Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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but I quite like not having Brian Tamaki or Kyle Chapman as MPs.
(ok, I know they got nowhere near 0.8%, but that may be because people knew they had no chance and didn't waste their votes).
Well, Brian Tamaki wasn't running so that counts him out, but in 2005 Destiny did get enough votes that Richard Lewis would have been elected were there no threshold.
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Boccia is also one of three Paralympic sports that have no Olympic counterpart; points shall be awarded to those who guess the other two in the comments.
Well, one would be "the bastard child of rugby, rugby league", the other I had to turn to wikipedia - can't say I saw it, Goalball sounds an awful lot like handball to me :-)
the 20,000 seat Pepsi Centre (where the Democrats recently did their thing)
I thought they were at Mile High?
Convention at the Pepsi Centre; Obama's speech (i.e. the last day of the convention) at Mile High.
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Graeme!!?? I understood (maybe) that now the ETS bill is passed, there's no more chance for a vote of no confidence & they're home & hosed. Or is that not until parliament stops sitting?
David Farrar has a post on the issue. Crux quote:
Some people think that just because no formal confidence vote is scheduled, the Prime Minister can remain in office without having the confidence of the House. This is not so. No Right Turn has a good post on this issue. You need to have the confidence of the House, even without a formal vote scheduled.
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So basically, the list/electorate balance is never revisited after the election?
Which means also that if a party (as might have happened) misses threshold and has no MPs, then one of their members gets elected at a byelection somehow, they only get the electorate MP, not the list ones.
Yes. It also means that if a party misses the threshold, and the party leader takes an election petition in their seat, and proves his their opponent stole ballots and replaced them with ballots for herself. But the real ballots are found, and the leader proves conclusively that he actually won the electorate, and the opponent is convicted of the corrupt practice of stealing and faking ballots, and receives the maximum penalty for that heinous crime against democracy (six months' imprisonment), there still isn't a reallocation of list seats, and all that party gets, despite getting enough votes for say 5 seats, is the leader's electorate seat.
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__if Winston won the Tauranga seat then Labour's nemesis - the Nats - would have lost a seat in Parliament.__
Under MMP?
No. It would've been their next list candidate in, rather than Bob Clarkson.
Graeme?!
Sorry - I was in a meeting :-)
There would have been a by-election. Clarkson is an electorate candidate, he'd have lost his electorate seat. National would be one person down while waiting for the by-election, and would have stayed one-person if they'd lost the by-election.
If Winston had one a by-election, he'd presumably resign his list seat before taking it up, and New Zealand First would have picked up an extra list member.
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There isn't a minister for retail
There is one for consumer affairs ... is that close enough?
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Obama has promised to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which is a hugely significantly step nationally and internationally as the US is not known for ratifying UN conventions.
Has he also promised to get the required 67 votes in the US Senate needed to actually ratify this (or any other) UN Convention?
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Don't belive everything you read on the Internet, eh?
From this NYTimes article.
__This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 5, 2008
An article on Tuesday about concerns over Senator John McCain’s background check of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, his choice of running mate, misstated the history of her political party affiliation. As The Times has since reported, she has been a registered Republican since 1982; she was not for a couple of years in the 1990s a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, which advocates a vote on whether her state should secede.__The more I read through it, the more in awe of the authors I am.
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The ultimate Palin rumour aggregation site is up and running. 69 and counting.
Now 71. Great page too. I haven't gone through all the links, but it seems reasonably comprehensive. It's nice that it's playing a relatively even hand and putting up ones that are true too.
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That passage labours under a syntax that would stop the heart of a horse, it offers an idiom previously unknown to the english language
It's interesting that you reference is now the sole one before the:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.
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this empty pant suit
Mostly, I thought she'd been wearing skirts - though I haven't been giving it my absolute attention...