You have to admit these are both great and show what a little imagination can do in political advertising.
Or if you want real belly-laughs just head over to Jim Corr’s site.
Browsing Posts in Politics
relies on an informed electorate.
Now you can be informed.
What John Handelaar has done over at kildarestreet.com with the help of some other great people is deeply important. Quite simply, the Dáil record is now properly accessible rather than just available. The site enables you to do the following:
- Read a dramatically-more-legible version of the Dáil Record going back to January 2004
- Search that record by speeches or written questions, or by speaker, or by date or date range
- Sign up for email alerts for when a search query you’re interested changes
- Sign up for email alerts whenever a TD of your choosing says something or asks a question which generated a written reply
- Subscribe to RSS feeds for individual TDs or for search queries
This isn’t just important for the content you find but also for the content that you don’t find. I will not be voting for any sitting TD in any future election unless I see continuous active engagement by them in the Dáil. If they don’t have anything to say, they shouldn’t be there.
The days of some gobshite getting elected because he got your daughter a job in the Civil Service or claims to be responsible for every penny spent in your constituency have to come to an end. kildarestreet.com will hopefully help usher the beginning of proper national politics involving those who care about our country and what it can become.
We all sat idly by as those running this country ran it into the ground. It’s time we started paying attention.
UPDATE:
I just used the site to check on our three TDs in Cork South-West. Summary as follows for the past year:
- Christy O’Sullivan (FF): Has spoken in 5 debates in the last year — well below average among TDs. Has received answers to 8 written questions in the last year — below average among TDs
- PJ Sheehan (FG): Has spoken in 81 debates in the last year — above average among TDs. Has received answers to 101 written questions in the last year — average among TDs.
- Jim O’Keeffe (FG): Has spoken in 51 debates in the last year — average among TDs. Has received answers to 173 written questions in the last year — above average among TDs.
After seeing this, I take back any ageist comments I made in the last election about PJ Sheehan and I’m disappointed to see my predictions about Christy O’Sullivan have proven true.
I was enraged on Thursday whilst listening to the latest Restaurant Guys’ podcast. They were interviewing a New York restaurateur who is being picketed by fois gras protestors. These ugg-boot-wearing idiots think they can intimidate a small business owner and effectively put him out of business. These cowards don’t have the balls to go after large fast-food chains who sell industrially produced chicken and figure they’ll go for easy marks instead.
Unfortunately for these hypocrites, this restaurant owner is Irish and (like the rest of us) he doesn’t like people telling him what to do. I was then thrilled to discover who he was. The restaurant is Knife + Fork and he is Damien Brasel. He was made head chef in Peacock Alley in Dublin at the age of 20! Two of my top ten meals of all time were in Peacock Alley in its heyday before it all went pear-shaped.
His response to these lazy cause-of-the-week nitwits? Put a fois gras tasting menu on! The outcome? His business has improved. Result 
If you are in New York and wondering where to eat, can I recommend you try Knife + Fork? Bring some chicken nuggets with you to throw at the wastes-of-oxygen picketing outside at the weekend.
I’ve ordered mine, have you?
Fianna Fail may be able to censor RTE and turn it into a toothless Soviet-era Pravda but luckily we have the internet to enable democracy and freedom of speech and expression.
Here is the original RTE piece on the Cowen nudes that they removed from their site and then apologised for mentioning. Thanks to Mr Mulley.
“Against us are… all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty… We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils..”
The updated Irish Politics site is now live. This is a tremendous resource for anyone interested in what people on the ground are writing about politics here.
It is a site that watches for any blog posts that mention a TD’s name and provides a summary of that post on the site. It is party neutral and is in no way partisan.
Those with blogs can add a widget which displays the latest politics posts on their own blog sidebar. Of course readers can now subscribe by email to get all the latest posts.
All details over at IrishElection.com. Well worth checking out.
I cannot understand why Christy O’Sullivan thinks he’ll get a vote from me. Here is a guy shoe-horned in by FF at a national level who sends me flyers with absolutely no information on them about who he is, what he believes in, where he lives, what he has accomplished as a politician or why I should vote for him.
And of course his website doesn’t load!
Inserting this nobody over a well known local politician like Alan Coleman is a huge mistake by FF. I don’t know how well Coleman would have done in this climate but at least he has a known reputation.
I will not vote for anonymous candidates from any party.
It appears the opposition parties have started their campaign to lose the next general election with their latest himbo/bimbo scheme which they picked up from the UK. They want traffic lights on food to indicate the levels of salt, sugar and fat. Not only are the stuck in the 1980′s with the fat obsession, but they show such a basic mis-understanding of human nature that the scheme was obviously devised by a marxist.
If I want to buy fat-laden, carb-laden, salt-laden Tayto, I bloody will and they chances of me looking at some insulting graphics are zero. When I smoked, you could have put pictures of sliced open cancerous lungs on the box and I’d happily have puffed away.
Information is only useful to those seeking it. If we want nutrition information then we’ll use the amazing human ability to read to find out what is in the box. “oh but people don’t know what a safe level of salt is, so our traffic light system will enable them to figure this out without actually ever having to think”. “Next year, we’ll be bringing in a system which does an instant analysis of your blood and won’t let you buy anything with too much salt or sugar”.
I was pleasantly surprised that FF told the opposition to get a clue and that they would not be bringing in such a scheme.
The first political party which starts a campaign to destroy the ever growing nanny state gets my vote.
You want people to eat properly? Then make Home Economics, Social & Scientific, Cooking compulsory in schools for both boys and girls starting around age 7. Hell, you could do a double whammy and teach it through Irish.
Technorati Tags: Traffic+Lights, Food, Labour, Fine+Gael, Marxism, Nanny+State, Nutrition, Intelligence, Cop+On, Information, Knowledge, Cooking, Tayto
At this stage I’m sick to the back teeth of the moral relativism that passes for liberal thought in modern Europe and particularly in Ireland. Recent events in the Middle East have just amplified the noise. So it is a joy to read something as reasoned and balanced as Norm Geras’ post on what is happening in Lebanon. Read the questions at the end very carefully and maybe you’ll learn something about yourself from your answers.
I’m surprised that so many of the old left in Britain have been able to move to a place politically where I can agree with much of what they say. It is a pity that the Irish left can still be found associating themselves with Ba’athist-hugging scumbags like George Galloway or Pol Pot groupies like Noam Chomsky.
[tags]Lebanon, Israel, Norm Geras, Pol Pot, Noam Chomsky, George Galloway, Baath party[/tags]
