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The smell of corruption

Written By: - Date published: 11:23 pm, May 16th, 2012 - 32 comments

banks

The Jackal raised the issue of corruption in relation to John Banks in a comment here and has written more about it on his blog. It appears on the evidence of DotCom’s lieutenant that  when he was a Member of Parliament Banks was offering to accept a financial consideration in respect of any act to be done by him in his capacity as a member of Parliament. This makes Philip Field look like a Good Samaritan. Banks has to go.

New political blog

Written By: - Date published: 11:40 am, April 20th, 2012 - 5 comments

blog key

Welcome to the twistedhive. A new political blog in the NZ ‘sphere.

Some interesting posts including some insightful commentary on the choices for Labour’s chief of staff and one about getting around the government’s plan to veto paid parental leave.

400,000 comments (almost)

Written By: - Date published: 12:18 pm, April 19th, 2012 - 53 comments

arguing

By one standard we have now passed 400 thousand comments. But I’m not a bullshitter with numbers like Bill English or Whaleoil. By my standards, we haven’t quite hit it yet. We will in a couple of weeks. I’m starting to get a bit worried about how we’re going to handle the rapidly increasing rate that people are arguing with each other here…

Come back, we were just measuring GDP wrong!

Written By: - Date published: 12:34 pm, March 28th, 2012 - 10 comments

scrooge-mcduck-make-it-rain

100 jobs a day were lost in January and 1000 people a week left New Zealand for Australia last year but it turns out it was all a mistake! David Farrar has discovered that we measure GDP slightly differently from Australia and if we use their measure then the purchasing power parity-adjusted difference in GDP per capita is close to zero. Hooray!

Tales from Christchurch

Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, February 23rd, 2012 - 4 comments

drama-mask

As a followup to the “big media” coverage of Christchurch yesterday, there are plenty of people posting on their experiences of life in the quake-ridden city. One that I follow is the blog of award winning Kiwi author Helen Lowe.

ImperatorFish: Shock As Labour Discovers David Farrar Is Not The PM

Written By: - Date published: 10:07 am, February 2nd, 2012 - 12 comments

imperator fish logo

Scott at Imperator Fish has kindly given us permission to syndicate posts from his blog – the original of this post is here

Labour Party MPs are said to be red-faced, after discovering that prominent blogger David Farrar is not the Prime Minister of New Zealand.

Shut it down

Written By: - Date published: 3:15 pm, January 31st, 2012 - 37 comments

blog key

The same day as we learn that Labour won’t be allowing press gallery journos free access to their wing of Parliament as previously (apparently a desperate attempt at message control by keeping off message MPs and journos apart: someone better tell Fran Mold what a cellphone is), Labour’s bizarre cult of David Farrar has performed its first human sacrifice.

Comment Privacy and fools

Written By: - Date published: 12:04 pm, December 19th, 2011 - 94 comments

cameron slater whaleoil flensed

Cameron Slater is a technological idiot. Well he has just proven it again. A comment on our site referred to IP/e-mail matching at another site. In his own guilt about privacy abuses Slater immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion.

I’d advise people to never put comments on sites that lack a privacy policy that is explicit about what information may be used for. But we ensure your privacy here.

ImperatorFish: Phil and Carmel’s Greatest Hits

Written By: - Date published: 9:10 am, December 13th, 2011 - 3 comments

imperator fish logo

Scott at Imperator Fish has kindly given us permission to syndicate posts from his blog – the original of this post is here

Holding the blogosphere to account: how did dpf, Trotter and WhaleOil do on their predictions for Phil Twyford and Carmel Sepuloni after Carmel won the Waitakere nomination…

 

ImperatorFish: Not Irony #2

Written By: - Date published: 2:48 pm, December 8th, 2011 - 38 comments

imperator fish logo

Scott at Imperator Fish has kindly given us permission to syndicate posts from his blog – the original of this post is here

David Farrar is running National’s line that anything the teachers don’t want must be good for the education of our children…

 

ImperatorFish: Not Irony #1

Written By: - Date published: 9:54 am, December 8th, 2011 - 28 comments

imperator fish logo

Scott at Imperator Fish has kindly given us permission to syndicate posts from his blog – the original of this post is here

David Farrar applies some wonky logic in order to blame everything bad the Nats do on the left. If any group of voters is to blame for the National/ACT deal, it’s those voters who gave National their party vote and/or John Banks their electorate vote.

Rugby World Cup cramps politics

Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, December 2nd, 2011 - 35 comments

rugbyball

One of the more interesting observations about this election campaign has been the effect of having the rugby world cup on the political process and therefore on our political blog stats. They were really crammed into the last two months and disrupted by big games.

“Blog king” no more

Written By: - Date published: 9:38 am, December 2nd, 2011 - 80 comments

Dolphin Over World 2010

Well we have just moved out of the election month, and we’re now getting the gradual fall back of readership and posts. About the only growth around NZ at present is in political blogging.

I’m happy to say that we now appear to consistently be either level pegging with Kiwiblog or exceeding their totals for a number of months. Since we have been ‘advised’ many times that this would never happen, I’m finding that it is rather more satisfying than I expected.

