I do hope our Government has those ISDS clauses in TPP2 turned off properly.
We wouldn’t want to see the next 14 years of Transdev ‘servicing wellington rail’ dotted with legal action…

Doubly sadly, Gareth Morgan fails to grasp the finer points of National's 'Dead Cat Strategy'.

https://mobile.twitter.com/XiuMei_THre

The web site name is, well.

That’s a pretty toxic mix and it’s being funded by someone.

I dunno, he could even get a poll bounce from that.

What happens is a party with a change mandate wins, and if it is successful then the new establishment that owes it’s positions and status to that change largely writes the history.

There is…

I always like to remind myself that in both 1935 and 1938, despite the failure of capitalism in the Great Depression and the failure of leadership in the Great War, 40% of New Zealanders STILL voted for conservative parties – and Labour’s…

If you believe that you own any cookies which reside on your computer, there is an easy solution. I've sent you an email Ian. ;-)

In 1940, Mannheim wrote a piece called, Man and society in an age of reconstruction, in which he developed a typology of how institutions of governance interact with civil society to define social order. I think a lot about the situation in…

That's the nature of tribes. Same here in NZ while Joyce was telling outrageous lies there was a core that justified…

For me, the most depressing thing about this (and the whole of the last 18 months or so) is the failure of the approval needle…

Yes, relatives of mine in the US see that as a major problem – yet they feel that reform of political donations/money in politics is even more to blame for…

I've heard coverage that Sessions was Papadopolous' supervisor on the campaign...

Agreed.

But there is also a crisis coming within the GOP. At some point GOP representatives are going to demand some kind of change. Without something happening a lot of GOP politicians are going to be…

The indictment on Monday did not name the Podesta Group or Mercury, instead referring to them as “two Washington, D.C., firms” that were recruited by Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates “to lobby in the United States on behalf of Yanukovych, the Party of Regions,…

Which was basically what took down all involved in the Watergate scandal. But I suspect this time round, Trump's most die-hard loyalists are an order of magnitude more radical than those who refused to accept the…

Yeah, there's something in that.

√ Paul Manafort
√ Rick Gates
√ George Papadopoulos
× Felix Sater
× Michael Flynn
× Roger Stone
× Carter Page
× Michael Cohen
× Corey Lewandowski
× Sam Clovis
× Steve Bannon
× Jeff Sessions
× Jared Kushner
× Eric Trump
× Donald…

Depends whether your disloyalty is to the Constitution or the President.

One can but hope someone is also planning to kneecap Bannon.
He must be skirting close to treason at the moment.

Which is pretty fucking incredible when you think about it.

IDd so far: Manafort, Lewandowski, Sam Clovis, Rick Gates and a couple of Russian agents.

Especially that they're being fed an alternative reality at the moment by Sean Hannity et al.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYlrngaEKIA

There's a lot of Trump-supporting folks out there who are likely to take any…

Very early on he identified Papadopolos as a likely target of the FBI who could be "turned".

It's really interesting to see how a lawyer interprets the…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/upstairs-at-home-with-the-tv-on-trump-fumes-over-russia-indictments/2017/10/30/fd0d0b16-bd87-11e7-8444-a0d4f04b89eb_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.ea2c5b711a6c

The thing that worries me about his shrill 'DO SOMETHING" tweet, is how his 'base' will interpret that, and what they might do in response...

(and in an aside, doesn't al qaeda…

It was two years from the day of first indictments until Nixon resigned, so there's a little way to go…