Archive for January, 2008

National Party U-turn on student loans

Written By: - Date published: 4:18 pm, January 31st, 2008 - 84 comments

National have just backed down on their opposition to interest free student loans. Back in 2005 Key called this ‘a policy that tells young New Zealanders to go and borrow to the hilt What a cost to the country! What an unaffordable and irresponsible cost to the country! It is a sad day National members […]

Moore than you can chew

Written By: - Date published: 2:16 pm, January 31st, 2008 - 17 comments

Madness is a key ingredient in politics. Always has been. J’accuse. Far queues. I think, therefore I am. Martin Luther King went to the mountain top. I have been to Geneva. Good things ought not be rushed. Freshly cooked meat ought not be rushed. Masticate it well, and never lick a very new steak knife. […]

Jacinda Ardern to lead IUSY

Written By: - Date published: 1:59 pm, January 31st, 2008 - 71 comments

Jacinda Ardern, former Young Labour president and political advisor, has just been elected president of the International Union of Socialist Youth – a group encompassing socialist, social democratic and Labour Party youth organisations from more than 100 countries. IUSY is a massive organisiation and holds consultative status with the United Nations. This is a huge […]

Substance, not style

Written By: - Date published: 1:37 pm, January 31st, 2008 - 46 comments

I don’t know if this is breaking some cyber protocol (oh, but I don’t much care if I am) but I want to put Jordan Carter‘s post on Helen Clark’s speech up here on The Standard. The reason is that while I agree with a lot of what IrishBill said – mainly that her speech […]

Who’ll run John’s boot camps?

Written By: - Date published: 3:22 pm, January 30th, 2008 - 70 comments

The Army has said it doesn’t want to run National’s boot camps – they prefer to train people who actually want to be there. So the question now is who do they plan to get to do it? They’re not saying much at the moment, but Key’s new policy does leave the door open for […]

Dull

Written By: - Date published: 10:58 am, January 30th, 2008 - 78 comments

I haven’t had time to do a thorough analysis of Clark’s speech but from a quick once-over I can say with certainty that it is underwhelming. Let’s face it, this was her chance to take the front foot and show the government had a policy agenda fit for a new term. Instead her speech is […]

Family Fist

Written By: - Date published: 5:45 pm, January 29th, 2008 - 57 comments

Mike Moreu from The Press is shaping up to be quite a fine cartoonist. Here’s his take on the Religious Right’s petition to restore the riding crop lady‘s right to beat her children. Meanwhile the folks over at Newzblog have done a great send-up of the increasingly incoherent Garth McVicar from Sensible Sentencing and the […]

Key speech: strategic blunder?

Written By: - Date published: 2:11 pm, January 29th, 2008 - 113 comments

So this is John Key’s ambition: throwing troubled teens in boot camp, beating up on beneficiaries and criminalising our children. I’ve only had a quick read through the speech in my lunch break so it’s possible I’ve got this wrong, but I get the distinct impression that Key has made a major strategic error here. […]

How a blog works

Written By: - Date published: 3:45 pm, January 28th, 2008 - 47 comments

I’ve always wondered what happens after I hit ‘publish’ here on the blog. Wired’s goneAll information about free download free verizon ringtones samsung. and put together an infographic, so now I know – click to zoom and drag to pan. (Via BoingBoing)

Granny Herald’s campaign fails

Written By: - Date published: 2:46 pm, January 28th, 2008 - 34 comments

Hidden away today at the bottom of the Herald’s story on further data from the latest DigiPoll is the news that only 3.8% of those surveyed rate the Electoral Finance Act as a vote influencing issue. You can just about feel the Herald’s despair that despite an unprecedented, wholly unbalanced and misleading campaign against the […]

The political brain – listen to this

Written By: - Date published: 9:08 am, January 28th, 2008 - 17 comments

A must hear for anyone interested in political marketing and influencing voters. This item played on Chris Laidlaw’s Sunday show on Radio NZ National yesterday. “When we decide who to vote for, are we making a rational choice? Or does emotion dictate our voting choice?” This is useful for people of all political stripes and […]

