…for all your hyperactively-excellent :} work on This incarnation of the ongoing Brendanblog; and in its Next Generation may you compile a tomorrow worthy of all the yesterdays (but less time-consuming :).

Thank you too, for the honor of having been Included on your suspicious auspiscious roster of usual suspects distinguished Guestbloggers ;]. The opportunity to Ventilate my odd opinions (and in my Own peculiar diction, unpasteurized! :) has been Important to me. Seriously, it has.

You’re a Good one, old Kiddoe. / And now (as Nana Loy would say:) ~ Onward & Upward!

Love,
~ Dad

Again with the Uprising, begob:

At the major ballot-counting center in Dublin, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan struggled to speak to reporters as anti-treaty activists jubilantly drowned him out with songs and chants of “No!” He eventually gave up and walked out, as one activist waved a sign reading “No to foreign rule” over his head.

Just rebel to the core, is all :}. OK here’s the deal ~ or rather, the No-deal (emphases added; and, Hat tip: sister-in-law Paddy Patty Ash :) ~~

Ireland’s voters have rejected the European Union reform treaty, a blueprint for modernizing the 27-nation bloc that cannot become law without Irish approval, electoral officials said Friday.

In a major blow to the EU, 53.4 percent of Irish voters said no to the treaty. Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen now will join other EU leaders at a summit next week to try to negotiate a new way forward.

Anti-treaty groups from the far left and right mobilized “no” voters by claiming that the treaty would empower EU chiefs in Brussels, Belgium, to force Ireland to change core policies — including its low business tax rates, its military neutrality and its ban on abortion.

Among such “far left” groups was (naturally :) Sinn Féin (whose name is translatable to English as, appropriately enough, “Ourselves Alone” :). The treaty rejection is not only a blow to the EU’s grand plan :> but also a shillelagh upside the heads of the Republic’s mainstream political parties, all of which advocated a Yes vote ~ and perhaps especially a whack across the kneecaps of Fianna Fáil’s Brian Cowen, who has replaced the formerly unsinkable (and Always incomparable :) Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach.

More after the break.

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In the tony Hartford outer suburb of Simsbury, law enforcement authorities (alerted by a vigilant citizen) recently thwarted a Terror plot whose perpetrator(s) had deployed a Chicken with an unusually sinister Stuffing:

…A motorist on Powder Forest Drive Friday morning noticed what looked like a whole chicken — the kind bought at grocery stores for roasting — with a pipe bomb stuffed inside, police said Monday.

When they arrived on the scene around 9 a.m. officers found the roaster had an improvised explosive device where the fowl’s innards should have been.

They closed the road for part of the morning as the Hartford Police Department’s bomb squad was called to detonate the device, police said.

In its recent history, Simsbury and local residents have had their problems with hungry black bears, roaming coyotes and escaped emus. Now town folks can add store-bought chicken, stuffed with a bomb, to the list of odd animal incidents.

With the chicken and bomb taken care of, police are left to investigate who’s responsible for the strange incident.

Police Capt. Matthew Catania would not describe the bomb Monday, but said it was “capable of causing harm to a person.”…

Which, thank God it didn’t occur, would definitionally have been Worse than the Irreparable harm already inflicted upon the Chicken :>.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Now ~ not to abruptly Pivot to the Negative or anything like that ;> ~ of course the reason Connecticut in general, and our Capital region of Hartford in particular, may Welcome this (only-by-the-grace-of-God) bit of Comic relief ~ is, that over the past week or so we have been quite-understandably Pounded all to Pieces, on the Cablenewsies & the Internets, about the astonishingly-tepid Videotaped response of his Lower Park Street neighbors to the depravedly-indifferent hit-&-run Rundown of Angel Arce Torres, age 78, who (it now develops) will spend whatever remains of his life on a ventilator in the hospital.

