Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Traditional Pragmatic Conservative | Sep 30, 2005 10:06

Simon Pound conducted an excellent interview on The Wire with National Party historian Barry Gustafson, regarding the moderate pushback within the party: NATFORT and all that. Gustafson's view is that the ideas on Maori and immigrants that National took into this year's election were the work of the "radical right" and that true conservatives would be far more circumspect.

"From time to time," he says, "the more free-market ideologically-driven radical right manages to seize control" of the National Party, and this has been one of those times.

This, he believes, is at odds with the prevailing conservative philosophy within the party. NATFORT's backers, he believes, are saying that "you cannot actually oversimplify and polarise on the issue of the Treaty and the place of Maori. Perceptions and realities are such that this is a complex issue and it needs to be looked and there needs to be an element of understanding and goodwill. And it's not a black and white thing - we have to realise that the Treaty does have a great symbolic significance, and that has to be addressed."

Gustafson is careful to say he does not regard the current course as racist, but says he believes that John Key, Bill English, Gerry Brownlee, Simon Power and Katherine Rich are all "much more traditional pragmatic conservative National Party people."

He also believes the new National intake will make its influence felt:

"You've got all kinds of people in the National Party with a range of experiences and knowledge who I think will not be satisfied with over-simplified slogans. That's fine for billboards during an election campaign, but they will want to discuss the detail of policy, and I think we're going to have a major debate on all kinds of issues including the Treaty and Maori."

A couple of correspondents have taken issue with my belief that it will be very difficult for Labour to win the next election. It's certainly not impossible, but a number of factors will conspire against it, not least the fact that Labour didn't take on board a lot of fresh talent this year. It would take a very strong performance in government. (On the other hand, the idea that the new government will only last a year is just a comforting Tory fantasy.) At any rate, it is appropriate, as Simon says, to think about what sort of National government we'd want running the place. If Gustafson's talking like this, I presume he's not the only one.

In quite a different vein, here is probably the best thing I've read about election day. Isaac Freeman blogs his day as an issuing officer. It's funny and intelligent.

Psst: … The New Zealand Herald Greasemonkey Script is back. It uses a different method from the one shut off by the Herald yesterday, and one that might take a little longer to disable.

The forcible ejection of Walter Wolfgang from the British Labour Party conference is hard to see as other than an illustration of what's wrong with that party under Blair. Wolfgang, who came to Britain as a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, has been a Labour Party member for 57 years. His offence this week seems to have been to shout out one word - "nonsense" - from up in the Gods during a speech by foreign secretary Jack Straw. He was thereafter bundled out by stewards, and then declined re-entry under - and this pretty much confirms every civil libertarian's worst fears - the Prevention of Terrorism Act. He was eventually re-admitted to a hero's welcome. The BBC has a story and pictures, and it's widely covered in the British newspapers.

I think Blair has taken on a messiah complex. Again, he has fudged his promise to make way for Gordon Brown, and he continues to behave as the sole recipient of the truth. He needs to keep his word, stop pretending he's saving the world, and go sooner rather than later.

DPF started out making fun of the Greens' meeting with business leaders on Kiwiblog, to little useful end, but the subsequent discussion thread has some good moments. Frog notes that the Dom Post also covered the other side of the business leaders' meeting - ie, not the windbags who rushed out and blathered for the cameras afterwards. On the other hand, Nevil Gibson, who should know better, managed to cram just about every panicky anti-Green cliché into one post on the NBR blog. As I've said, I don't agree with every Green policy, but I see a role for them in Parliament and, if it comes to it, in coalition (I might say the same about Act if they hadn't behaved like such arses in the past three years).

Meanwhile, the Arctic ice cap has melted to a record low, raising fears that a "positive feedback" cycle of accelerated warming may already have come into play. Not to worry, though, because it's all just a plot by anti-business zealots in the worldwide green lobby …

The CBS News report (transcript and video) Undeclared Civil War In Iraq is pretty scary.

And finally, Tom DeLay, the corrupt Republican House majority leader, actually has to face a court, after being impotently admonished three times in the past year by the House ethics committee. Perhaps this might lead to some better scrutiny of the democratic indecency of last year's Texas redistricting scam, which was steered by DeLay. The Village Voice backgrounds the current case and DeLay's grubby history.

This is pretty hilarious for those who occasionally look in on evil stick insect Ann Coulter. Coulter was asked on Fox News to comment on the fact that, as a San Francisco Chronicle story pointed out, conservative cause celebre Pat Tillman (a college football star who enlisted in the army, went to Iraq and was killed in a covered-up friendly fire incident) opposed the Iraq war, planned to vote Kerry and read Noam Chomsky - all qualities that should make him, by Coulter's reasoning, a traitorous scumbag who hates America. She responded in the classic neocon style. Flat-out denial. Here's the video.

And to conclude: while we wait for the special vote count to be announced, Public Address reader David Stone has pointed out to me something that should have been evident, but which I haven't seen anyone else make note of. For all the talk of polling volatility as polling day drew near, the lead did not change in any of the major polls. All the AC Nielsen polls in September showed National in front and all the Herald Digipolls showed Labour in front. All the One News Colmar Brunton polls in September showed National in front and all the 3 News TNS Global polls showed Labour in front.

