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Meme moratorium | Sep 26, 2005 11:02
I'm calling a moratorium. On, that is, the making-ourselves-feel-better meme coursing through centre-right circles that, in fact, the centre-right actually won more votes on the 17th, and it was only rotten old MMP that snatched away the victory.
There are many things awry with this hypothesis - which is based on the idea that United Future and New Zealand First are really centre-right parties whose intentions were perverted by the system - the most prominent among them being that it's ludicrous to try and map the voting pattern under one electoral system onto hypothetical voting choices under another.
Further, NZF's economic platform (which calls for import substitution, for goodness sake) is by no definition a centre-right one (it is in fact arguably to the left of Labour's) and polls have consistently found, by a modest margin, that Winston's support base wanted him to go with Labour. If National had achieved more votes than Labour, or been able to nurture other coalition support parties, it would be forming a government. But it didn't, and it isn't. You've got till the specials come in on Saturday, folks. Then get over it.
So Hurricane Rita wasn't quite as destructive as feared, but the prospect was bad enough to require a calamitous evacuation. The question is: is this the shape of things to come? Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, spat the dummy late last week, declaring the hurricane wave to be the "smoking gun" of global warming:
Asked what conclusion the Bush administration should draw from two hurricanes of such high intensity hitting the US in quick succession, Sir John said: "If what looks like is going to be a horrible mess causes the extreme sceptics about climate change in the US to reconsider their opinion, that would be an extremely valuable outcome."
Asked about characterising them as "loonies", he said: "There are a group of people in various parts of the world ... who simply don't want to accept human activities can change climate and are changing the climate."
"I'd liken them to the people who denied that smoking causes lung cancer."
If the frequency and intensity of hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico really has permanently increased, then, Houston, we have a problem. The authorities can hardly ignore the worst-case threat of storms like Rita, but they can also hardly relish the thought of annual mass evacuations.
Meanwhile, Boing Boing has a disturbing Katrina round-up.
The Christian Heritage Party has finally fronted and officially dispensed with its policy director, Mark Munroe, after the leak and publication of a revolting email in which Munroe sought to contend that Capill's offences - raping children - did not meet the Biblical definition of rape and were in fact of a lesser degree than the act of raping a married woman.
The leaked email first appeared on Kiwiblog, where it was followed by some astonishingly farcical discussion about whether Munroe had in fact read the scriptures properly. (Here's the thing, folks: our criminal law is not based on the bizarre edicts of the Old Testament, but sound, secular ideas about consent.)
The story was taken up by The Fundy Post, which published a version of the email showing that the recipients were the mad Flanagans (for some reason, DPF removed that information). Hilariously, Munroe accused The Fundy Post's Paul Litterick of behaving unethically.
So … any more sordid personalities still lurking in the shadows of this creepy little party?
Staying on the moral tip, Ars Tehcnica has an interesting comment piece on the new FBI "obscenity squad", and the Slashdot community muses further on the plan to ban B&D.
Some video: a great interview which demonstrates what happens when Fox News's Bill O'Reilly comes across an interview subject he can't intimidate - in this case, veteran talk show host Phil O'Donoghue, in the topuc of the Iraq war.
Some audio: my interview with Shane Jones on The Wire last week. Judging by the phone calls afterwards, the listeners liked him a lot. I'm hoping to talk to National's Tim Groser this week.
The pro-Bush angry brigade predicts 20,000 for a pro-war demonstration to match the 100,000 who marched against the war in Washington this week. They get … about 400.
And finally, I've love to point you to John Roughan's explanation as to why he decided not to vote Maori Party - and voted UFO instead - but, of course, I can't, because that's "premium" content. Thanks anyway …
It appears that not all of the Herald's columnists knew they were to be locked up in the "premium" cells. Business columnist Jenny Ruth only found out when she was preparing an invoice for her work, went to check her work online - and found that she wasn't allowed to see it. She says:
Something else you might want to consider is if my work is "premium content," shouldn't the Herald be paying a premium price for it. I think you'll find the other columnists are as angry about this as I am -- particularly that they didn't tell me about this and provide me with free access. Will they make me pay to research Herald stories?
And Matthew Harman has been in touch with the final word on stories you find through the Herald's on-site keyword search. They won't expire as such after seven days - but after that time they will become "premium" content, and will attracted a fee. If you find the same stories by another means - drilling down through the Herald site's index structure, or using an external search engine, the links will behave like they always have. Everybody clear on that now?