Shadbolt launches “Freedom of Sleaze” campaign

Written By: - Date published: 8:10 pm, January 27th, 2008 - 20 comments

Terrible Tim has launched another campaign to attack the Electoral Finance Act by using as much sexual double-entendre as possible for Truth’s Page 2 readers. However this campaign’s main aim is to double the weekly’s circulation by the end of the year, in which case the paper’s owner will give $5,000 to the campaign against […]

Romney humiliates self, white people everywhere

Written By: - Date published: 1:54 pm, January 27th, 2008 - 19 comments

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s not the first aspiring leader to try and present himself as ‘down with the bros’, but this is truly cringeworthy. Stephen Colbert asks the question everyone’s been wondering: More Stephen Colbert over at Comedy Central.

DPF takes the moral highground

Written By: - Date published: 1:19 am, January 27th, 2008 - 133 comments

As you will know National Party Blogger David Farrar gave us a wee razzing for publishing an out of date list of Bob Clarkson’s vast parliamentary achievements on Friday. Much high-horsing followed: [DPF: I now understand why you don’t post under your full name. You would be unemployable. No one would ever hire people whose […]

Apologies for Burqa Bob

Written By: - Date published: 7:03 pm, January 25th, 2008 - 109 comments

It would appear David Farrar is deeply concerned about the amount of traffic his mate Bill has been drumming up for The Standard this week, judging by his strange attack on our site this evening over a trifling error in our earlier post on Bob Clarkson. The article in question was a repost of an […]

Massey to go the way of Saddam and lose statue?

Written By: - Date published: 5:16 pm, January 25th, 2008 - 11 comments

New Zealand Labour movement activists will support Irish unionists – the political sort – who wish to remove Reform Prime Minister Massey’s statue from Limavady in Northern Ireland’s Derry County. Massey is remembered without affection by trade unionists here for the mounted special police known as “Massey’s Cossacks” who were used to hunt down strikebreakers […]

The whalers are coming

Written By: - Date published: 5:08 pm, January 25th, 2008 - 15 comments

The Dom reports today that the Japanese whaling fleet has ben “spotted steaming towards the Ross Sea” – part of our territorial waters. They’re presumably coming here having had their activities in Australian waters declared illegal last week. The Greens have just just called for the government to get involved. Labour’s Steve Chadwick has said […]

Daily Show on financial news

Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, January 25th, 2008 - 14 comments

Jon Stewart had a good piece last night on why we shouldn’t just trust the economic and financial “experts”. People deserve better from the media than the dehumanising econo-speak about ‘soft labour markets’ and housing ‘corrections’ that dominates our Business pages, so it’s good to see Jon poking a bit of fun. Fox News also […]

Burqa Bob to stand in Tauranga

Written By: - Date published: 2:33 pm, January 25th, 2008 - 49 comments

After much speculation, National MP Bob Clarkson has finally announced he will be standing again in Tauranga, apparently to work on housing affordability issues. What a gift. For those who missed it last time, here’s Bob’s entire contribution to Parliament since August last year: (17 Oct 2007) Interjection : “Bureaucratic!” (10 Oct 2007) Interjection : […]

An emerging threat to MMP?

Written By: - Date published: 5:36 pm, January 24th, 2008 - 100 comments

After Brash and the extreme right were exposed in The Hollow Men the Nats changed their leader hoping for a fresh start. What’s becoming apparent is that National’s shady backers haven’t changed. The policy and the cash are coming from the same people they always have – people like Peter Shirtcliffe who’s evidently now helping […]

Same old faces, same old tactics

Written By: - Date published: 2:06 pm, January 23rd, 2008 - 251 comments

Well it looks like Free Speech Coalition founder Cameron Slater has taken a break from stalking John Minto and photoshopping underage bloggers’ faces onto porn and decided to finally publish the Coalition’s updated donors list (and only a month after he said he would). Interestingly, a “P Shirtcliffe” is listed as having donated $5000. Now […]

