June 2010

We finally have proof that the vuvuzela gives dogs at least, the sh*ts.

Hitting the brown note though might be something that needs to be explored in the local body elections.

Fans of the Subway sandwich have been frowning this week with the news the winter cucumber shortage has led to rationing the vegetable.

At Subway Metro on Devon St West, a notice was put in the service window, stating only two cucumber slices will go on six-inch subs instead of three, with five instead of six for foot-longs.

David Herrick, of Subway Restaurant marketing, said all cucumbers used by Subway were grown in New Zealand hot houses.

As there was often a smaller crop in the middle of winter, traditionally the organisation then sourced extra stock from Australia.

“Australia had very heavy rain, so they’ve got no telegraph cucumbers for us,” Mr Herrick said.

And how is this news exactly?

A friend of mine from Henderson went to his local Bond and Bond the other day, but couldn’t buy a new TV because they were out of stock in the model he wanted.

Could the Taranaki Daily News please contact him to get this exclusive scoop?

In its second major ruling on gun rights in three years, the Supreme Court Monday extended the federally protected right to keep and bear arms to all 50 states. The decision will be hailed by gun rights advocates and comes over the opposition of gun control groups, the city of Chicago and four justices.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the five justice majority saying “the right to keep and bear arms must be regarded as a substantive guarantee, not a prohibition that could be ignored so long as the States legislated in an evenhanded manner.”

The ruling builds upon the Court’s 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller that invalidated the handgun ban in the nation’s capital. More importantly, that decision held that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was a right the Founders specifically delegated to individuals. The justices affirmed that decision and extended its reach to the 50 states. Today’s ruling also invalidates Chicago’s handgun ban.

The Second Amendment stands firm with no meddling or changes. So important is the right to keep and bear arms to ensure the First Amendment remains intact. The Founding Fathers of the US were sensible, great men.

Chief Justice John Roberts was the most vocal advocate of using the Due Process Clause to extend the Second Amendment rights to the states. “I don’t see how you can read — I don’t see how you can read Heller and not take away from it the notion that the Second Amendment…was extremely important to the framers in their view of what liberty meant.”

The discussion over “liberty” was a major philosophical theme of the arguments. Gura and National Rifle Association lawyer Paul Clement argued that the rights articulated in the Second Amendment are fundamental freedoms and would exist to all Americans even if there was no law specifically saying so.

Oh that we could have such a document here. Or even the same rights.

To celebrate such a victory here is a little video for my readers to enjoy.

John Banks has made a bit of an oops after it was revealed that his staff claimed for $438.80 in entertainment expenses. In stark contrast to Looney Len Brown though John Banks has told us who he was having lunch and coffee with.

The $438.80 claim covers four occasions – entertaining the United States Ambassador at Euro Restaurant on the waterfront for $215.50, catching up with arts patron James Wallace at Frasers cafe in Mt Eden ($23.80), discussing the Peter Blake memorial with businessman John Street at the Stamford Plaza Hotel ($44) and having lunch with Britomart developer Peter Cooper at the Northern Club ($155.50).

The onus is now on Mr Brown to come clean on who he dined with on the council card at Volare at a cost of $810.00. Come clean Looney Len.

Brian Marshall

I blogged on the weekend about the massive shift in influence in South Pacific politics with the announcement that Fiji would join the Non-Aligned Movement and the growing influence of China in Fiji.

We need look no further than the Fiji Government’s own website to see just how out of the play New Zealand has become. Right across the home page is a lovely picture from 4 days ago of the Chinese Ambassador handing yet another cheque.

Also on the Fiji Government website is a link to the proposed People’s Charter. If only our government proposed solutions in such a transparent way. Perhaps for the first time since independence in 1970 we are seeing Fiji actually properly participate in nation building, and without the strictures of a colonial past to hedge in the populace. The People’s Charter reads well, certainly far better than Sir Paul Reeves travesty of a constitution which condemned Fiji to a separatist parliament and further coups.

To go with the People Charter a song and video has also been commissioned that shows Fiji in a far different light from that showed by our mainstream media, who prefer to continue to show gun wielding soldiers when they are in fact few and far between.

In the game of Realpolitik the Commodore has showed up Helen Clark, John Howard, John Key and Kevin Rudd and in the process started the eventual weaning of the rest of the South Pacific from the parsimonious, condescending and sanctimonious remonstrations of New Zealand and Australia. Mark my words, this failure of our foreign policy will be felt for many years to come, with Vanuatu, Tonga, then Samoa distancing themselves from New Zealand.

the worst part of all this is that we only have our-selves to blame. In our arrogance, we thought we knew best, we thought that we could force Fiji into our way of doing things, yet conducted ourselves with complete hypocrisy. We insisted that Fiji return to democracy and at the same time feted dictators, cut free trade deals with non-democratic regimes and exported our produce to worse. All the time we wagged our fingers at Fiji and tut-tutted about how terrible it all was that they didn’t have an elected government anymore. Well we have got what we deserved, and the Fijians are laughing at us.

