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Don’t ask directions from Colin

Written By: - Date published: 10:12 am, August 3rd, 2010 - 15 comments

Needed a laugh. Luckily, C Espiner always delivers: “While his predecessor was fond of visiting Europe, Key has virtually snubbed the northern hemisphere since he has been prime minister.”

Climate change, bikinis, climate change, bikinis

Written By: - Date published: 10:19 pm, July 14th, 2010 - 16 comments

Are swimsuit specials a thoughtful, clever way of arousing interest in climate change? Or are they little more than sexist idiocy? Are you curious enough to find out? Read this from the Guardian…

Vote! Kean for Columbia

Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, July 13th, 2010 - 10 comments

By David Farrar, Keith Ng, Rob Salmond, and Tim Watkin. Many people are concerned about the quality of public affairs journalism in New Zealand. Being concerned is a good start, but how can you take the next step? How can you help make it better? Yes, you. Here is one way. Follow this link and […]

Blubbering into oblivion

Written By: - Date published: 4:47 pm, July 7th, 2010 - 47 comments

I had to laugh at this comment by Mako about my least favorite wingnut… More desperate anti-Brown smearing from Slater. His latest allegation is that ‘Looney Len’ wants every school to plant 500 trees a year. A waste of our precious education budget! he wails. Child slave labour! he howls. ‘Surely one of his backers […]

Labour’s lineup emerges

Written By: - Date published: 1:43 pm, July 6th, 2010 - 50 comments

Labour’s lineup for the next election is emerging, the usual balance between continuity and new talent. There will be some interesting electorate selections coming up. Such personality politics is always very popular of course, but more important than the people is the policy…

Pro-choice responses to Chadwick’s Abortion Bill

Written By: - Date published: 9:47 pm, July 5th, 2010 - 157 comments

Been a bit disappointed that there hasn’t been a post up here yet on the news out on Saturday that Steve Chadwick is seeking support for a Member’s Bill to make abortion truly on demand in NZ, to 24 weeks.  Then I remembered that I still have posting rights from doing the 2008 General Election […]

The reverse midas touch

Written By: - Date published: 12:01 pm, July 4th, 2010 - 8 comments

David Farrar leapt to a “they did it too” defence of the taxpayer-funded ‘survey’ that National MPs are sending to selected voters around the country. I reckon he wrote the questions. It was Farrar’s dodgy polling that convinced National to run Melissa Lee as the candidate in Mt Albert. I guess Lee getting caught out with a dodgy ‘survey’ is just Farrar’s reverse midas touch striking again.

Edwards: Goff totally loses the plot

Written By: - Date published: 7:51 am, June 24th, 2010 - 125 comments

A government whose raison d’etre is furthering corporate interests can be pretty damned incompetent and still do okay, because corporate msm do the PR for them. And in return for this government favouring corporate interests over all else we’ve seen countless examples of NACT committing howling errors of judgement, if not outright illegalities, only to […]

Best blog award

Written By: - Date published: 9:50 pm, June 10th, 2010 - 12 comments

The “Air NZ” best blog awards are out. Congratulations to Cactus and to Dim Post, the other winners, and all who took part. You can certainly learn a lot about the vibrant NZ blogging community by reading through the many nominated links here.

Nanny state on the roads

Written By: - Date published: 7:20 am, June 8th, 2010 - 70 comments

Last Queen’s Birthday Weekend 10 people died on the roads and 32 were seriously injured. Last Easter another 12 dead, the highest toll in 18 years. This Queen’s Birthday police announced a massive crackdown on speeding. Idiots such as DPF denounced it as a “revenue gathering exercise”. But events have proved them very wrong, with the lowest toll in 54 years.

