Reliably authoritarian

Despite its recent efforts to brand itself as "liberal", one thing you can still rely on the National Party to be is consistently authoritarian. And so we have their Corrections spokesperson, Simon Power, calling for Tim Selwyn's prison blog - written by snailmail sent to his friend Bomber on the outside - to be banned.

The immediate question - which occurs slightly before the one about how Simon Power thinks he's going to shut down a site hosted in America - is "under what law"? As Corrections point out, prisoners are allowed to write letters, and whether or not they're published elsewhere is nothing to do with them. But instead of considering such questions, Power's reaction is knee-jerk and reflexive: he sees something he doesn't like, and he wants it banned. And given what his leader was saying on Friday, it seems that this is just par for the course for National...