When did lesbians take over softball?

It's been nearly 20 years since I lived in America. Lots of things have changed. Still, I find it hard to accept that these days only lesbian women play softball because it wasn't the case in the 1980s.

This all goes back to that Wall Street Journal picture of Elena Kagan. Apparently anyone looking at that picture would have known that Kagan is a lesbian. Why? Because she's playing softball, that's why. I just don't know.

I didn't see the picture before I heard about the controversy, but I would not have associated a woman playing softball with lesbianism. Softball is not a tough game; you do not have to be 'butch' to play. I played quite a bit in the late 80s/early 90s in the mixed-sex company league when I was working for Citibank. I don't think any of the women I played with were lesbians.

When I look at the picture of Kagan all I see is a woman playing in a game at an office picnic or something like that. No uniform shirt or proper footware. Why read anything more than that into the picture?

Of course, the Irish media has picked up on all this nonsense and regurgitated what they're reading in the American press. As far as I can tell not a single Irish journalist has bothered to contact Softball Ireland, despite the fact that there are dozens of teams playing the game here, almost all in mixed-sex leagues. They might have been able to help the Irish Times by explaining that the women who play softball don't fit that or any stereotype.

Maybe there's a grain of truth to this whole 'women who play softball' thing, but all I can imagine is that this will make it that bit tougher to convince women in the office to turn out for the summer softball league.

No shortage of public money in Bray

Aren't we in a severe budget crisis? Aren't government bodies cutting back everywhere? I only ask because I've been wondering for the past few weeks where the money came from to re-landscape the roundabouts in south Bray? They used to be grassy areas, but now they're like half desert and half prairie with a small woodlands area.



Truth is, I don't know which public body paid for these 'upgrades', but it hardly matters. Money's supposedly tight and one of our local authorities - Bray Town Council, Wicklow County Council - thought this a wise investment. I liked the old style roundabouts better. And how long had it been since the last upgrade?

Walking away from mortgages will be Irish emigrants' revenge

{Posted in wrong spot. Click here for this post.}

Leaving cert students should have option to take 2 math exams

The Tainaiste has suggested that universities accept students who fail the Honours Leaving Cert in Mathematics. That doesn't seem quite right to me, although I understand where she's coming from - too many students are bailing out of the honours paper and settling for the pass paper.

A simple and equitable solution would be to do the following: let all students take both the pass and honours paper (with an option to skip either). That's not feasible at the moment because the two exams are held simultaneously, but they could be held on different days.

That way any student who was afraid of losing out on a college place all together for failing honours math could take the pass paper as a fall back. There'd be no extra studying required as anyone who has put the work into an honours level course should have no difficulty passing the pass level paper.

We should follow Minister's logic and scrap TV license

The Minister for Comms says the TV license won't exist in 2020. Well, why don't we follow the Minister's logic on the electric cars - be first in Europe to force pace of change - why don't we scrap license as of 2012. That would have the effect of focusing minds at RTE and open up television production & distribution to all sorts of creative people here.

There's absolutely no reason Irish cultural products can't compete in a free market in our wired world. Irish authors, playwrights, songwriters, actors, etc. all manage well, why not those who create digital media? Oh yeah, we also have some excellent games and other software producers.

Scrap the license and free the market now - we'll be ahead of the curve as other countries are forced to do likewise.

Euro's crisis is thanks to hubris of European elites

I missed most of the 9:00 news tonight and so didn't see how (or if) RTE reported on today's news on the euro, but it's gotten a lot more serious. Greek debt is now junk, the euro fell by more than 2¢ against the dollar (a currency with its own concerns) and today a member of the FDP - junior coalition partner in the German Government - said Greece might have to "leave the euro zone for a time."

The German and Greek peoples are pulling in opposite directions. The Germans don't want to bail out the Greeks (or any other errant euro members) and the Greeks don't want to endure the pain required to get their government spending under control to German satisfaction.

Are we approaching the moment of truth for the euro (& the EU)? I've said before that I'm not anti-EU, but I've never understood why the European elite kept plowing on with their political project when the people were so far behind. The European project was too important to allow it be forced on people, but never sufficiently explained.

Now you see the results. First real difficult moment arrives and the various peoples of Europe are pulling apart. The Greek & German governments are like rubber bands stretching, stretching trying to keep holding hands with each other while their respective voters pull them back from any sense of European solidarity.

How do you think this image from Athens on Die Zeit's web site plays with the German people?

The stupid things is, if the euro disintegrates, the European Union will follow. It should never have come to this. The hubris of the Europhiles was as great, maybe greater, than that of the bankers who are public enemy number one today.

Maol Muire Tynan - still can't pronounce it

Maol Muire Tynan is a name I used to see regularly in the Irish Times. It also stuck in my head because I always used to wonder how you pronounced the name. I could probably have a stab at it now having lived her for 20 years, but from the day I moved here the name was just a mystery to me. In fact, for a while I didn't even know if the name belonged to a man or woman (woman, if you don't know).

I only mention her name because I just stumbled across it. She's now the Public Affairs Manager at ESB. Good for her. I'm sure it's a better paying job than journalist at the Irish Times. Probably less pressure too - at least until we start having rolling strikes and electricity cuts that I keep hearing about.

