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31. mai 2005
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Tony Blair takes advantage of Chirac's weakened position:
U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair pressed French President Jacques Chirac on the need for deregulation across the European Union after French voters rejected a treaty adding powers to the region's government, Blair's spokesman said.
With custody of the 25-nation bloc's rotating presidency beginning in July, Blair wants Chirac's backing for a package of economic changes including fewer rules restricting work hours and deregulation in the services industry.
Blair's agenda may bring into the open a disagreement about how the EU should handle competition from India and China. Britain wants to drop rules that business groups including the Confederation of British Industry say put Europe at a disadvantage, while France and Germany are suspicious of changes that may hurt protections for workers' pay, pensions and job security.
If the Dutch now deliver the expected nee, the 'constitution' may be dead, despite what the eurocrats hope. This saves Blair from holding any referendum altogether - he would certainly lose it - and may also give the UK a chance to improve its bargaining power within the EU. If Blair can, against the odds, succeed in deregulating the EU, then the defeat can be turned into a long-term win for the union. [lots of 'if's there --ed. I am dreaming, ok?]
7:25:40 PM 
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W. Mark Felt, now aged 91, has stepped forward and confirmed he was indeed 'Deep Throat', the mysterious secret source that played a role in exposing the Watergate scandal to The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, bringing down the Nixon presidency.
W. Mark Felt, 91, who was second-in-command at the FBI in the early 1970s, kept the secret even from his family until 2002, when he confided to a friend that he had been Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's source, the magazine said.
"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," he told lawyer John D. O'Connor, the author of the Vanity Fair article, the magazine said in a press release.
Considering that Felt was one of the top suspects and one of rather few insiders it could really be, there is little reason to doubt this now. The WaPo has so far not confirmed it, however.
Vanity Fair has gotten a major scoop here.
Update: The Washington Post has now confirmed that W. Mark Pelt was 'deep throat.'
7:13:36 PM
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Why did the chicken cross the road? The law didn't care, and fined it. But now a judge has shown mercy on poor Ophelia.
Ophelia, a black Polish hen, earned her owners a £30 fine for illegally walking across the street in California.
California state law bans livestock from highways but not domestic pets.
But lawyers for Ophelia's owners Linc and Helena Moore successfully argued that Ophelia was domesticated and could not be charged as livestock - and the case was dismissed.
This story has headline writers across the world chuckling in delight. Observe:
People get paid for this stuff!
6:55:25 PM
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Speaking of French-bashing: After the EU defeat Francois Chirac decided he had to do something, so he sacked the very unpopular prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and replaced him with Dominique de Villepin, who we remember as the spokesman for the axis of weasels. In the meantime, de Villepin has been interior minister.
This should be good news for everybody. De Villepin is loved by France's closest allies. And those who hate him will now probably have the satisfaction of seeing the arrogant bastard trying to push through deeply unpopular reforms in France, making him a favourite target for many of the same people just voting 'non.'
PS: Does anybody expect that those who chided President Bush for appointing officials that were deeply unpopular in Europe will now criticise Chirac for appointing a prime minister that will hardly do anything to improve the trans-atlantic ties? Nah, me neither.
2:54:10 PM
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 Norwegian finance minister Per-Kristian Foss (Cons), who supports Norway's entry into the European Union, discovers the joys of French-bashing as he explains on TV why Norwegians shouldn't care what the French say about the constitution:
- The Norwegian people's attitudes to the EU cannot be formed with basis in French racists and communists.
Well, Foss (picture) is at least a little bit right, but I doubt he's made any new friends in France, not to mention the Norwegian anti-EU campaign.
Mark Steyn knows this, too, but still feels free to gloat about the French turning down the constitution for what may be described as the wrong reasons.
Ah, say the Eurofetishists, but you naysayers are gloating undeservedly: the French didn't suddenly see the light and decide British Eurosceptics had been right all along; they rejected the EU constitution because they thought it was an Anglo-Saxon racket to impose capitalism on their pampered protectionist utopia.
But so what? Britain's naysayers don't have to reject the constitution for the same reason as France's commies, fascists, racists, eco-nutters, anachronistic unionists, featherbedded farmers, middle-aged "students", Trot professors and welfare queens, bless 'em all. If they want to go down the Eurinal of history clinging to their unaffordable welfare state, their 30-hour work weeks, 10-month work years and seven-year work decades, that's up to them. If Britain doesn't, that should be up to Britain.
