While I Was Away

Little activity on this blog in the past week, in spite of all the wonderful things out there in the world to write about. The news of Florida Congressman Mark Foley's salacious e-mails to an underage Capitol Hill page was my favourite snippet that surfaced in the past week. Foley was a member of the House Missing and Exploited Children Caucus, providing a suitably comic demonstration of the venality and hypocrisy of the GOP in affairs of the cock. Is this the same party that succeeded in getting Bill Clinton impeached? Of course there is a serious side to Foley's shennanigans and especially to the efforts of the Senate and the Republican Party to keep the matter hushed up for the past seven months. There may be a bit of blowback come the mid-term elections in November.

Bertie Ahern has kept things lively on the Emerald Isle with his mea culpa - or should that be mea ne culpa? - garnering sympathy from the Plain People of Ireland, few of whom have the same access to interest-free loans from well-heeled friends, and as Seanachie predicted last week, he appears to have got away with it, for now, if that trusted barometer of probability Paddy Power is anything to go by. Far be it from Seanachie to ply on the 'told you so's', but, as predicted a couple of weeks back, Michael McDowell's reign as PD leader, and Tánaiste, has got off to an awful start, with opinion polls suggesting that the Peeple think that McDowell was a bit mealy-mouthed in his assessment of the Taoiseach's behaviour. Mickey Mack should be nice and crisp when they take him down off that line. In the meantime, Bertie has paid back the loan, with interest, according to the Sindo, who are taking an unusually hard line with the Drumcondra barrow boy. So I suppose we can all move on then?