Murray McCully hasn’t even issued a press release about Fiji’s joining of the Non-Aligned Movement. I suppose he will throw his hands up in anguish when Robert Mugabe, Muammar al-Gaddafi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad come calling. We can hardly complain though can we?

The Commodore basically “rat-fucked” us internationally, and all he did was stand firm and tell us to stop interfering in Fiji’s internal affairs. Actually, a quite reasonable request. Instead we place restrictions and sanctions on them because…well..because they were so successful with Zimbabwe, weren’t they?

So, thanks to successive governments, China is now happily camped less than three hours flying time from Auckland and not a shot was fired. I wonder what our Vietnam, Malayan and Korean veterans think about that? They gave their blood, sweat, tears and lives to keep China and their proxies at bay. that has turned out to be all for naught.

Nevermind about mending bridges, there are chasms to be filled now and with our current policies I don’t hold much hope in the place of my birth resuming friendly relations with New Zealand anytime soon.

Prisoners with alcohol and drug addictions have to deal with it. We don’t offer alcohol to prisoners with alcohol addictions or P to prisoners with methamphetamine addictions. This is a prison, it’s not a home.

Judith Collins

The ongoing Garner v. Edwards saga has the pinkos all upset about churnalistic ethics. It is hogwash of course unless we have the BBC model here in New Zealand and even that is a tedious comparison.

There will always be bias in any repeater’s or churnalist’s repeating because, well they are human and humans have brains that enable them to think. This preciousness that somehow all churnalists are supposed to be neutral is pinko horse-piss.

Andrew Sullivan looks at this very issue as well;

The appropriateness of the Weigel’s comments about Drudge aside, I’m much more horrified by the suggestion, on Goldblog and elsewhere, that this is somehow the Washington Post’s fault for hiring journalists who, you know, have opinions about stuff.  When will news outlets give up on the charade of neutrality in reporting?

In an era of monopolistic news reporting, if you are the only newspaper in town, or one of three channels on the tube, you are you going to be a lot less concerned with providing a superior product and a lot more concerned with not saying anything that might alienate a member of your captive audience.  It’s not important to have the smartest reporters or the sharpest analysis – after all, people are pretty much forced read the news you give them.  Instead, it’s just important to have reporters that are careful (or dense) enough to stop thinking about a subject before they risk suggesting that one interpretation of events might be superior to others.

End result: a perverse culture that values manufactured or feigned neutrality above all else, endless “he said/she said” reporting, and a mainstream media that is afraid to actually let its own reporters use their brains.

People, consumers, aren’t stupid, they know and recognise bias when they see it. I for one know that Duncan Garner gives no one any favours. He is almost an anarchist in his thinking. He just wants a story and presents it how he sees it. If you think there is bias in the story then that is your problem not his. He climbed in boots and all and ran the secret tapes provided from Labour and The Standard operatives in the lead up to the election, now he is smacking troughing former ministers including the biggest trougher of the lot, Chris Carter. The left makes the mistake in thinking that it is personal, it almost never is. Even when I am putting a hit on it still isn’t personal. The left however likes to see a reason for something, so for Carter it is latent homo-phobia, except they are the ones who see it and no-one else, for Len Brown it is a right wing conspiracy except no-one forced Len Brown to spend the money, no-one forced him to slap himself silly on TV and no-one foreced him to break his own council’s rules. Labour and the rest of the left do themselves no favours by crying conspiracy everytime something goes wrong in the press for them. They almost never look in the mirror.

Likewise with drug bust of Phil Goff’s daughter. Personally I couldn’t give a tinkers cuss whether she or any other MPs kids was taking ecstasy, and that isn’t the issue, the issue is how the MP handles it when the tough questions come, and that is where the pinkos are falling over. For nine long years they had a media cowed by Helen Clark and Heather Simpson. They would bully, black-list and cajole repeaters who didn’t play nicely. They are still doing it. Right now both Duncan Garner and Patrick Gowwer are on Labour’s blacklist. With petulant reciprocation of supposed sleights against MPs it is little wonder that Labour is constantly getting bad press.

Phil Goff handled the response to Jonathan Marshall’s questions poorly. It isn’t a smear, it is fact that his daughter was arrested, charged and found guilty. Goff pretends that he wants to lead this nation, yet when presented with prima facie evidence that his daughter is a drug user, he starts with denial, the politicians default position. That won’t cut it. Only the most stupid of people would think that his denial helps. It doesn’t it now portrays his daughter as a drug mule, a courier or a dealer, none of which are a better position than a drug taker. People want their leaders to be able to deal with tough issues, not run for cover or deny the existence of reality.