Misconstrued and moving on | Sep 23, 2005 11:11
NBR has finally surrendered one of the least defensible elements of its ropey assault on Dick Hubbard last year, by stating on its front page that his statement in a TV interview was "misconstrued and that he did not intend to represent that his company prepared two triple bottom line reports. NBR withdraws any implication that Mr Hubbard deliberately attempted to deceive the viewers of the television interview. Mr Hubbard's court proceedings have been settled in a mutually satisfactory manner by NBR making a donation to a charity of Mr Hubbard's choice."
This shouldn't be any surprise. I went through the Hubbard attack in a Listener column at the time and concluded that the facts spread across nine stories over five pages of the paper might have made perhaps one or two stories of actual merit. And the 'Triple Bottom Lie' claim was disingenuous from the start:
But the NBR's claim that Hubbard had "lied" on television was weaker yet. Anderson and Lill chose not to phone Hubbard to confirm what he had said. But the candidate told the New Zealand Herald that he had simply stumbled on his words, saying first "2001" and then correcting himself to "2002".
The NBR presented as proof a short excerpt from a transcript of the programme (under the heading "Dick's TV deception"). But the paper's excerpt cut off in the middle of Hubbard's answer, just before he appeared to refer specifically to having only done one report. And nowhere in the full transcript does Hubbard actually say anything about having produced two reports. The NBR's basis for depicting Hubbard as a liar was remarkably weak.
I'm glad they've moved on. I read NBR more frequently since Nick Bryant kindly put me on the free list, and it fills a value role - one undermined by extended fits of daftness like the Hubbard assault. The Dom Post is also onto the will-Fairfax-buy-NBR story I broke this week in the Listener.
Andrew Ecclestone chimed in on the issue of the Herald going "premium" by kindly directing me to the weblog of Neil McIntosh, the deputy editor of Guardian Unlimited, where McIntosh has a very good post about the unseemly - and quite possibly unfounded - excitement of some in the newspaper industry about the New York Times also starting to charge for its op-ed content.
Reader Richard Easther suggested that "the real question is why the Herald thinks its editoral columnists are worth $99 per year, when the NY Times will sell me access to its stable for US $50 -- considerably cheaper at today's exchange rate. And not only that, the Times online is free to home delivery subscribers."
Editor & Publisher has another story about the NYT move, noting:
The question, of course, remains: how quickly, and how many, other Web editors and bloggers will copy the columns in question and put them up on their own sites, daring the Times to sue them.
As Andrew points out, Herald columnist Colin James already posts his columns on his own website. Will others follow suit, just to stay in the conversation?
Thanks to the magic of the interweb, we've been checking out some of the new fall season shows on American television.
Among the comedies, Kitchen Confidential (yes, based on the book by Anthony Bourdain) is a fairly serious disappointment. You might have thought that this most New York of memoirs in the hands of Sex and the City creator Darren Starr would be edgy and funny. It isn't either of those. How I Met Your Mother isn't much better.
But My Name is Earl is funny and original - somewhere between Raising Arizona and Outrageous Fortune. Look forward to it. Everybody Hates Chris, a childhood memoir narrated by Chris Rock, also looks like a winner to us.
Also, the household Buffy fan has given a qualified thumbs up to the new David Boreanaz crime vehicle, Bones, with the caveat that the leads, Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel, are "above the material."
The funny thing is, all of these shows were announced yesterday in the new-season TV3 lineup. What's TVNZ got then?
A Newsday story adds fuel to the idea that the inhabitants of Jesusland have done a pretty good job of turning secular Iraq into Allahland: "Basra has become like Tehran, where morals are enforced not by family but by religious militias. This is no aberration, but quite possibly the future of Iraq."
Meanwhile, as Shi-ites flee Baghdad neighbourhoods, a University of Baghdad professor declares that "civil war today is closer than any time before."
The National Enquirer claims that George W. Bush is back on the turps. It's hazily sourced and probably not true, but the fact that the Enquirer figured it could get away with doing it suggests that the Bush mantle is really starting to slip.
Brian Boyko casts a sceptical eye over the new anti-obscenity squad being assembled at the FBI, as a "top priority" of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. It doesn't sound like it's too popular inside the agency either.
The Guardian interviews Steve Jobs.
Not such a smart move | Sep 22, 2005 09:32
The Herald has gone premium and the people are not happy. Several grumpy readers have contacted me about the New Zealand Herald's introduction yesterday of its new content policies. Opinion pieces are now "premium content" and to read them online you'll need to pay: $3 a day or $99 a year.
I might consider forking out myself as a business expense, but this is effectively the end of my - or any other blogger - linking to anything written by the Herald commentators covered by the policy.
