down, dirty, and weak

So what did I say. Yep, Cullen will be mud-slinging. And John Armstrong says it well in the Herald.

"The dirt-flinging should have been left to an underling, allowing Dr Cullen to keep the high ground and reinforce public confidence that the inquiry by Douglas White, QC, will not be a whitewash - as Act and National are rather tenuously suggesting.

Instead, Dr Cullen adopted the "people in glass houses should not throw stones" line of attack by threatening to expose financial shenanigans by Labour's opponents.

He was doing neither Mr Tamihere, who, not surprisingly, has been given leave to stay away from Parliament this week, nor the Government any favours.

It was as if he was saying that anything naughty Mr Tamihere was found to have done would somehow be mitigated by the naughty things Opposition MPs are supposed to have done. Worse for Dr Cullen's case, he had no decent dirt to fling."

And it appears that Helen Clark's chief press secretary, Mike Munro, issued the statement retracting Tamihere's comments to the Sunday Star Times in which he said he opposed the Foreshore and Seabed legislation. Nothing to do with Tamihere at all. Pure spin.

And on a lighter note, congratulations to James Franklin for becoming only the second kiwi test cricketer to get a test hat-trick - and the first in nearly 30 years of test cricket.