Sunday, June 28, 2009

wondering what to tick....?

My friend gave permission for me to post his correspondence up ~

"Kia ora Sue,

Regarding the upcoming referendum and its ambiguous, leading question, I wanted to ask if you would make a statement of how you would suggest those who disagree with the wording of the referendum should answer. I've so far heard of a number of options: ticking every box, not answering at all. For those who are supportive of the current legislation but against the referendum, what would you suggest? There must be so many New Zealanders against the wording of it, but obviously if as many of us as possible answer it in protest in the *same* way, the impact will be felt more by the instigators, and at a government level.

Many thanks for your time Sue.
Dudley Benson"


response:


"Hi Dudley

Sue Bradford has asked me to respond to your email regarding the very confusing referendum question. You will probably have seen the intense media response to this, which has taken up a lot of Sue’s time over the last few days. However the Green “position” is that people should respond to the referendum by voting “yes” in spite of its ambiguity. This is the position the NGOs who supported the s59 Bill throughout have taken and this response is in support of them. You may know their website www.yesvote.org.nz. Sue Bradford has also launched a Private Member’s Bill on Referenda which I will attach to this email for your information.

Kind Regards

Geraldine Molloy
Executive Assistant to Sue Bradford MP"

R.I.P Michael Jackson

August 1958 - June 2009
R.I.P Michael Jackson

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Family Fist turn referendum into referendumb ( I want to hit their kids as well)


Key dragged into smacking debate
Prime Minister John Key has been dragged into the centre of the resurgent smacking debate. As the controversy around the citizens-initiated referendum mounted, one of the organisations backing it last night called for a meeting with Mr Key and said it could produce evidence that parents were being needlessly prosecuted under the 2007 law change. It removed the defence of reasonable force from the Crimes Act, effectively banning smacking as a means of correction while giving police discretion over prosecutions. Arguments have raged ever since and opponents managed to get enough signatures on a petition to force the referendum to be held. It will ask the question: "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?"

What the fundie Family Fist need to understand is that if they get the legal right to hit their kids, we will all want the legal right to hit their kids. Seriously though Family Fist need to get that their expensive, ill worded tantrum isn’t going to move popular support into a reversal of the repeal of section 59 and the reason is we are as a nation in a different headspace.

The media fuelled debate over the repeal of section 59 was inspired mostly by talkback hosts convincing NZers that the Labour Party nanny state dykeocracy was kicking in the door and telling you what water shower heads and lighbulbs you are allowed to have. The Nanny State myth (a myth that NOT PC has amusingly built an entire blog site out of catering to white men who feel so threatened by equality that they bitch like little girls about their restriction of ‘freedom’s – yawn, grow some balls and be men boys) was created by talkback hosts and played into this con that ‘Labour knew best’. NZers hate that so much that they can get blinded by nothings like ‘political correctness’ and forget the actual issues. Now we have the reality of the Daddy state, the myths of the Nanny state seem far away and silly, which is where all this hysteria about the repeal of section 59 has ended up.

David Farrar, the man who was running all the technical aspects of Don Brash’s office at the time the printed emails were leaked, was yesterday saying on Kiwiblogh that he supported Family Fist because the relationship between a child and parent was special and the Government shouldn’t regulate that relationship. This was the exact same argument used by Farrar’s religious mates in the 1970s when the Government ruled that rape in marriage was a crime. The religious buddies of Farrar’s cried out just as David does now that the relationship between a married man and woman was special and that the Government shouldn’t regulate that. Thank God we’ve moved on from such a petty view of the world.

The repeal of section 59 closed a loophole in the legislation that meant the Court ended up defending parents who had assaulted their children, that was a ridiculous position to be in. The Court is there to defend the weak, and a child in the care of their parent has very little power, to end up with a situation where the power of the court was being used against the child to protect a parent who assaulted that child was a legal philosophical position that simply wasn’t tenable in a progressive country. The nonsense that the Nanny State would jail parents who smacked was hysterical verbal diarrhea from a conservative Christian clique who believe that physical punishment is required to keep Satan, the dark lord of evil, away from their children, obviously that belief isn’t tenable in a secular country, so they polished their attack and made it all about the Nanny State.