I've written my take on this unfortunate move - blame Tony O'Reilly, basically - in this week's Listener, and pointed out that it could have been worse. I really think that the people at the Herald have done what they can to follow the boss's orders without screwing up a good online business, but their policy on link expiry is completely bonkers: if you find a story via the Herald's on-site search, the link will expire in seven days. If you find it some other way, it won't. No sign, however, of charging for use of the on-site search window, which was the plan at the time I wrote the Listener column. (If you want to avoid this craziness, search the site using Google. Type site:http://www.nzherald.co.nz/ then a space and then your search terms.)
Speaking of search, I figured Google Blog Search was a good thing, but the results it returns are idiosyncratic. More worryingly, it seems to be enabling a new wave of comments spam.
Synthetic Thoughts has an entry on something had had bypassed me completely: a New Zealand Post service that allows you to design personalised stamps via the Internet. Not cheap, but, one would think, a pretty groovy marketing device. He also rounds up some significant news in the world of digital TV and PVRs.
Boing Boing has a useful entry on non-lethal acoustic weapons, including links to photographs of one such device deployed outside the Superdome in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina and podcasts of an NPR programme on this new generation of crowd-control devices.
What the hell is going on in Iraq? I've been struggling to make sense of the Basra incident, but Juan Cole gathers the threads and offers a basic timeline. I also have to agree with his conclusion on the embezzlement of between one and two billion dollars from the Iraqi defence ministry, leaving it bereft:
Americans should be outraged at this news, which has now been reported twice by fine journalists in Iraq, but which has not become an issue in American politics. The embezzlement at the ministry of defense left the Iraqi military poorly equipped, and greatly delayed the moment at which it could take over from the US in providing security to the country. The embezzlement is directly tied to the Iraqi government losing control over its own capital, as reported here yesterday. The scale of it matches Saddam's kickbacks in the oil for food scandal, but the US journalists who were so outraged at the former don't seem to have the time of day for the embezzlement story.
Meanwhile, Riverbend has been examining the two Arabic and one English-language versions of the new Iraqi constitution and finds they're all different.
Looking like a winner | Sep 20, 2005 10:20
A good part of looking like a winner is acting like a winner, and as John Armstrong says today, Helen Clark is wasting no time doing that. Lots of handshakes and hongi, and a very clear intention to project a sense of business being carried on. You'd never guess from the countenance of the caretaker Prime Minister that it was very close indeed on election night, or that until the special votes come in, she can't conclusively claim to have won at all.
On the other hand, I'm struggling to recall a worse election-night performance than that of Peter Dunne - you'd have to go back to Mike Moore's infamous "long, cold night" speech in 1993, but even that was just an unfortunate ramble, rather than the strutting, pompous effort that Dunne put on. "The people have spoken!" he declared, neglecting to mention that "the people" had removed five of his eight MPs. His tirade against TV One's election night anchor Mark Sainsbury - preceded, apparently, by an abusive email to TV3's John Campbell - was simply embarrassing.
Amusingly, his extraordinarily presumptuous ultimatum about refusing to support a government where "the Greens sit around the Cabinet table" appeared to have evaporated by close of play yesterday. The realities of coalition politics may yet mean that Rod Donald doesn't get his Cabinet post, but by any measure the Greens have come out of Election 2005 with more credibility than Dunne and his silly party.
Meanwhile, it would appear that Tariana Turia's Maori Party colleagues have been making some effort to remove the chip from her shoulder. On election night, in what should have been an inclusive speech, she basically called "our people" cowards for giving Labour the lion's share of the party vote, even as they delivered four Maori Party electorate MPs. (Actually, that seemed to me to be a pretty savvy voting strategy: they knew that it was important for them to keep out National, and they could effectively get two MPs for the price of one if they split their votes.)
On the Sunday morning Checkpoint special she insisted that her party had never really believed that National would carry out its promise to abolish the Maori seats, and said she believed that it could still be subject to negotiation with National. When Katherine Ryan pointed out that they'd just spoken to Don Brash, who had in no uncertain terms reiterated that that the abolition of the seats was a "bottom line", Turia simply refused to acknowledge it. Yesterday's official release from party president Professor Whatarangi Winiata took a rather different tone, acknowledging that both Labour and National, each lacking an absolute majority, would naturally wish to talk to the Maori Party "but we will not resile from our earlier statement which made our position clear, that we will do our utmost to ensure that the National Party does not make it to the Government benches."
