It's on ... the reptiles have begun a new jihad and are determined to give the lettuce short odds...
Liberal moderates abandon Ley, begin move to Hastie
Senior conservative and moderate MPs believe there is growing momentum behind Andrew Hastie’s push to become leader, amid fury that Sussan Ley has delivered a climate policy ‘worse than the Nationals’.
By Greg Brown and Lachlan Leeming
Meanwhile, Dame Slap keeps ranting away...
No delete button can scrub out the details of what Labor senators Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher did to weaponise a baseless claim of a political cover-up of an alleged rape.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist
The pond would rather poke out an eye than go there, so her obsessive compulsion is best left on Planet Janet, far above the faraway tree ...
Meanwhile the reptiles are keeping their ABC/BBC jihad alive...
ABC’s managing director defended selected editing of Trump and now he has the press club to answer to
ABC managing director Hugh Marks faces a credibility test when he submits himself before the National Press Club, after defending Four Corners’ own Donald Trump coverage.
By James Madden
Answer to the press club? That gormless bunch who keep disinviting people because they're nervous nellies?
As well as the maddening Madden, cackling Claire was also in on this game...
BBC meltdown sparks disquiet over ABC’s own impartiality and journalistic blind spots
The BBC’s spectacular implosion over claims of bias has become a stark warning for public broadcasters worldwide and renews the focus on the narrative-driven journalism of our ABC.
By Claire Lehmann
Truth in King Donald's world?
The coverage of King Donald's disunited states is a singular example of the reptiles determination to decouple from the world.
That is, of course, designed to be a segue to Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang, trying to cover the Marge wars and other current disunited matters ...
The header: First he drained the swamp, now Trump is draining his own base, Donald Trump is trying to reset the political narrative by backing down on his reciprocal tariffs, picking a fight with Marjorie Taylor Greene and rewriting history on Jeffrey Epstein.
The caption: US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks alongside Donald Trump at a campaign event on March 9, 2024. Picture: AFP
He drained the swamp?
He and his minions are the swamp, and what a rich, deep, fetid swamp it is.
The lesser Kelly gang member's offering was remarkably thin stuff, barely a 3 minute read, and graced with just that opening snap as a visual distraction.
Joe's pitiful attempt was a reminder that in the world of the full to overflowing intertubes, the lizard Oz is the last place to go for coverage of the disunited states:
In addition, the US President is moving to isolate his internal critics by making an example of Marjorie Taylor Greene – once one of his most loyal allies – and branding her a “traitor” and a “disgrace to our GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY!”
The flurry of activity reveals a US president who is feeling the political heat and eager to show he still retains the ability to dictate and harness the passions of the MAGA movement to advance his own interests.
Trump’s bid to wrest back control of the political agenda is likely to come at a high price by setting off a new chain reaction of unpredictable consequences and igniting new battlefronts.
This is already apparent. His decision to lift reciprocal tariffs on selective goods – backdated to Thursday – is being widely interpreted as a major backdown and a glaring concession that his signature economic policy had been increasing prices for Americans all along.
The decision to exempt hundreds of imports, including Australian beef, from his April 2 tariffs has been targeted to capture goods not produced inside America including coffee, tea, tropical fruits and juices, cocoa, spices, bananas, oranges, tomatoes and a wider range of fertilisers.
Predictably, the move has triggered demands from American business and industry groups for the tariff relief to be more widely spread.
US Chamber of Commerce executive vice-president Neil Bradley encouraged Trump to lift imposts on “other products not readily available from domestic courses and in instances where tariffs threaten American jobs”.
“We also urge the administration to provide tariff relief for the more than 236,000 small businesses who import into the US,” he said.
National Association of Manufacturers chief executive Jay Timmons said “just as coffee primarily must be produced elsewhere, the same is true for a range of critical manufacturing inputs and machinery that keep our factories humming”.
“Tariffs on essential manufacturing inputs raise costs on factory floors, slow investment in equipment and risk undercutting … efforts to boost US manufacturing output and jobs.”
Attempting to dilute the potency of the Epstein issue, Trump is leaning into the scandal to try to share the political pain more broadly. He is flagging plans to ask the Justice Department and FBI to launch an investigation into Epstein’s ties with Bill Clinton, his former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman (a Democratic donor) and the nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase.
His goal is to generate a new narrative that release of the Epstein files is a “con job” being pushed by the Democrats as a distraction – a dubious ploy given he and senior members of his cabinet stoked interest in the issue and the need for greater transparency during the 2024 presidential campaign.
The pushback from the US President comes after more than 20,000 of Epstein’s emails were released last week, providing further insights into his contact network. They included correspondence in which the convicted sex offender, who died by suicide in August 2019, said Trump “knew about the girls” and spent hours at his house along with one of his victims, later identified as Virginia Giuffre.
Finally, Trump’s political attack on Greene risks deepening the fissures in his own political constituency. He is now trying to ostracise any breakaway figure seen as a greater MAGA purist than himself, with the President accusing his former ally of shifting to the “Far Left.”
“I understand that wonderful, Conservative people are thinking about primarying Marjorie in her District of Georgia, that they too are fed up with her and her antics and, if the right person runs, they will have my Complete and Unyielding Support,” he said on Truth Social.