Public referendum are important, too important to let Family Fist ruin it for everyone. There is no requirement on the Clerk of the House to inform Family Fist that their question made no sense, but there is room for the question to be modified with the help of the Clerk IF Family Fist initiates that discussion. Wasting $9million on a poorly worded tantrum mocks democracy and serves no point in determining the mood of the nation on important issues. In future the petitioner needs to seek out the advice of the Clerk of the House to make sure the question makes sense and is valid in clearly calling for a change in legislation.

Regardless of where you are in this debate, this abortion created by Family Fist serves no one well.

Cops & Power


Police stop and search innocent people to balance race figures, terror watchdog says
White people are being unjustifiably stopped and searched to provide racial balance in police statistics, the antiterrorism watchdog said yesterday. Lord Carlile of Berriew, QC, described the searches in his annual report on the operation of counterterrorism legislation as “almost certainly” illegal. He said that he knew of cases where people were stopped by officers even though they did not fit any known terrorist profile. He accused the police of wasting time and money by carrying out “self-evidently unmerited searches”, which were also an invasion of civil liberties. The searches, for example, of blonde women who fit no terrorist profile came against a backdrop of complaints from rights groups that the number of black and Muslim people being stopped and searched by police was disproportionate.

TUMEKE! To make up the numbers to pretend they are not racist, UK cops have been stopping white people and putting them through ‘terrorist’ searches to pump up numbers to hide their original racial discrimination. Giving more power to the cops is always a questionable move: Police getting tasers, lowering the evidential threshold to declare you a gang member and freeze personal assets, the NZ Police taking your DNA on mere suspicion and new surveillance powers to film you secretly without judicial oversight are all examples of creeping Police powers in NZ at a time when the Independence Complaints process is only funded to independently investigate 30% of cases.

Police power without independent oversight is not security.

National green lights moves to let Japan hunt Whales (how’s that change feeling?)


When National announced that they were going to butcher Labour’s ‘hug a polar bear’ programmes, their spin drs giggled at how clever they were to avoid answering hard questions about deep social cuts by wrapping the entire affair up as some type of cleansing of political correctness from the awful Nanny State, but few would’ve guessed that National were actually serious at least in killing whales.

Murray McCully, The Dark Lord of the Sith (who NEVER seems to get criticized by Jane Clifton in the Listener*) has been screwing over international aid by removing its independence so that Murray can use the aid money to further corporate interests over and above humanitarian interests. But his latest move to let the Japanese hunt whales is surely a right wing move too far. McCully is destroying NZ’s long stand against whaling by agreeing to a compromise (something the Australians refuse to do) with the Japanese means that NZ will willingly accept that ‘scientific’ whaling is legitimate when every intelligent person knows that ‘scientific’ whaling is an utter lie.

McCully’s aim seems to be the same as his destruction of the independence of the International Aid fund, he wants to give Japan a get out of jail free card on whaling in expectation of trade interests. That this Government’s greenlighting of a concession to let Japan continue the ‘scientific’ whaling lie is more to do with McCully’s trade before aid world view and is just another example of the real type of ‘change’ these right wingers have slipped past the voters. We should NOT allow Japan to continue the 'scientific' whaling lie, and we sure as hell shouldn't be letting them do so because of McCully's bloodmoney worldview. I didn't notice National letting voters know NZ was going to bend over and take it from the Japanese by giving up on whaling protections.

(* PS – I haven’t bought a copy of the Listener since that nice Findlay stopped being editor so I was interested to peruse a free copy I received this week and oh my Christ it’s gone so hard right I had to perform an exorcism with old bong water on my copy as soon as I had read it fearing the combined evil within my house would lead me to start wanting to physically discipline children. The National Party zeitgeist that has washed over NZ is reflected in right wing columnist after right wing columnist of a once great magazine that now sums up the new Sylvia Park anti-intellectualism Ponsonby housewife perspective that the Listener perfectly represents. Won’t someone please give Deborah Hill Cone a) a cone and b) some friends to tell her those Harry Potter glasses are terribly unflattering).

