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The Gayest Thing Ever? | Apr 08, 2005 12:01
Time for a laugh, I think. The best thing to come out of the whole Tamihere shemozzle must surely be the excellent Hairy McLairy parody aired on Morning Report today after whizzing around the Internet this week. DPF has the MP3 here.
And I am eternally indebted to PA reader Martin Hermans for drawing my attention to 'America We Stand As One', a great steaming, heaving slab of patriotic soft rock that, unbelievably, is not the work of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but a heartfelt tune by TV stuntman 'Dangerous' Dennis Madalone.
The priceless QuickTime video is here.
And the participants of this discussion forum have been discussing whether is it, in fact, The Gayest Thing Ever. I think this post summed it up: "Now, understand that I don't use the term "gay" when deriding something. I think it's an insult, saying that homosexuality is as bad as whatever the thing is. But, after seeing this, I can't help but paraphrase Eric Cartman and say that that was the most fucking gayest thing I've seen."
Personally, I think you've just got to accept that "gay" is a word that won't be tied down. I've actually had this conversation with the kids: pointing out that there are two (well, alright, three) meanings of "gay", including the South Park meaning (not that I actually let them watch South Park) and the meaning that applies to our good gay friends. They don't seem confused by it.
This just in: a Russian court has cleared The Simpsons of moral degeneracy. The case comes on the heels of a move by Russian MPs to have the cartoon reclassified adults-only, because, among other things, it "introduce[s] antagonism between children and parents." The Izvestia newspaper's response was quite funny: "They reacted like this to a fairly innocent episode of The Simpsons. What would they say if they saw South Park or Beavis and Butthead?"
Libz' spokesman and Free Radical contributor Peter Cresswell has entered blogdom with a new blog called Not PC (my normal practice is to pour scorn on empty banging-on about political correctness, but I'll let him off on account of it also being a play on his initials). He's remembering Toy Love, among other things. Simon Grigg, who was very much there at the time, has blogged in a similar vein.
Jon Stewart nails it again (QuickTime clip) as regards the bizarre and scary comments from Republican legislators in the wake of the Schiavo business. First among them, of course, wantonly corrupt House majority leader (and hardline Christian conservative) Tom DeLay. Slate has provided a handy scorecard of DeLay's various ethical calamities - the latest of which is the revelation that more than half a million dollars worth of political donations went to his wife and daughter. Not for the first time, I'm bound to think that in a Parliamentary democracy, he would have been forced to resign long ago.
And how 'bout this? After Power Line and friends have noisily convinced themselves that the notoriously Republican Party Schiavo memo was in fact a wicked Democratic plot the equal of Rathergate … turns out it wasn't A Republican Party counsel has admitted to writing the memo, but is having unfortunate memory lapses as to its distribution. No apology from Power Line, of course. Just more sweaty con-spiracy theorising.
Wonkette points out that it's not the first time the Senator involved, Mel Martinez, has blamed spooky ghost writers for documents emerging from his office.
But it gets much weirder. The author of the memo has also apparently admitted to being 'Curveball', the wildly and wholly inaccurate "source" for much of the Iraqi "intelligence" used to press the case for war. Not for the first time, it seems reasonable to ask: WTF?
Scroll down for politics | Apr 07, 2005 11:50
I'll put this up the front of the post to avoid confusing fanboys who have Googled their way here. My interview yesterday with Chris Knox, about the excellent new Toy Love retrospective Cuts, is archived here as a 10MB MP3. I had my man Zach take out all but the beginnings and ends of the songs we played so no one has a copyright coronary. It's a good interview.
You can also listen to an interview from the same show with TelstraClear's head of wholesaling Raymond O'Brien, on the de-peering issue. It was initially offered as a background briefing, but I think it's better to air the arguments for all to hear, and Raymond agreed to come on. I think he was slick and I was firm but fair.
