And today in international Trumpery

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, reacting to news reports last week in the Panama Papers leak on how New Zealand has become a haven for international tax cheats and money launderers (the Mossack Fonseca law firm from which the Panama Papers come has a prominent and profitable office in Auckland), responded with bizarre accusations that notable charities—Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the International Red Cross—are somehow culpably involved in the same corruption, and that a Green MP, Mojo Mathers, is the holder of a foreign trust.

Then on Wednesday afternoon, addressing a question from Mr. Shaw, co-leader of the Green Party, as to why he refused to apologize for these allegations, he shouted until the speaker ejected him from the house. Today's international conservative movement, people, showing the way of Burkean civility and restraint.

I started thinking of it as a kind of modest preview of President Trump. Trump's not going to be a prime minister, of course, so he won't be hanging around in Congress, except there's that annual State of the Union address, nominally presided over by the Speaker of the House:

Wanker of many generations!

Bill Johnson, ex-politician (R-Alabama, sometime gubernatorial candidate) and current international humanitarian, discussed in a post here last December, resurfaced recently (via General Stuck in comments at Balloon Juice).

Possible recipients in the Rotorua mud baths. Picture from Fodors.

Johnson was the strange soul who went off to New Zealand to help with earthquake relief and while living in Christchurch took to the unusual hobby of sperm donation, [jump]

Real thing

Updated 4/22/2012

An Italian contemporary art and design blog entitled CocaColla.it, apparently quite a good one, gave up the ghost a couple of weeks ago—it had existed since 2010—under assault from a certain large international company with a similar-sounding name, for infringement of copyright.

Found at Bloggokin.it.

You can read about it, in somewhat undependable English, here, and a more extended text in Italian and English here. I don't think there's anything that can be done about it, but there is some other Coke news: [jump]

Wanker of the forever!

I think it was Atrios who pioneered the idea of nominating a metaphorical "wanker of the day", or week, or month. But do liberals ever give a thought to the wanker-for-real? Well, here's to Bill Johnson (link picked up from Daily Kos), once known as a Republican politician and foe of same-sex marriage, lately turned to good works in disaster recovery in Haiti and New Zealand, and now revealed as a wanker with a cause, supplying some good old Republican, Mensa-member sperm to a (fairly large) number of Kiwi ladies who want babies, including members of same-sex couples. I don't care if he's a Republican--well done, that man!

Update 12/13

A story in Gawker suggests that there may in fact have been no wanking involved: that he was donating that first-class pakeha* sperm in a more up-close and personal fashion, if you know what I mean; I mean, bluntly, that he was schtupping the clients in person, even the lesbians. This could explain, for one thing, why Mrs. Johnson objected to the procedures (she herself was not in New Zealand at the time). I refuse to believe it, though.

*Pakeha is Kiwi for "white", in the sense of "Belgian", or "colonialist".