Following closely on the heels of various other recent Hartford horrors, including the brutal mugging/beating of 71-year-old former Deputy Mayor Nick Carbone ~ who has probably done more to help All the people of Hartford than any other living person ~ all this has set off some considerable sociological soul-searching in & around the city of my birth, and my son’s. / Also, on a purely Practical level, the Staties are coming in ~ Again ~ to give the Local constabulary a hand. Hey ~ it’s a Start.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

So. You can perhaps see why we kind of Like the Simsbury Chickenbomb story. At least it has a happy Ending. (Well. Apart from the Chicken. / Fire in the Hole, indeed. :)

Note: Just so nobody will assume I’m Spinning this issue ~ I support Barack Obama, for whom I voted in my state’s primary. (Admittedly, I was For Hillary before I was Against her. :) My sinister motivation here :> is that I’m Also in favor of (a) due Process and (b) Puerto Rico :}.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The host of MSNBC’s Spitball Dirtball Screwball Hardball with Chris Matthews yesterday mounted another bold attack in his ongoing 2nd Battle of San Juan. Extremely extensive transcript excerpts (tendentious emphases added; my commentary follows):

…MATTHEWS:  And then you can see it going through Puerto Rico.

When it comes time to fight for who‘s got the most elected delegates -

pledged delegates, and if you lose that, if you come short, which is likely you will come short, can you add Puerto Rican votes to your claim of a popularity—of a popular vote victory?

[Clinton Communications Director Howard] WOLFSON:  Of course.

MATTHEWS:  Even though they can‘t vote in the presidential election?

WOLFSON:  Well, they‘re participating in our…

MATTHEWS:  Right, right, right.

WOLFSON:  … in our primary process.

MATTHEWS:  But are you willing to say that you have a right to the nomination based on Puerto Rican votes?

WOLFSON:  Yes.  Which votes are you going to exclude from the process?

MATTHEWS:  No, just—just…

WOLFSON:  I said yes.

MATTHEWS:  Just people that are not American—are not voting in the American presidential election.  That‘s all.

[Much more after the Jump. / ~ the guestblogger]

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Only a vanishingly small fraction of us can ever hope to learn & teach so much before we subside back into the quantum foam. / Well done, Professor: and may infinities of angels, dancing on the singular pinpoints of Many Worlds, sing thee to thy rest. (Emphases added :) ~

John A. Wheeler, a visionary physicist and teacher who helped invent the theory of nuclear fission, gave black holes their name and argued about the nature of reality with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, died Sunday morning at his home in Hightstown, N.J. He was 96.

…As a professor at Princeton and then at the University of Texas in Austin, Dr. Wheeler set the agenda for generations of theoretical physicists, using metaphor as effectively as calculus to capture the imaginations of his students and colleagues and to pose questions that would send them, minds blazing, to the barricades to confront nature.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”

… “He rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians,” said Freeman Dyson, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study across town in Princeton.

Among Dr. Wheeler’s students was Richard Feynman of the California Institute of Technology, who parlayed a crazy-sounding suggestion by Dr. Wheeler into work that led to a Nobel Prize. Another was Hugh Everett, whose Ph.D. thesis under Dr. Wheeler on quantum mechanics envisioned parallel alternate universes endlessly branching and splitting apart — a notion that Dr. Wheeler called “Many Worlds” and which has become a favorite of many cosmologists as well as science fiction writers.

Recalling his student days, Dr. Feynman once said, “Some people think Wheeler’s gotten crazy in his later years, but he’s always been crazy.”

Yes and Feynman (who, assuredly, should Know :) would agree: we should All be so crazy :}. More after the leap jump :}.

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No more the Teflon Taoiseach: bid a long farewell to Bertie ~

April 2 (Bloomberg) — Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern will resign next month after presiding over the euro region’s fastest-growing economy for 10 years and helping broker peace in Northern Ireland. He quit under pressure from lawmakers over his failure to explain gifts and cash he got in the 1990s.

“I believe it’s in the best interests of the government, my party and the people of Ireland to set out a timetable for my departure,” Ahern, 56, told reporters in Dublin today.

