One of the neat things about satellite radio...

...is the World Radio Network, which plays segments from broadcasters around the world. You get to hear the news from each country's point of view.

These days, the news is mostly about the financial crisis. Polish Radio talks about the governments efforts to help or repatriate unemployed Poles stranded in the UK. Romanian Radio discusses Italian vigilante patrols against immigrants, mostly Romanians.

But the most intriguing broadcast was from RTÉ. Like the rest of us, the Irish are having a bit of a problem with their banks. I had not even heard of the Anglo Irish Bank fraud, which they're now calling "Ireland's Enron". The Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation have now been called in.

As far as I can make out, Anglo Irish Bank, Ireland's third largest financial institution, nationalized in January after attempts to recapitalize it failed, apparently lent its own directors €255 million before it went bust. This may have been part of a larger scheme in which it lent ten unnamed customers €451 million to buy its own shares. Presumably this was in order to support the share price, which collapsed anyway. Insofar as the loans were secured by the shares, when the shares went to zero the loans were written off. €83 million of the loans were repaid, I'm guessing before that happened.

Ex-chairman of Anglo Irish Sean FitzPatrick was one of those who were lent money by the bank. FitzPatrick resigned in December after saying he had hid loans from the company. He and other former bankers are now likely to be questioned by the fraud squad.

Half a billion dollars, more or less. I guess these days, that sum's small enough to be lost in the noise.

Larison on Romney's presidential prospects, or lack thereof.

Daniel Larison has, as usual, some intelligent things to say about Mitt Romney and his chances of becoming president (excerpted for length):

As I kept observing during the primaries, anti-Mormon sentiment in America is considerable and widespread and not at all limited just to conservative evangelicals, but it is particularly strong among the latter. People who do not want a Mormon President are very comfortable saying so (there was no issue here of respondents who gave false answers to pollsters), and the only groups whose candidates meet greater resistance with the electorate as a whole are Muslims and atheists. No one would say that it is surprising if a Muslim candidate could not win a presidential nomination or national election, because I think everyone understands that the electorate is not going to support such a candidate precisely because of his religion. Call this identity politics, call it sectarianism if you must, but it is all but unavoidable in a mass democracy in a country where the majority belongs, broadly speaking, to the same religion.

Candidates of minority religions are not going to fare well in national elections here until a considerable majority is non-observant or simply not religious at all. This observation tends to annoy politically active ecumenists who seem to think that religion could not possibly matter so much that it would affect voting or political alliances. It seems to me that this rule about minority religion candidates is true in pretty much any Western-style democracy with a large observant religious population. Indian secularism seems to offer the exception to the rule, as the elevation of Manmohan Singh to the post of PM there shows. Parliamentary systems can be more immune to this rule to the extent that one of the leading parties, as in India, is self-consciously not aligned with any particular religion, and presidential voting involves more of a personal identification with the candidate that makes this issue more significant.

In any case, the opposition was similar, albeit less intense, with a Mormon candidate. The difference is that surprisingly few in the media and the pundit class seemed willing to believe that respondents actually meant it when they said this. That was the fundamental political obstacle that Romney could not have overcome and will not overcome in the future if he tries again. In the event that he somehow prevailed in the primaries, he could never have won a general election with so much built-in opposition to his candidacy. Looking back on the embarrassing campaign and the final result, Republicans might regret McCain’s nomination, but given the intense hostility to Huckabee from the leadership and the movement elite (including many of the very people who later conveniently became devoted Palinites) Romney was the only viable alternative. The presidential vote would have been an even greater defeat for the GOP with Romney at the helm, and a significant part of this would have been on account of his religion.

This does not touch on the flaws that Romney himself had as a candidate, which would have made winning difficult even without the problem of anti-Mormonism, and which complicates the story by using a deeply-flawed candidate and his campaign as the evidence for the limits of political cooperation among different kinds of religious conservatives. It complicates the story because there was good reason to doubt how much Romney actually shared social and religious conservatives’ political goals. Having no pro-life record worth mentioning, given his extremely convenient discovery of the evils of ESCR around the time he began preparing his presidential campaign, he seemed to offer pro-lifers little more than lip service in a campaign against a number of other candidates–including MCain!–whose pro-life credentials were far superior. Perhaps realizing that he had no credibility, Romney was constantly on the attack against his rivals by trying to paint them as insufficiently zealous in the cause. This wasn’t just a case of the zeal of the convert, but it was more like a con-man pretending to be a zealous convert lecturing long-time devotees on their lack of fidelity while trying to convince them to join his pyramid scheme. There were other liabilities, not least of which was his career in private equity firms and his identification with corporate America, which would have become huge drags on the ticket as the financial crisis unfolded.

Okay, two wordy posts need balance. How about some baby meerkats?

The LATimes Unleashed blog had photos of two baby meerkats named Zanzibar and Nairobi, born January 23rd at Sydney's Taronga Zoo:



(there are more photos at their post.)

The Telegraph quotes keeper Bobby-Jo Vial: "They're already eating solid foods and displaying behaviours similar to adults. They're very precocious."

The Sydney Morning Herald story includes this photo from Reuters:



Video from the BBC and NTDTV.

Edit: For some unfathomable reason, the BBC locked their video away, but there's one from the Guardian here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/feb/20/baby-meerkats-australia