Category Archives: Politics

“Ladies and gentleman of the press” leave now of face arrest

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Just looking at the G20 coverage on Guardian.co.uk: Maybe more sinister than police attacking peaceful protesters — because it may show intent — is a video where an office addresses the “ladies and gentleman of the press” and asks them to leave the area or they will be arrested.

The officer from the City of London police, who was only following orders in fairness, said the senior officer is using the UK Public Order Act to move them. The Public Order Act, along with the Irish act of the same name, is often claimed to be often misused. As the Guardian says, the law was “intended primarily to disperse potentially disruptive or violent gatherings.”

The newspaper also reports the “Metropolitan police, which led the G20 operations, later apologised for using the measure on members of the press.” But is that good enough of a response to blocking the media from watching how the police were to “resolve the situation”, when the “situation” is a peaceful protest?

There is also another video clearly showing the police charging a group of photographers and camera operators.

In general, the Guardian, and members of the public who help them, have to be commended for some great coverage of London police attacking peaceful G2o protesters, people trying to get home, and the media.

It’s coverage of the death of Ian Tomlinson — who was just trying get home after work — in print and online has been excellent. The newspaper’s pages of photographs and text put the spotlight on the police’s attack on Tomlinson just moments before his death. And it put the Independent Police Complaints Commission to shame for not launching a full investigation from the start.

Tomlinson died of internal bleeding and not of a hart attack as first reported. He was an Evening Standard newspaper seller who was apparently finding it hard to get home because of blocked streets. A police officer attacked Tomlinson from behind and struck him to the ground while he had his hand in his pockets and was walking away from a group of officers.

An editorial today in the Guardian’s Sunday paper, the Observer, “The public are fast losing patience with thuggish policing” talks of the police in the UK over stepping the mark in more than just the G20 policing. I only found it while writing the above, but it sums up what I want to say far better than I could have:

This aggression is no doubt linked to the government’s nasty habit of writing laws that prefer the convenience of security forces to the rights of free citizens. But the police are public servants, not government enforcers. Their job is to keep the peace, not clear the streets of dissent.

“Uncommissioned” nude portrait of Brian Cowen hung in galleries

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Don’t worry, we have no images of the art in question. From the Sunday Tribune:

an anonymous prankster who hung a nude portrait of Taoiseach Brian Cowen in the hallowed halls of the National Gallery.

The still unidentified renegade artist had painted Cowen as he was sitting on the loo with a roll of toilet paper in his hand. The painter’s attempts at lifting the country’s spirits certain­ly worked as dozens of visitors to the gallery last week were left chuckling at the unorthodox artwork.

It was not vandalism, a source is quoted as saying it was rather “just adding another one to the collection.”  The description card put up along side the art is classic. Read the article.

Those pesky anti-EU Germans

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Reichstag building

Major focus on the Irish Times poll results that there has been a ‘Major swing in favour of Lisbon treaty as 51% would now vote Yes.’

But as a report in the same paper last week, which passed quietly by in the international news pages, shows it’s not only anti-EU nuts who are asking hard questions about the treaty:

At the second and final day of oral hearings at the constitutional court in Karlsruhe, the eight presiding judges asked government counsel pointed questions about the democratic consequences of ratification.

The judges, according to the article, should have decided if the Lisbon treaty conflicts with the Basic Law (the German constitution, in all but name) sometime early in the summer.

Now, who on the Yes side are going to start calling the German court names, and calling Germany anti-EU? No takes? No, I didn’t think so.

Iceland to out do Ireland’s status as the island at the edge of the EU

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Or, in other words, Iceland is to join the EU, it’s membership is to be fast tracked in record time, the Guardian had an exclusive* on the story this morning…

Iceland will be put on a fast track to joining the European Union to rescue the small Arctic state from financial collapse amid rising expectations that it will apply for membership within months, senior policy-makers in Brussels and Reykjavik have told the Guardian.

I wonder how other countries who are looking to join will view this fast tracking?

* = The Guardian Style Guide says an exclusive is “term used by tabloid newspapers to denote a story that is in all of them.”

“We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” says Obama. So, is the Bush admistration scot-free?

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George W Bush leaving

Pictured above, President Barack Obama waving good bye to George W Bush who oversaw war crimes and corruption on a massive scale. Money and blood.

John Naughton writes about Obama’s possible first mistake, ‘Coming soon: Obama’s first mistake?‘. Is the new President thinking of letting the Bush administration away with just a bit of a telling off ? And does he have the right to do such?

Naughton points to Paul Krugmanin the NY Times, ‘Forgive and Forget?‘, and Mark Anderson at SNS, ‘The Bush Team: Time for Jail?‘.

