Thursday, January 01, 2015

Election Expulsions

DSC03693
Bike paths to nowhere: this boondoggle travels along the HSR right of way in Miaoli for a kilometer and then dies. Brilliant.

Sorry about the light blogging, but I am swamped with work.

Well, it's a new year, but same old politics. First, Clara Chou, the talk show host who accused the President of getting under the table money, six million US bucks worth, from the Ting Hsin Group, has been expelled from the KMT. The TT reports:
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday denied media personality Clara Chou (周玉蔻) a chance to present herself at the party’s Central Standing Committee meeting to appeal against her expulsion from the party.

The Evaluation and Discipline Committee of the party’s Taipei chapter on Tuesday decided to expel Chou from the party, with chapter director Chung Tse-liang (鍾則良) saying that remarks made by Chou during the campaigns leading up to the nine-in-one election on Nov. 29 had damaged the party’s reputation.
Meanwhile, in the now legendary Tainan city council speaker vote, which the DPP lost to the KMT despite having a 29-16 advantage over the KMT, the DPP has expelled the five councilors who voted for the KMT:
The DPP, which has 29 councilors in the 57-seat council, had expected to win the speakership race on Thursday last week, with two of the 11 independents on the council and one Taiwan Solidarity Union councilor allying themselves with the party.
However, DPP candidate Lai Mei-hui (賴美惠) lost to the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Lee Chuan-chiao (李全教) by 26 votes to 29, despite the KMT only having 16 seats.

A DPP investigation into why it lost out in the secret voting despite the KMT holding less than one-third of the council identified Tainan councilors Chen Chao-lai (陳朝來), Tseng Wang Ya-yun (曾王雅雲), Tsai Chiu-lan (蔡秋蘭), Liang Shun-fa (梁順發) and Chuang Yu-chu (莊玉珠) as having gone against the party line.
Prosecutors have already moved to annul the election on the grounds that bribery took place. It's kinda of funny, because it is hard to believe that five DPPers switched sides without bribery. Thus, a KMT victory would stink to high heaven and certainly call attention to itself, but the local KMTers went ahead and spent the millions to do it anyway. I am sure the KMT won all those speaker elections in other places without bribery, because all those independents of course voted their own consciences. Of course! It was only those DPPers in Taiwan who strangely elected to vote for the KMT.

Of course, there's Changhua, where everyone's indicted after every election.

Hello, Lord Raglan: I was in a convenience store this afternoon around 2:30 and the ICRT announcer explained that the reason Disney heroes' fathers/parents are dead is that Walt Disney's mother died in an accident in her home. Facepalm. From Frodo to Spiderman to Simba to Harry Potter to Rose of Titanic, the reason the hero's father is dead is because the hero is the son of the gods. Not because Disney's mom had an accident. Don't they teach Joseph Campbell to undergrads anymore?
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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Re Disney heros: No need to bring in pop psychology or babble about mythic origins. The reasons so many Disney parents are dead are simple: 1. It creates an immediate sympathy for the main character when you learn the parent is dead. 2. In some cases it also adds to the importance of the main character surviving because he/she is the only family the surviving parent has. 3. The parents have to be incapacitated somehow that the young character can be the hero (a parent doesn't have to actually die - see Mulan).

Did someone actually get paid to write a whole book on this?

http://xkcd.com/793/

Michael Turton said...

LOL. Brian, look up the book in the link there.

Michael

les said...

Speaking of Al Jazeera, does anyone know why it was dropped here? They're one of the few networks that consistently presents Taiwan as an independent nation, different color on the map etc. OTOH, they are quite critical of China...