A Dublin-based tribunal is investigating Ahern’s personal finances as part of a probe into illegal payments to politicians. The prime minister, leader of the Fianna Fail party, gave evidence for eight days at the tribunal and is scheduled to appear again next month.

…During Ahern’s time as premier, or taoiseach in Irish, the size of the economy more than doubled to $280 billion and the number of people with jobs increased 40 percent to a record 2.1 million. His government cut income, corporation and capital taxes and still ran budget surpluses in every year of his tenure except one.

…With then U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, Ahern helped bring about a Northern Ireland peace deal between unionists and republicans in the divided province. The climax came in May 2007, when Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley agreed to become first minister in a government with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, signaling the end of more than three decades of conflict.

Once known as the “Teflon Taoiseach,” Ahern had previously escaped the taint of corruption scandals of the sort that destroyed the reputations of a number of Irish politicians, winning a third term in May 2007.

…“There’s still a huge amount of people in Ireland who 100 percent support Bertie,” said Nial Ring, 48, a pub owner from the Ballybough area of north Dublin, who was standing outside government buildings holding a banner saying “Ballybough Loves Bertie.”

Ahern’s announcement of his timetable for leaving office means he will still be able to take up an invitation to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress in Washington on April 30…

Something tells me that the Congress’s applause will be a cheering rousing chorus of appreciation for yer man notwithstanding any possible peccadilloes, and a grand Sendoff.

…a very blessed Saint Patrick’s Day to one and All ~ and a reasonably ;> Enjoyable one as well.

:}

And here you always thought March Madness consists merely of Basketball, Politics, and half-arsed-baked Recruitment Center Bombings in Times Square but OH No: now it’s Katie bar th’ Door to boot ~

It’s depressing, it’s not usually sung in Ireland for St. Patrick’s Day, and its lyrics were written by an Englishman who never set foot on Irish soil.

Those are only some of the reasons why a Manhattan pub owner is banning the song “Danny Boy” for the entire month of March.

“It’s overplayed, it’s been ranked among the 25 most depressing songs of all time and it’s more appropriate for a funeral than for a St. Patrick’s Day celebration,” said Shaun Clancy, who owns Foley’s Pub and Restaurant, across the street from the Empire State Building.

The 38-year-old Clancy, who started bartending when he was 12 at his father’s pub in County Cavan, Ireland, promised a free Guinness to patrons who sing any other traditional Irish song** at the pub’s pre-St. Patrick’s Day karaoke party on Tuesday.

…At least one patron at Foley’s was glad to hear the song was banned from the pub for the rest of the month.

The song is “all right, but I get fed up with hearing it — it’s like the elections,” Martin Gaffney, 73, said in a thick Irish brogue…

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Thus collapsing the Illinois GOP’s quantum wave function. (Or if you prefer, the Measurement of the votes [Curiously enough] killed the Republicans’ previously-Indeterminate kittycat. :) Links added:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A Democrat on Saturday captured the Illinois U.S. House of Representatives seat former Speaker Dennis Hastert held for more than two decades before he retired.

Returns showed physicist and businessman Bill Foster beating dairy owner Jim Oberweis by 52 percent to 48 percent of the vote in a long-time Republican district that currently stretches across northern Illinois from the Chicago suburbs nearly to the Mississippi River.

…While the area has been a Republican stronghold for years, redistricting brought geographic changes and population shifts including more Hispanics and younger suburban families that changed its make-up. The 2008 edition of the Almanac of American Politics rated the district as “a tough one for Democrats to win but not impossible.”

Evidently Not. / Mu on, Representative-elect Foster. :)

The only Shoah survivor ever elected to the U.S. Congress, Tom Lantos of California, has died at the age of 80.

A passionate fighter for human rights ~ from age 16 when he escaped the deathcamp and joined the underground Resistance, until the day he died ~ this irreplaceable man will be sorely missed by all who love freedom.