Iranian watershed moment?


Day of mourning called for
Supporters of Iran's defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi are preparing for a day of mourning for eight people killed in mass demonstrations against what he says was a rigged election. Iran's English-language state television has reported eight people killed in protests since official results from Friday's poll showed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been re-elected. His huge lead on Mousavi, a moderate former prime minister, has provoked Iran's worst unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Bloodshed, protests, arrests and a media crackdown have rocked the world's fifth biggest oil exporter, embroiled in a dispute with the West over its nuclear programme.

I think the televised debates which caused the very foundations of the Islamic Republic to shake has changed the debate in Iran forever. I think that this is a watershed moment in Iranian history, one which the US should step back from and watch rather than directly interfere, let’s not forget that it was the CIA coup blowback 5 decades ago that created the conditions that birthed this theocracy in the first place and direct US intervention will only reopen that wound. Let’s also not forget that Ahmadinejad was elected by a freaked out Iranian population that George Bush had terrified with his Axis of Evil brainfart and by parking the US army next door to them: this is not the time to exacerbate what could be a natural evolution towards democracy.

Let’s also not get too blinded by any nonsense that Mousavi is some sort of beacon for liberal democracy, it is a sad indictment on the Theocracy as a whole that the people of Iran are so limited for real choice that Mousavi can be considered moderate. Which is why I think the change is much more profound than Mousavi winning or not. I tend to lean with STRATFOR’s assessment…

"........this election has shed light on an underlying reality that is difficult for most Western analysts and media agencies to accept. Mousavi derives most of his support from urban professional classes who responded positively to “Obamaesque” calls for change and felt that their time had come to take Iran in a different direction. The fact remains, however, that the clerical regime still carries broad support, and Ahmadinejad — despite being lambasted by his political rivals for mishandling the economy and foreign relations — has strong support among the rural, poorer and mostly deeply religious population. Ahmadinejad campaigned heavily for this election and made sure during the campaign to visit rural provinces, where some 24 million Iranians, or 34 percent of the total population, make their living. He also put a lot of money into his campaign to buy popular support. Mousavi, on the other hand, returned into the political limelight only about four months ahead of the election and struggled to connect with Iran’s lower classes, who fail to identify with the working elite or with an Ahmadinejad rival and Mousavi supporter like Rafsanjani, who is widely known and criticized for his corruptive practices."
STRATFOR

…and here’s the rub, for as much as no one likes a crank like Ahmadinejad running things, we have yet to see any actual evidence that the vote has been rigged, yes there are questions, but no proof yet, in fact in an environment where Twitter can evade state repression, it is actually of some concern that no evidence of fraud has been tweeted to the rest of the planet yet. The reality is that cheat or not Ahmadinejad may well have ‘won’ the election, but the reverberations of the open debate on TV has meant that reform must come and I think the Guardian Council is starting to acknowledge this new reality as the anger from the middle class intelligentsia continues to cleverly use street politics to force home the new paradigm they want a modern Iran to evolve into.

Iran is still on a knife edge I’m not pretending it is safe, but I think the televised debates sparked a deep yearning for reform that goes well beyond the current limitations of the Iranian state. My hope is that we are viewing the painful birthing of Iran’s maturity from radical theocratic reaction to the 1958 coup to a reasoned realignment redefining what a modern Muslim country should look like.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

In Search of the Miraculous

Fragments of an Unknown Teaching
P. D. Ouspensky









Monday, June 8, 2009

This is the new sound, just like the old sound, just like the noose round, over open ground


Pakistan army chief says tide turned in Swat
Pakistan's army had "turned the tide" against Taliban fighters and aimed to completely eradicate them from the Swat valley, the army chief said, ahead of a meeting with US special envoy Richard Holbrooke on Friday. On Thursday, hours after President Barack Obama's point man for Afghanistan and Pakistan visited Mardan district to see camps set up for some of the 2.5 million people who fled the conflict zone, militants shot dead five police and a soldier after first targetting a convoy with a roadside bomb. Pakistan launched an offensive to expel Taliban militants from Swat last month in a move welcomed by Western allies worried that the nuclear-armed country was sliding into chaos.

