httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0bsWl-GnOo&feature=player_embedded#!
Solomon Burke – singer, preacher and patriarch – died on Sunday of natural causes at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, leaving behind 21 children, 90 grandchildren, 19 great grandchildren and a legend.
Now that, right there, was a soul man.
The Cowen/Lenihan government – which has been wrong about everything on the economy – is putting its faith in blind optimism….This is blind and pathetic optimism, because it is based on the same three-card trick, the same bluff and gamble that got us here in the first place. In short, they have learnt nothing at all.’
(David McWilliams, yesterday’s Sunday Business Post)
Yes. Not bad, David. But this is how you tear Brian Lenihan a new one:
‘…on Prime Time , Lenihan announced that the entire banking system would be restored to “the greatness it once had”. Oh dear God – he really means “greatness”.
And the greatness our banking system as a whole once had? The cronyism of overlapping boards? The grotesque salaries and bonuses for people who proved so wildly incompetent? The revolving doors through which regulators became bankers and vice versa? The cooking of the books?
The terrifying thing about all of this is the mentality it reveals. It helps explain why Brian Lenihan has made so many disastrous decisions and why he still can’t face up to the reality that the banks played him like a violin’.
(Fintan O’Toole, last Tuesday’s Irish Times)
A fan weighs-in.
(Clockwise: Terry, Tom, Sean and Cormac.)The Four Horsemen of the Apologist are on their way.
Problem solved.
The Financial Regulator’s new Code of Conduct on Mortgage Arrears is designed, among other things, to protect mortgage holders from having their homes repossessed or being switched from tracker mortgages onto expensive variable rates. No bad thing, with more than 36,000 people way behind on their mortgage payments right now.
Some however want the code diluted, claiming that mortgage holders will abuse it, concocting spurious excuses to delay the repossession of their homes.
Monday’s toxic flood at Ajka, now pouring into the Danube.
This is what a million cubic metes of toxic red sludge looks like, up close.
Minutes after the Morning Ireland interview two weeks ago.
At Government buildings this afternoon.
(Photocall Ireland)
No. Just Brian’s joke hand buzzer. It slayed them at the Mount Falcon.
Bill Clinton’s Battle Cry To Irish, Get Up And Get Going, Is Heeded (Niall O’Dowd, Huffington Post)
(Photocall Ireland)
From today’s editorial in the Guardian:
‘When financiers joked in 2008 that the only difference between bankrupt Iceland and hard-up Ireland was one letter and a few days, they got it wrong – the mess the Emerald Isle is now in is so much worse.’
Ouch.
‘…all the way down, Dublin ministers have promised voters that things are about to get better. Those emergency loans to the banks – that would sort it. These savage spending cuts – that would do the job. That decision to pretty much guarantee the entire banking system (with practically no questions asked) – this time for sure. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Like a body flung off the roof of a skyscraper, the Irish economy has just kept on falling.’
Ditto.
‘…being open for business at all costs does not work well for small countries with homogeneous economies. And it really does not work with dozy policymakers.’
Game over.
closure (noun) 1. finality. 2. the act of closing something, eg a business or a transport route. 3. a parliamentary procedure for cutting short a debate and taking an immediate vote. 4. the thing that, according to Brian Lenihan, we now have.
