Every Day is Election Day

Viva la Vida on repeat in work, at home, the iPod… tad ridiculous. And even more ridiculous that I just heard an ad on the radio announcing that it’s out on Friday… aaaaaaaaaaand I still squealed. Breaking the law can be good for the ears.

Juno is [finally!] out on DVD… Hurrah! Pizza night ahoy friendies. WATCH THIS MOVIE. The dialogue is phemonenal and Ellen Page is tremendous in it.

If you haven’t been before, visit www.rarebooks.ie. Fabulous. Just as a real musty bookshop should be, and if you buy online, they send you your book wrapped in old newspapers! Spiffy.

Softening to Damien Dempsey through his recent album ‘The Rocky Road’. Luke Kelly is alive and well folks…

We’re going to Neil Diamond on Saturday with respective parentals. Both sets are equally excited, and it should be yet another fabulous family occasion in Croker. President McAleese shall be in attendance so it’s a night for the glad rags…

Kilkenny kick off the championship season this weekend… WIN!

Davy Fitz in Waterford… I feel I must restrain myself here. I won’t say what I really want to for fear it will come back and bite me in the ass.

Home to vote tomorrow, how quaint. Driving home with Nickey and using the occasion to hang with Darmo on Thursday. I won’t lecture you, but I’ll be voting yes.

Oh, and Prince is cancelled. That’s the secret I couldn’t tell you the other night buds.

Meanwhile here are two photos of Reilly and I at Radiohead, and one of the boys themselves to boot:

Ps. I don’t really follow BB (I swear *cough*) but I will miss Dermot O’Leary from BBLB. Here is one of his best (Irish) moments. G’wan ya yellabelly!

…one just to annoy the Reilly.

I’m just back from a day-jaunt home, and on the bus this morning I was eavesdropping the driver’s radio tuned to Radio 1 where Playback was gathering pace, and featuring Finian McGrath’s interview on Wednesday’s Drivetime.

To summarise it briefly, McGrath, an independent TD who supports the coalition government, believes that Irish accession to the Treaty might be repugnant to Article 9 of the Irish Constitution. McGrath wants President McAleese to refer the Treaty to the Council of State, a body of judges and former Presidents and Taoisigh, who would decide on whether the proposed Treaty is unconstitutional - and if so, allow the President to stop its passage through the ratification process which ends in the June 12th referendum.

This, naturally enough, has caused a mild political uproar, with many wondering whether the President has the power to refer such a bill once it comes to her for a signature, once it has been ratified by the people through plebiscite. McGrath, for his part, has defended himself against arguments that his motivations are political (McGrath is advocating a No vote) by saying that the Yes side are just as bad, dodging his own questions on the legitimacy of the Treaty while in the Dail and diminishing his dissent to that of a crank who’ll take any action to stop Ireland’s accession to Lisbon.

Sometimes the attitude of some of our parliamentarians and public figures really astounds me. McGrath defends his calls for a consultation with the Council of State based on the fears that it threatens the foundations of the state itself. I, for one, can only assume that his intentions are fair and that his fears are genuine, and not just concocted for the sake of a desperate anti-Lisbon blockade.

What I’m particularly galled about, though, is McGrath’s seeming oblivion to what’s actually being voted on, and indeed his apparent cluelessness about what a referendum such as the Lisbon one actually entails. (more…)

Interesting. I noticed it emerged this morning that Billary has made three loans to her operation in the past 30 days, of considerable amounts, more than $6.4 million, which combined with her subsequent individual loans, add up to at least $11.4 million she’s donated to her campaign since February.

Over on Yes-We-Can hill, BO is still now emerging as the clear nominee, with a total of 100 delegates won in the past week since the victory in North Carolina and the narrow loss in Indiana, leaving him just 169 votes away from victory.

It irritates me that the Clintonites seem happy to overlook that this is a campaign that has been funded on the whole from personal donations, with the change-we-can-believe-in sermon gaining payments from 1.5 odd million people.

Clinton’s campaign seems narrow and stretched. Why? Because it is. She may claim to be the only candidate capable of beating McCain, but she’s becoming more Vice-Presidential by the day. Barack has already won more votes, more delegates, and more than twice as many states as Senator Clinton, whose path to the nomination has grown extremely thin. But these loans show that her crusade will continue to contest the remaining primaries robustly.

There are only six contests remaining on the Democratic primary calendar and only 217 pledged delegates left to be awarded. There are 253 remaining undeclared superdelegates. The Clinton campaign expects to trail by more than 100 pledged delegates and will then ask the superdelegates to upend the resolve of the party supports on the ground.

Hillary will likely stay in the race and go to the convention where she still has a chance with this crooked DNC Superdelegate system. Superdelegates are all well and good, but what of the millions of people on the ground who have been provoked and motivated by Obama’s campaign? This whole system is unfair and unjust. It gives even more power to people to be king makers. There should only be delegates and they should be awarded proportionate to the vote counts in each state.

It just isn’t fair. If the super delegates give the nomination to Hillary when Obama has the popular vote, are they truly representative of the democratic process? If she is clearly lacking in groundswell support, she does not deserve the nomination. If this should happen, this will not sit well with the newly enlightened Obama-ites. Many of his supporters will not vote come November, which would be a seismic electoral disaster, especially given that Obama has managed to mobilise young voters and previously disenfranchised societal groups like no candidate before. Obama has emerged as a new voice, a viable leader for the Democrats, succeeding where rhetoric from Nancy Pelosi and the like have failed. Clinton has demonstrated an extraordinary will to win, and a refusal to quit when she was losing primary after caucus after primary. Her campaign is now arguably at the stage where it is dependent on miracles like the surfacing of a new, and worse, Jeremiah Wright controversy. Ultimately her continued presence in the campaign will only damage the party further.