Oh you’ve won? Really? Because my reading of the situation is exactly what always happens in the Swat Valley, the Military move in, the extremists move into the mountains and restart their guerilla war against the military. Seeing as this humanitarian catastrophe that has seen millions displaced and the damage done to civilian infrastructure run into a Billion dollars has all been done at the behest of America, it is America’s responsibility to stump up the entire Billion and make sure the rebuilding of Mingora is done because if none of that rebuilding is done, all this military action will have succeeded in doing is causing the next generation of radicalized militants righteously furious at their displacement, ie the military action will end up causing more harm than it ‘solved’.

Obama needs to walk the walk as well as talk the talk because if demanding humanitarian crises via military intervention that they then don’t bother to clean up afterwards is the ‘new America’, I’ve got news for him, it’s the same old bullshit blowback America with a friendly new smile, that ain’t change.

The Rodney Hide Auckland Super City agenda a direct assault on democracy


Hide plans radical shakeup of councils
Local Government Minister Rodney Hide has Cabinet approval to look into law changes that will strip local council spending back to core services rather than cultural, environmental and social spending. The Cabinet has signed off on Mr Hide's request for the Department of Internal Affairs to review local government law, including the removal of the requirement for councils to deliver on "community outcomes" such as social, environmental and cultural "wellbeing" which Mr Hide said pushed councils into providing services well beyond their core roles. In the Cabinet paper Mr Hide said there was a need for a clearer delineation of central and local government roles. He proposed making councils more financially transparent to force them to focus on core activities. He listed these as transport and water services and public health and safety, such as rubbish collection.

AND IT BEGINS! Rodney Hide has been using the Super City as a grand privatization blueprint he intends to use for the entire country post second term of the National/ACT Government and gutting any social and community responsibility for Councils by suggesting such services are central Government responsibilities is a smokescreen because Central Government WILL NOT increase funding for those local community services at all.

Not content with annexing the entire city of Auckland and placing 5 of Rodney’s hand picked clique headed by the largest privatizer of water in the country to control Auckland (quorum is 2 for that ruling council), Rodney now wants to purge all community and social services from Council responsibilities. The true agenda of what ACT have been planning to do by forcing these hard right policies through under a misuse of urgency is nothing short of a coup, ACT have no mandate for these radical changes, and National are allowing them to push this through so John Key’s hands don’t get dirty. In the Auckland Commission Executive summary, the core brief is framed in terms of cost efficiency…

in order to maximise, in a cost effective manner,—
(a) the current and future well-being of the region and its communities; and
(b) the region’s contribution to wider national objectives and outcomes.
and so:
a secure, prosperous, and sustainable future. Maintaining the status quo, or tinkering around the edges, is not the answer. Bold change is required, and that is what the Commission is recommending.


…with so many efficiency’s created by a unitary Council, how come the Council will now have no cash to fund the crucial social services for their communities? If the social well being of the people living in the city ISN’T a concern for the Council, what the hell is the Council for? Will we allow the hard right to redefine the responsibilities of civic duty to a handful of services they intend to sell off minus a social conscience? Note of course all of this is being done without ANY mandate or ANY consultation and by misusing Parliamentary process in the manner National have throughout their short term in office, often Parliament is being asked to vote on law they have only just read at the opening of urgency, this is a coup and as the size of that coup starts to dawn on Aucklanders there will be anger.