A big hand for DPF

Written By: - Date published: 8:14 am, May 31st, 2010 - 20 comments

A shadowy cabal calling themselves “The NZ Bloggers Union” set out to create a grass-roots “Air NZ” blog award. Apparently a bunch of blogs have entered, The Standard might even be one of them, which is pretty organised for us! But we were deeply disturbed to hear that DPF will not be entering, apparently because he does not believe in awards. What’s up with that? Well, we’re from The Standard, and we’re here to help…

Nats floundering on inequality

Written By: - Date published: 7:16 am, May 25th, 2010 - 35 comments

Pointing out that a “rich get richer” budget is going to increase inequality in NZ seems to be making the Nats uncomfortable. Bill English tries to simply deny the facts. DPF tries to divert attention to “social mobility”. Lame efforts in both cases. The truth is that inequality isn’t on the Nats radar. They simply don’t care.

The Bechdel Test

Written By: - Date published: 6:59 pm, May 23rd, 2010 - 46 comments

“The Bechdel test” requires a movie to pass three questions:

1) Does it have two or more women in it (who have names)?

2) Do they talk to one another?

3) Do they talk to one another about something other than a man?

This two minute video explains…

Shed some sunlight on a limp response

Written By: - Date published: 7:32 pm, May 15th, 2010 - 33 comments

David Farrar has finally made a comment on my “Hey Chubby…” post. It raises more questions than it answers. So I ask some of the obvious questions, and conclude that he has forsaken the principles of “free speech” that he so enthusiastically espoused only a few years ago.

Hey “Chubby”…..

Written By: - Date published: 7:12 pm, May 12th, 2010 - 80 comments

It looks like Nationals favourite pollster and blogging spinster has been sniffing around trying to find out who our authors are. So I guess I’ll have to gently castigate him yet again. Such a child, always reaching for the cookie jar..

In the process it appears that he has pissed off some journos, and it appears that David has acquired a new nickname.

Meta Caption Contest

Written By: - Date published: 2:14 pm, May 6th, 2010 - 15 comments

DPF strikes out

Written By: - Date published: 7:15 am, May 6th, 2010 - 29 comments

I don’t read Kiwiblog often. DPF is capable of interesting political commentary or detailed policy wonkery on occasion, but most of the time it is editorial cut and paste jobs, troll farming, or postcards from his latest holiday. Ho hummm. Even a casual reader such as myself, however, can’t help but notice that National’s eternal spinster is having a pretty appalling week.

Nat-onomics: $30 million up in flames

Written By: - Date published: 1:15 pm, April 17th, 2010 - 11 comments

Vernon Small calculates that if the Cullen Fund had continued getting its monthly contributions, rather than just the one-off $250 million the government gave in July, we would be $30 million better off by now. Predictably, the financially illiterate Key apologists are having a cry about being shown to have stuffed this one up so badly.

Mr Key’s exciting Washington adventure

Written By: - Date published: 7:00 am, April 14th, 2010 - 19 comments

Following this masterpiece from Rabid Fire on Key’s F#ck Everybody policy, here’s a lovely summary of Mr Key’s exciting Washington adventure.

… the PM soon brightened, opening the Prime Ministerial lunchbox to show the press gallery his special lunch. “Look! Look! Bronagh’s made me special aeroplane shaped sandwiches for when I go on the aeroplane!”

Garner coy on accusations

Written By: - Date published: 11:55 am, April 11th, 2010 - 29 comments

The day after Zet’s post here on homophobic, imbalanced reporting by TV3’s Duncan Garner, Brian Edward’s wrote a scathing detailed deconstruction of Garner‘s repeatedly vicious coverage of Chris Carter. Edwards suggests Garner’s repeated attacks resemble a personal harassment campaign, a view Dim Post agrees with saying Garner’s obsession with Chris Carter has wandered into dark and […]

DPF doesn’t care about democracy

Written By: - Date published: 12:23 pm, March 31st, 2010 - 4 comments

Norightturn writes DPF went apeshit about the then-Labour government’s Electoral Finance Act. He vented online, raised funds, even launched billboards. You’d think that with plans to sack an elected council and strip 560,000 people of their vote in regional council elections for four years, as a “defender of democracy”, he’d be similarly outraged.

