Liberal democracy under further attack?

The NZ Herald reports that a deal between Labour, the Greens and NZ First may mean that spending by government departments on advertising are to be exempt from electoral spending limits - and no amount of two-faced swarminess by the government or its sycophants is going to disguise what this will mean - more government department advertising promoting the benefits of policies of the government.

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Labour has already started using government department activities to promote "the government". I noticed it on signs used by Transit New Zealand associated with road projects, no longer is it simply a fact that project X is underway costing $xxxxxxx, it now has a sign saying "a project funded by the New Zealand Government" as if it is directly linked to Ministers and MPs. Ads for Working for Families also are contentious.

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However as the Herald editorial reports, there is one point that Labour and its supporters don't get " When is the Government going to get this message: democracy is not a device to keep the Labour Party in power."

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The Electoral Finance Bill has been criticised by plenty who would otherwise be supportive of Labour politically - the Human Rights Commission and PPTA are unlikely opponents of a Labour government measure. As the Herald says:

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"It was staggering enough last year that Helen Clark and her lieutenants could not understand why nobody else regarded their electoral pledge card as innocent information. Now, having grudgingly repaid the public purse, they are hell-bent on giving themselves the right to raid it again."

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It is this complete disconnect with the truth that is the hallmark of the ruthlessness of Labour to remain in power. Elections should be campaigned on the basis of people voluntarily promoting and supporting political parties.

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The Herald concludes:

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"Parties have different advantages. If National has more well-heeled donors, Labour probably has the more committed and articulate foot soldiers. National's supposed advantages were of less urgent concern to Labour when it was polling well. Now in desperation it wants to screw the scrum. It has succumbed to the old conceit of the Left that the interests of the people are identical with its own. The interests of any healthy democracy lie in unrestricted debate, not laws that favour incumbents with public finance and suppression of free speech. If these bills pass, they will be Labour's epitaph."

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One can only hope, and it will put paid to any claim of neutrality and belief in democracy that the Greens and NZ First purport to support. What it would show by all those parties is that power is more important than principle.

Woman dies due to lack of reason

Stone age beliefs have killed Janet Moses. It is believed she drowned as people tried to remove a Maori"curse".

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The dark ages are still here, and as Stuff reports, Dr. Hone Kaa is a part of this by saying ""It's a very difficult process," he said. "I'm personally very wary of removing them." He said while water was often used to cleanse the victim: "I've never heard of great gallons being used".
Kaa said there could be a physical element to the removal. "You may have to hold the person down because the spirit may fight within the person to stay, so you need others around you to restrain them."

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Or maybe you could leave someone alone and not assault them in the process, which is what this is really saying. Or how about simply recognising that this is all witchcraft and nonsense.

King Carlos tells Chavez to "shut up"

The creeping authoritarianism of Hugo Chavez's elected socialist dictatorship has been periodically reported on by myself from his insane rant at the UN, to his growing restrictions on free speech. Not PC has also told the ongoing story of Chavez's regime from shortages in supermarkets, how Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhilips have turned their back on investments in Venezuela, seeking to expel foreigners who express criticism of the regime, and government approval needed for baby names. A friend who has relatives there has described how poor service is there, and how there is a distinct lack of work ethic among anyone involved in anything to do with government or any monopolies. Oil money buys complacency.

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Meanwhile the left still looks fondly upon him, after all the ends (socialism) always seems to justify the means (state bullying). What particularly grates is how London Mayor Ken Livingstone has cuddled up to this bully. This is so unspeakably abominable that Livingstone deserves to be booted out on this ground alone.

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Now Chavez has been told off, by no less than the King of Spain, Juan Carlos. Someone who knows something about a transition from dictatorship to freedom. Both were at the "Ibero-American" summit in Santiago, Chile. Chavez called the previous Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Aznar a "fascist". Given Spain's past under Franco, this was a grave insult - particularly given the dramatic change Spain undertook to have its current vibrant, free and open society, with liberal democracy.

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The Spanish Prime Minister (Zapatero, who defeated Aznar at the ballot box) called for more diplomatic words to be used and for respect of other leaders, despite political differences.

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The Sunday Telegraph reports: "Former prime minister Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people," said Mr Zapatero, eliciting applause from the gathered heads of state.

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Indeed, Chavez doesn't understand that liberal democracy actually includes respecting that previous (and future) elected governments have legitimacy, and something called a constitution and rule of law is what true leaders respect. Chavez simply changes these on a whim because he is a power hungry demagogue.

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Chavez apparently kept trying to interrupt until King Juan Carlos could take no more and said "Why don't you shut up?".

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Indeed. Chavez thinks he is the vanguard of a new revolution, when he is a blundering loudmouthed bully, and quite unhinged.

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Meanwhile, yesterday a two mile protest march went through Caracas opposing Chavez's changes to the Constitution to increase his power. He called students protesting "spoilt little brats" and that it is all orchestrated by the USA. Yes - of course it is Hugo. Four students were shot returning to campus after a protest earlier in the week after an armed group stormed the campus.

What Winston should say to North Korea

Winston is visiting North Korea next week, a visit I've already condemned as being unconscionable, as it implies that a state which imprisons children as young as 4 as political prisoners and works entire families in gulags from dusk till midnight 7 days, should be treated as an equal - or even deserves being talked to.