The Auckland Commission Executive’s first quote from any interest group just happens to be the hard right think tank The Committee for Auckland

Commenting on current financial circumstances, the Committee for Auckland observed recently, “It is difficult to imagine how New Zealand can recover, and succeed economically, unless Auckland does”.1

…their ‘plan’ for ‘prosperity’ seems to be a mass immigration policy for Auckland, they mention ‘growth’ 13 times on their first page, as my co-blogger Tim put it…

From that and the infrastructure and project pitches I take it the construction companies must be up to their manhole covers in this front group. It's all GDP and business buzz-words with a heavy large open-ended public works angle. And the immigration issue the Commissioners have alluded to only as the encouragement of talent is clearly just numbers when the veneer of "talent" is stripped away by the Committee's call to continue to deluge the city with ever more immigrants:

…so we are seeing a pro-business mass immigration ‘throw-another-million- in-there-worry-about-infrastructure’s-inability-to-cope-later ’ policy to create ‘growth’ at the exact same time they gut the Council from social responsibilities. Remember, all of this has been done without Aucklanders being consulted. This is a coup, a naked attempt to not only seize power but to recast the entire system to benefit the right’s corporate chums.

Politically correct water reducing shower heads and light efficient light bulbs don’t really seem so hysterically important in the wake of what the right are doing now do they?

How is that change feeling now folks?

Key must rein in Hide’s radical right agenda
The release of an obscure cabinet paper revealing a plan to gut local government and open the door to privatisation of assets has Green Co-Leader Russel Norman calling on the Prime Minister to rein in Rodney Hide. The Cabinet Paper, released onto the Department of Internal Affairs website and signed off by Local Government Minister Rodney Hide, seeks approval to develop legislation to amend the Local Government Act. “This Cabinet paper wants to implement ACT Party policy by narrowing the powers of local government and making it easier to sell Auckland’s $23 billion in public assets. The paper proposes to do this without public consultation,” Dr Norman said today.
“John Key needs to come clean on whether he supports the direction that Rodney Hide proposes for local government. And if he doesn’t, then he needs to rein Rodney in.” The Paper proposes to restrict the freedom of Councils to work outside a narrow band of ‘core services’ (para 13). The Cabinet Paper also complains about the “requirements to consult the public on some decisions – notably decisions to contract major council services to the private sector or to sell shares in a port or airport company” (para 18). Dr Norman said that “Hide may not like it but the public don’t want it to be easy to sell public assets or contract out core services to the private sector.” “Remarkably, Hide doesn’t propose to talk to Aucklanders about these changes to the Local Government Act but will conduct a ‘some targeted consultation’ (para 37), which presumably means checking with the Business Roundtable.” Dr Norman said that both Hide and Associate Minister John Carter should be made to explain themselves at public meetings in Auckland this week. “The people of Auckland are already under attack from the anti-democratic Minister of Local Government with the forced amalgamation of the city’s councils. John Key needs to tell us where he stands,” Dr Norman said. Local Government Spokesperson Sue Kedgley said: “This paper reveals Act’s secret agenda to castrate local democracy. He is trying to reduce local government's powers to the point where they are unable to deliver social and environmental services, which are surely their core business. An extremely dangerous agenda is revealed in this cabinet paper, and all of New Zealand, and not just Aucklanders, need to understand what Hide is trying to do here.”

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Just when you thought you couldn’t hate George W Bush anymore…


Investigation finds U.S. military hardware easy to buy, ship
• Watchdog agency GAO buys military hardware, ships it overseas with ease
• Lawmaker: "Gigantic loophole" allows enemies to get U.S. technology
• Hardware that can be used in nuclear devices and ground fighting purchased
• "The scandal here may be what is legal, not what is illegal," representative says

