I like Tory MP Louise Mensch. I think she’s bright, articulate and beautiful (as we have discussed.) I’m quoting her in another context elsewhere, but came across this appearance, where she featured on the BBC’s Have I Got News For You, 22 April 2011 adding her bit to the campaign to discredit the UK ‘super-injunctions’ (remember those?) … see what you think.
Simon Lusk in the headlines again!
Oh dear. National senior whip Michael Woodhouse reports campaign strategist Simon Lusk has a ‘very negative agenda’ for the National Party. Shades of ‘The Hollow Men’? (click to watch video at 3News)
For someone who likes to keep a low profile and work behind the scenes, we’re hearing quite a lot about Simon Lusk, aren’t we?
Well, well. Just a few weeks after my mild curiosity-fueled questions about Simon Lusk (see ‘So, who is Simon Lusk?‘) he’s in the news. Again.
TV3 News reports in ‘Secret minutes reveal split in National’s ranks‘:
Leaked minutes of a National Party board meeting in March show major concerns over a party member who is so close to some of the party’s MPs that he presents a serious risk to the party and its image.
But when 3 News asked Prime Minister John Key to explain, he said he did not know of any concerns.
Under questioning though, he did start to recall.
The man in question is Simon Lusk, who loves the outdoors but who also sees himself as a big fish in the National Party.
3 News is told he gets paid to give strategic advice to about a dozen of the party’s MPs and aspiring MPs.
But secret National Party board minutes from March released to 3 News show the party is so worried about Mr Lusk’s influence that his “agenda represents a serious risk to the party”….
How interesting.
I haven’t thought much more about Simon Lusk than I did when I last wrote about him, but, since then, we’ve seen the further public unravelling of the fringe-dwelling ACT party.
According to some insiders, the ACT Party leadership coup by National Party geriatrics Don Brash and John ‘Amnesia’ Banks was carried out with the help of the Machiavellian Simon Lusk and his lovely assistant Jordan Williams. (Look how well that’s worked out for ACT!)
Perhaps the National Party’s senior whip, Dunedin List MP Michael Woodhouse (right) is right to be worried. For him to report (details here) that Simon Lusk poses a ‘serious risk to the Party’ and has a ‘very negative agenda for the Party’ … well, gee. That can’t be good.
Play it again, Simon
In this context, it’s worth listening again to the Trevor Mallard interview on Radio NZ’s Morning Report 29 March 2012 about Michelle Boag’s email to ACC Minister Judith Collins getting leaked. (Apparently this is the interview which prompted Judith Collins to threaten defamation lawsuits …still available for your listening pleasure.)
Simon Lusk and his ‘below the radar’ activities feature. See what you make of it.
Listen via radionz.co.nz here:
Here’s the MP3 file (1.5MB)
– P
‘That politician got amnesia again’
I finally got around to listening to this, following the NZ Herald carrying it yesterday.
It’s catchy!
Click to visit YouTube
Listen here
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
(or 3.5MB mp3 file for non-flash browsers).
– P
Why not put it out there?
I know the cynics may try to tear this down. I don’t care. Why not aim high?
– P
Via Nick Bilton thanks to Tim Murphy.
Teapot tape saga sputters out with withdrawal of ‘costs’ action against cameraman
Scrambling at the Teapot meeting (pic: Dean Purcell NZ Herald)
For the record:
Teapot costs bid dropped
By Cherie Howie Herald on Sunday May 6, 2012
The Attorney-General has ditched plans to demand nearly $14,000 in court costs from freelance photographer Bradley Ambrose over the long-running “teapot tape” saga.
Ambrose was embroiled in controversy and faced criminal investigation after he taped a conversation between Prime Minister John Key and Act Epsom candidate John Banks at an Auckland cafe just before the November election last year.
He said it was accidental but Key said the recording was illegal and laid a complaint with police.
Ambrose went to the High Court to ask for the conversation to be declared public. This was rejected and was followed by a memorandum filed in the Auckland High Court seeking $13,669 in costs.
But on Wednesday, Crown Law Office spokeswoman Jan Fulstow confirmed the order had been withdrawn by the Attorney-General. …
Like, I’m sure, many other journalists and non-journalists, I saw the Attorney-General claiming $14,000 in costs to prepare for and attend a court hearing on whether a conversation carried out in front of 40 journalists with cameras and recorders was ‘public’ as dubious. Politics lecturer Bryce Edwards labelled it ‘political vindictiveness‘.
A NZ Herald editorial at the time Crown should pay its own tea tape bill pointed out that the Attorney-General didn’t even argue the question at issue of a ‘public’ or ‘private’ conversation:
At the hearing, counsel for the Attorney-General chose not to address that issue, arguing instead that Mr Ambrose’s request for a declaratory judgment should be refused on procedural grounds. Since police were investigating a complaint from Mr Key, the Crown suggested a court ruling at that stage would interfere with the process of criminal justice.
Judge Helen Winkelmann agreed, deciding it would not be appropriate to conduct “a mini-trial as to whether certain conduct constituted a criminal offence … in advance of a police investigation or trial”.
So, yes, I agree with this week’s decision. I think the Crown seeking costs (including a $700 limousine bill) for their ‘motion’ asking the judge to kick the issue to touch while a police investigation was carried out (and, coincidentally, a General Election, ahem) was ‘off base’ at all sorts of levels.