Interesting observations

Written By: - Date published: 4:02 pm, March 24th, 2010 - 14 comments

Interesting times – on both sides of the political divide currently. Over at the Pundit, Tim Watkin provides some thought provoking observations on selections, mining, and asks ‘Why are National and Labour trying so hard to LOSE Auckland?”

Clueless forgot to pay the bill?

Written By: - Date published: 2:05 pm, March 22nd, 2010 - 15 comments

I regret to inform the world that John Keys domain has run out of money and is in the process of expiring (much like this government will eventually do). This is a pity as http://johnkey.co.nz has probably has the highest hit rate of any of the National party websites.This is because there has been a […]

Crossbreed a dumb mistake with wingnuts

Written By: - Date published: 12:23 pm, March 21st, 2010 - 6 comments

An amusing tale of how Rush Limbaugh screws up, and a pile of wingnuts immediately jump to the wrong conclusions.

American wingnuts at their most ridiculous. But we have the angry and irrational breed here as well.

Meanwhile, at nationalmps.co.nz…

Written By: - Date published: 11:16 am, March 9th, 2010 - 19 comments

Remember how a couple of months back National set up NationalMPs? It was meant to be their answer to Red Alert, Labour’s frequently raucous, unstagemanaged blog where Labour’s MPs write what they want. But the Nats’ attempt is deadly dull. Either the leadership is gagging them or the Nat MPs are dreadful bores.

David Farrar – A known hypocrite and a bit of an idiot (in my opinion).

Written By: - Date published: 4:04 pm, February 24th, 2010 - 130 comments

David Farrar obviously lost it today. In a post called “Anonymous Smears” he is upset about Eddie pointing out Murray McCully and his mining shares. There wasn’t an value known when the post was written, so Eddie reasonably asked if there was a conflict of interest.

David can get upset with an opinion from a author. However he has attacked this site as an entity. So as sysop of the site, he is getting my opinion about his opinion, and my opinion on his antics. It is an honest opinion, the same as Eddies. However in this case just for benefit of David, it isn’t anonymous.

Farrar fudging ACE figures

Written By: - Date published: 8:05 am, February 24th, 2010 - 45 comments

A Price Waterhouse Coopers report has highlighted the huge returns from each dollar spent on Adult and Community Education (ACE). Farrar and other bloggers have attacked the conclusions of the report and the credibility of PWC, but the attack is bizarre…

Return of Editing the Herald

Written By: - Date published: 11:50 am, February 19th, 2010 - 1 comment

Guess what? Editing the Herald is back for the new year and it’s as sharp as ever.

The Herald is still full of casual idiocy, incredible stuff ups (like the headline that went to print on page 3 as “HeadXXX”), and the bizarreness of Garth George.

EtH skewers it all brilliantly.

David Farrar’s conflict of interest

Written By: - Date published: 8:05 am, February 17th, 2010 - 171 comments

David Farrar is well know as National’s main pollster. But should he also be polling on political issues for internal affairs? And what other non-tender contracts has his company, Curia, been doing for the public sector?

Poneke: If only scientists were more like god…

Written By: - Date published: 7:00 am, February 7th, 2010 - 79 comments

Poneke’s weblog recently wrote a critical post about ‘climategate’ where he has had a look through the subset of  selectively leaked pages of private correspondence thieved from the CRU at the University of East Anglia. His analysis didn’t bother to look at the science of climate change virtually at all, and what science was looked at was full of myths. Furthermore it wasn’t particularly original. Most appeared to have been cribbed from a number of climate change denialist sites and throughly debunked in part or as a whole by many other sites. It was hardly the type of original thinking that David Farrar at kiwiblog should have labeled as being

Poneke’s full post is a must read.  It is also the sort of journalism that should be in the mainstream media.

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Tim Watkin slams tax cuts for tax cheats

Written By: - Date published: 12:18 pm, February 1st, 2010 - 16 comments

On the Q+A blog, Tim Watkin rips into the proposed tax changes. Part of the post: …You might think that such a new source of tax income would open the door for tax cuts for the poorest New Zealanders; after all, they struggle the most in tough economic times and spend a higher proportion of […]

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