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Military hardware that can be used in nuclear devices and ground fighting can be easily purchased In the United States and shipped overseas, a government investigation revealed Thursday. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) watchdog agency set up fake companies to obtain military and dual use items -- which have both military and commercial use -- in the United States and ship them overseas, according to a report made public at a House subcommittee hearing. The domestic purchases allow buyers to avoid U.S. restrictions on sales to foreign entities, it noted. Items purchased in the bogus transactions included parts for making nuclear devices and guiding missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, as well as night-vision devices, body armor and other hardware for ground combat, said the report provided to the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee. "There appears to be a gigantic loophole within our laws that makes it easy for our enemies to get hold of our superior military technology and use it against us," said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Michigan. Gregory Kutz, a GAO managing director who led the 13-month investigation, said it found "sensitive dual-use and military technology can be easily and legally purchased from manufacturers and distributors within the United States and illegally exported without detection." He stressed that no laws were broken by any of the companies that sold items to the undercover GAO operation, and that the magnitude of trying to check all overseas travelers and shipments made it impossible to halt illegal export of the items under current law. Committee members said the lack of regulation or export controls made the situation particularly troubling. "The scandal here may be what is legal, not what is illegal," said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Oregon.

Dear Mr Bush
Let me get this straight, in the 8 years of your “Ye-ha” as a foreign policy to fight a self created war of terror, it NEVER occurred to you to check domestic military hardware sales to the very nations you put on the list of people you would like to bomb back into the stone age for freedom and democracy??? You had time to torture, start a war based on a pack of lies, kill a million or so Iraqi’s (we’re not sure because you don’t count them when you kill them), set the economy into decline through the offensive cost of the war, set up secret CIA torture prisons in Europe, kidnap people illegally from around the planet, spy on American’s, erode their civil rights, hold people indefinitely without charging them and lower America’s standing in the world supposedly to combat extremists who wish to do the West harm YET AT NO TIME thought of perhaps passing restrictions on NOT SELLING EXTREMISTS THE BLOODY WEAPONS IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!!

Just when I didn’t think I could despise the moronic, ill thought out knee jerk manner in which you ran America, along comes news of the one thing you could have done that would’ve successfully stopped high tech military hardware getting into the hands of extremists and you didn’t do a bloody thing – what kept you George? Busy torturing illegally kidnapped people in secret prisons to save democracy? It didn’t occur to you perhaps to not sell extremists military hardware direct from your factories? America allows it’s corporate military industrial complex to sell America’s enemies the very weapons that could end up killing Americans!

What bold leadership, state sanctioned torture and a war based on lies to stop terrorism – yes. Regulation not to sell the extremists military hardware from your own arms industry – apparently no.

Mt Albert byelection update


Grim poll result caps bad week for Nats
National's worst week in office since the election was yesterday capped with a poll showing Labour has an unassailable lead in the Mt Albert byelection. Labour may even increase its majority in the seat this weekend, which would be a big boost to the authority of new leader Phil Goff within the Labour Party. Prime Minister John Key's day of campaigning in the electorate yesterday will be his last. Mr Key and Mr Goff passed within metres of each other at Westfield St Lukes but the PM appeared determined to avoid his rival. The pair have been engaged in a war over how to progress a complaint against former Internal Affairs Minister Richard Worth. At one point yesterday, Labour activists followed Mr Key at St Lukes shouting, "Where is Dr Worth?" but he ignored them. Mr Goff attributed Labour's commanding lead in last night's One News poll not to the Worth scandal but rather to the issue of the SH20 motorway extension through Mt Albert to Waterview, the Super City plans and the campaign run by National's Melissa Lee.

You know, part of me feels sorry for Melissa Lee – her public meltdown is taking on Britney Spears proportions but the question is where are the National Party in all of this? After executing dear old Christian fundamentalist Ravi on the grounds that Lee would be more electable (hahahahahahah, I feel a Tui billboard coming on), National have done nothing to actually help their candidate deal with the intense media scrutiny and policy strategies she needed to adopt to have a chance of winning here, the fact is National kneecapped Melissa with their motorway announcement and have shown as much political mismanagement of Lee’s candidacy as they have with Worth and Rankin. With mates like National, who needs enemies?

