Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
[Prime Minister David] Cameron lost it over Rupert Murdoch. He showed staggering lack of judgment in hiring Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor, as his first director of communications at Downing Street, a hubristic decision made against the best advice and apparently with a dual aim: to show he was not an old Etonian “toff” and to get favorable treatment from the 37 percent of the British print media owned by Murdoch. He then spent a fair chunk of time during his first year in office in 26 meetings with various News Corp. honchos, including Rebekah Brooks, who was arrested by the British police Sunday. Brooks happened to be part of the Chipping Norton set, well described by Oborne as “an incestuous collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners, located in and around the prime minister’s Oxfordshire constituency.” – Roger Cohen in The New York Times