Zichrono Livracha: May his memory be a blessing.

Yes, not wanting their annual Good Times Role :> to get Stuck Inside of Mobile due to some damn ol’ Primary date changed by those idiots up in Montgomery, south Alabamians said to hell with That and voted yesterday :) ~

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) Feb 25 — Don’t mess with Mardi Gras in Alabama.

Voters in two coastal counties — Baldwin and Mobile — will vote Wednesday even though the state primary is six days later on Feb. 5. The reason: Feb. 5 also is Fat Tuesday when throngs of people celebrate Mardi Gras on the Gulf Coast. The frenzied end to Carnival is an official holiday in the two counties in Alabama.

When the state legislature moved up the presidential primary from June 3 to Super Tuesday, it discovered belatedly that it fell on Mardi Gras. In Baldwin and Mobile counties, government shuts down and crowds by the tens of thousands jam the port city’s streets for parades.

The legislature’s solution was to let voters in those two counties go to the precincts six days early. The votes cast will be sealed and counted with the others on Super Tuesday.

…Mobile County, which has the most parades and balls, will have all its regular polling places open Wednesday and one place open in Mobile on Feb. 5. Baldwin County will have one polling place open on Wednesday and then all its regular polling places open on Feb. 5.

Yesterday’s Mobile County turnout was reportedly strong, perhaps in response to Tuesday’s wise editorial advice from The Press-Register:

If Mobile County residents want a say in who will be the party nominees for president of the United States, they need to say so tomorrow.

…On Tuesday, Feb. 5, the day of Republican and Democratic presidential primaries in Alabama, a large number of voters are going to be celebrating Mardi Gras. As the Press-Register’s legendary Masked Observer reminds us, “Revelry mixed with democracy can only lead to unbridled insanity.”

Only one polling place will be open on Feb. 5, at the Revenue Commissioner’s Office at Michael Boulevard and Azalea Road, well away from the packed streets of downtown. If everyone waits until then, lines are likely to be long.

So avoid the Super Tuesday rush; if you live in Mobile County, you should vote on Wednesday.

:)

WashPost columnist Ruth Marcus explains why the Dems can get gridlocked, too (and by all means read the whole thing for the 1984-and-related backstory). / Hat tip: Bob Lutts, CT political Oracle & peerless constitutional Constructionist :}. / Emphases added:

…Indeed, 2008 is looking like 1984 on steroids: For the poorly organized, underfinanced insurgent (Hart), substitute a candidate (Barack Obama) with the money and organization to compete with the establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton). For a front-runner about whom the party faithful are hardly enthusiastic (Mondale), substitute a candidate (Clinton) who has a loyal, energized following.

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Based on various incarnations of a Newsletter published over several decades under the freedom-loving Texas physician’s name, The New Republic’s James Kirchick seems to think Maybe So:

…In other words, Paul’s campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically–or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point–over the course of decades–he would have done something about it.

For me at least, the TNR piece requires a slow & careful reading in order to form a Tentative opinion. There’s a good deal of guileful Guilt-by-Association embedded within it; and it sure doesn’t sound like the guileless old GoldStandard Freemarket Isolationist Son of Liberty we all Know & Love :).

Then again…well, Y’know: smoke, fire, & So forth. / Once again, here’s the whole thing. What Say ye, gentle Peace&Freedomphiles?

Like Brendan’s below on the tiny Tunguska asteroid :), this story is a couple of days old but Here it is anyway.

A judge in Belfast Crown Court has ruled Sean Hoey, 38, an electrician from south County Armagh, not guilty in the hideous terrorist bombing in Omagh, County Tyrone, whereby the execrable RIRA (”Real Irish Republican Army”) slaughtered 29 innocent children, women and men in August of 1998.

Apparently the Northern Ireland police botched their evidence, and the prosecutors their presentation, so thoroughly that the charges were impossible to prove. The judge was reportedly scathing in his analysis of the authorities’ performance in the case.

