Advertisment
Written By: Eddie - Date published: 2:14 pm, March 17th, 2010 - 18 comments
I tried to write a satire of John Armstrong’s column today along the lines of the ‘Beloved Key‘ one I did the other day. But I’ve had to give it away. It’s beyond parody.
So, I guess I’ll do some serious analysis instead.
Written By: Eddie - Date published: 11:35 am, March 17th, 2010 - 56 comments
The New Zealand Herald has never been shy of attacking blogs for their lack of journalistic standards and editorial rigour, but given some of their recent work you’ve got to wonder who they think they’re kidding.
Take today’s woeful piece by Dita De Boni pontificating about Charles Chauvel and those screaming kids on his plane.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:49 am, March 10th, 2010 - 24 comments
“Tolley finds ally in school mum” screams the headline of Audrey Young’s piece today.
When National runs a bus tour the Herald is desperate in its attempts to drum up support, when it’s Labour all they want to talk about is how much the bus is costing the taxpayer.
Written By: John A - Date published: 10:03 am, February 12th, 2010 - 24 comments
The best political commentary these days doesn’t come from the political journalists. As Zetetic shows, they have turned themselves into government minders.
But there are others who tell it like it is. Such as Karlo Mila in today’s DomPost. The article was headed up “If you could just suck it up, that would be nice.”
A few …
Written By: IrishBill - Date published: 1:10 pm, February 1st, 2010 - 85 comments
I see the DomPost is running a sniveling editorial claiming Labour’s commitment to raising the minimum wage can’t be done.
It then breaks out the dodgy unadjusted maths to claim Labour would never have lifted the minimum wage to $15 if it was in power because it “only” lifted it by $5 last time and then …
Written By: Eddie - Date published: 10:25 am, December 14th, 2009 - 22 comments
Colin Espiner has a piece in the Dom Post today attributing Labour’s four point rise in the polls to Goff’s ‘Nationhood’ speech.
He goes on, in what can’t help but be interpreted as a wee dig at The Standard:
after 30 years in politics, it’s also possible [Goff] knows the electorate a bit better than some of …
Written By: Dancr - Date published: 9:00 am, December 7th, 2009 - 20 comments
All the arguments in one handy location – thank you Rod Oram, who in his SSTimes column says:
…All it [the report] can say is: we’re not sure what the problems are or what we can do about them. But much lower taxes, government spending and regulation will do the trick. It offers no evidence or …
Written By: Dancr - Date published: 2:30 pm, December 1st, 2009 - 81 comments
I’ve been thinking about the reaction Phil Goff has had to his Nationhood speech, and whether Team Labour would be happy with the way it’s rolled out. Got headlines, tick, got commentators to notice, tick, appealed to demographic ‘non-Labour voting male’, tick, made some positioning statements on policy, tick. But what about the down side?
Allowed …
Written By: Dancr - Date published: 8:56 pm, November 2nd, 2009 - 4 comments
The American asks:
Who are smarter, liberals or conservatives? This is the kind of question that could spark fierce and endless debates between political opponents, but what if we could know, scientifically, that one side has the edge in brainpower? Should that change how we think about political issues?
This interesting article points out that to succeed …
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 1:30 pm, November 2nd, 2009 - 17 comments
I think Granny Herald must have shares in Infratil, based on her rubbish editorial today:
Particular fervour is reserved for private-sector participation in this sector, perhaps because water is one of life’s necessities. Rarely is it conceded that, in reality, it occupies the same utility bag as electricity, which in this country and elsewhere has been …
Written By: Eddie - Date published: 2:51 pm, October 20th, 2009 - 5 comments
Tim Hazledine, a professor of economics at the University of Auckland, has a nice piece in the Herald today that lays out just how absurd National’s spin about the ACC “blowout” really is.
Suppose you and your spouse are in charge of a family of, say, three young children. That means you are legally responsible for …
Written By: Dancr - Date published: 9:29 pm, October 19th, 2009 - 2 comments
Pausing for a moment from the steamroller of local politics – here we have some of the significant moments of the last nine years, courtesy of the Guardian. They’ve put together these images of the ’00’s. What would a Kiwi version look like?
Written By: Eddie - Date published: 11:26 am, October 15th, 2009 - 5 comments
Very good editorial on ACC in The Independent today. The article’s offline, but it’s quite clear about why the Government is trying to manufacture a crisis over the financial position of ACC:
ACC currently collects sufficient levies to meet each year’s claims – it has levy revenue of $4.1b in the 2009 June year, compared with …
Written By: Tammy Gordon - Date published: 2:45 pm, September 9th, 2009 - 53 comments
An email doing the rounds of the women’s networks found its way to me today. It’s link to an article about the late Sophie Elliott, fomerly of Otago University and the essay she wrote on equity and and equality.
Sophie may have been heading to Treasury the week she was murdered but when you read this …
Written By: The Standard - Date published: 2:30 pm, July 28th, 2009 - 60 comments
A reader sent through this article from the Guardian by Malalai Joya, who was the youngest woman to enter the Afghan parliament before being suspended for denouncing the warlords and war criminals sitting beside her.
Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed …
Written By: The Standard - Date published: 1:33 pm, July 22nd, 2009 - 12 comments
Gordon Campbell has a great piece over at Scoop about Treasury’s latest ideological outburst and the resurrection of Don Brash. He points out the futility of choosing a man who played a large role in creating our wage gap with Australia in the first place to head a commission designed to close it:
Brash wants to …
Written By: The Standard - Date published: 5:40 pm, July 15th, 2009 - 15 comments
Gordon Campbell has a great piece up at Scoop on the pitfalls of Public Private Partnerships, something we’re going to be hearing a lot more about in the near future if National and its business mates get their way. Go have a read.
Written By: Dancr - Date published: 9:42 pm, July 1st, 2009 - 11 comments
When we talk politics we often use words like positioning, frame, context – words are a vital part of the programme of political communication. Here’s a really interesting thought from US academic Lera Boroditsky, who asks How does our language shape the way we think?
…patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in …
Written By: Dancr - Date published: 6:41 pm, June 28th, 2009 - 3 comments
I was in relaxed, Saturday mode, perusing the Dom Post at my leisure. Then I read this from Tracey Watkins and checked that the world had not shifted in alignment:
Has the Government lost its mojo? How else to explain the uncanny quiet that has descended on the Beehive in recent weeks? It may be that …
Written By: Dancr - Date published: 12:30 pm, June 13th, 2009 - 9 comments
I know political animals are watching Mt Albert today, but something to read in the meantime on the psychology of buying ‘green’. We hear it in a myriad of places and phrases, from sustainability to the need to buy what’s best for the environment. But how much is that really a motivator, and how much …
Written By: IrishBill - Date published: 3:06 pm, June 10th, 2009 - 9 comments
Kevin Roberts has a new post up on his Herald blog, “From the Edge”. What a load of bloody waffle.
To think in the 80’s and 90’s people used to take the man seriously. Mind you they took neo-liberalism seriously too. Perhaps Roberts is due a comeback along with all the other old tat.
Written By: Dancr - Date published: 1:41 pm, May 23rd, 2009 - 1 comment
A cold weekend afternoon. Perfect timing for a distracting article on Twitter, Adderall, lifehacking, mindful jogging, power browsing, Obama’s BlackBerry, and the benefits of overstimulation. Sam Anderson presents thoughts in defence of distraction.
Over the last several years, the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention. We hunt it in …
Written By: Dancr - Date published: 10:23 pm, May 16th, 2009 - 26 comments
Whenever I spot one of the dual electric/petrol cars I always find myself a little fascinated and a little envious. But I have to admit the likelihood of my actually owning one seems remote. Maybe I need to be pushed along, as this article from the Herald Sun suggests:
A proposal to ban sales of …
Written By: Dancr - Date published: 10:42 pm, May 14th, 2009 - 13 comments
I’m a little re-created – some mysteriousness with my profile means I am re-defined “similar but different” for the time being. But I haven’t stopped reading and I thought these were an interesting series of observations on the current state of play:
Colin Espiner: This is, without a doubt, National’s worst week in government. And it’s …
Written By: Tane - Date published: 10:00 am, May 2nd, 2009 - 26 comments
No Right Turn highlights Thursday’s Herald editorial calling for our political leaders to step up and take some leadership in the republic debate.
The Herald argues:
If republican sentiment is to blossom, it needs to be galvanised from above. Such a process, done well, would lead to a seeping into the national consciousness of the idea that …
Written By: Tane - Date published: 2:00 pm, May 1st, 2009 - 39 comments
If you’d told me the Herald would use International Workers’ Day as an opportunity to preach class warfare I wouldn’t have believed you. But there’s really no other way to describe today’s editorial.
We all know the Government is running a large deficit at the moment. Of course, the deficit would be much smaller (about $2.5 …
Written By: Tane - Date published: 9:44 pm, April 28th, 2009 - 29 comments
Gordon Campbell’s latest Scoop column takes a very critical view of the Greens’ Memorandum of Understanding with National. While the Greens’ strategy is based on the need to cooperate with what they see as a likely two-term National Government, Campbell argues their cooperation may help turn that likelihood into a certainty.
Despite the genuine merits of …
Written By: Dancer - Date published: 8:23 am, March 30th, 2009 - 22 comments
The irony of this article struck me when this week the well-off get the biggest boost to their wallet. From the Guardian
:
The chancellor is preparing to channel cash to poorer families in his budget as part of a mini-fiscal stimulus to kick-start the economy and protect the vulnerable. Senior cabinet figures are backing a campaign …
Written By: Eddie - Date published: 7:03 pm, March 16th, 2009 - 29 comments
Sadly, I couldn’t find Colin Espiner’s excellent piece in The Press today online. It’s good. Colin’s thoughtful observations derail the government’s PR spin about That Nice Man Mr Key and his commonsense centrist approach.
He wonders whether the National government is taking advantage of the economic crisis to push through hard-right reforms Kiwis didn’t vote for.
‘‘Never …
Written By: Dancer - Date published: 11:32 am, March 16th, 2009 - 12 comments
A conversation that seems to be occuring more and more frequently is asking what’s the future of our newspapers? It’s a global question and is examined in some depth in this interesting article from The American which says:
Speculation about the future of the newspaper or its equivalents should start with a review of the newspaper …
Comments