And so the Tamihere saga lurches another way. I thought he was largely very impressive in his interview on Close Up last night: it was a testament to his political charisma that he was able to get away with it at all, especially given that he seems to have done the interview without either the knowledge or consent of his bosses (although I'm willing to entertain theories that they did know). He managed to look both staunch and contrite, without actually resiling from most of what he said, he offered up great soundbites ("I idolise Michael Cullen - I'd give the bloke my toothbrush if he asked for it") and he generally pulled it off. The gossip that the party isn't entirely unhappy about the way it's gone might even be true …
Of course, the emotional traits that allow him to do this, and which are a key to his public appeal, are the same ones that lead him to get himself into trouble by being such a flaming great cock in the first place. But I feel sorry for him, talking about how he'd still love one of his sons if he "chose" to be homosexual. He needs to get out more, so to speak. I've never met a homosexual who "chose" to be gay. DPF feels the same.
Speaking of said saga, this might cause some excitement, or at least amusement, in some quarters: I got a message from John Drinnan at NBR yesterday saying that he had "had a couple of calls re your blog on John Tamihere - suggesting you are active in the Labour Party and worked on the hustings for Judith Tizard in 1993 and or 1996 - I want to check whether this is true."
Well, partially: in 1996, an old friend of mine inherited the Auckland Central Labour Party after Prebble and his chums had left pretty much scorched earth when they went off to form Act. He was wondering what he'd do and asked if I'd join, and I said yes. I'd written an editorial for Planet magazine saying that MMP was only going to work if ordinary folks got involved, so I thought I should put my money where my mouth was.
I met Judith Tizard shortly after that, went to some campaign meetings, helped write a leaflet and did some mailbox drops. (Ironically, I was mainly concerned with rolling Sandra Lee, who I couldn't bear at the time.) Apart from that, I think I only went to two electorate meetings around the same time. I delivered a batch of leaflets in 1999. That's it.
I'm not quite sure when I resigned party membership, but it was some time before Mediawatch came along. I think involvement in the democratic process is healthy, but it was obviously inappropriate if I was going to be in a paid professional role that touched on politics. I am absolutely not active in any way in the Labour Party, and wouldn't wish to be.
I made a speech about the Civil Union Bill to a Rainbow Labour breakfast last year, but that was about the issue, rather than the party, as I was at pains to emphasise when I eventually agreed to do it. I declined an invitation to speak at another Labour Party function last year because I felt that wasn't the case. I regard Judith as a family friend, but I've never discussed John Tamihere with her, although she once introduced him to me at the Silver Scroll Awards. She's the only Labour MP I actually know to more than say hello to.
I'm fairly sure I know which member of Team Tamihere would have initiated the call, but I won't go there (Christ, the last thing I'd want to do would be get involved in Labour Party internal politics ...), beyond suggesting that he should calm down and breathe through his nose. This will be in an Ad Hoc item in NBR tomorrow, which is perfectly fair. After all, I had some fun when its publisher Barry Colman paid for Don Brash's media skills training last year and didn't declare it, even after a tipsy member of the reporting staff let it slip to another journalist.
Speaking of NBR, congratulations to Deborah Hill Cone, who last night took out the Citigroup Australasia Awards for Excellence in Journalism with her series "The great Aussie bank swindle" and "Are Australian banks fleecing our tax man?" for the paper last year. Shame she hasn't made a blog post since December.
Oh, and I've told David Cohen I'm happy for him to interview me later this month for a print publication. Should be fun, and possibly not what you expect.
[That's enough NBR journalists - Ed.]
Oh, alright then …
Selectively Remembering the Pope | Apr 06, 2005 10:01
Just a quickie today: the way the death of Terri Schiavo neatly segued into the death of the Pope has encouraged the US conservative right to go ahead and politicise the Pope to try and carry forward the momentum generated by the Schiavo debacle. Hence, lots of nice, respectful stuff about JP2. The problem is that this is quite different to what these people were saying about the same Pope when he opposed the war in Iraq.
