed on shared, as opposed to integrated, education here…  ANYhoo… As the BBC report notes, US President Barack Obama was speaking in London to an audience of young people when he responded to …

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“processing it through their stunted, trivial prism of partisan loyalty…”

At the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald makes a number of important points about the reaction to US Senator Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster against John Brennan’s nomination as head of the CIA.  From Glenn Greenwald at Comment is Free Last week’s 13-hour filibuster of John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director by GOP Sen. Rand Paul was one of the first – and, from the perspective of media attention, easily among the most effective -Congressional efforts to dramatize and oppose just how radical …

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Bilderberg 2012: “Are you here for the brunch?”

The Guardian’s Charlie Skelton is in Chantilly, Virginia, ahead of the, whisper it, annual Bilderberg conference – “a small, flexible, informal and off-the-record international forum in which different viewpoints can be expressed and mutual understanding enhanced”.  As he says at the Big G’s US News blog Everything’s set. The hotel is being primped and hoovered, the security is arriving, the press is nowhere to be seen, and I just had a really boring crab salad. It’s shaping up to be a vintage Bilderberg. …

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He Came, He Saw, He Complimented.

Yesterday, and yesterday only, President Obama was in the house. Unlike the formality of the previous week, his brief visit culminated in a speech to a large crowd in College Green. Following an introduction by Enda Kenny, Obama pleased the crowd but it was largely sentiment and reassurance rather than substance with an obligatory is féidir linn thrown in at the end. Did it play well with the crowd? You bet. Did they care about the content? Hell, no. Job well …

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