None of which, quite obviously, provides any Justice to the families of the victims of the mass murder; nor can it ever tell us whether Mr. Hoey, in addition to being now legally Not Guilty, is or is not also factually Innocent of having functioned as the RIRA Bombmaker ~ which we can now only hope (as he of course claims) that he really, actually, truly did Not.

The BBC’s Kevin Connolly gives us a good overview, well worth reading in full, of the whole horrid business, including these telling passages:

…But more than anything, for the rest of us, it was the timing of the attack on Omagh which burned it into our memories.

It came just four months after Northern Ireland’s fractious political parties made a political deal which included Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA.

It tore apart a community in a province which was beginning to learn to hope after decades of despair - and it made people fear that the new dawn which had promised so much, would be quickly and cruelly extinguished.

Like the other bombings in the early part of 1998 in places like Lisburn and Banbridge, Omagh was a conscious attempt by republicans who disagreed with the political strategy of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, to destabilise Northern Ireland in that vulnerable moment of hope.

It failed - but there is a terrible irony to the way in which the campaign was halted only by the wave of revulsion triggered by the carnage at Omagh.

…The Omagh families were dignified in defeat, as they have been dignified at every stage of their fight for justice. Their campaigning will go on, but the prospect is surely receding now that anyone will ever be convicted of murdering their husbands and brothers and sisters and wives and children.

As this case fades from our memories it’s worth remembering the victims of all Northern Ireland’s atrocities for whom the pain is not fading even as the province heads into a more hopeful future.

Amen.

In the Dec. 17 NY Times [free registration required] Adam Nagourney shares the Shocking revelation that in the presidential nominations contests, Super Duper Tuesday just might Not constitute The End of All Things. [Why yes, I’ve been rewatching The Trilogy on TV lately; how’dja Guess? :] Emphases Added:

As campaigns try to keep up with this fast-paced, multi-layered campaign, there is growing sense among Republicans that for their contest at least — and perhaps for Democrats — Feb. 5 may not be the end of the line…

…The conventional wisdom is that a candidate must do well enough in the contests that take place in January — starting with Iowa and New Hampshire — to roll into Feb. 5 with enough force to sweep the table. Even if the candidate doesn’t actually accumulate enough delegates to claim the nomination, the pressure from party leaders to coalesce around a nominee, combined with the obstacles facing other candidates who might want to fight on, would carry the day.

Except that it is now entirely possible that no Republican will be moving very quickly going into Feb. 5. In fact, it is entirely plausible that Mike Huckabee of Arkansas will win the caucuses [in Iowa]; that John McCain of Arizona will win New Hampshire; that Mitt Romney of Massachusetts will win Michigan, Fred Thompson of Tennessee will win South Carolina and Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York will win Florida. In those circumstances, with no obvious front-runner, and with many of the candidates having adequate resources and varying bases of support, they could just divide the prize on Feb. 5 and move on to the next primary.

“Which means the race might not be over until the convention,” said Peter Robinson, a fellow with the Hoover Institution and a speechwriter in the Reagan White House. “I know there comes a time every year when journalists say this is going to be decided at the convention. I won’t say it’s probable, but it is possible: This race just won’t close.”

Still, there are considerable obstacles to a protracted nominating battle…

…Which Nagourney goes on to elucidate. Read the whole free-registration-required thing.

(Full Disclosure: my own Impish fantasy is TWO contested Conventions, a Dem 3-way and Repub 4-way, in which the seating of the Penalized Delegations ~ those from the Impermissibly Early primary-&-caucus states, previously presumed to be No Problemo because the respective Nominees Presumptive will grant them Full Dispensations for the sake of Party Harmony ~ become, in the unanticipatedly-consequential Absence of said Nominees Presumptive, the very Condundrum whose solution is Crucial to the the concoction of a Majority for Somebody. / IOW ohhh, wouldn’t it be Fierce? :)