Archive for the ‘Electoral politics’ Category

Symbolism and rhetoric

Monday, February 4th, 2008

Many people pointed last week to Obama's victory speech in South Carolina, calling it inspiring and uplifting. At first glance I saw it as well executed, but perhaps lacking in substance in areas I would like to have addressed, but as I listened closer, particularly to the latter sections, I ...

Post-ACE resources

Friday, January 25th, 2008

On last night's show I made mention of an online graphic demonstrating the relative wealth of US presidential candidates. That graphic is available at this post with the large version here showing just what the disparities are. While I'm at it, I misremembered some of the details - Obama is ...

A Critical Ear: recent interviews

Friday, September 14th, 2007

One of my current side projects is the radio show I present with Bob Naiman on WRFU. A Critical Ear covers a range of US domestic and foreign policy developments. Bob works for Just Foreign Policy and is incredibly well informed on foreign policy, activism, and labor issues, so it's ...

Labour Leadership Race

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

There seems to be quite a bit of momentum building behind Eamon Gilmore's bid to win the Labour Party leadership. Interestingly, several distinct blocks within the party are supporting him - Higgins and Stagg who are traditionally seen as the core of the left of the party came out in ...

Brendan Ryan loses seat

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

Unfortunate news for Brendan Ryan, who I mentioned in yesterday's post, as he narrowly missed out on retaining his Seanad seat today. The other two incumbents - teacher union leader Joe O'Toole and businessman Fergal Quinn - kept their seats, but Ryan - who has a strong record on social ...

Following the Seanad elections

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

Fascinating stuff for anyone interested in following the Seanad elections at the moment. The people counting the vocational panels - those 43 seats elected by public representatives - are posting regular Excel sheets with updates of each round of counting. Not regular enough for some of the contributors at politics.ie ...

Instant run-off voting gaining ground in United States

Saturday, November 25th, 2006

A New America Foundation press release points to the recent successes of movements for instant runoff voting across the US:In California, where San Francisco became the state's first Instant Runoff Voting city in 2004, voters in the cities of Oakland and Davis approved the idea, which would allow voters to ...

Intergenerational justice in Ireland

Friday, February 10th, 2006

The Irish Labour Party has published what sounds like an interesting proposed constitutional referendum, relating to protection of cultural heritage:The Labour Party has published a Bill, introduced into the Dáil by Party President Michael D Higgins, which will protect cultural heritage and also place an ...

Robots.txt and irlgov.ie

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

Over at Gavin's Blog there's an interesting observation about the robots.txt file at www.irlgov.ie. Now, robots.txt files are not something I'm given to browsing on an ongoing basis, but there do seem to be some strange items on the ignore list - specifically, several documents that no longer appear on ...

Move to revamp electoral register in Ireland.

Thursday, October 20th, 2005

The Irish Labour Party has launched a new bill - it actually got its first reading today - to totally revamp the manner in which the electoral register is compiled and maintained.Apart from creating an Election Registration Commissioner,the Bill provides for access by registration authorities to information held by third ...