Says David:

Midst all the volatility that has so far been the centre of post-election attention, how can this consistency of differences between the polls be explained? It certainly meant that once the election result was known, it would show which organisations were getting things (more) right, and which were getting them (more) wrong. As it turns out, the last 3News/TNS poll was the closest. But the remarkably consistent differences between the media/polling organisations - ACNeilsen and Colmar Brunton with National leading, and Digipoll and TNS with Labour in front - remains unexplained.

This, among other aspects of the polls, suggests that the polling organisations should be much more open about their methodology - timing, demographics, degree of response, assumptions, etc. It would be particularly interesting, don't you think, for them to be asked directly to explain their consistently different results?

Yes, I think it would be interesting.

By the way, this post is as long as it is because circumstances prevent me being elsewhere, so I might as well type. Those circumstances being a lengthy (over a week now) and debilitating attack of gout, which tends to strike in Spring.

I've hitherto never considered the condition bad enough to go on the preventative medication (I find the idea of a daily pill for life a bit challenging) but, after the past week, pass the damn tablets, nurse. Trouble is, I can't start the preventative until the symptoms subside, and that hasn't happened. I've had to blow out important meetings in Christchurch and Wellington this week and turn down a prime ticket for the Auckland vs Wellington NPC match tonight, and I'll probably miss the ASPA Awards tomorrow night. I am tired, pissed off and in pain. So make the gout jokes by all means, just forgive me if I don't laugh …

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Routing Around | Sep 28, 2005 10:21

Quite some years ago, John Gilmore declared that "The Net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it." In the broader sense, he meant that that any blockage will be bypassed. So come on down, then, the New Zealand Herald GreaseMonkey Script.

This code rewrites the URL of search results delivered by the New Zealand Herald website's built-in search facility, bypassing the "premium content" subscription page and making old (ie: more than seven days) news stories free to access like they used to be; and like they still are if you find them by some other means than the Herald's onsite search, such as Google.

It works because the way the Herald's new system is devised is a bit ropey. It only works in the Firefox browser with the GreaseMonkey plug-in installed, and only if you search within categories rather than "All Sections", but, yes, it does work.

Is it legal? In recent years the MED lawyers have been fairly emphatic in their contention that the role of the Copyright Act is not to protect access control systems (that's why you can so readily buy region-free DVD players in New Zealand), but IANAL, and I'd be interested in any comments on the issue.

I should emphasise that I continue to applaud the Herald's decision not to break the thousands of existing inbound links to its old stories as part of the "premium content" switch, and to allow the continued creation of persistent links by slightly roundabout means. But it's interesting, no?

The American site Never Pay Retail has taken a slightly different approach to the premium content issue, by finding syndicated instances of New York Times columns recently placed behind the Times Select subscription wall, and linking to those. Enterprising. (Hat-tip to PA reader Grant.)

Meanwhile, court documents reveal that Marc Ellis was after pills that were "smooth on the come-down". Isn't everyone? And is this still front-page news? Blogging It Real is duly appalled.

Meanwhile as "rumours" ("leaks", surely?) suggest good news for the Greens and/or Labour in the special vote count to be released at 2pm on Saturday, the Greens met with business leaders, some of whom left in a snit because the Greens had been unwilling to "compromise" on their policies. Do these people understand Parliamentary democracy at all?

It would be silly for the Greens to now suddenly perform a backflip on their manifesto. That's what their supporters voted for. But that's hardly to say that they will somehow be able to ram through contentious policies, whether in or out of a coalition. There is, for instance, overwhelming (about 83%; ie everyone but the Greens, New Zealand First and possibly the Maori Party) Parliamentary support for existing foreign trade policies.

I personally disagree with some Green policies, while on the other hand, I note that David Haywood found that on energy policy the Greens are considerably more in touch with reality than any other Parliamentary party. The likes of Roger Kerr (who has a bit of a nerve calling other people "extreme") and Michael Barnett need to calm down a bit.

Nick McBride pointed me to a persuasive essay by Michael Schwartz on the issue of immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Meanwhile, reason goes to court with the "intelligent design" civil trial in Pennsylvania. Please tell me we're not going to go back to the Scopes Monkey Trial. That would be a bit scary.

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Back to the Future? | Sep 27, 2005 10:07

NATFORT - Nationals for the Treaty - might just turn out to be a naïve venture from the fringes of its party, or it might be the tip of a broad-based attempt to get National back on track. Either way it's an implicit challenge to the present leadership.

The left-bloggers are, perhaps understandably, more overtly interested in this than than their kin on the right. Jordan Carter blogged about it yesterday, and Frog had a crack as well. I don't think they're doing it out of schadenfreude, which would hardly be warranted at present. But when your campaign schtick is to carry the torch for "mainstream New Zealand" and you get fewer votes than the other crowd, perhaps it's time for a new schtick.