If Fianna Fáil used "deem and pass" ...

Just imagine the reaction of Fintan O'Toole and Vincent Browne if Fianna Fáil ever tried a stunt like deem and pass? Just imagine the tut-tutting of Pat Kenny and George Hook. Just imagine.

I hadn't been paying much attention to America's health care debate and I still don't have a firm grasp what exactly it is Congress may pass, but using this "deem and pass" method is outrageous.

First, what is "deem and pass"?

... the health-care bill would be voted on INDIRECTLY, tucked into what's known as "the rule." The rule essentially outlines the rules for an upcoming vote -- in this case, it would be the vote on the package of reconciliation fixes.

By passing "the rule," the House also would "deem" the Senate bill passed (with a "hereby" statement. "We hereby deem..."). The House would then vote on the package of reconciliation fixes. But the Senate health-care bill would be considered passed even if they never vote on the reconciliation fixes.

Get that? No, well basically it's a trick where the health care package is passed, but nobody has to be tarred as having voted for it.

I like how David Brooks sums up what this means.

Deem and pass? Are you kidding me? Is this what the Revolutionary War was fought for? Is this what the boys on Normandy beach were trying to defend? Is this where we thought we would end up when Obama was speaking so beautifully in Iowa or promising to put away childish things?

... This is the largest piece of legislation in a generation and Pelosi wants to pass it without a vote. It’s unbelievable that people even talk about this with a straight face.

And he voted for Obama.

This will be Barak Obama's legacy.

Night in Dublin's new theater will cost you

Dublin's new Grand Canal Theatre opened last night. I presume it's as spectacular inside as outside (eh, no, I don't know what's going on with those red things).

It sure will be a pricey experience to go to the new theater. My wife and daughters were looking at tickets for Hairspray later this year. The cost of the tickets - including booking charge - was a lot more than they paid last summer for flight to London, train journey into the city and tickets to the show there.

American troops don't "stop off" in tax havens

President Obama thanked Brian Cowen for allowing American troops use Shannon as a transit stop on the way to Iraq and Afghanistan. That's the insurance policy against being tagged as a tax haven. Avoiding tax haven designation is one of the keys to economic recovery.

The cost of November strike day

Remember last November when just about all teachers and civil servants and others went on strike for a day? That was before the budget when all the pay cuts were implemented. Remember?

Well, I know of one state body that has only now gotten around to deducting the pay for that day - at the 2010 salary scale. That means the strike day was 5% (if that was the pay cut) less expensive to each of that body's employees than they had a right to expect AND 5% more expensive for the state than it should have been.

I'd love to know if this is the case throughout the public sector.

Housekeeping issues

Still working on comments. Sorry about the big delay. I'm regularly posting on Twitter. My goal is to get this blog to be more like a series of short twitter posts, but with comments. Haloscan pulled the rug out from under me and I haven't had enough time to get Disqus comments working. I also probably need a new blog template, but haven't found one I like yet.

Should we adopt an education credits system?

Youth unemployment is a huge issue here, so I'm not really opposed to the state offering training for young people. The fact that the state is looking for "private organisations" to do the training and "reskilling" is a plus as far as I'm concerned. Again, FÁS should be closed down.

I'm just wondering, however, if the fact that so many under 35s need "reskilling" is not an indictment of the way we organize our education? I mean if a person's education is dated before he's 35 how does it make sense that each individual and we as as a nation invest so much in university courses?

I'm more thinking out loud than definitely in favor of massive change, but maybe it would be better if there were some way that people could use education credits at any time in their lives to "reskill" rather than the current system, which assumes you really need nothing more once you're 21.

Bush admin's response to tsunami better comparison for current efforts

After listening to the last few minutes of Pat Kenny's show today I'm ready to explode. Okay, his panel was stuffed with Obamaphiles, but I'm just so sick of people comparing President Obama's handling of Haiti with President Bush's handling of Katrina.

President Bush made one big blunder in New Orleans and two less crucial blunders. The biggest error Bush made was not treating the New Orleans government, especially the mayor, like an ineffectual, tin-head, tin-pot third world leader that he actually imagined himself to be. Bush and the governor at the time should have jointly ousted him because he was a nincompoop.

I know the relief effort was bogged down and troubled, but I don't believe anyone died due to it. People were discommoded and upset, but what upset those the people whose homes and cities had been ruined were issues on a different scale from what the people of Haiti are putting up with now.

Bush's biggest political blunder, although only a small error really, was not decamping from Washington to set up a temporary White House in the region. It wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference to anyone's life, but the media would have been satisfied that at least he was 'doing something.'

Of course Pat Kenny and seemingly everyone else in RTE hasn't grasped that the media performed worse than did the Bush administration. And that was Bush's second minor error - not calling the media out on the lies they peddled at the time.