Former Act Party leader Richard Prebble did his bit for the cause yesterday, with a withering assault on National's election strategy and on Don Brash himself:
National ran a brilliant first past the post campaign. Unfortunately it was MMP. Don Brash is dreaming that he can form a coalition when he has eaten his allies. On the present results a National led government would have to rely on the Maori Party. Not credible. Our advice to Brash is to tell Murray McCully to stop plotting and concede that National cannot form a government even if the specials result in the Greens falling below the threshold …
A very large number of the 210,000 specials to be counted are invalid. Voters not on the roll who turn up to vote are given a special vote. If they do not have a late valid enrolment the vote is not counted. We doubt that there are more than 120,000 valid votes to count, unlikely to change the result.
Prebble also endorses John Key as "the candidate from central casting - he never forgets his lines." It think it's a pretty sound piece of analysis, and not likely to be the last given that Prebble has set up The Letter with its own website. (But is it really "NZ's largest email newsletter"? I think not.)
I'm actually happy enough to see Rodney Hide back in the House. He's an effective MP, and, with its wackjobs dismissed and its two best MPs returned (ie: Rodney and Heather Roy), Act now has the perfect platform from which to sort itself out. I would expect that unless he does anything really stupid, Rodney will own Epsom for as long as he wants it. And I bet National won't campaign against him the way it did this time.
Prebble is also on the money when he looks at what won Labour the election: its successful strategy of seeking to mobilise its vote in safe urban seats. The work put in there was work that didn't go into marginal seats in the regions - where Labour is starting to disappear from view. This is certainly a problem for Labour - it should start finding strong candidates in those seats as soon as the dust settles - but it's also a problem for National, which needs to find some way of getting the raw numbers out of the cities.
Brian Rudman explored the same theme, concluding that Labour should be very grateful for its core urban support:
While their fair-weather supporters deserted them in provincial towns such as Timaru, Invercargill and Hastings, Aucklanders stayed staunch, and in particular that goes for the Pacific Islanders and Maori of South Auckland, where party officials say the turnout was not only heavier than usual but also predominantly in favour of Labour.
It was the votes in these high-turnout seats, reported in late, that nudged Labour into the lead on Saturday night.
Colin James intones grimly on the need for the next government to "remarry town and country", but I'm not sure if the divisions exposed by the election are all that intractable. Labour's greater problem is that under-performing electorate MPs have been returned to Parliament on its list, and that they're there at the expense of fresh talent. Sure, Shane Jones and Maryan Street arrive, but bright young candidates like Phil Twyford and Stuart Nash, who fought well in hopeless suburban Auckland seats, have to wait another three years for a real shot. I seriously doubt that Labour MPs will get list placings simply for being there next time around. (Or that Labour would go into another election without a better tax policy.)
National, on the other hand, has an excellent intake, led by Tim Groser, who, even given his lack of Parliamentary experience, is surely the answer to its need for a safe pair of hands in Foreign Affairs. As close as National got - and for all the kind words spoken about Brash on the night - I think it's now time for National to move on. A National team fronted by the likes of Key, Groser and Katherine Rich would look modern, relevant and formidable.
And moi? Fairly shattered. Unlike seemingly everyone else, I didn't get terribly drunk on election night, but I'd already done that part the night before. A bunch of us went to see David Kilgour and SJD at the King's Arms. David was good, quite low-key, and SJD were the unlikeliest Friday-night-at-the-pub band you could imagine. When they dip into 1970s LA white funk it is so uncool, and yet it's lovely and entrancing. There was a nice sense of warmth and community there on the night; like church, only more out-of-it. There were not a lot of National voters in the house. (Oh, and cheers to the various Hard News punters I ran into on the night - I did enjoy having a rave.)
On Sunday, I did what I like to do on important days, and fetched some of the usual suspects around for a slap-up lunch and too much wine, then fell asleep on the couch. I find all that immensely satisfying, although the kids took some justifiable amusement in me conking out before they did.
So it was a little bit of a struggle to get out the door last night for the special preview screening of Serenity, but it was well worthwhile. It was actually the second such screening - the first, in a 250-capacity, cinema, sold out instantly, and there were upwards of 400 excited geeks there when the doors opened on the mega-screen last night. UIP has hopefully learned a useful lesson about the power of grassroots fandom.
I promised Paul Brislen I wouldn't give out any spoilers (the film's not back until November), so suffice to say that if you're familiar with the worlds of Joss Whedon you won't be disappointed. There was even a special pre-recorded message from Joss himself before hand. What a nice man.
PS: An apology to Span for not acknowledging her good work on profiling the political affiliations of New Zealand bloggers when I quoted the results in The Listener lately. That was remiss of me. Help me make up for it by going and visiting Spanblather.
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