And personally, given that short of a stunning reinvention by Labour (or an equally stunning collapse on National's part), National will be in government in three years' time, I feel I have every interest in that party's withdrawal from the politics of resentment and rediscovery of modernity. That is: Key as the leader and McCully nowhere near the campaign strategy. And some more thoughtful policy development.

It's not that these ideas should be verboten (check out Keith's conclusion that the Maori seats are a bad thing today), but the manner of it all. Anyway, Simon Pound is very interested and is trying to line up a NATFORT interview for his 95bFM Wire show on Thursday, which ought to be interesting.

Going to a right-wing blog, observing that Iraq's a bit of a shambles and getting called a Saddam-lover almost qualifies as a unique cultural experience these days. It's sort of quaint. Things were proceeding according to traditional practice in an Iraq thread over at Chez Farrar yesterday, although it did take a worrying 12 comments posts for the phrase "Saddam apologist" to be uttered. And then someone calling themselves Ms Marple sailed in with this:

Ed, no one is saying Saddam is a nice chap who should have been allowed free dominion over his murderous ways. The invasion was premised on mendacious justifications. The invaders took a holier-than-thou attitude, not just to the Hussein regime, but to anyone who thought invasion was a bad idea, and then they turned out to be crass and human and fallible. Sure, not anywhere near as horrible as the regime they were overthrowing, but horrible none-the-less and amplified by their own self-righteous rhetoric and their historical hypocrisy. That stuff pisses people off. And not just bleeding heart liberals in the West, but also a significant number of Iraqis and Arabs and Muslims. Which is, of course, totally counter-productive to the stated US intentions in Iraq. The only people who didn't see the chaos that wracks Iraq now were those too blinkered by faith or ideology or hatred to step back and take a look at the religo/ethnic dynamic within Iraq, the regional power paradigm and fact that together, Bin Laden and Bush had together ignited a fundamentalist war that was always going to find a flash point in an occupied Iraq (it was even the rather farcical contention from the White House, dismissed by every intelligence chief, that Iraq was one of it's homes). The process of the invasion saw the utter decimation of Iraqi infrastructure. The aftermath of invasion demonstrated a dismal degree of planning for the inevitable post-war realities. All of that pisses people off. It doesn't make them love Saddam Hussein. It makes them dislike the US administration for forcing a war, lying to them, planning the post-war poorly and giving the "War on Terror" another breeding ground for its terrorists.

And then when you take another look at it, you can see now lost, real promise for a more sustainable solution to the Iraqi regime. Iraq was an increasingly pariah state in the Middle East, even within the Arab League who traditionally supported Saddam against all-comers. The regime had a limited life-span without decimating the country and making large scale militancy (if not civil war) inevitable. You can argue the semantics of the nature of what that change would have been and how it would have affected US/Western strategic and cultural interests. But in the end, that's probably the most beguiling thing about Saddam Hussein, George W. and the Iraqi invasion, there is no position that is not bad for someone. There is no real or potential solution that avoids violence and tragedy and bullshit. And there never was. The reality is that the US did a whole lot of bad stuff in terms of inventing its invasion justification, in terms of managing the post-war situation, in terms of being a complete hypocrite. They will no doubt rest on the laurels of their achievement, but it is right that they should be called on what they did wrong. Calling someone a Saddam apologist because they attack the failings of a country that strives to be the exemplar of righteousness is kind of lame.

Which I thought was rather good …

But it's not funny. I've been wary about the idea that an immediate withdrawal - cutting and running - from Iraq is a good idea. Surely, having started this mess, the coalition of the willing owes the Iraqi people some attempt at the preservation of order. But Juan Cole, who was of similar mind, is now calling for troop withdrawal, "For the good of Iraq. For the good of America." If you read nothing else on the wires today, read that post.

Also, Billmon makes the same transit, and Riverbend offers further translation of the draft Iraqi constitution, the effect of which is not at all reassuring.

So I just don't know. But what I do know is that I am angry at the American government for its lies and its grotesque incompetence, I am angry at the terrorists who have found their opportunities on Iraqi soil, and I am angry at the right-wing bloggers and their stupid "Good News from Iraq" press-release fantasies.

Crossing now to the "premium content" wars, here's a great example of the New York Times breaking something that worked. For the past few years, a guy called Bobby has run what amounts to a Paul Krugman fan site, The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive. It collects work by and information about the economist and New York Times columnist. It's nicely ordered and remarkably comprehensive: links, multimedia, interview transcripts, chapters (with permission) from Krugman books. It even has a little community going.

But a couple of days ago, Bobby gets an email from Krugman to say the Times has become aware if his site ("I think too many bloggers gave the link") and asked him to ask Bobby to stop posting his NYT columns, which provide the pulse of the website. Presumably, this has only become a problem since "premium content" came along.

Yes, I know that it's a Times copyright and he really has no right to re-publish the columns on his tidy little website. But would the Times ever make an archive for one of its marquee columnists with the love and care and earnestness shown here?. Never. Sometimes, content owners, across the news and entertainment media, need to think more about the value added to their properties by those motivated individuals, the fans.

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