Instapundit, for one, has been very nicey-nicey about the Pope. But, as Justin Raimondo points out in a lovely bit of Google site:searching, Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds has a long record of being perfectly vile about the same beloved religious leader. Surely some mistake?
Another blogger picked up an even starker example of hypocrisy from Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. The problem is that these people don't care enough to even be embarrassed.
Also post-Schiavo, Republican Senator John Cornyn has made an extraordinary statement saying that violence against judges is understandable in the circumstances (those circumstances being: judges actually interpreting the law as it's written). This isn't some theoretical issue - the mother and husband of US Judge Joan Lefkow were murdered recently by someone who didn't like her work. It's terrorism, and a Republican senator is making excuses for it. These people are scary. AmericaBlog has the details.
I love the way One Good Move does things: Norm has a nice little package on the unintended consequences of sexual abstinence pledges by American teenagers, including a highly scurrilous take on the issue by Bill Maher, which is well worth your boss's bandwidth …
And that'll do you. If you're interested, I'm talking to Chris Knox about the reissued and scrubbed-up Toy Love album just before 1pm on my Wire show today. Should be good fun. Also trying to get someone from TelstraClear to talk de-peering at about 12.30. You can listen in here.
PS: Andi Henderson picked up a great little typo (JT's, not mine) in my cut-and-paste from Tamihere's deleted blog yesterday. Referring to 3 News, he said: "Who looks at their ethnics, their standards, their morality?" Hmmm ...
Meltdown! | Apr 05, 2005 09:45
I'm starting to wonder whether it was John Tamihere I liked, or just Helen Bain's script. After last week's Parliamentary assault on TV3, which was followed by a blog posting so silly that somebody sensibly deleted it from the party website (I'll paste in the whole thing below), comes the publication of Tamihere's interview with Ian Wishart of Investigate magazine.
Leaving aside the obvious - ie, if he was going to lose the plot, couldn't he have done it somewhere a little classier than Investigate? - what's notable about Tamihere's depiction of his colleagues in government is how woefully self-serving it is. Everyone else is a "tosser", a "queer", a "butch", a bunch of dupes (Labour's coalition partners) or (in the case of the Parliamentary Press Gallery) "utterly and totally useless". Tamihere, on the other hand, offers leadership defined by "moral issues", and has caucus colleagues who would back him "to the hilt". Yeah, right …
Tamihere has his virtues - and one of them is the emotional charge he brings to the business of politics - but even if he gets re-elected, I doubt anyone in his caucus (which elects a Cabinet) thinks he's senior leadership material any more. Trying to bounce back from a failure of judgement by abandoning any judgement whatsoever will do that to you.
And as Rodney Hide points out, the Maori Party won't have him - despising Tamihere is just about written into its constitution. Rodney has a whole lot more laughs listing the Wit and Wisdom of the Member for Tamaki Makarau in his blog, and the Herald story sums it up.
The funny thing is that Rodney, who has devoted enormous energy to declaring that John Tamihere's word is not to be trusted, went on Checkpoint yesterday to declare that every word JT had said was God's truth. Even the claim, in Rodney's words, that "the country is being run by a lesbian cabal". Don't be such a fuckwit man. Nobody's asking you about the (ahem) "heterosexual cabal" running your party …
Both Rodney and DPF are having a good old gloat, which is entirely understandable, but I seriously doubt that the public will see this the same way as the Katherine Rich business. Rich looked feisty to the public. Tamihere just looks demented. I think he's going to be a lonely man from now on. Oh, and that deleted blog post, made when he knew that the Investigate story was coming down the pike and had failed to stop it, in full:
Despite knowing that several allegations screened by TV3 Duncan Garner against me were wrong TV3 proceeded to run the story.
