Clare Daly Is Not A Fan

So you thought Barack Obama was a socialist? The socialists don't think he's one of them, not at all, and Clare Daly's diatribe put paid to that argument.

Representing Dublin North, Ms. Daly is a genuine European styled socialist, and as far as she is concerned, the President of the United States is a war criminal. And the whole of Ireland is being prostituted for his amusement, lacking only a hefty dose of padderwhackery to complete the picture.

You could say she's not a fan of the charismatic black man with Irish roots on his mother's side, the side he doesn't promote because it is of too pale a hue.

She's not a great fan of Bono either, and once Bono was put into the same pub with Mrs. Obama and daughters for a much-publicized lunch, she found more fuel for her raging fire. Soak the rich being her philosophy, she deeply begrudges those whose hard work and talent have paid off and they want to distribute it to the needy as they see fit without Ms. Daly's input.

All the fawning by the media and the government has infuriated Ms. Daly, and she has spoken out against the nonsense.

Oddly enough, she'll have plenty of moral support among the right wingers, who aren't fans of Mr. Obama either. They're also disgusted with the adulation from the press and the wall-to-wall coverage of the Obama genealogy tour. They have been having great fun with the unsuppressed boredom of the Obama daughters, who have been seen looking completely bored. What teenager gives a toss about the Books of Kells?

By attacking the American president, Ms. Daly has guaranteed herself a bit of attention that she doesn't normally receive, existing as she does on the fringe of a movement that lacks popular support. There is a reason that the United Left Alliance does not hold many seats in government.

If You Can't Reach Them In Church

The Catholic Church hierarchy in Ireland is trying its best to convince people that they should demand a 'no' vote on abortion legislation. They've run into a small snag, in that few people go to church and so there are few ears present on a Sunday monrning to listen to the sermon.

Attempts have been made to convince the legislators that they should vote no. The threat of excommunication has been dangled, with the only result being Enda Kenny stating that he is Catholic and Taoiseach but not a Catholic Taoiseach. The Catholic Church doesn't rule any longer, which must be a difficult concept to grasp after nearly one hundred years. Ah for the good old days, when the word of a bishop could snap the Dail into attention....

Where does the Church go to reach people if they aren't in church and the TDs are too busy watching the polls that indicate the Irish public is very much in favor of liberalizing the abortion laws?

Back to the source, of course. To the captive audience, the ones too young to know they are being used and manipulated.

The chairman of a Catholic primary school board in South Dublin just happens to have experience as a spokesman for retired Cardinal Desmond Connell, who would clearly be very much interested in getting the anti-abortion message to the voting public. Eddie Shaw used his knowledge of public relations and communications to solve the problem.

Imagine the shock of all those mothers who rifled through a child's backpack in search of important notes from the teacher, only to find a leaflet inviting them to attend the Vigil For Life.

Outrage would best describe the feeling of those parents. No one wants their child used like a pawn. Ireland had enough of that, back when the poor were locked away in industrial schools in an attempt to remake Irish society by remaking its most vulnerable children.

It turns out that not all the teachers went along with the marketing campaign, either refusing to insert the leaflets into backpacks or conveniently forgetting to do so.

Now Mr. Shaw is under fire by the parents, who are likely to start a campaign of their own. To get rid of Mr. Shaw. And then to get the Catholic Church out of the public school system in Ireland.

Blame The Publishers Not The Apple

The Feds say Apple conspired to raise prices on e-books. Apple says they didn't do any such thing. In fact, says Apple's Eddy Cue, it was the publishers who set the prices. Apple just wanted to be able to work with them so there could be some books in the newly hatched iBookstore.

It wasn't me. It was them. Point those fingers the other way.

Once the publishers had their way, they raised prices. Of course they raised prices. Amazon, with 90% of the ebook market, was pricing ebooks below cost and the publishers were losing money. The difference had to be made up somewhere.

Why did Apple go to court on the charge of price-fixing, when all the publishers quietly settled? Maybe because Apple firmly believes it is not guilty of the crime, and it isn't going to let the Federal Government cast aspersions on Steve Jobs' legacy.

Mr. Cue's testimony is key because the Feds say he's the one who rigged the prices. It was all his handiwork, the agency model for ebook pricing. In court, he's saying he didn't do it. All Apple did was to let publishers set the price and then take a 30% cut. Where' s the price fixing conspiracy in that? If the publishers discussed among themselves, that isn't anything that Apple controlled.

