Suffrage and suffering

"Once is happenstance. Twice coincidence. Third time is hostile action."

It should be Obama by a landslide, but there's the very real possibility that rigged electronic voting and other forms of disenfranchising could still land the Loose Moose in the White House. Gordon Campbell's worried, and he's mentioning the half of it.

OK, so what do you want to hack, Diebold or Sequoia? How about taking people who have lost their homes off the roll? How about preventing people without photo ID from voting? Hurrah for the Dept of Homeland Security's plan for Real ID, not. Tim Robbins made an impassioned plea on Real Time with Bill Maher last week to not take this vote for granted. Vote. If you're told you can't vote and you know you're registered, vote anyway. Vote with a "provisional ballot."

Over here in NZ, our voting process is much more honest. It's transparent, like a used KFC napkin.

Boomer bashing

(Click to embiggen)

From the excellent Grant Buist

Outside the parallelogram

• After the attempted assault on the PM yesterday, police have taken the Riccarton Mall food court floor in for questioning. Charges of being part of an organised gangway are expected to be laid later today.
• Following a tip-off from an anonymous source, Mike Williams and a team from the Labour Parliamentary Research Unit have flown to an obscure hospital outside Rome to investigate a lead. Leaked details suggest that a baby swap occurred many years ago and the person known as "John Key" is actually the Anti-Christ.
• Popular street mime Mr Lichen has been contacted by the Electoral Commission after a complaint that his act used words or graphics that constituted an electoral advertisement. Mr Lichen has defended himself, stating that his work is not an attack on Helen Clark and Winston Peters, but a silent re-enactment of the final scene in Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.
• The National Party has unveiled their Tough on Crime policy. In addition to DNA testing all arrestees, Guthrie cards of all New Zealand-born citizens will be added to the DNA database as well. Police spokespeople responded positively to the move, saying that if people have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.

The Eco-tourism paradox

"What we once thought we had
We didn't
And what we have now
Will never be
That way again." - Nick Cave

Parts of the world are disappearing, and Fromer's has compiled them in 500 Places To See Before They Disappear. This Stuff article doesn't mention any particular NZ items on the endangered list, but Oz has 21 listings.

Cane toads can take a bit of the blame for the demise of the Daintree Rainforest and Kakadu National Park. There's the poor Tazzie Devils dying out because of some weird facial sex cancer, while Tasmanian islands get Loraxed by logging and mining.

But ecotourism is taking its toll on places such as the Great Barrier Reef and Fraser Island. Whole boatloads of concerned middle-class Greenies go out to see the Reef every day of the year. They drop shit overboard, they leak diesel exhaust all over it, hassle the local wildlife and generally act contrary to what one would expect for concerned preservationalists. On Fraser Island, 4WDs run up and down the beaches, ripping the dunes up and eroding it worse than any horse could cause.

So be a good Greenie, and don't go there if you really care. Unless you can develop some form of cure for facial sex cancer or a neutron bomb for cane toads, just stay away. Your presence there is not helpful.

Porsche trims $20bn off hedges

Porsche have made a deft move against the "locusts" of Mayfair. Porsche is set to grab up to US$20 billion off hedge funds after secretly buying up a majority of VW stock. The losses may drive some hedge fund companies into bankruptcy.

From the commentary:

"Porsche was secretly raising its stake through derivatives and options to a smidgen under 75 per cent... More than 30 per cent of the VW holding is in the form of options, or commitments to buy the shares at a later date for a particular price. As a result, Porsche is the only major holder able to satisfy the hedgies' need to close their positions. Porsche stands to make more out of a few weeks of speculating on markets than it could in years of selling cars."

Evidentially, it all seems above board and perfectly legal, although the German regulator is investigating to see if there was any evidence of insider trading. And who wants to fight on the side of a hedge fund right now? They're pond scum. If it's all legit, the move will give a nice little profit to all those German pension funds who started buying into the car company earlier in the year.

The hedgies aren't safe, and Boards of Directors all around the world are realising that they're employees just like everyone below them. Here in NZ, the recent Contact Energy AGM was our own version of out-playing the players. Welcome to a new form of economic warfare. Anarcho-capitalist shareholders.

