What on earth was all that about? The Prime Minister's broadside yesterday at the Green Party - and in particular, its co-leader, Jeanette Fitzsimons - looks not only unwise, but quite unjustified.
Fitzsimmons' offence appears to have been voting with Opposition MPs to ask Helen Clark to appear before the Corngate select committee inquiry. There was no chance of that happening - Labour and United Future members on the committee had a majority in voting against it - and it simply does not answer the description of the smear campaign Clark implied that Fitzsimons had been running against her.
Let's get this straight: National Nick Smith has wandered in very late in the piece and had notable success - especially given that his "new" documents were released last November - in embarrassing the government over the events of late 2000 and early 2001. Act sniffed blood and piled in with a frankly warped "letter" that seems to deliberately confuse several issues. Even Winston Peters - sniffing the kind of fear that delivers him votes - has wobbled over into calling for a moratorium extension.
But the Greens? Gimme a break. They asked for, and were granted, the inquiry. They didn't set the terms of reference, but were consulted on them, and declared themselves happy. Fitzsimons seems to have conducted herself with a degree of measure missing from the Prime Minister's conduct over this matter. If, as committee chair, she has taken a proprietorial interest in the inquiry, well, she's hardly the first member to do that.
Yet yesterday Clark even re-heated the suggestion that senior Greens were in on the publication of Nicky Hager's Seeds of Distrust. This was a reasonable question to ask in the heated weeks after the book's contrived, explosive launch last year, and at least one Green Party member, the book's publisher, Craig Potton, knew the book was coming. But I'm not aware of any evidence that suggests the Green leadership was in on it, and if the Prime Minister has any, she ought to produce it.
Assuming there is a strategy behind this - and not just an attack of bile (and that there isn't some dastardly Green action we don't know about) - it's obviously one of dealing with the issue by going on the attack. Perhaps there's some longer-term, post-moratorium aim. Perhaps the focus groups say that people love it when the PM enters talking-about-herself-in-the-third-person mode. But the short-term effect of bashing the Greens for something they haven't done has just been to increase the impression the government is protesting too much.
Here's a good one. At the same time as US copyright law is being used for force ISPs to hand over its customers' private information to the RIAA, and as the USA Patriot Act allows federal agents to seize things like library borrowing records without a warrant, the American government is funding the use and distribution of software that offers individuals anonymity on the Internet: but only if they're Iranian.
More on Scoop's scoop on the Diebold voting machines. A letter from Diebold's CEO that says he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." At the least, this is a rather tasteless promise for a man selling voting machines to make ...
The Dutch get all sensible over medicinal marijuana and make it available on prescription in pharmacies, along with instructions for brewing it as tea and using it with an inhaler. Anarchy in the streets looming? Hardly.
Reports of a planned Australian launch of Apple's iTunes Music Store before the end of the year. Over here, Apple's local people have talked to the record companies, but the chief obstacle is our limp uptake of broadband Internet.
An extraordinary and inspiring announcement from the BBC that has been lost in all the Hutton headlines. The corporation is planning to digitise and offer for download, for free, as much of its back catalogue of programmes that it can legally do, from the earliest radio reels to nature documentaries to educational programmes. Anyone will be allowed to re-use, re-edit, mix and share this material with their own, provided it's for non-commercial use. The project is called the BBC Creative Archive. Rock on.
And finally, thanks for coming. Public Address logged about 35,000 visits from 15,000 unique users last month, our best yet. Cheers!