Posts by Ian Dalziel
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Hard News: It was a munted year, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Dominion of the damned...
Glenn Livingstone, for example, is part of this co-op project to make new sections affordable for red zone residents, the sort of thing the government and council should have done but haven’t.
Too, true - removing property caveats such as those that hampered the Haywoods would have helped many more folk as well...
I think Brownlee only exercises 'Special Powers' that cause grief and pain, he has done very little (if anything) that has had a beneficial effect at a human level.
I sometimes wonder if this whole thing isn't part of a much larger Magickal working, because someone is gonna have to send all these pesky demons back to whence they came when this is all over... -
Southerly: Coming Up For Air, in reply to ChrisW,
Breakdown town...*
A fart joke on a higher plane.
Though I'm guessing they don't serve
beans on long haul plane trips...
(While balloonists may benefit from them)*Can't imagine a world without s.p.u.d.s
:- ) -
The Gerry-mandering continues…
Wake to a grey morning, headline on The Press
"Quake Minister Brownlee scolds council" – a ray of hope methinks…
but no, I’m still living in a fools paradise!
Rather than chastise their fiscal imprudence…Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee has accused “parts” of the Christchurch City Council of slowing the earthquake recovery and has refused to rule out sacking councillors.
Days after being reappointed, Brownlee waded into Christchurch politics, accusing some councillors of being ill-informed and not supporting Mayor Bob Parker.
“There is a case for some elected members of the council to step up and learn a little more about what is going on than they know at the moment.
“We need to get past the idea that we are waiting for someone else to do it,” he said.
“I have great sympathy for the mayor. I don’t know that he is all that well supported by the council.”So Brownlee will maintain the status quo (Bob and his motley ‘A Team’ crew of ex media faces and clowns), and get rid of any voices raised in question on behalf of the ratepayers (the so-called ‘B Team’ of people who are doing what they were elected to do).
It’s gonna be a long three years…
Bastards…<snap - Joe ! - nice comment at the Press website yesterday, too>
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Hard News: It was a munted year, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Tiny Emirate...
Now Marryatt is paid more dollar for dollar than Julia Gillard.
Now Marryatt is paid more than $1 for every person in Christchurch...
I think we should all be allowed to personally deliver our dollar to him
(I'm thinking of him in a silo that we can drop the coins in it and make him say "thank you, I'm here to serve..." while he does his Scrooge McDuck impersonation...
Oh and he should quit his other 5 jobs (paid directorships) as well,
to better concentrate on earning his mammothly munificent Mammon.I'm gonna lose karmic points for this I know...
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Legal Beagle: 14 Pages of Democracy, in reply to izogi,
The vulgar vote men...
Aren't there meant to be party scrutineers during the counts to catch this sort of thing, or does that not always happen at the smaller polling places?
I just read a great article on LBJ's 1948 election in Texas ( New Yorker, Jan 29, 1990 ) - how he spread lies and bought votes, allegedly with Brown and Root's money (Brown & Root became KBR a division of Halliburton), how the various counties/fiefdom bosses basically kept scrutineers away, stuffed ballot boxes, and whatever else it took...
from one source:
Johnson had it a little easier, as his symbiotic relationship with Brown & Root occurred before campaign finance laws required candidates to reveal the sources of their funding. Indeed, by Johnson's own admission, according to his biographer Ronnie Dugger, much of the money he got from Brown & Root came in cash. In return, Johnson steered lucrative federal contracts to the company. Those contracts helped Brown & Root become a global construction powerhouse that today employs 20,000 people and operates in more than 100 countries.
"It was a totally corrupt relationship and it benefited both of them enormously," says Dugger, the author of The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson. "Brown & Root got rich, and Johnson got power and riches." Without Brown & Root's money, Johnson wouldn't have won (or rather, been able to steal) the 1948 race for U.S. Senate. "That was the turning point. He wouldn't have been in the running without Brown & Root's money and airplanes. And the 1948 election allowed Lyndon to become president," said Dugger, who is currently running for the Green Party's nomination for the U.S. Senate in New York.
and from wikipedia:
The runoff count took a week. The Democratic State Central Committee (not the State of Texas, because the matter was a party primary) handled the count, and it finally announced that Johnson had won by 87 votes. By a majority of one member (29-28) the committee voted to certify Johnson's nomination, with the last vote cast on Johnson's behalf by Temple, Texas, publisher Frank W. Mayborn, who rushed back to Texas from a business trip in Nashville, Tennessee.
There were many allegations of fraud on both sides. Thus one writer alleges that Johnson's campaign manager, future Texas governor John B. Connally, was connected with 202 ballots in Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County that had curiously been cast in alphabetical order and just at the close of polling, with all of the people whose names appeared on the ballots being dead on election day. Robert Caro argued in his 1989 book that Johnson had stolen the election in Jim Wells County and other counties in South Texas, as well as rigging 10,000 ballots in Bexar County alone. A judge, Luis Salas, said in 1977 that he had certified 202 fraudulent ballots for Johnson.
my emphasis
Those were the days, eh?
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I remember listening to this…
I remember Chris filming it at our place
(well his and Barbara’s, I just flatted there)
I think those may even be my sheets on the
lounge walls (no expense spared at Studio Hakanoa!)
I remember all those young folk, Tex and Ged, too…
I just didn’t remember that I was in it, albeit briefly!
…accidental immortality!Thanks Mysterex
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to WH,
Going Busch...
if I had Max and Maurice alone in a room I'd do something unspeakable
makes me think of those other bad boys Max and Moritz
House...
I've been swearing in the MPs myself today:
That Bast**d John Key
F**kin' Bill English
Bl**dy Nicky Wagner
etc... -
Hard News: It was a munted year, in reply to Roger,
‘main trunk sewer’
Like Taumarunui on the main trunk...
</coat> -
Capture: Colour is the new black, in reply to Richard Aston,
light, as a feather...
but looking at that peacock for too long
and I can feel an altered state coming on.a (re)calibration of life...
the you're so vane dept...feather : any of the flat appendages growing from a bird's skin and forming its plumage, consisting of a partly hollow horny shaft fringed with vanes of barbs.
sounds remarkably like cocksmen of all species...
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Capture: Colour is the new black, in reply to Richard Aston,
Fan antics...
what on earth drives that kind
of “Look at me!” display.Lookame mate
me meat
we meet
mate me
strike a pose
strike a chord
in accord
harmonics
vibration
a tone
big resonancy,
the sound of colour
creates a space
patterns perceived
pulchritude
pooling
pulling
pulsing
coruscating
on thin eyes