From this week’s Private Eye. Thanks to HM for the tip. See costs below, starts at $1,900. (Would you want to give up this lifestyle and bestow it to a jumped up carpetbagger?):

And a sample of KLM business class flying:

There’s no doubt that SF leader Gerry Adams is under enormous pressure over the IRA killing of Portlaoise prison warder Brian Stack.

The latest development sees FG Taoiseach, Enda Kenny piling it on, demanding  to know who it was in the IRA that Gerry Adams introduced to Stack’s son, when he smuggled him in the back of a van to a secret and undisclosed Border rendezvous so that they could discuss his father’s death.

I strongly suspect from my own, admittedly limited dealings with an Taoiseach that in this and in other cases of IRA excess, Mr Kenny’s primary interest is in digging up dirt on Mr Adams for party political purposes and that truth and justice for the Stack family may be of secondary importance.

I am thus inclined to view the Taoiseach’s exertions on behalf of the late prison warder’s family with a somewhat jaundiced eye.

Nonetheless, who Adams took the Stack family member to meet is an interesting question, for sure, and more than Mr Kenny would dearly love the answer. But here’s another question, one that I haven’t seen asked, much less answered or even addressed by the Irish media, and it is this.

What was it that Brian Stack did to provoke the Provos into killing him, and by so doing risk an almighty confrontation with the Irish state? It must have been something pretty hairy, I would guess, for the IRA to have ignored General Army Order No. 8 and to place Sinn Fein’s burgeoning electoral ambitions in the South in some peril.

I suspect the answer lies in events that took place in Portlaoise jail in the early 1980’s.

If anyone out there is of sufficient vintage and seniority in the IRA at the time to provide an answer, please feel free to contact this site, safe in the knowledge that your identity will be never be disclosed.

I think we all deserve to know. Don’t you? After all, it is what started this whole thing….

Click on the link folks:

https://static01.nyt.com/video/players/offsite/index.html?videoId=100000004269364

Well, Donald Trump has just lifted another rock and from underneath plucked a Labor Secretary to add to his cabinet-from-hell.

He’s a fast-food executive known for his opposition to raising the minimum wage, is against widening eligibility for overtime pay and has criticised Obamacare because the health care premiums working class people must buy means they don’t spend as much time and money in his restaurants (but presumably they are a lot healthier as a result).

The guy’s name, believe it or not, is Puzder and he is CEO of fast food outfits called Carls Jr and Hardee’s, neither of whose premises or food I have ever sampled or would want to sample.

This is what he looks like:

Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Andrew Puzder, who opposes minimum wage increases

Puzder’s advertising strategy is a simple one. Link unhealthy, fat-friendly food with sexy young Ivanka Trump-like women in suggestive ads.

Presumably that is what brought Puzder to Trump’s attention. And presumably this is what the populist President-elect thinks populism is about: less bread and more circuses.

Here is a sample:

https://youtu.be/QdNXJAhafPw

Here’s another:

https://youtu.be/MK8TsuRrwtM

Trump is far from finished, by the way. He still has to fill the most important Cabinet slot, Secretary of State, who will, God help us, be responsible for implementing Trump’s foreign policy ideas.

Distressing to learn of the death of Phillip Knightley who died today (December 7th), aged 87, a towering figure in British journalism and an inspiration and role-model to my generation of reporters. His book on war reportage, ‘The First Casualty’ was a classic.

The full, depressing story can be read here.

Recently, i.e. in the last month or so, David Gordon de-friended me on Facebook after I had asked him some pertinent questions relating to his appointment as spin doctor to the Foster-McGuinness politburo, such as how much is he being paid to shill for the power-sharing Executive?.

But the former Belfast Telegraph and BBC journalist was unwilling to shed any light on the circumstances of his appointment, which was facilitated outside normal procedures via Royal Prerogative powers, and the next day I discovered his Facebook move to cut me off.

Isn’t that another way to exercise censorship, something that Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin might do?

But he is not alone. The story below, from today’s News Letter, demonstrates that his reticence is shared by his employers at Stormont Castle who have declined to disclose the code of conduct covering his employment terms on the grounds that to do so would infringe his privacy rights.

The same rebuff was delivered recently to a couple of Assembly members who wrote the Executive asking for an explanation of his role and the circumstances of his employment.

So, the taxpayer is paying his salary and various emoluments but is not allowed to know what rules govern his employment, what were circumstances governing his hiring and just exactly what his role is?

It is enough to make one think that the Foster/McGuinness cabal have something to hide. If so, I wonder what it is?

Stormont’s incredible Kafkaesque reply to questions about spin doctor

This answer from Gerry Adams to a question from Radio Louth’s Michael Reade about the Brian Stack affair last week, jumped out at me:

GA:  Michael, I work quite closely with An Garda Siochána. I have passed information on to them over the years about criminal activity along the border. I have given them the names of those who have been suspected of being involved. I’ve given them other information – that’s my duty as both a citizen and as a public servant.

Since the killing of Portlaoise prison warder, Brian Stack was carried out by the IRA, and since the SF president passed on to the Gardai the names of several alleged culprits and has revealed in the same interview with Michael Reade that the senior IRA figure who authorised the killing has been disciplined, some interesting questions follow.

To begin with, the claim from Gerry Adams that the gun attack on Brian Stack was not authorised by the IRA leadership should be taken with a generous pinch of salt.

Since 1948, when General Army Order No 8 was issued by the Army Council, the IRA forbad any military action against the Southern state and that, presumably, included prison officers.

The IRA issued that order so that its efforts to destabilise the Northern Ireland state, either by attacking security forces in the North or in Britain, would not be distracted by unnecessarily causing antagonism in the South, where the IRA trained and stored many arms dumps. The IRA could not fight a war on two fronts and hope to win.

That doesn’t mean that the IRA didn’t clash with members of the Irish state’s security apparatus. Since June 1972, six members of the Garda were killed by the Provisional IRA, mostly in the course of robberies, Border bombings and kidnappings.

Although some will object to this characterisation, nearly all of the police deaths at IRA hands in the South during the Troubles were not planned or deliberate operations, but rather the by-product of activity primarily directed at sustaining the IRA’s war in the North.

The killing of Brian Stack fell into a different category, however, being planned and directed to end the life of a prison warder who, presumably, had wronged the IRA in some way, mostly likely its inmates in Portlaoise jail.

Had the IRA admitted that Mr Stack had been deliberately targeted on the orders of its leadership that would have invited the toughest of responses from the then government in Dublin, headed by Garret Fitzgerald and Dick Spring.

Mr Stack was killed in March 1983 when Sinn Fein was enjoying considerable electoral success in the North – where Gerry Adams had been elected MP for West Belfast – and was gearing up to mount an electoral challenge South of the Border.

Had the IRA admitted the Stack killing it is difficult to imagine the Fitzgerald government reacting in any way other than by grasping a heaven-sent opportunity to stick the boot into Sinn Fein.

So, the Provo leadership had more than a normal incentive to lie, at least lie by silence, about killing Mr Stack. It wasn’t until August 2013, that the Provos owned up, thirty years after the deed was done.

As I wrote above, it is advisable to take the claim that the attack on the prison official was unauthorised and that the culprit was ‘disciplined’, with a large portion of sodium chloride! It falls into the category of: ‘They would say that, wouldn’t they?’

Mr Adams can move this story on quite easily by answering this question: was the IRA leader who embarked on the unauthorised operation against Mr Stack, one of the names that he passed on the Garda commissioner?

If not, how could he now possibly object to giving the authorities the name? After all, that is his duty ‘as both a citizen and as a public servant’.

Because I’m watching the Rachel Maddow show again!