Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Dotcom: Further news of the unlikely, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
To be fair, Key didn't really spend his own fortune on becoming Prime Minister.
A better comparison might be with Alan Gibbs, Michael Fay et al pumping millions (often secretly) over the years into the Act Party, or, more recently, with Colin Craig's vanity party.
Dotcom actually seems less weird.
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Hard News: A wretched editorial, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
And I don’t think I was the only person more than a little… disquieted by how sharply the victim of a crime got elbowed out of the way so media commentators could get to the “real issue” – how it affected the political interests of an awful lot of men both in New Leeland and Malaysia.
There was a real tone of that.
IMO & YMMV, of course, but that seemed to me another symptom of how rape culture works – if you push rape victims to the margins of their own story, as it were, you don’t have to bother yourself with them. Right?
I would not disagree with you there, at all.
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Hard News: Dotcom: Further news of the unlikely, in reply to william blake,
Perhaps immigration was looking firmly at .com’s bank account when issuing visas, just like they have when processing other businessmen with dubious histories.
Or the minister was. That's really the best-case scenario for the government at the moment: they overruled the SIS to get residency for a guy with a criminal record and a current FBI investigation because he was just really rich.
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Hard News: Dotcom: Further news of the unlikely, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Russell: Um… would that be KDC or Internet Mana shopping a story paragraph three of Andrea’s own story says Dotcom’s been pushing for a while? Look, we’re all grown ups here perfectly well aware the Press Gallery is being pitched and spun from all sides all the time, but please let’s not be cute…
It adds some dates to the timeline. Dates during which the government was negotiating with interests who have participated as parties to the court action since.
So is alleging that the Government ran some convoluted residency honey trap at the behest of a foreign corporation, or something. I’ve given up chanting “correlation does not imply causation” at the media, but someone needs to even if you do believe there’s no corruption or depravity the Government won’t stoop to…
As I noted, the new emails do not prove the conspiracy theory. But it’s entirely reasonable to ask why the SIS would have done a 90-minute turnaround on its strong advice to Immigration NZ, given that it felt that even the earlier offences had been grounds for refusal of residency to someone it now knew to also be the subject of a current FBI and police investigation. Also, it’s reasonable to ask what the nature of the “political pressure” was.
Edit: It's also reasonable to ask how the head of the SIS, Warren Tucker, could have forgotten to mention this unusual situation involving a foreign government agency to the responsible minister, Mr Key. Particularly given that a couple of Key's own ministers were connected to Dotcom and might surely have wanted to know.
As I said in the post, today’s revelations lend some credence to Dotcom’s claim in this respect.
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Hard News: Going solar?, in reply to James Green,
You just about had me sold, so I, too, am curious!
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Hard News: Dotcom: Further news of the unlikely, in reply to Matthew Poole,
there was a conspiracy to lure him to NZ
He was already here when the deals were apparently done. The talk of “residency” means permanent residency, not just being a resident.
Actually no. This June 2011 story by David Fisher refers to his intention to settle in New Zealand. He’d been back and forth on visits from Hong Kong, once for two months, but he may well not have settled had his residency not been granted.
It’s interesting that while the character grounds for residency were overridden by a “special direction” in 2010, his bid to buy the Coatesville mansion was rejected on character grounds by the Overseas Investment Commission in 2011.
FWIW, I do think his previous convictions were relatively minor. The computer hacking and computer fraud convictions were earned as a minor (the judge said “youthful foolishness”) and the procedural stock trading offences in Hong Kong attracted a fine of $US1250. The worst of them was the 2001 pump-and-dump share purchase in Letsbuyit.com, which caused genuine losses for other investors, but he copped a plea and avoided any jail time there (he could conceivably have been acquitted – German law was messy in that area). It’s indicative of his longtime tendency to ride just the wrong side of the line.
But none of those were the stuff of a joint FBI and New Zealand police operation, which came in while his residency application was being considered. That was surely pretty major.
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Hard News: A wretched editorial, in reply to Lilith __,
Just to put this in context though, a woman whose alleged attacker has been allowed to flee the country by government minsters is attacked FOR BEING CRITICAL OF THE GOVERNMENT?
It’s remarkable how often that argument has been advanced in the past week. Also, creepy.
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Ah. Andrea Vance follows up. Interesting ...
The Security and Intelligence Service (SIS) withdrew its objections to Kim Dotcom's residency as the Government negotiated a deal with a major Hollywood studio over The Hobbit.
Mega boss Dotcom, founder of the Internet-Mana party, believes US authorities wanted to keep him in New Zealand so it would be easier to extradite him on internet piracy and copyright infringement charges.
He has long claimed the New Zealand Government was acting at the behest of the American film industry but has never offered proof.
Warner Brothers had threatened to pull the plug on filming the The Hobbit movies in New Zealand, which would have cost the domestic film industry thousands of jobs.
The National Government flew 10 top Hollywood executives to Wellington and thrashed out a deal at Premier House, the official residence of Prime Minister John Key.
Sources today pointed Fairfax Media to the timing of the Hobbit negotiations and the spy agency U-turn.
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The herald has helpfully put all the emails in one place.
It's a bloody interesting read.
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Hard News: A wretched editorial, in reply to David MacGregor,
It seems an hysterical term applied in New Zealand – spurious correlationships being drawn from sketchy data.
Really? I'll occasionally feel the phrase is mis-applied -- and you could say the same about many useful and important concepts -- but I've no doubt it has meaning and relevance in a New Zealand context.
But the real point of my comment about the 3rd Degree story was that is was a potpourri of topics – a topical grab bag…if ‘rape culture’ is the axe you are grinding, or partisan distaste for Murray McCully or the current government…grind away. So eager to get the woman on camera were TV3 that anything she had to say would be ok. No doubt it helped that she was telegenic.
Ugh. Perhaps Billingsley simply and understandably felt that she was due a personal contribution to a political debate that had been going on around her for a week and a half. I can think of no reason that she, of all people, should not be allowed to speak her mind.