The agency model caused ebook prices to rise, according to the government, but it has been pointed out that ebook prices actually fell overall. The publishers were able to increase prices on the hottest titles and then cut the price on the backlist or midlist titles. It's how they price print editions, and it's how they wanted to price ebooks until Amazon got involved.

And what about Amazon? The iBookstore cut into their share of the market, which would suggest that the agency model improved competition. If Amazon's books were so much cheaper, it wouldn't have lost a considerable chunk of market share to Apple. Consumers are not stupid, even if the Justice Department thinks they are.

It's been suggested that Amazon got the litigation ball rolling, using the courts to crush a competitor when that competitor was putting the squeeze on Amazon's total control of the ebook market.

Not that the Justice Department cares. They won't step in to curtail Amazon until all the competition is crushed. When it's too late.

Controversy For Bloomsday

What can you talk about as you wander Dublin with all the other James Joyce aficionados tomorrow? They've seen it before, done it before, eaten those breakfast kidneys before. The conversation would drag, but for a blessing from Ithys Press.

It turns out that James Joyce had various bits and pieces of his writing tucked away and thus unpublished. That oversight has now been corrected, in a limited edition titled Finn's Hotel. If you know Finnegan's Wake forward and backward, you'll recognize many of the characters. Like an artist paints studies that will be incorporated in a large work, so too did Mr. Joyce write studies. Or is that not the correct way to view the pieces?

The debate now rages over whether or not the studies are studies that led to a novel or if the writings are suitable for free-standing inclusion in the Joyce catalogue.

Official Joyce scholar Terence Killeen is in a small huff over the publication because the pieces are not some "narrative tableau" as the publisher claims, but are early drafts that the author used to create the final product. There was never an intention to publish the bits, any more than an author would seek to publish all the parts of a novel that get edited out.

As you wander through the world of Leopold Bloom, feel free to support Mr. Killeen's position or counter with that of the publisher, who notes that the short pieces he likes to call "epiclets" (a la Joyce) wrote the things long before the author ever thought about Finnegan's Wake.

Keep in mind, however, that the publisher is offering ten deluxe copies of Finn's Hotel for 2500 euro, and only 140 at the more affordable 350 euro. The publisher contends that Mr. Joyce wasn't thinking of Finnegan's Wake when he penned what sound like character studies, hence the justification to publish. It would seem that the publisher is fashioning a rather lame excuse to turn a profit.You might have a difficult time of rebutting the fact that writers scribble notes and ponder a certain plot twist in their heads for years, and Mr. Joyce might very well have been conceptualizing a novel before he knew he had a novel in him.

What the collection of vignettes or epiclets or whatever will demonstrate to those who want to learn how to write creatively is the process that one very notable author used. Take Finn's Hotel and compare it to Finnegan's Wake, and then discuss among yourselves the parts that worked for Mr. Joyce and the parts that did not.

It will make the time pass more quickly, especially when you've done it before and seen it before. At last, something new to debate after you've downed your order of fried kidneys and need to focus on something besides the tang of urine in your mouth.

We All Fall Short

But after we fall, we don't go and rob a bank.

Navahcia Edwards would like the court to be merciful when she is sentenced for her part in an armed bank robbery. In her defense, she insists that she is not the person she would seem to be, based on trial testimony. She's worked hard, all her life, and she fell short. Everyone falls short.

Her excuse for robbing the bank lies in her wretched childhood of abuse and negligence, because being left to care for your siblings at the age of five will naturally pre-dispose a girl towards bank robbery. Did that explain why she copied The Town when she organized the heist?

Not being nurtured, as her father believes, led her to think that what she and her boyfriend saw in a movie could be translated into real life. You might think that someone who posted a high GPA at Moraine Valley Community College would have enough education to realize that Ben Affleck was acting out a script that he wrote based entirely on his imagination. Writers get to write the ending they want. It has nothing to do with what would transpire in the real world.

She wanted to have a career in modeling but if a girl isn't unusually tall and thin as a rail, she isn't going to make it no matter how hard she works. Ms. Edwards drifted towards the less desirable projects available, the ones that involve nudity and pornography.

So she found a job working at a bank but there isn't much money in a career as a bank teller. With all that money around, she used her education to figure out how to embezzle some of it, but she wasn't smart enough to not get caught. It was her promise to pay the money back, and avoid jail time, that led to her plot to rob the bank where she once worked to get the money to reimburse the first theft.

