Thursday, November 09, 2006

American Politics & Alcohol

Donald Rumsfeld has stepped down as US Secretary of Defence, only a day after the American mid-term elections.

The article on stuff http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3855235a10,00.html has an excellent quote from Bush stating that the Iraq policy was "not working well enough, fast enough"... more like its not working at all.

Very pleased to see that the Democrats have one power of Congress and are currently only one seat away from controlling the senate... the next two years are going to be very interesting to follow and the next presidential election will be better yet.

YAY!!! NZ politicians have voted to keep the drinking age at 18, pleased to see they realised that raising the drinking age back to 20 would not have fixed the drinking problems that NZ faces. Now that this bill has failed maybe they will work on some good campaigns done through the media which could work well, as have the drink driving and "make it click" campaigns

3 comments:

Just my opinion said...

The best way to educate children about alcohol is to get the parents to do this. No matter how much money Govt spends on this, there is no substitute for ones parents to give good advice and educate.

How is it that many countries Central/Southern Europe amongst other countries have far lower drinking ages (if any) and have not got a binge drinking problem? Culture plays a lot in this, but it is all taught at home.

The vote is a good result because no matter what the law is, kids will always be able to get their hands on alcohol. However this is also the case with other drugs too!

Rich said...

The only time that drinking ever became unfashionable amongst young people was in England when E was the drug of choice. Since E and lager don't really go together, drinking piss became terminally unhip.

Which resulted in much happier clubs and pubs (in the middle-class urban circles where E is popular - out in the 'burbs the chavs kept on drinking and puking as much as ever).

Of course, we can't get E at a reasonable price in NZ because of dumbass drug laws and effective customs controls. Maybe the government should just sack a whole bunch of customs officers so we can get decent, friendly drugs.

Just my opinion said...

LOL, it is safe to say E is still very popular in the UK, London in particular. Lager and bitter/ale is still popular in the non drug circles, just go into Soho or Leicester Sq on a Friday night.

You can't count the Chavs, they are just scum :)