Hard News: All this and more
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Y'know -- no, really, I was -- I had been wondering what Ian Wishart was up to.
And now you have your answer - Ian's been writing 'Absolute Power: The Helen Clark Years', an impartial, even-handed look at Clark as a woman, a leader, a high-flying politician and a satanic childless lesbian pawn of Pyongyang.
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WH:
Good point. Obviously there is only so much that governments can do to control things that are determined by international markets (the price of dairy products, international credit crises, rising price of oil etc), but I suppose that is cold comfort for people struggling to make their mortgage repayments, buy their groceries and pay their utility and petrol bills.
I do not see the slowing of the housing market as a bad thing, but perhaps that bubble should never have been allowed to develop as it did.
In America, McMansions were ground zero of the sub-prime meltdown. The little Machiavellian in me is tempted to think that a similar meltdown would be the prescription for NZ's housing bubble. Not to mention the ideal PR case against urban sprawl. It would certainly teach the Quarter Acre Cartel a few lessons.
The economy will certainly be an issue come election time. But I think a much bigger issue can be summed up in two words: culture war.
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DeepRed:
Well, bring on some scarf-wearing weirdos and we can have ourselves a merry little kulturkampf that would have Bismark spinning in his grave with glee. I think there are people on both the left and the right who'd quite like to play at being Pat Buchanan, but they should meditate on Pyrrhus of Epirus' assessment of the Battle of Asculum.
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WH,
One of my favourite columnists, EJ Dionne, wrote this piece about the US Culture Wars recently. A touch optimistic perhaps, but the rise of more moderate US Christian leaders and the miserable failure that is George W. Bush may yet combine to realign US politics towards the social justice left.
Í´m sure the secularist wing of the party is having to bite its tongue, but it is good to see the Democrats try to break down the strangehold conservatives have had on US religious/political discourse.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702847.html
And someone at the Guardian wrote this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/13/budget.economy
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