Bits and pieces: The stuff there isn’t time to write about in any depth… this week – Presidential Campaigns here and there, Fintan O’Toole, Michael Taft on the time we all ‘partied’ and Conor McCabe to speak at Pearse Institute.

There’s so much going on that it’s difficult to keep track of it. So let’s briefly consider a few of the issues of the day in almost no detail at all!

We have an US Republican Presidential candidate nomination process that continues to throw up the most intriguing possible Presidents. Many of these people make Mitt Romney look good, and that just can’t be right. But John Dickerson of Slate discusses the elusive quality of ‘leadership’ in relation to Obama and makes what seem to be some good points.

There’s our own Presidential Election where the field looks oddly diminished now we see them all as actual candidates rather than potential nominees. I was amused by Stephen Collins pointing to ‘Áras hopefuls McGuinness, Norris face tough questions’… which is a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever I saw one. But I wonder if it’s a very sensible tactic. Ascribing difference to those two marks them as distinct from the rest of the field. Not necessarily the line I’d be taking if I – for example – was keen that Mary Davis would win.

Speaking of which, Mary Davis without doubt has the most polished looking posters of the campaign so far. Top that Norris or McGuinness. And there’s Sean Gallagher who perhaps in an indication of his chances has decided to forego posters. A nation looks on – or doesn’t – bemusedly.

Worth a quick mention is the bizarre tangle Fintan O’Toole has tied himself up in over the McGuinness candidacy. It’s like one column in I got it, O’Toole doesn’t think McGuinness should be President. But two columns, the latter of which uses ever more baroque reasoning to say the same thing and continues to add an amazingly partitionist aspect to it?

Then again today John Waters tries, with no real conviction, to distance himself from his previous column on the Presidency.

On a complete tangent, anyone noticed how the Amazon Kindle can now access Public Library books in the US.

I don’t have a Kindle, but there’s something I like about the idea of this. Presumably as with any public library there will only be limited copies available of a book to readers and when they’re ‘checked out’ they’re not accessible, but while one can be concerned about the threat to printed books – though anyone who goes to the Central Library will see how that’s a threat that remains muted and for a variety of reasons, the fact that someone is thinking through the logic of ebooks and how they can and should be read not simply in a commercial context but with a sense of public good is oddly heartening. Surely, Amazon isn’t doing this purely for benign reasons, no doubt the calculation is that by approaching the problem in this way they’ll pull in more readers for their ereaders, but even so.

Meanwhile, here’s an important article by Michael Taft which uses data to support what many of us may have felt purely on a subjective level a regards our supposed ‘party’ in the early 2000s.

And an excellent point here in comments…

But – whatever the background to the figures – they do support what I feel should be the focus of the left in defending social welfare – we should argue in favour of equality and in support of a system into which everybody pays and everybody gains. When we focus on the poor and the so-called ‘most vulnerable’ we shift the focus away from a welfare state and back towards some modernised version of Victorian charity.

I think this gets lost in a lot of the discussion at the moment.

Also on matters economic, consider IBECs some parts sensible, some parts not, submission on growth in the economy. A lot to agree with, not least that they’re talking about growth, and some of their ideas seem quite interesting. I’m not sure I disagree with their thoughts on child benefit. But… this being IBEC as always they want more spending cuts, and that links directly into the quote above as regards the sort of social provision we’ll be left with after their approach.

This by the way is surely an hypothetical…

And still on the economic front, this here, The Dream of Europe and the Bailout of Greece – Planet Money Podcast from NPR is eye-opening as regards perceptions in Germany and the Greek bailout – which seem a world away from the caricatures one reads or hears in much of the news media of a resentful Germany unwilling to help others.

Here’s something anyone who hasn’t heard Conor speak before should try to get along to…THE RAY CROTTY MEMORIAL LECTURE 15 OCTOBER 2011 – PRESENTED BY DR. CONOR MCCABE