That the police investigation led to no charges but merely a policeman’s untested statement that Ambrose had acted ‘unlawfully’ but it wasn’t in the public interest to prosecute him is echoed in this:
[Crown Law Office spokeswoman Jan] Fulstow said the move [to withdraw the application for $13,669 costs against Ambrose] was also prompted by “the public interest in bringing the matter to a close”.
Good old ‘public interest’ vs ‘the issues that matter’.
– P
Self-hate as a metric of intolerance?
This conversation, spurred by a reworking of the old saying ‘It takes one to know one’ got me thinking this morning:
A conversation about haters (click to read at storify.com)
I reckon Nick Denton is RIGHT. (‘Takes one to hate one.’) Or enough right that it’s worth doing a self-audit, so:
How much of my own intolerances are a result of my ‘dislike’ of my own weaknesses or past weaknesses in any particular area?
This is another dimension of the sort of psycho-babble I find interesting such as The Paradox of Animosity examining the thought: Choose your enemies carefully, because you will become like them.
There’s no question that the dubious moral justification for dodgy deeds that Chris Trotter referred to recently (broadly: ‘They’re crooked, so we’re justified in being crooked too’) is a human moral affliction far wider than political discourse — it’s deployed to justify all sorts of dishonest actions, not just debate.
The idea that a kind of angry hyper-sensitivity (amplified intolerance?) is a result of self-loathing is certainly another spin on the cliché about reformed cigarette smokers (addicts) becoming highly intolerant of smokers.
Q: Does my intolerance of [fill-in-the-gap] — besides being just argumentativeness — stem from some aspect of myself that I don’t happily accept?
Hey, don’t misunderstand: I’m not agonizing over this, just interested in the idea. Any thoughts?
– P
Mike Hosking: ‘a note of some clarification’ re SkyCity
On Radio NZ’s Mediawatch today I heard clips of broadcaster Mike Hosking’s statement of ‘clarification‘ about his work with SkyCity casinos broadcast on NewstalkZB earlier this week.
Hosking was responding to commentary and news reports like this and this that he’s received tens of thousands of dollars of cash and benefits from the Casino and restaurant operator — working as an ‘Ambassador’ for the business.
I like to track things to their source (that’s no reflection on Mediawatch’s editing, just a habit of mine), so here’s Hosking’s full 24 April 2012 on-air statement for the record:
– P
(PS I think more people are interested in this controversy than Mike Hosking makes out.)
John assures John he’s complied with electoral law
Yesterday, Labour leader David Shearer called for Prime Minister John Key to stand Banks down from his ministerial portfolios.
A spokeswoman for the prime minister said Banks had assured him he had complied with local body electoral law.— NZ Herald 29 April 2012
Like this?:
“The Long Adios,” a Walmart detective story
“Are you lying, punk?”
“I don’t recall! I swear!”
– P
‘No compromise’ extremism damages a political system
I mentioned Tea Party pin up boy Rep. Allen West’s Joe McCarthy-esque very specific but fact-free assertion that “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress are “members of the Communist Party” recently as an example of political actors telling bare-faced lies with such regularity that it’s almost become unremarkable now (see An obituary for Facts).
The West lie is quoted as an example of growing toxic political extremism in the GOP — supposedly a ‘mainstream’ party — in this excellent Washington Post op-ed Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
Saturday, April 28, 2012
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.
The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.
Well worth reading in full here at the Washington Post.
– P
First, tranquilize the bear
What a photo!
A young bear is seen falling from a tree after being tranquilized. (Andy Duann/CU Independent)
via @AnnieLowry NYTimes who linked to a news story on Yahoo
Responding to criticism can be tricky
Ha! No win situation?
“If you ignore criticisms people make of you, you’re arrogant & elitist – if you engage them, you’re thin-skinned & overly-sensitive.” Glenn Greenwald
For my own part, I tend to take the risk and engage. Others don’t. No worries.
– P
Property Tutors’ Sean Wood is ‘not of good character’ – according to Authority & Judge
I’ve entertained questions of my own about former Richmastery (now Property Tutors) mentor and property spruiker Sean Wood’s credibility and marketing methods for some years (see here). Now the Financial Markets Authority’s conclusion that ’15 million dollar man’ Sean Wood is not a person of ‘good character’ for the purposes of the Financial Advisor’s Act (and thus to decline his application to be an Authorised Financial Advisor) has been confirmed on appeal to the Wellington District Court.
Judge Stephen Harrop ruled:*
“Mr Wood’s failure to disclose convictions and, more importantly, the fact of his conduct behind the convictions and his attitude to compliance with the law, mean that he is not of good character such as is required to be an AFA [Authorised Financial Advisor].
FMA says Sean Wood 'is not of good character'. (Click to read this at the FMA site.)
Being the first case of its kind, Sean Wood’s rejection by the Financial Markets Authority as unsuitable to be an Authorised Financial Advisor, his appeal against the FMA decision — resulting in a District Court Judge (a) confirming Wood’s assessment as ‘not a person of good character’ and (b) dismissing his appeal … well, it was bound to attract publicity. Continue reading →
Colbert on Fox’s Steve Doocy: ‘Journalism plus’
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
Laws for sale, UK style
There’s lobbying and then there’s this corrupt garbage.
Jeremy Hunt and the Murdochs: how minister oiled wheels of BSkyB bid
A haul of email, text and phone call records appear to show how minister aided News Corp takeover
Blistering stuff from The Guardian — my hat’s off to Nick Davies and David Leigh.
Is it too far-fetched to think this sort of thing could happen in innocent New Zealand? Really?
– P