So, what has Obama said so-far? Krugmanin writes:

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

The point is made that the oath Obama made yeasterday is not a conditional one. But further to that, as Krugmain and Anderson point at — is the decision to let the Bush admin away with crimes within Obama’s right to make?

Change in White House foreign policy?

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I’m filling the following, a direct copy of the text on whitehouse.gov/agenda/foreign_policy, for future referencing.

I could comment on some points, but — besides it being unfair to do so at this early stage — I’m thinking (maybe even hoping) that these sections are clouded in diplomacy and Obama’s bringing everybody along strategy (for lack of a better phrase before 8am).

Continue reading →

Calling Bush the worst president adds to collective amnesia

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Barack Obama and George W Bush

In the Irish Times ‘Head to Head’  segment yesterday,  Is George W Bush the worst president in US history?, Fintan O’Toole describes why the labelling Bush as the worst president ever has its problems:

The problem is that, in this respect, WPE [worst president ever] misrepresents both the nature of US power and the scale of Obama’s task if he is to bring about real change. Bush was not just a village idiot who captured the most powerful office in the world by some weird fluke. A two-term president, he got elected and re-elected because he spoke to values and attitudes that have deep roots in US culture. He tapped in to a strain of US nationalism that is deeply wedded to violence, power and an urge to dominate at all costs.

US history is shaped in part by idealism, by notions of public virtue and civic engagement, and by magnificent resistance to injustice. It is also shaped by slavery, genocide and a relentlessly expansionist will to power. Bush and his neoconservative ideologues didn’t invent the barbarism long intertwined with US civilisation. There is far more continuity between his and previous presidencies than WPE syndrome imagines.

Even the indisputably great George Washington was known to the Iroquois, as the Seneca chief Cornplanter told him in 1790, as “Town Destroyer”, and, he added, “our children cling to the necks of their mothers” when they heard the name. The equally great Thomas Jefferson created a “civilisation programme” for the Indians which amounted to a choice between adopting European ways or, in effect, being exterminated. The towering Abraham Lincoln, probably the greatest of US presidents, ordered the largest mass execution in US history – of Dakota Indian prisoners – and presided over a concentration camp for the Navajos at Bosque Redondo that made Guantánamo look like Butlins. None of this is to suggest that figures like Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln deserve the same historical obloquy as Bush. But it is important to recognise that every president of the 18th and 19th centuries oversaw the operation of slavery or the Indian genocide or both. Beside these crimes against humanity, even the folly and viciousness of Bush’s invasion of Iraq and sanctioning of torture become less egregious.

Even within the last 40 years, the violations of international law, the US constitution and common decency overseen by other presidents rival, and in some cases outstrip, Bush’s misdeeds. Is the Iraq invasion really worse than the Vietnam War, for which presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon bear responsibility, and in which perhaps a million civilians died? Is it worse than the repression and terror in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile and Argentina, supported, directly and indirectly, by Nixon and Reagan? Is the mendacity that accompanied the Iraq war – which was supported by Congress – a worse abuse of the constitution than Nixon’s secret invasion of Cambodia, without congressional knowledge, in 1970? Is it worse than Reagan’s explicit defiance of Congress in carrying out a secret, parallel foreign policy in the Iran-Contra scandals? Hardly.

Read it all here.

Cyclists, motorists, climate change, and obesity

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There’s been a good few anti-cyclist letters appearing in Irish newspapers in the last few years, it looks like it prompted this rant by Trevor White on cycling and motorists, note the quote from a Dutch ambassador to Ireland:

Motorists are remarkably impertinent. Despite constituting a very real threat to their own welfare, to pedestrians, to cyclists and to the environment – in other words, a very real threat to everyone – they still lecture people who ride bicycles on the etiquette of getting from A to B.

Hence our newspapers are full of windy missives from Irate of Killiney, on the menace that cyclists apparently represent. In a sane world such menaces would be locked up.  But this, as we well know, is not a sane world. Hence drivers think it perfectly normal to behave like lunatics, indeed to accuse cyclists of madness, when in fact it is the other way around. Compared to motorists, cyclists are moral angels.

Some years ago a Dutch ambassador to Ireland was asked, on the eve of his return to Holland, to say what most surprised him about Dublin. “That’s easy,” he said. “The contempt with which your motorists treat your cyclists.” That rudeness is officially sanctioned. Indeed despite the fact that there are now two Irish government ministers who cycle to work, cyclists are discouraged at nearly every turn.

The full post ‘On Your Bike!‘ is worth reading.