Politics around the blogs

Liberty Scott has a round-up of a few interesting and possibly even hopeful points over recent days from some of NZ's parliamentary parties. From National: Brash talks about nanny state... but; from Labour: The tiny libertarian part of Labour; and from ACT: ACT on Campus on decriminalising marijuana - which, says The Tory, "will only happen with bold men and women prepared to state the case, especially MPs." If only there were some.

Instead of bold men and women, as Sus points out, we have growth in bureaucracy without any corresponding improvement in anything noticeable.

Meanwhile, with the Tasmanian miners freed, tributes are pouring in from all over. Personally, I like this one from Southern Gent posted just before their release: The miners are majors.

If you want to stop Cullen's ridiculous proposal to tax capital gains on money from overseas that you haven't yet made, Whinging in New Zealand has a link to a protest site put together by GPG.

Based on recent decisions not to prosecute various Labour Party luminaries despite at least the appearance of prima facie reasons to do so -- the latest being the decision not to prosecute for buying the election, reported with a very unpleasant headline -- Whale Oil suggests that the best thing lawyer Rob Moodie can do to avoid being prosecuted for contempt for releasing the Army report on the Berrymans' bridge is ... to join the Labour Party himself.

And for NZ Music Month, musician The Tomahawk Kid has some thoughts on musicians, moochers and looters, and lists some of his own favourite NZ music, as does the G-Man.

And on "that leak," TK suggests you don't "be taken in by the government's smokescreen -- trying to get the heat off what they have done by trying to find a scapegoat. Look to the perpetrators of the real crime." Quite right.

The leaker, if he or she was genuine (and not a Labour stooge panted intentionally to create a diversion), deserves not approbation but a medal. As I said the other day, "Whoever the whistle-blower was, whoever divulged Cabinet's plan to nationalise Telecom's network, did exactly the right thing. What the whistle-blower did was warn a victim of burglary what he overheard the burglars planning to do to them. It was a moral act.

And speaking of spin and Telecom, Russell Brown of Hard News posted an out-of-context remark from Theresa Gattung purporting to "explaining [Telecom's] incumbent telco business model: using "confusion" as a "marketing tool" to maintain prices and margins." As you'd expect with any out-of context snippet used in such a fashion, less than the whole truth is not the truth; as Telecom's John Goulter explains the full clip at Telecom's site apparently shows that what Gattung was talking about was Telecom's plan to simplify their pricing model, quite the opposite of the confusion Brown was clearly hoping to generate with his spin. Shame. Herald story here.

And just to confirm that I won't be talking about Dancing with the Stars. Ever. Although I might mention Chuck Norris occasionally instead -- Jimmy Jangles has the top Chuck facts here.

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UPDATE: Link to full Telecom speech added. Russell Brown defends his out-of-context flim-flammery with it. Apparently he feels that all is well with posting such stuff without the full context as long as it gets you noticed.
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TAGS: Politics-NZ