Wednesday, 15 October 2008

bits and pieces

hardly surprising that many media commentators are declaring john key the "unofficial" winner of last night's debate. as with many others, i'm surprised that an academic like therese arseneau treated the phone poll as if it had any meaning whatsoever. she was even debunked by micheal laws of all people, who admitted on radio live to voting 30 times in one such previous poll. we had alan simpson in the waikato times making a similar bizarre statement: "It's not a reliable poll but it conveys a strong message..." huh?

since it's getting late, i'll put in a couple of links. gordon campbell has a good post on the debate. the standard points out all the factual errors made by mr key (i'm being charitable in assuming he made mistakes rather that he intended to deliberately mislead).

this 20 minute animation called "the story of stuff" was sent to me by a friend a few days ago. it's an educational piece that deals with the costs of our consumer culture. simple but effective.

great to see the daily show tonight making much of the fact that arabs can be decent family men. it was in relation to senator mccain's response to a woman at one of his rallies who claimed senator obama was an arab. "no ma'am", says senator mccain, "he's not an arab, he's a decent family man". both john stewart and asif mandvi were hilarious in highlighting the bigotry of that particular remark.

helen clark is in hamilton tomorrow for a full day of campaigning, so i'll report back on how that went, if i have the energy at the end of the day!

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