National wanted to win this by-election, it would destabilize Goff’s leadership and leave Labour utterly unprepared for the crucial 2011 election, however cruising at historically high approval levels has breed an arrogance in 9 months that took Labour 9 years to develop.

Kiwiblogh and Whaleoil drew first blood in this game by perpetrating the Tizard effect and promptly led to claims by Matt McCarten that Labour had weakly collapsed when they shafted Twyford for he CV rich Shearer. The right wing blog conspiracy quickly turned pressure on local boy Ravi to kneecap him fearing his fundy views on life wouldn’t gain much traction in their bid to win Mt Albert and thus crucify Goff’s leadership. While Ravi, a little battler who had thanklessly faced off against Clark for two elections, may have lost, his losing would be nothing as spectacular as the implosion Lee has become, let’s gleefully recap her campaign so far shall we?

In a move that was jaw dropping, National highlighted the arrogance that has so far shaped their short term in office (culminating in last months annexation of Auckland) by not telling Lee what their motorway plans were, leaving her high and dry trying to explain away the destruction of 300 odd homes. In her attempt to find a new line to spin this unpalatable policy, she astoundingly tried to claim a motorway would draw South Auckland criminals away from Mt Albert. The media gasped, pundits choked and the National Party defense line was quickly established that Melissa had blurted her motorway crime prevention scheme out in the heat of a public meeting under intense provocation from Labour. Bullshit! Listen to Melissa Lee and she wasn’t pressured at all to make the comment, she tried to argue her position rationally, this stupid clown actually tried to reason her racist undertones regarding South Aucklanders, she wasn’t cornered and lost her head in the heat of the moment, she was rationalizing her law and order spin on the motorway, but that truth was far too unpalatable and National pretended she was ‘under pressure’.

Worse was to come, she then went into hiding finding any excuse not to be interviewed until Paul Henry demolished her on Close Up in what was one of the best political interviews of his life. Not wanting to keep her meltdown to just one media outlet, Melissa then went onto TV3 and gave Duncan Garner his Qantas TV Award entry with an interview that had her blankly trying to answer basic questions the way a puppet does when no one has a hand up its bum.

And just when National voters couldn't imagine it could get any worse, it did. Not content to keep her implosion to just the Television medium, Melissa went on Radio NZ and TOLD them that she expected to lose? WTF? Test this woman for P – the golden rule of elections is that you NEVER admit defeat until the Polls close, why the hell would anyone vote for you if you don’t believe in yourself? And we still have 3 weeks left before the election, Christ you couldn’t make this stuff up.

Melissa Lee held up her CV as a TV presenter and that she could handle the media, to now have her boss weakly rush to the electorate in a desperate attempt to at least win second place shows just how badly National have cocked this whole by-election up. At the beginning National Party mouth-pieces, Kiwiblogh and Whaleoil, were crowing that Labour had everything to lose here, now it is National who has everything to lose, what if Melissa Lee came 3rd? Wouldn’t that start the death knell to National being a 1 term party, I mean who would publicly claim to have voted for Melissa Lee and by extension the National Party after their joint performance so far?

Friday, June 5, 2009

Hood Nerds



Not since N*E*R*D have I been so jazzed about the homie/point dexter hybrid, something obviously close to my heart. This is a community group in America called Hood Nerds who encourage 'getting good grades and still living in the hood'.

I can't wait til something like this comes to NZ, although the property market always looking for 'the new Ponsonby' must also mean there is a 'new Rewa hard'. And having grown up there I know not to assume South Auckland would be the only thriving scene for Hood nerds. South-side thugs travel aaaaall the way to Mt Albert to commit crimes anyway, haven't you heard?

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Forever Wack...

"Forever Strong has arisen concerns because of the use of Ka Mate within the film. The tribe Ngati Toa, whom the iconic dance ideally belongs to is widely used within New Zealand sports teams and recognised as a symbol of New Zealand. Ngati Toa believe that in order to use the war dance within the film, producers should have asked direct permission from the tribe. Creators of Forever Strong has yet to comment on the situation."

WTF?