She’s moving full stream ahead alright. Away from the nomination.

I’ll leave you with this, a quote from Bill Clinton in 2004:

“If one candidate’s trying to scare you and the other one’s trying to get you to think, if one candidate’s appealing to your fears and the other one’s appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.”

PS - Watch this: McCain threatens to walk off the show when Jon Stewart presses him on whether Bush is more of a liability for him than Rev. Wright is for Obama. Classic.

Love is… lying in a bed in a hotel on top of a mountain (this is very tree-in-the-hole-and-the-hole-in-the-bog-esque, non?!) in Slovakia, watching BBC World News (and more specificially, the Russian Inauguration - Dmitry Medvedev ftw apparently), happy out, clad in our faculty day t-shirts. CommDay for the Y-chromosomed one, Law for das model, and whatever you’re having yourself!

It’s an odd, semi-executive lifestyle we lead sometimes. We’re here in Slovakia, somewhere called Brusno, at the 54^th Board Meeting of the European Students’ Union, and currently – more specifically – at the preliminary Seminar on ‘Equity in Higher Education’ (for ‘equity’ read ‘Soviet-era bitching from suspiciously butch types about how society “just doesn’t want me to succeed”’). Two weeks ago it was Slovenia for a conference on implementing a European Qualifications Framework. I won’t go on – if you’re bored reading this paragraph, you can imagine how bored we are attending the bloody things – but in between we had a UCD Ball, a few bouts of food poisoning, and a couple of other mentionable bits ‘n’ bobs. That said, not to be arrogant, but the movement in Ireland is streets ahead of a lot of the Unions present here, albeit resignation happy in the year that’s been!

Student conferences are odd creatures, particularly international ones. The number of attendees at the last ESU meeting who were actually in classes was one – and she was a secondary school pupil, not a student at all. This time I’d be shocked if there was even ONE person still in classes. Hypocrisy central, this lot. We’re Stakeholders apparently, we of hack student living, out of the classroom/lecture theatre to represent our peers.

Regardless, we’re enjoying ourselves, and the opportunity to see some beautiful parts of Eastern Europe. We drove 5 hours from the airport in Bratislava to get here, and although tedious, we met up with many of our fellow delegates en route and killed the journey with West Wing episodes, laughing at Lynam’s mp3 collection and stopping for ice cream at 1am. One of the lovely folks from Norway bears an uncanny resemblance to our mate Stephen, who Lynam quickly named ‘Fitzy’. Fitzy and Lynam joined us in our room last night for some Primary Lovin’, and Ciara was happy with the Obama result, with Gav and Lynam, the Clintonites, left to ponder the prospects of Obama v. McCain…Brennan reassured them at this point with a rant which probably included something about a fat lady…

“There is an interesting rhetorics between equality and equity…” Really, now? Back to this then. Basically the last day and a half has been spent in this place trying to define ‘equity’ first, and the horrific muddles between ‘equity’ and ‘equality’ that naturally become of a conference where 5 of the 80 people are native Anglophones and even they ­­(we) don’t really understand the difference. And this is while USI, along with maybe NUS-UK and nobody else, are net donors to the European student process. Not to be arrogant, but slow to change and all as we are back home, we are ridiculously progressive in our ideals and practice in comparison to our counterparts here. In Slovenia two weeks ago the other ‘stakeholders’ (why Slovenian teachers’ unions are stakeholders in a National Qualifications Framework For Lifelong Learning we weren’t sure, and still aren’t, a junket and a half on…) sat around in awe at the idea that Ireland, never mind having an NQF of its own, actually has a Minister for Education. Slovenia, it appears, has no Minister for Education but rather a minister for another brief who happens to own three private universities. Our Norweigan friends’ younger brethren from their secondary students’ union, meanwhile, couldn’t get their heads around the idea that someone might not go directly into a bachelors programme once they left high school. Hardly any wonder they left the EEC over some fish and their forests (Reilly is voting No, and Brennan Yes, but more about that later!).

We’re gagging for scandal and news from home about the Cabinet reshuffle, and gasping for gossip via text from home in the form of politics.ie texts, Nickey’s musings from a hotel room in Croker or an idle speculative text from a friend. News about the resignation of Seamus Brennan (no relation!) spread like wild fire last night, and since then we haven’t stopped playing around with cabinet formations in our heads… much like Reilly’s 4-3-1-2 game plan for United in the Champions League Final (Rooney playing in ‘the hole’ with Ronaldo pushing forward alongside Tevez… let me hear an ‘on your own… on your own… on your own…!’). One thing is for sure, Mary Coughlan will get a top ministerial job (our money is on Enterprise, Trade & Employment…) if not Tánaiste, and has Martin and Lenihan hot on her Bundoran-bought heels. Obviously we’re laying serious bets on Education, and Brennan sees Pat Carey figuring somewhere, with Reilly taking a log shot with Willie O’Dea (“he’s an academic”). Reilly also figures Micheal Martin’s time in Enterprise makes him a sure thing for Finance… time will tell!

Anyway. Back to life, back to reality. A speaker from the European secondary schools’ union here just claimed that the reason only 10% of PhD applicants are female, although they make up 70%+ of the undergraduate roll calls, is because there are no female academic role models for them. Ciara is launching into a “do you need to be shown how to do everything?” tirade. Gav’s blunt opinion is that pretty much all positive discrimination is merely an “oxymoronic crock of shit” anyway. Brennan threw her cat amongst the pigeons in an Ainsley Hayes tirade. Fun und games.

Lunch now, more on the cabinet later!

Gav and Ciara