She is 25 and so should be big enough to look after herself, Goff should have said that. He didn’t. Is Jonathan Marshall biased for reporting it? Of course not. He told a story. Labour don’t like it of course. In their minds they will be thinking if the story had landed on the gallery’s desks then nothing would have happened. That is as it may be, but it didn’t and Jonathan Marshall isn’t in the gallery. The only thing he is thinking about is whether or not his story is going to make the front page or not. There isn’t a smear or a conspiracy, there just is. And the sooner that Labour and MSM bosses realise that people actually want bias then the sooner we can all get on and enjoy the news.

Thankfully, the internet is ripping the heart out of our mid-20th century media culture.  We’re going back to old-old-school reporting, way back to the era of when newspapers had open party affiliations.  If I want to learn about an issue, I don’t watch cable news debate theater, designed to ensure both sides go in endless circles.  And I certainly don’t read a David Broder column.  I go read an honest, intelligent partisan, an Yglesias or Klein or a Frum or a Salam, and then I go read a response from the other side.  Even if there isn’t a response, at least I know what I’m getting — I have a sense of the worldview I’m hearing and the assumptions that are going into the argument.  I don’t have to worry that the writer is burying some secret conclusion out of sight.  Full disclosure beats selective omission, every time.

Good reporting requires honesty, integrity, and analytical rigor.  Good reporting is not editorializing.  But a good reporter should not be neutral.  A good reporter should tell me what he thinks, why he thinks it, and why it’s relevant.

Blogging has added a newer dimension, a more raw and visceral dimension to the news. We are unashamedly biased, we know we are, our reader know we are and that is why we retain audiences. If you don’t like that then take a hike, because we and the world doesn’t care.

Perfect, it even includes a picture of a whale.

Everything you wanted to know about Boogers

Duncan Garner has had a swipe at Labour lickspittle and “raffle-ticket seller” Brian Edwards, after Edwards told not even half of a story in a tit-for-tat attack to get Garner after TV3 starting mercilessly hunting down troughing MPs.

Edwards accused Garner of a “Get Carter” campaign and obviously is running Carter’s and Clark’s lines for them. Duncan Garner though is having none of it.

The Labour party are becoming very precious now the boot is on the  other foot. They are used to total control of the media via Clark. We can witness the righteous victim-hood through Len Brown and Chris Carter. Everything is a smear except that everything has proven to be true. A smear is when the likes of Trevor Mallard asserts that American Bagmen are funding National and then produces nothing but thin air.

There are no smears, there is no organised conspiracy to bring down Brown, poofs and others. They are victims of their own legacy of entitle-itis.

Brian,

I have never denied there was an incident between myself and Chris, indeed I told everyone about it at the time because I was shocked that Chris would call me by a four letter word – that your version of this story doesn’t reflect.

Unfortunately your version of it is very, very wrong and you do yourself no favours.

You have relied on the word of Chris Carter and even Phil Goff can’t rely on that.

Yes Darren Hughes was there and he will confirm what happened if people wish to approach him.

Darren may even wish to write on this site?

But why rely on my word? Surely the Chief Whip, Mr Hughes will launch a defence of the incident for Mr Carter. Or will he?

I bet he doesn’t. Because Carter behaved disgracefully in the Koru Club that evening and provoked the incident.

I will consider posting the full version on the 3News website tomorrow. I certainly won’t do it here to satisfy former broadcaster and Labour Party raffle ticket seller Brian Edwards.

Because Brian, I am not going to give you the pleasure of writing it on your site. Before you publish your version, you should check your facts – you will be very embarrassed shortly. Once again, in your attempt to defend your Labour mate – you will drag this on and perhaps back into the public arena. Just what Labour needs. What a media strategist you are!!!!

Your version is simply wrong on so many fronts – you expose yourself once again as a sham and a Labour Party hack.

And an increasingly unemployed one at that. Why is Labour now using other ‘mediatrainers’ and not you?

Once again I will consider putting my version on the 3 News website tomorrow.

But one more thing Brian. I also notice that your claim I attacked Chris was because I hated gays and was homophobic? Even Chris says that’s not true now. So where does all this leave your wimpering campaign against me? In tatters.

Once again, rather than taking my word, why doesn’t Darren Hughes post on here now about the Koru Club incident?

Don’t take my word Brian, take his.

Like you challenged me to front to defend myself – I am inviting Darren to tell the full story, to defend Chris. I somehow think he won’t .. but I’m waiting …..