Rooting

Labour MP Iain Lees-Galloway has decided to divert his focus from running one up parliamentary stenographers and instead focus on the things that matter to Kiwi voters…..like removing a ban on bagpipes.

Labour is calling on officials to overturn the ban on bagpipes being played at World Cup Rugby matches, saying it makes Kiwis look like a bunch of kiltjoys.

“If we can have the haka, then surely the Scots should be allowed a bit of skirt and skirl,” Labour’s unofficial spokesperson with a Scottish name, Iain Lees-Galloway, said.

The Palmerston North-based MP and colleagues Jacinda Ardern and Lianne Dalziel were approached for comment on the ban by a journalist from Edinburgh’s Sunday Post who said the issue had caused a furore in Scotland, prompting that country’s Sports Minister to issue a plea to games organisers to rethink their stance.

“I’m not sure on what grounds I was contacted, although I am a third generation Scottish migrant, from the McVicar and McCrae line, but I do know my long-passed Scottish grandmother would be outraged by the ban,” Jacinda Ardern said. “And men in kilts? What’s not to like? Richie McCaw fronted up in a kilt, with a set of pipes and played Amazing Grace at a recent charity auction and he’s an All Black.”

“Like the haka, bagpipes have stirred the spirit of sportspeople for centuries. And, like the haka they are an important part of New Zealand culture,” Iain Lees-Galloway said.

“Many of us have close family links to Scotland. Given bagpipes were included in the sensational and dynamic RWC opening ceremony, why not allow them at the games – even if it’s just before and after a match – as well.

“I can’t deny my ancestry. I support Scotland against any other team but the All Blacks. Surely a compromise can be reached before Scotland’s next game in Wellington,” Iain Lees-Galloway said.

I’m not sure, given his predations in the area that Iain Lees-Galloway should be talking about a “bit of skirt”.

Berlusconi is a serious rooter.

Silvio Berlusconi was at the centre of further sordid revelations about his sex life on Saturday after the Italian leader was caught boasting of having sex with eight women in one night.

…In one conversation taped by investigators in early 2009, Mr Berlusconi told him: “Last night I had a queue outside my door, there were 11 of them. I only managed to do eight of them, I couldn’t manage any more. You just can’t get round to all of them.

“But this morning I feel great, I’m pleased with my stamina.”

Makes Trevor Mallard’s or Murray McCully’s depredations on the fairer sex seem rather tame. A certain high profile political figure who had three on the go at one time also needs to try harder.

Great quote today in the Telegraph about why journalists don’t cover rooting politicians.

The extent of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s womanising has in the past been hidden because of a convention that the French press reports little on politicians’ private lives and the fact that its privacy laws are among the strictest in Europe, commentators and legal experts said on Monday.

Why is it the journalist don’t go after them?

Jean Quatremer, the journalist at Libération newspaper was the first French journalist to warn that Mr Strauss-Kahn’s treatment of women risked causing his downfall in Washington. However, he was only allowed to publish the information on his blog.

On Monday, he told the Daily Telegraph the Strauss-Kahn affair could be a “turning point” in France’s approach to its politician’s private lives.

More recently former President François Mitterrand was able to hide the existence of his (illegitimate) daughter Mazarine, and in 2007, the French only learned of the split between defeated Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal and her partner François Hollande after the electoral campaign.

But “DSK is an affair too many,” he said. “The so-called respect of private life is a fig leaf for journalistic cowardice,” he said.

“We are scared of falling out with politicians as they are our sources, but they need us in any case,” he said.

“Dominique Strauss-Kahn wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in Britain, America or Sweden,” he said.

What will give New Zealand journalists the courage to cover politicians dodgy sexually practices?

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is finding out all too closely the difference between the US and France when it comes to rooting politicians.

If anyone was in any doubt about the enormous gulf that exists between how the French and American republics conduct their politics, then they need look no further than the harrowing image of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief  and putative presidential candidate, being led away in handcuffs by a bunch of New York cops after being subjected to the indignity of a DNA test. In America this is called the “perp walk”, and it’s supposed to be humiliating.

This sort of thing simply doesn’t happen in France, where the sexual peccadilloes of its leading politicians are simply taken for granted. As my colleague Anne-Elisabeth Moutet wrote this morning, it was an open secret in France that Mr Strauss-Kahn had an eye for the ladies, and at one point tore off a young journalist’s bra when she took his fancy.  No one ever thought to contact the police because this is the type of behaviour everyone in France expects of their politicians.

Unbelievable behaviour….ripping off a journalists bra! And it is expected!

Any attempt by a French policeman to handcuff a prominent politician would be tantamount to committing an act of treason. In America it doesn’t matter whether you are OJ Simpson or an international statesman of the stature of Mr Strauss Kahn: if the cops believe you’ve broken the law, you’ll soon find yourself paraded in public in handcuffs before being thrown in the slammer.

Clearly, so far as New York’s cops are concerned, there is no such thing as the entente cordial.

Hmmm…could we be seeing a similar perp walk here soon?

Sometimes politicians don’t engage their brain before committing words to the interwebs. Most of the time some politicians are engaging their little brain. In this case, once again, it is the Mangrove, Stuart Nash. Looks like Little Stuie was engaged on this effort, freudian slips and all.

This will be a huge relief for all the husbands of attractive women the nation over, except for those in the Hawke’s Bay, to know now that The Mangrove’s roots are firmly only in the Hawke’s Bay. One thing is for sure though when a mistress becomes a wife, a position becomes vacant.

Perhaps readers might like to help The Mangrove re-write that sentence more appropriately.

Craig Foss has got himself a new ute. Well if you call such a soft vehicle a ute at all. It’s the sort of thing Charles Chauvel would drive.

Shortly after he got it Stuart “The Mangrove” Nash was seen climbing all over the back of it when the whinging bikers were in town. I hear he wants to borrow it for the following features:

Wellside – with sports bar, lockable roller shutter, bedliner with 12V power socket, and internal tie downs.

Rooting in the back of the ute is a time honoured Hawkes Bay tradition. Still I suppose it is better than converting the local gravestone makers office into a huge billboard to scare young kids and elderly passersby.