Biofuel stars at Taupo (and we win)

Written By: - Date published: 1:43 pm, January 22nd, 2008 - 10 comments

Congratultions to Jonny Reid for his win in the Taupo A1GP sprint race on Sunday. He also managed to finish fourth in the feature race which gives the NZ team the series lead. What was also a world first is that all of the teams competing took to the track with 30% biofuel in their […]

They just don’t learn

Written By: - Date published: 1:38 pm, January 22nd, 2008 - 109 comments

I see the Free Speech Coalition hasn’t learned anything from the ramshackle PR fiasco that was their launch and have posted up another billboard in Invercargill today, this time featuring Robert Mugabe and criticising the government’s ‘silencing’ of Mayor Shadbolt, who is ironically one of the least silent people in the country at the moment. […]

Is Barack Obama dull?

Written By: - Date published: 9:40 am, January 22nd, 2008 - 31 comments

Armando Iannucci from The Observer wonders whether he’s the only person to find Barack Obama dull: Like Will Smith, who in the new film I Am Legend wakes up to find himself the last man alive in a world of zombies, am I now the only person left on the planet who finds Barack Obama […]

The Herald still campaigning for National

Written By: - Date published: 9:26 am, January 22nd, 2008 - 99 comments

Yesterday The Herald reported that: Demographia, an international survey business run by Hugh Pavletich of Christchurch and Wendell Cox of the United States, today issued its fourth annual report, showing New Zealand has slipped drastically on an international scale. Now quite aside from the shoddy methodology of the study to which the PM has already […]

Spinning the spin.

Written By: - Date published: 2:11 pm, January 20th, 2008 - 279 comments

Ruth Laugeson has an article in the Sunday Star Times about the increased numbers of communications staff employed by ministries. Entitled “Spinning govt yarn costs $47m”, the article is in many ways a lovely piece of spin in its own right. The basis of the article is that the number of spindoctors employed by the […]

Shadbolt campaign funded by Hollow Men

Written By: - Date published: 7:02 pm, January 18th, 2008 - 96 comments

Remember how I asked who was funding Tim Shadbolt’s campaign to “bring down the government”? Turns out the Southland Times was interested too and they’ve found out his move to deliberately break electoral law is being propped up by the Talley brothers, who appear to have a bit of a history of that themselves. Now […]

Discussing “constituency matters” with the Brethren

Written By: - Date published: 3:15 pm, January 18th, 2008 - 6 comments

Today’s Age gives a few insights into “constituency matters” the Brethren discussed with John Howard from 2003 to 2006, the last about the same time they were commissioning private investigators to dig dirt on our Helen. Support for George Bush and the war in Iraq featured highly, as according to the Brethren “God has clearly […]

Introducing the world’s cheapest car

Written By: - Date published: 11:57 am, January 18th, 2008 - 8 comments

From Time: A lot is riding on the the world’s cheapest car. In the words of Ratan Tata, chairman of the company behind the upstart econobox, India’s “People’s Car” will be a “safe, affordable, all weather vehicle for a family which is today traveling on a two wheeler.” The entry level model is ticketed at […]

Desperation from the Herald

Written By: - Date published: 10:59 am, January 18th, 2008 - 31 comments

Yesterday’s supposed scandal over an email exhange between Michael Cullen and a National Party activist was an absurd piece of political activism from the Herald. Recently the paper has been running almost daily attack articles on the government, but this was surely scraping the bottom of the barrel. Nat activist John Middleton was painted as […]

More shoddy reporting from The Herald

Written By: - Date published: 8:00 pm, January 17th, 2008 - 25 comments

Move over Mediawatch. Thesproutandthebean have outed more biased reporting in Granny Herald: the abysmal attempt at rationalising the retention of a monarchy in this herald opinion piece was made interesting by what was omitted rather than included. the authors were Sean Palmer and Simon O’Connor and this was the declaration we got of their interests: […]