Parker withdrawing

Written By: - Date published: 5:20 pm, December 1st, 2011 - 312 comments

david-parker_19

David Parker has withdrawn from the leadership race of the Labour party according to Stuff. Predictably Kiwiblog, Stuff, and probably the other right-wing media fools are using this as an opportunity to hype up David Shearer as an easier opponent for John Key. It is not for nothing that David Farrar has “Fomenting Happy Mischief …

Victim tales of the right

Written By: - Date published: 3:40 pm, November 29th, 2011 - 26 comments

poodles

Nationals yapping poodles here were doing it during the election by calling Labour “nasty” in violation of any level of common sense. John Key and teabags. In the US similar supporters are calling Obama nasty for pointing out a lying political ad by Mitt Romney.

Don’t ya know the right are always the poor victims… I just tend to find them to be whining dickheads. But I am actually trying to be nasty.

Taking out the trash

Written By: - Date published: 12:49 pm, November 22nd, 2011 - 18 comments

dumping-trash

Michael Laws has been calling for listeners to shoot journalists.  He’s a disturbed individual who should never be on the air again. Wouldn’t be nice to take the trash out of political commentary?

Penguin: Key lies to help us

Written By: - Date published: 8:40 am, November 8th, 2011 - 30 comments

Yes, that’s an actual quote [sans 'serfs'] from David Farrar lying about his master John Key’s lies about not raising GST.

hattip: frank macskasy

 

 

DPF – deliberately missing the point

Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, October 20th, 2011 - 101 comments

Rosefacebook

DPF is stirring the sewer again with ridiculous smears about a Labour candidate. Does he resort to mud-flinging due to a lack of National policy that stacks up?

Not PC on John Key’s lies

Written By: - Date published: 2:57 pm, October 12th, 2011 - 16 comments

key-fail-thumb

Trenchant criticism of the beleaguered PM today from an unusual source. Well worth clicking through to read the whole post, here’s the main points…

Let the courts decide

Written By: - Date published: 9:46 am, October 11th, 2011 - 57 comments

martin bomber bradbury war on news

The threat of invoking defamation is a standard tactic to intimidate those who can’t afford the legals bills to shut their mouths. Such threats are sometimes known as strategic lawsuits against public participation or SLAPPS. My understanding of Lange v. Atkinson (2000) and the qualified privilege afforded to political commentary that it enshrines, suggests there is no way …

The right’s weird obsession with Darien Fenton

Written By: - Date published: 8:00 pm, October 3rd, 2011 - 261 comments

poodles

Darien Fenton makes a mean comment about a celebrity butcher on facebook and then apologises for it and offers to shout him a drink to make up for it.

No big deal? Well according to some hysterical righties that makes Fenton worse than Hitler.

Diverse hypocrites

Written By: - Date published: 7:22 am, September 7th, 2011 - 69 comments

natcaucus-small

National is the party of middle aged white guys, but according to their chief spinster we shouldn’t care…

Farrar: Ironically being political and shallow

Written By: - Date published: 11:00 am, September 4th, 2011 - 66 comments

Farrar MMP

Reading the political spin from David Farrar (channeling Bill English) over the weekend, I have to keep reminding myself that he really has very little idea about the practicalities of business. Where he is concerned about political costs, I find from a perspective of an exporter that I’m far more concerned about reliability of services.

Worlds apart

Written By: - Date published: 12:10 pm, September 1st, 2011 - 47 comments

Spotted in an English pub. Check out the artist’s name.

The new political battleground

Written By: - Date published: 9:12 am, August 30th, 2011 - 23 comments

blog key

Rijab looks at how social media can be a useful tool for political parties but how it also needs to be used carefully, lest it come back to hurt you. Red Alert and Frogblog are very free, with MPs writing what they want and relatively loose moderation, whereas NationalMPs is insipid and tightly controlled – who has taken the smarter course?

In search of a justification

Written By: - Date published: 7:40 am, August 12th, 2011 - 122 comments

rich-man-poor-man

Farrar and others of the Right push for ever lower taxes, but their arguments are laughably flimsy.  Tax cuts don’t raise revenue.  Tax cuts don’t cause growth.  In search of their  ”superior moral justification for selfishness” the Right are going to have to do a lot better than that…

The answer to violence

Written By: - Date published: 8:08 am, July 25th, 2011 - 71 comments

red-flag-half-mast300

The tragic events in Norway raise many questions, and there are no easy answers.

Yet more dodgy Nat numbers

Written By: - Date published: 6:56 pm, July 18th, 2011 - 61 comments

bill english plank

If you’re a blogosphere regular, you’ll have noticed that recently every monkey with a copy of the Fountainhead and a crush on John Key has been spouting the line that the top 10% of taxpayers pay 71% of net tax. Sounds incredible, eh? That’s because it’s not credible. It’s more cheap tricks from the Nats.

Distasteful

Written By: - Date published: 10:40 am, July 16th, 2011 - 47 comments

dpf-billboard-thumb

DPF thinks that comparing Lockwood Smith to a KKK member is “a pretty disgusting smear”.  Could this be the same DPF who ran a billboard campaign comparing Labour government politicians to brutal dictators?

Cleaning up Kiwiblog

Written By: - Date published: 3:28 pm, July 8th, 2011 - 43 comments

hazmat-cleaners

It’s a tough job, but somebody has got to do it…

Why blog?

Written By: - Date published: 12:04 pm, June 18th, 2011 - 58 comments

question-mark

In which r0b ponders why he blogs, and decides to come out.  Very boring and predictable, I promise.

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