Garbage in, garbage out

I've done the Nats, I did the Greens. Time for Labour:

Labour misleading the public, again

While Labour may have gotten away with their orange propaganda, they flew the wrong side of devious according to the Advertising Standards Authority. The Two Johns attack ad has been deemed misleading.

$150k to pimp Kissinger as Yoda

Maureen Dowd plots a brilliant, and hopefully prescient, script on Sarah Palin going AWOL:

"Does McCain know the maverick’s maverick has gone all mavericky on him?"

Reason not to migrate to Oz #47

Fucking big bird-eating spiders of Cairns (Hat Tip BoingBoing)

Vote for your imaginary president now

Got an irresistible urge to vote and can't wait til November 8? Head on over to the President of New Zealand website and VOTE NOW on who you would choose as New Zealand's first president. The vote closes on October 31st, one week from now.

The nominees, who YOU CHOOSE the order of preference of are:

James Belich
Jim Bolger
Claudia Orange
Kiri Te Kanawa
Wilson Whineray

Profiles of the candidates are available here. Get to it, people!

Pope admits he is Catholic

Land Transport Minister admits bike helmets may put people off cycling.

Balancing the books

Unbelievable. A headline in today's DomPost says that the Wellington City Council is looking at ways of shaving around $50 million from their spending. This is fair enough, what with Dunedin City Council facing lending shortages, it is prudent to look at where pennies can be pinched.

The aim is to cut between 3 per cent and 5 per cent a year from council's operating expenditure. Saving $3.5 million a year over the next decade will save the council $52 million after compound interest is calculated.

Kerry Prendergast sez, "But it is not a fiddle around the edges. Staff have been told to go back and look at everything, and just because you think it is a sacred cow, it isn't."

Ms Prendergast said she "was determined to keep rates increases to the level of inflation" but did not want to see the indoor sports centre or upgrade of council flats affected. "They would both contribute to the health and wellbeing of Wellingtonians, so I would put those as a higher priority than the others."

I can understand the reluctance to cut back on the council flat upgrade, seeing as WCC funding is part of the deal to secure even greater central government funding for the project too. However, the Cobham Park project fits into the $50 million ballpark comfortably. Don't think of the park project as a sacred cow. It is a white elephant that is threatening the local environment. It needs to be put down.

Ms Bob Roberts

If you haven't watched Sarah Palin's debut on Saturday Night Live yet, have a look.

Opening sketch:



Closing sketch:



Most of the actors avoid eye contact with her completely. The last time I saw friction like this was in Bob Roberts, when Tim Robbins' candidate appears in a SNL-type show called Cutting Edge.

The Independent concludes, "Though her performance will no doubt increase her skyrocketing celebrity, a cynic might venture that it has come to something when a person seeking to become vice-president of the most powerful nation on earth celebrates being an object of derision."

Good Old Days

The journos are underwhelmed. Tracy Watkins bemoans the sterile campaign, while Colin Espiner pines for some fear and loathing to go with the chicken and asparagus pie. Fair go.


Preparing to go 'on the road' in 1987

Back in the old days, people used to throw eggs and rotten fruit at politicians. These days, you'd get charged with terrorism for doing stunts like that.

In the old days, a bit of No. 8 wire and a bright idea was all one needed to get out the vote. These days, the Tao D'election requires authorisation statements, financial agents, and an argument of lawyers (or is it a tempest of lawyers?) in reserve.

In the old days, a politician who refused a soapbox was soon out of a job. These days, a posse of Hollywoods pick and choose their audiences and ignore others. And, as Russell Brown observes, such a policy provides a better show when they don't show up at all.

In the old days, when all MPs were electorate MPs, their were no bullshit scripts. They sold their side of the story in the local language, not squeezed through the PR digestive system and focus group gropes.

Meh to contemporary elections.

White collar crime wave

The NYT has a story on how the War on Terror has taken the heat off white collar criminals:

So depleted are the ranks of the F.B.I.’s white-collar investigators that executives in the private sector say they have had difficulty attracting the bureau’s attention in cases involving possible frauds of millions of dollars.

Here in NZ, the Labour-led government is committed to abolishing the SFO and merging its duties in a new FBI equivalent, the Organised Crime Bureau. At a time when criminal malfeasance in finance companies is becoming evident and the financial climate ripening for scammers and fraudsters, abolishing a specialised white collar crime unit is just about the stupidest thing to do.