And, Dan Boyle - who I actually have a sneaking regard for - I'm sorry if you don't like that the United States has to defend itself, but you could have at least acknowledged the massive effort by the American navy and other forces to get supplies to the people of Indonesia. I hate that sort of 'knowing', 'little-smile-on-the-lips', 'amusing-to-all-euro-hipsters', snide anti-Americanism that Boyle displayed today when he said, "It's the best use of the American military I've seen in at least two decades." (I may not have it verbatim, but that's pretty close.) I thought he was better than that.

A better comparison with today's relief effort was the United States' response to the 2004 tsunami, which the Bush administration handled well.Not perfectly, of course, just as I'm sure today's relief effort is not going perfectly. Nothing goes perfectly.

Mass. election proves America's still not Europe

I posted this on Twitter earlier:

One year anniversary of Obama's election. He can still right ship, but Brown's win ends European dream of what Obama would mean.

I thought I'd expand on that a bit.

A lot of Europeans believed - more than hoped - that the election of Barak Obama meant that America had finally woken up to all that was wrong with their country (ie - all the ways it wasn't European). Although I imagine most Europeans aren't aware of it yet, last night's election result from Massachusetts has put paid to that idea.

That doesn't mean President Obama's Presidency is doomed. There's plenty of time left for him to fix the obvious problems and go on in the job for 7 more years.

Much the same applies to the Democratic Party. They too can adjust their ambitions and look for American solutions to America's problems and avert their wistful gazes from the European social and economic models. And, of course, the Republican Party is still a mess so clearly nothing is decided other than that the American people don't want to be Europeans.

Brown vs Coakley in Mass and vs health care in US

RTE & the Irish Times have been trumpeting President Obama's success in getting his health care proposals through the various stages in both houses of Congress. In fact, sometimes the headlines are so excited that I'm sure the average Irish Times reader or RTE viewer who's paid any attention at all figures that Americans already have their government health care.

However, both RTE & the Irish Times have gone quiet on that front the past week, understandably, with Haiti dominating the news. Still, just in case you're vaguely interested, tomorrow's election in Massachusetts could be the end of America's national health care dalliance.

If Republican Scott Brown manages to defeat Democrat Martha Coakley for what was Senator Kennedy's US Senate seat, the President's health care plan is probably dead in the water. Not only will the Republicans have that crucial 41st vote to enable them to filibuster the Senate, but every Democrat from a state less Democrat-blue than Massachusetts (pretty much all of them) is going to be wondering about his own political health if he/she votes for the President's plan. Something much less watered down is probably all that could be hoped for if Brown wins.

As of right now the polls show him up slightly and Intrade says the good money's on a Brown victory.

Haloscan comments have vanished

I don't know what happened to the comments. Something seems to have changed with Haloscan.com. I can't access my account. I hope all's not lost there.

In the meantime I decided to reinstate the Twitter box, which was interfering with the comments. Maybe I'll add another Twitter box for my posts as American in Ireland.

The overly centralized mind

On Friday the Minister for Education, panicked by complaints from teachers and parents and the press, announced all schools were closed until Thursday of this week. Every school throughout the state.

No doubt he made that decision based almost entirely on the forecast provided by Met Eireann, who assured us that the 'bitter cold' and 'arctic conditions' would continue throughout this week. They were wrong about that, but these things happen. If there's one thing anyone in Ireland knows - even the government should know this - it is that you cannot rely on the weather.

The minister is the commissar in our soviet-style, centralized system. All of us little peasants look to him to be in charge, to 'do something' about everything. On Friday all the clamoring was for the government or the Minister to 'do something' about the schools deciding whether they should be open or closed. So, he did something, but it was the wrong thing.

Today the minister looks like an idiot. There's no reason why the schools in and around Dublin cannot be open today, let alone tomorrow and Wednesday. I'm sure the story's similar in other parts of the country too.

Yes, there probably are areas where this rain is snow, but why can't schools coordinate their response with the Gardaí and take such decisions locally? Why does the minister have to be involved?

Of course he didn't have to step in. He shouldn't have, but still the media and the peasants wanted to see the commissar act and he did. And now, starting today, we'll all start complaining again about the schools being unnecessarily closed and demand that the minister 'do something.'

Will week off eliminate strike threat?

At a minimum pretty much every kid in the state is going to miss a week of school due to the weather. So are the teachers. http://bit.ly/7km9Kx

I wonder if the Minister is hoping that these missed days will head off any strike action later in the school year? If not, how many days can kids miss before vacation days have to be sacrificed? As far as I'm concerned it's not a biggie for the primary school kids. The secondary school year is a lot shorter, however and a full week off now combined with any length of strike could mean a lot of missed material.

Now that the Lisbon Treaty is secure out pop the tax harmonizers

We're a long way from out of our economic disaster, but the EU is ready to bash our hopes of recovery again. Yesterday's Sunday Business Post said the EU is set to push again for a common "tax base" for business taxes.

Of course our government will oppose such an effort, but any serious attempt at forcing this through will prove the utter cynicism of those in charge of the EU project. We were assured time and again over the past two years - before Lisbon I & II - that such a move was not possible. Now, in our severely weakened state, we may have to burn a lot of political capital to prevent from happening that which was supposedly not possible.

Yet, it must be done. Without the business tax advantage, Ireland is too small, too isolated and too remote to be a viable economy inside the EU.