Posts by Russell Brown
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Yippee, a US election post with only passing reference to the Governor of Alaska and in which an issue has actually been raised.
I couldn't do that to you, Angus.
The McCain campaign announces that Palin will no longer co-operate with the official Troopergate enquiry, because it is "tainted".
(Interestingly, the Palin camp's explanation for Monegan's firing -- that he disobeyed Palin and went to Washington to get federal funds to investigate sexual assault cases that his governor would not give him budget for -- kinda plays into the whole "rape kit" thing from Wasilla.)
Also: former Palin crony backs up NYT account of Palin cronyism.
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__You can make a serious fiscally conservative argument against Obama's economic policies.__
Craig, I could hug you. I really do wish this case was being made by conservative movements across the globe.
What, instead of bad-faith ads about how the Scary Black Liberal wants to teach sex to six year-olds? Do tell.
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Cheering. Everyone has their own style when it comes to cheering the team. My technique is mainly to just be loud with coherent as a secondary concern.
Over years of watching top sport while the rest of the household is asleep, I have perfected the silent cheer. The team scores, you leap to your feet, open your throat and punch the air. But there is no sound.
I'll leave someone else to formulate the "tree falls in the forest" joke.
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Yes, I did get straight in but didn't like the Best available on offer, so waited, eventually got back in (by which time I was beginning to regret not taking the best available) and got where I wanted.
Bah. The internet does not like me.
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And lets not forget this was despite the breathless reporting of IRA-style attacks and napalm which as I understand it did not come from the leaked affadavit, as I don't believe it was yet in the defence's hands.
The talk of the IRA manual is in the affidavit, but I suspect you're right and that it was fed to reporters very early on by police. I don't approve of that either, but several of the defendants and their surrogates subsequently crossed a line themselves. And like I said, Valerie Morse has a bloody nerve.
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You have conflated John Minto talking about the evidence from one set of intercepts about the defendant mentioned in his article, to being about all the intercepts. Minto makes it clear that he's talking very specifically here, yet you seem to ignore this. You've done this previously, I'm not sure why you continue to continue to misread the same article.
In other words, he's doing exactly what I said -- and what the solictor general is so pissed off at the Dom Post for doing -- talking up a selected part of the evidence that suits his purposes. That was precisely my point.
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Did anyone manage to buy Warriors tickets online via Ticketek this morning?
I hammered away at the reload button this morning -- getting error messages, failed loads and "try again" messages -- and eventually got through after an hour, by which time the seats Ticketek said were available weren't really available, because the ground had sold out.
Is it really impossible for Ticketek to scale properly for events like this?
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__the defendants and their supporters were also making extraordinary claims on their own behalf.__
The one defendant I know personally was strongly advised by his/her/its lawyer to make no public claims, and did not. Nor did I see anything more extraordinary claimed with respect to that person than "X would never do such a thing, that is unlike the X I know."
There was far more expressed than that by some defendants and, more especially, surrogates such as John Minto. He certainly felt free to use his privileged access to evidence and presence in court to deliver his own spin on suppressed evidence.
Remember the newspaper column he wrote declaring that the intercepts -- the same ones the Dom Post quoted -- picked up:
nothing one wouldn't hear on a Saturday afternoon at any gun club around New Zealand – even before the beer comes out.
It was all quite surreal. Those of us sitting in court were incredulous. The lack of substance to the evidence we heard was frankly embarrassing.
Minto explicitly set himself up as an adviser and spokesman for the defendants, and he had no compunction about selectively quoting privileged evidence to influence public opinion about the case. And he wasn't the only one to do so.
This article on CounterPunch by one of the accused, Valerie Morse, is a disgrace. It kind of makes my blood boil when she says:
I was arrested, I believe, to provide a cloak for the racist nature of the operation.
There's a good reply to that, but it involves currently suppressed evidence. Morse is simply using the vacuum to spin the story for public consumption.
There there's this extensive account of the gathering of the intercept evidence on the website of Morse's publishing venture. As usual, the account is selective, and the reader is invited to see the police investigation as solely political in motivation.
So, yeah, I had a problem with that.
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I'm not necessarily advocating for it, but there is certainly a school of thought that the Govt can spend it's way through global recession...
Quite. I'm surprised it's being touted as such an issue this morning. The money fleeing the markets is already going into government bonds, which bears out your argument about risk-averseness. You could also make the case that it's a course permitted by the strong state of the government's books now.
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Wheee! I have a hyphenated doctrine
Well, I figured that if Fran O was going to go around conferring them, I'd dish out a few myself ...
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