It looks like the Democrats are going to attempt to shoehorn the Obamacare bill through on the thinnest of margins. Considering the controversial nature of some parts of the bill and the partisan sentiment it has generated, one can only say that this is a foolish and dangerous thing to try and do. Time has [...]

You  may be wondering why Republicans seem so adamantly against Obama’s healthcare bill when it seems, superficially at any rate, to offer millions more people a chance of decent health care. The Democrats love to portray the Republicans as selfish people obstructing the provision of healthcare to millions of their fellow Americans.
This may explain their [...]

Having failed to convince the Republicans of the merits of Obamacare, the Democrats have now decided to use brute force and bully the legislation through with a simple majority. This is a spectacularly bad idea. Forcing the bill through under “budget reconciliation” essentially undermines the entire set of safeguards the Americans have in place to [...]

Suppose a German Shepherd had just killed his police handler by mauling him in an unprovoked attack? This dog has a history of previously mauling the dead body of a drunk who fell into the dog’s pen and broke his neck. The same dog had also been involved in the death of another police handler, [...]

Back from South Africa, anyway. Jet lagged out of my gourd as well.
After a decade away (15 years since emigrating), South Africa now feels like a foreign land to me. The South African government claims that crime has dropped since the Apartheid years but I doubt very much that that is true. Absolutely everyone I [...]

In what has to be the most bizarre over-reaction I have heard in a long time, the Herald reports that a 12-year-old girl was arrested for scrawling on her desk. That is: properly arrested in handcuffs and dragged off to the police station and given eight hours of community service as her sentence.
Wow.
I realise this [...]

Apparently, Mr Obama would now like to talk to to Republicans about health care. The man is really a laugh riot. After trying to ram a highly divisive, partisan health bill through the senate and failing, Mr. Obama would like a televised bipartisan summit for half a day to break the impasse.
I suspect you are [...]

Obama announces.
President Barack Obama sent Congress his new budget overnight, a plan that forecasts the government spending a record US$1.66 trillion ($2.37 trillion) more than it takes in through taxes.
1.66 TRILLION deficit in a single year…
If you laid every dollar bill end to end you could walk on them through the centre of the sun [...]

Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article.
Here’s a new category of spam – disaster spam. Seems a little self-defeating to me to try and sensationalise a sensational event, but that does not seem to stop the guys on Stuff:
NZ powerless to help Haiti, says McCully
New Zealand [...]

Yes, It is the time for reviews of the past year, the perennial favorite of tired journalists the world over. Like me, they knocked this together in mid-December and timed it to drop into whatever publication they owed a column to. Just as I did last year, I thought you might like to have a [...]