TV3's producer, Mr Jennings has rushed to the defence of Mr Garner, despite the fact that he approved the hatchet job. Getting Jennings to rush to the aid of Garner is a bit like watching Hitler defend Goebbels. Who watches the media? Garner and Jennings knew that the tax allegation was false. They knew that I was a trustee of my sister's family trust and did not own the property and they still sent their cameras around to violate my sister, a grandmother bringing up her grandchildren by herself.
Jennings says that Garner says he does not have a private media consultancy business. I say what Jennings says is untrue – that is a fact and Garner knows he is telling porkies again.
I could proceed to list further allegations which under limited journalistic scrutiny would have been found to have been wrong and unworthy. Who watches the Garners and Jennings of this world? Who looks at their ethnics, their standards, their morality?
Garner and his mates at the Waipareira Trust must now know that Rodney Hide will drop them like a hot spud as he has done with his other soul mate, Jim Peron.
Hide stood up in the House and stated unequivocally that 'Jim Peron is a fine upstanding citizen – he has had dinner at my house and I have had dinner at his house' I wonder what tricks and treats occurred at these dinners?
That last part is especially sad.
If you want more, Noelle has Wally Wishart on her 95bFM Wire show at 12.15pm today.
A correction to last week's post on the disappearing tribute to Jim Peron from Rodney's conference speech. The sans-Peron version went out well after the speech on his Hidesight email list, but Rodney says it was actually an earlier version, sent in error, and censoring after the fact wouldn't be his style, and I believe him.
No Right Turn responds to a Sunday Star Times poll showing remarkably strong public opposition to any more state asset sales - and notes Chris Trotter's speculation that a promise to buy back infrastrucure companies, including Tranz Rail and Telecom should sit well in some party's platform. Well, the deal with Toll has already seen the Crown regain the important part - the tracks - for $1, with sundry fine print aimed at protecting both Toll's financial interest and the public good. Murray Horton offers a detailed left-wing criticism of the government's decision not to compete with Toll for the whole of Tranz Rail - but we really don't want the government getting into bidding wars. That kind of risk is for commercial companies.
And there aren't many retail businesses we really want the government running either, least of all a complex one like Telecom. It's too late to mandate unbundling, and unless Telecom decided to flick off its infrastructure (somewhat unlikely), It would make more sense for the government to fund new telecommunications infrastructure (largely indirectly, by enabling schools, hospitals, universities and research institutions to install new fibre - they did it with interest-free loans in Canada). Telecom would hate this too - reasoning that its taxes were being used to compete against it - but it would foster a wave of competition at the retail end and we'd all have broadband for breakfast. We need more private telcos, not a state monopoly. This is really what the Advanced Network argument is about. So our theoretical left-wing party should be promising not to buy back Telecom, but to get open-access fibre laid every and make some regulations as to the use of Internet exchanges.
Meanwhile, a Herald poll indicates that the public would rather have more spending on services than tax cuts. Fewer than a quarter surveyed preferred an across-the-board tax cut.
No Right Turn also comments on an insight at Big News - which is that, on the numbers, it would serve National's purposes very badly if it were to abolish Maori seats and have all their voters flow back into general electorates. You reckon they thought about that?
Riverbend gets into media crit as American TV floods into Iraq. Quite funny.
Like any good music nerd, I have a mental list of the Best Gigs Ever; the shows that, if they didn't change my life, certainly added to my understanding of what a live performance can be. Even leaving aside local artists - which, for no particular reason, I categorise separately - there have been a few.
The list includes the Clash in Auckland, 1982; Prince at Wembley Arena on the Parade tour, 1986 (the tunes! the arrangements! the choreography!); David Thomas, New Cross, 1987; the Butthole Surfers, whilst trollied on acid (me, I mean, but quite possibly them too), London ULU 1989; Boogie Down Productions, Brixton Academy, 1989; Sun Ra and the Arkestra, Harlesden Mean Fiddler, 1990; Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Brixton Academy, 1991; The Flaming Lips, Auckland Big Day Out, 2004; The White Stripes, Auckland St James 2004 … and I should also note that The Fall have never let me down.