For decades, some of us have argued that "Europe" is too diverse to form a single polity, that the British and French are in fact foreign to each other. Sir Edward Heath and his ilk scoff at such crude language: why, today's young cosmopolitan Britons are perfectly comfortable drinking Beaujolais and eating croissants and flaunting their wedding tackle on the Côte d'Azur. True, and irrelevant. What Sunday's vote underlined is profound differences in political culture. Britain's anti-Europeans and France's lunatic fringe are united only in their reluctance to be bossed around by a regulatory regime that insists a one-size-fits-all rulebook can be applied from Ballymena to the Baltics. It can't. The alleged incompatibility of our dissatisfactions makes the point: all politics is local; despite the assiduous promotion of the term, electorally speaking there is no such thing as a "European".
The EUrocrats have overextended the EU far beyond the will of many Europeans. A common market is a great idea. A certain standardisation to ease trans-national commerce is brilliant. Going from there to a busybody in Brussels that wants to dictate to every member country its foreign policy, domestic tax policy, immigration rules, welfare policies, education policy and who knows what else is just a massive non-democratic power grab. The people of each sovereign state is perfectly capable of electing leaders that take care of these issues themselves. Or if they aren't, that is hardly anybody else's issue.
As I see it, the EU is a good idea taken on a crazy ride.
2:02:53 PM
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The Cheneys try to draft Laura Bush.
"You know, people are thinking of Mrs. Clinton running for president. I think Mrs. Bush ought to run for president," Mrs. Cheney said. "If we want to have a Bush dynasty, let's get Laura Bush."
The vice president, who again ruled out making his own run for president when Bush's term ends, agreed.
"It's a great idea," Dick Cheney said. "And I think I know who would win too."
Or maybe the Cheneys are just not too happy about Jeb Bush.
PS: I am aware the Cheneys don't really want or expect Laura Bush to run. You can't be President of the US as your first big-management job.
9:03:54 AM
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The Sudanese government has taken action over allegations of mass rape in Darfur: They have arrested the man who documented the atrocities. Paul Foreman, leader of the Dutch Medecins San Frontieres, was on Monday arrested and then released on bail.
"He (Mr Foreman) is on bail and not allowed to leave the country, " MSF Holland spokesman Geoff Prescott told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.
"He's been charged with crimes against the state by the government on the grounds that they didn't seem to have appreciated our report on rape in Darfur".
Mr Foreman had said "medical privilege" and patient confidentiality prevented him from handing over documents requested by the authorities.
Another reason for respecting the information, Mr Prescott explained, was because women "made pregnant as a result of rape outside wedlock can be arrested by the authorities" in Sudan.
Just bloody outragous.
8:56:52 AM
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The people of Somalia would no doubt be delighted with the idea of an American-style filibuster congressional showdown, instead of this:
The rival fighters, loyal to Mohamed Habsade and Hassan Mohamed Nuur Shargudud - both members of the Somali parliament - were using assault rifles, double-barrelled anti-aircraft missiles mounted on big trucks, and heavy machineguns, our correspondent says.
Sources from the only hospital in the city say 15 people, including children, were killed and more than 20 others were wounded.
But no worries, the cavalry is on its way... Eh, no, it isn't.
The African Union has agreed to send some 1,700 troops to Somalia but said it would not send them unless it was safe to do so.
They could ask Bill Clinton about what is and isn't safe to do in Somalia. Apparently the only "safe" course is staying out. Staying put in Nairobi, which the alleged Somali government is actually doing, sounds like a good idea when the restoration of order relies on the support of the African Union.
4:50:21 AM
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John Naughton in the Observer is not scared of bloggers:
There is, writes Virginia Postrel in her column on Forbes.com, 'something about blogs [that] makes a lot of respectable journalists hyperventilate. News pros seem terribly threatened by online amateurs.'
As an illustration she quotes a Los Angeles Times columnist, David Shaw, an über-hack who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his media criticism. Blogging, Shaw writes, is a 'solipsistic, self-aggrandising, journalist-wannabe genre'. Bloggers are 'practitioners of what is at best pseudo-journalism' and 'many bloggers ... don't seem to worry much about being accurate'.
Postrel goes on to point out that Shaw omits to provide any links to blogs which illustrate these dismissive claims - in itself an interesting lapse in journalistic standards. But that is par for this course.
The article argues that blogging is good news for journalism, since bloggers will bring attention and praise to good journalism, and conversely hammer on bad reporting.
Conversely, good reporting and intelligent commentary is passed from blog to blog and spreads like wildfire beyond the jurisdiction in which it was originally published. This can only be good for journalism in the long run, if only because, as my mother used to say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Blogging won't wipe out journalism, for the simple reason that journalism requires skills and resources that bloggers will never have. But it will improve the practice of our trade. I don't expect that Pulitzer-winning Dave will like this prospect much. But he'll just have to get used to it.
You bet.
4:12:54 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.06.2005; 06:08:59.
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