The FBI didn't follow Ben Affleck's script and they soon arrested Ms. Edwards and her accomplice, who promptly turned on her and made her the brains of the operation. With the trial concluded, and facing a long sentence, Ms. Edwards asks the judge to be lenient. We all fall short, and she blames her dysfunctional upbringing for turning to crime.

She is that lost five-year-old child who was left alone, and she wasn't at the bank when it was robbed. Okay, sure, she helped in the planning, but that was it.

The prosecutor wants her put away for 10 to 12, which would give her plenty of time to complete a college degree. Filmmaking or creative writing would be good choices for someone who fell short by believing a piece of fiction was a documentary.

Technology Cleans Up A Dirty Habit

Now that the French are doing it, you know it's going to become a fashion statement that will sweep the world.

It's the electronic cigarette, a fancy device that delivers nicotine without the tar and the ash and the unpleasant smell.

It's not a cigarette, banned from television advertising. So you know you'll be seeing a lot of advertising, and soon. Which means it won't be long before your local politician will apply all the same tobacco taxes to it, to keep revenues up. If people start switching to e-cigs in droves, where will all the sin tax money come from?

Want to really aggravate some holier-than-thou anti-smoking campaigner? Suck on an e-cig in a bar or a restaurant where smoking is banned, and enjoy the frustration when they can't make you stop smoking in public where it's not allowed because you're not smoking.

There are the usual cries from the nannies among us who insist that e-cigs will encourage children to smoke and who knows what medical dangers lie within the nicotine vapor being inhaled. Movie stars will make it look glamorous, and now that the French are discovering the e-cig, it will be nearly impossible to stop the fashionistas from indulging.

The traditional manufacturers of tobacco cigarettes are getting into the field, recognizing the shift that is taking place. As their product is pushed towards extinction, the lure of nicotine addiction finds a new method of delivery and the old school corporations are not going to miss the vapor boat on this product. As long as people remain hooked on the nicotine, they'll want a way to get it, and that means profits.

It isn't exactly like smoking, but when you want a fix and you don't want to stand out in the cold to smoke, all you have to do is pull out the plastic stick shaped like a cigarette and enjoy the rush in comfort. Your doctor will applaud you for giving up tobacco and all its cancer risks.

Your local taxing body will thank you as well, as soon as they figure out how to make you pay for your habit that isn't dirty any more.

Jury Selection And How It Evolved

The ordinary citizens who will decide if George Zimmerman is guilty or innocent face a battery of questions from the prosecution and the defense. Mr. Zimmerman, charged with murdering Trayvon Martin in a case that swings on a controversial self-defense law in Florida, will be judged by a jury of his peers. Those peers must demonstrate that they are neutral, have no set opinion about the highly publicized case, and swear to listen to the testimony before reaching a decision.


It's the system that has evolved, but there was a time when a defendant in a high-profile case was judged by a jury comprised of those determined to convict no matter what was said in court.

Go back to 1889, when Chicago police detective Daniel Coughlin was arrested on a charge of murder in a case that riveted the nation.

The prosecutors thought nothing of packing the jury with men whose minds were made up, their opinions based entirely on press coverage that provided a platform for Coughlin's enemies. It was the norm, and had been done previously to convict the Anarchists who dared to speak out for an eight-hour workday. The trial that followed the Haymarket Riot was seen as an achievement for justice, with four men hanged for killing policemen when they had nothing to do with the killing.

The jury was packed again when Daniel Coughlin stood trial for murder, but his Irish-American colleagues were also investing Chicago political circles, extending the reach of the Irish immigrant into the government of the State of Illinois. The method of choosing jurors came under fire when one of their own was on trial, and so they legislated fairness.

To read THE KING OF THE IRISH is to witness the evolution of the jury selection process, as a case of blatant injustice based on bigotry and fueled by political intrigue led to marked changes in the way that a jury is impanelled.

There was a time when a man could be sentenced to hang because his political beliefs did not match those of the prosecutor and the judge. Expect the potential jurors in Florida to be asked all about their attitudes towards guns, self-defense, and vigilantes. Almost 125 years after Daniel Coughlin's conviction, the system has evolved, to reinforce the concept of innocence before guilt is proven in a court of law.