It looks like I'm fixing to add another one: George Clinton and his band were sensational on Saturday night. The three-hour show traversed the history of black music from 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On' to 'Atomic Dog' (including, it must be noted, an unfortunate half hour of prog rock from the Funkadelic lineup) and hit its peak in a mind-blowing 20-minute journey through 'Flashlight'. Wow. Oh yes we got The Funk, and we were all the better for it …
PS: I'm not often in a position to pass on sports gossip, but here goes: did you see the sevens in Hong Kong recently? Did you note the speed, strength and skill of loose forward Liam Messam? Would you reckon he might make a future midfielder in the mould of Tana Umaga? Well, apparently the All Black selectors do ...
Doggin' | Apr 01, 2005 12:09
I suppose no one can really yank the chain on John Tamihere - that's part of his thing - but his Parliamentary assault on TV3's Duncan Garner, and more especially the claim that 3 News shows political bias towards Rodney Hide, was fairly extraordinary. Being angry is one thing: alleging malign intent of a whole group of people is another.
On the other hand: if Bruce Bryant was Garner's source, if he was involved with a company attacked by Act for its questionable dealings with Te Wananga o Aotearoa, and if 3 News knew that but didn't report it, then there may be some questions to answer. TV3 news chief Mark Jennings was quick to back his man.
Speaking of Act, how fast is Rodney Hide running away from Jim Peron? Very fast. Rodney has posted two versions of his party conference speech to the Internet. The first one contains the lines:
Let me pay a special welcome to someone I'm proud to call my friend, Jim Peron. Jim is the hardest of hard working men. He's a small businessman.
The second one - you guessed it - does not.
This seems silly - not to mention an attempt to rewrite history - but it's understandable that people should feel let down by Peron. He's not a paedophile (and I still think the testimony of Eric Garris should be approached with extreme caution where it concerns Peron) but as Chris Banks concludes in an unexpected Part 3 to his excellent investigation for GayNZ.com, he has been selective with the truth about what he may have written or published in the past. Jay Bennie wraps it up in a worthwhile editorial. Personally, I don't think any of the menagerie of characters in this business emerges very well, and that New Zealand First would do well to ponder Bennie's "people in glass houses" comment.
Further on the theme of things disappearing, Three Point Turn noted the mysterious removal of everything with Graham Capill's name on it from the Christian Heritage website.
NEWSFLASH: all the alluding can come to an end now: Capill's name suppression on charges of indecently assaulting a girl under 12 has been lifted with his guilty plea. But I'm interested as to what kind of indecent assault of child might be, as the judge put it, "not at the serious end of the scale" …
And I would not be expecting to hear any moral lectures from that quarter again.
Interesting Christian Science Monitor story on democratic movements possibly not following the script in the Middle East.
Scientific American has an interesting interview with Leonardo Chiariglione, the "father of MP3".
Bummer! Even before episode two of the new Doctor Who hits the wires, it has been announced that Christopher Eccleston won't be returning for another series. Meanwhile, Prime TV sent out a press release yesterday announcing that it will be screening the new series here "this winter".
I've been struggling a bit - well, a lot - with work this week. Too much to think about, too much time blogging about weird things happening a long way away. (I really can't go Schiavo again, but I would like to make special mention of well-argued emails from longtime reader Morgan Nicol who argues against the let-her-die decision from the atheist point of view - contending that even the tiniest sliver of life should be held onto because there's nothing afterwards.) And then there's the Special Project. Tell you next week ...
Assuming I haven't collapsed in a heap, I'm planning on rebooting my brain with The Funk tomorrow night. George Clinton and 25 accompanying funkazoids are playing the St James tomorrow night, and I simply cannot see how that can not be a good thing. I will have fries with that shake, I will make the mothership connection and I look forward to believing, if only for an evening, that we really are one nation under a groove ...
And then, of course, I have a Very Important Meeting on Monday morning. It can be tiresome being a grown-up ...
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