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After all would you treat those who abuse children as a deliberate state policy as equals?

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I'm unsure why he is going, North Korea is a long way off being a valuable trading partner, I can think of many less tinpot places with better human rights records he hasn't visited. I can only put it down to the Labour Party nuclear fetish. North Korea has signed a deal to dismantle its (announced and detected) nuclear facilities - not destroy its current nuclear weapons arsenal - but is to be rewarded for successfully developing and testing a nuclear weapon, but promising to "never ever proliferate and not make any more".

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Coming from a country that insists the Korean War was started by the US, when even the Kremlin revealed some years ago that this is complete fiction. A country that claims the rest of the world starves while it is a workers' paradise - in other words one of the most truth detached countries on earth, is hardly one you can trust to do a deal with.

Anyway, Winston is apparently going to "reinforce with North Korea the importance of fully declaring and dismantling its nuclear programmes and to express New Zealand's strong support for the Six Party Talks process" according to NZ Herald. Well that'll make a difference, Kim Jong Il will be bearing that in mind with his next bottle of cognac - oooh New Zealand agrees with us keeping our nukes and dismantling (hiding) the rest of our programme.

Setting aside this worthless piece of diplomacy, there IS something else Winston said that is more sinister. The Herald also says "New Zealand was ready to help North Korea's economic development once it had abandoned its plans to develop nuclear weapons" (sic).

Well setting aside the illiterate past tense from NZPA which would please me ("was" not "is"), how will this happen? Are taxpayers going to help this murderous totalitarian nightmare to develop? Would we have supported the economic development of Nazi Germany if it never invaded Poland and promised not to develop MORE nuclear weapons (but keep the ones it has)?

No. New Zealand taxpayers should absolutely revolt at the idea of paying a cent towards these butchers. Winston SHOULD ask North Korea to open up its gulags, which hold around 200,000 prisoners, to the Red Cross (not the North Korean Red Cross which is near useless). Ask them about Camp 22, about imprisoning children as political prisoners, about these cases from the gulags:

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"there were two girls and they were trying to take out a piece of noodle from one polluted water pond where they put the garbage. And one guard kicked the kids into the small pond, and they drowned."

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and

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"And I heard many times that eyeballs were taken out by beating. And I saw that by beating the person, the muscle was damaged and the bone was exposed, outside, and they put salt on the wounded part."

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and

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"The reason why she was forced to go to the prison is her father’s elder brother was purged at the Anbyon, Kanwhan Do province. She went when she was 5 years old. All of the family members were imprisoned. Her mother starved to death, and her brother also starved to death in the prison. I met her at age 26. So it means she was in the prison for 21 years. I think she no longer is in the world"

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So what happened to this woman who was a political prisoner from age 5? Yes 5!! A former gulag guard tells:

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"my supervisor, when he saw the woman, she was beautiful. And he raped her, and he was found by the watchman officer. And he was investigated. My superior, his rank was reduced and the woman was sent to the detention center And then I didn’t see her for one year.
...One day I was going to the place to load the coal, I met her. And I noticed she was exactly that woman, and I asked her, how you could survive. And she told me, that "yes, I survived". But she showed me her body, and it was all burned by fire.
...After six months I met her at the corn storage in Kusan district and found her putting on a used tire on her knees because her legs were cut off. Because of a coal mine wagon ran over her knees. And all she could do now was separate the corn grains from the cob"

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Winston, if you don't raise human rights with North Korea then, in the words of the cliche, you don't deserve to be pissed on if you're on fire. Nobody in North Korea can even utter a word questioning this - you can, you effectively have diplomatic immunity in this case.

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Oh and if you only care about economic development, you might give North Korea the only seriously sound advice it needs ...

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set your people free!

Time to give Harawira a lesson

"I don't understand terrorism as it is understood by those fuelled by the jingoistic, acid-drenched, hate-filled, anti-Islamic, death to anyone from the Middle East, vitriolic, poisonous claptrap that the United States is trying to foist upon the rest of the world" he says according to the Herald.

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He's either an idiot or willfully blind.

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What jingo was involved when four airliners were hijacked on 9/11, what jingo was involved when the London underground and a bus were bombed? Who foisted THAT upon us you leftwing bigot?

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Who said "death to anyone from the Middle East"? You did - idiot!

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Who spreads poisonous claptrap that the world should be a Islamic caliphate which barely tolerates other religions, and calls for death to infidels, and willingly spreads a doctrine of suicide and sacrifice to children, and spreads venom about Jews that is akin to Nazi Germany?

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Or maybe Hone your own "jingoistic, acid-drenched, hate filled" anti-Americanism is the reality? You'd love a world where you and your mates could steal the property of others, lock up those who offend you, where you and your mates could wander on land you think is yours and take it off the registered legal owners, where taxes can be used for you and your mates - and where words like "accountability" are dismissed as "business roundtable speak" (a former Maori MP once said that!). Maybe Hone you like the model of Africa, the continent of rampant corruption, where who you know matters more than what you do.

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It's about time that the electoral system was made colourblind, and a Maori vote counted as much as a non-Maori vote - the Maori seats should go, the Maori Party can then try to convince an electorate or 5% of voters that it is entitled to be in Parliament- like everyone else, but Hone has his own "jingoistic, acid-drenched, hate filled word" for being treated like everyone else - racism.