Greene crossed the President by suggesting he was straying too far from his America First platform and spending too much time on his foreign agenda. In addition, she championed the release of the Epstein files along with greater efforts to address the affordability crisis.
She will not go down without a fight. Responding to Trump’s attack on her, Greene posted that “most Americans wish he would fight this hard to help the forgotten men and women of America who are fed up with foreign wars and foreign causes, are going broke trying to feed their families, and are losing hope of ever achieving the American dream.”
“I have supported President Trump with too much of my precious time, too much of my own money, and fought harder for him even when almost all other Republicans turned their back and denounced him. But I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump … For me, I remain America First and America Only!!!”
In trying to solve the problem presented by Greene, Trump’s solution is to pour petrol on the fire and embrace the chaos. He will be hoping the blaze doesn’t also burn through his own political credibility.
Remarkable really, that with King Donald's ratings deep in the toilet, Joe can keep on scribbling about him having political credibility still to burn ...
Keep up Joe, the war has widened ...
Where's the bromancer to make sense of it all?
Still MIA since 28th October, and still no word of either his bludging or his secret mission collecting brand new reasons for paranoid hysteria.
Speaking of paranoia...
Australian security agencies will be grappling for decades with the threat from foreign spies trying to steal AUKUS nuclear submarine secrets.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent
If the spies do manage to find out when the subs will surface, how much they will cost and what earthly good they will do to help in Australia's defence in 2050, here's hoping they share their findings...
Major Mitchell seems to have also gone MIA so it was left to simpleton Simon to defend the indefensible ...
The thumb flourish ...
The next Coalition battle must focus on a credible alternative path; the forgotten imperative to reduce global carbon consumption is a message in the balance.
By Simon Benson
... turned into this ...
The header: Net zero a political victory but heat’s on Coalition to show a convincing climate change plan, The next Coalition battle must focus on a credible alternative path; the forgotten imperative to reduce global carbon consumption is a message in the balance.
The caption for the hapless, downcast warrior, knowing the lettuce had hit the lead in the straight: Leader of the Opposition Sussan Ley. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
It was a tricky business, selling the word salad that had spewed into the ether over the weekend, but simplistic Simon was up to the task ...
The government would have you believe it is not. But accusing Liberal MPs of climate denialism has the risk of suggesting anybody else who is sceptical of the mandated approach to reach the 2050 target is an idiot. Much like anyone who disagreed with the Indigenous voice to parliament was labelled a racist.
But could the same be said of one of the world’s leading energy economists – dubbed the “green economist” by the BBC – Sir Dieter Helm?
The clash between science, or knowledge, and politics may go back to Plato and Aristotle but it never gets old.
Helm is professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford. In 2015, he was reappointed chairman of the British government’s natural capital committee, and in 2021 he was knighted for services to not only energy policy but also the environment.
The reptiles suddenly realised that COP30 was a thing, Thousands of climate activists marched in the Brazilian city of Belem on Saturday (November 15) to call for climate justice and territorial protection at COP30.
The pond was reminded of of other long wars ...
Simpleton Simon clutched at the Pom to show the way ...
On the issue of COPs, this is what Helm had to say about the 30th shindig underway in Brazil.
“Incredibly, Brazil has cut a new road through the Amazon to allow all those delegates flying to COP30 to get to the meeting,” he wrote in The Times.
“Hard to make this stuff up. Nevertheless, world leaders, to the extent they turn up, will no doubt yet again tell us they are ‘saving the planet’.”
Helm doesn’t fly in aeroplanes because of the carbon they emit. He rails against the deforestation of the planet, which he says has led to the Amazon, for instance, going from one of the world’s greatest carbon sinks to a net emitter of carbon because of the scale at which it is being destroyed.
What Helm laments the most is that the world seems to have forgotten about the sequestration side of the equation and, more important, carbon consumption.
Helm says the renewables-only solution is a costly fantasy but more radically suggests that applying a carbon tax on consumption of anything with carbon in it would be more effective at cutting emissions.
He is bewildered by the notion that in Britain, for instance, deindustrialisation may have reduced the nation’s emissions profile but consumption of carbon by importing the same products it used to make hasn’t changed the nation’s overall carbon footprint. And after all, isn’t it the global level of carbon that matters?
The same argument could be made in Australia.
Dear sweet long absent lord, not a carbon tax. What would the likes of the onion muncher and petulant Peta say?
At this point the reptiles introduced the windmill-hating beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, Opposition frontbencher Angus Taylor was a former student of Dieter Helm at Oxford. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Oh they were all rallying behind Barners, Tamworth's eternal shame ...
“The greenhouse is getting ever hotter as the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere keeps going up – at a rate of two parts per million every year since 1990 and last year at three ppm,” he says in a podcast aired last week.
“Now it is 425 ppm, up from 275 ppm before the industrial revolution and on course for over 500 ppm. The next generation is going to be appalled by what we have done.
“The answers are painful, but either they are faced up to or we carry on wasting money and without making any difference to climate change.
“First, if we want to stop causing climate change, our net zero target is the wrong one: it should be net zero carbon consumption (rather than production) and preferably derived from a global target focused on the increase in carbon concentration in the atmosphere.
“That global target should be based upon ppm, not a target measured in degrees centigrade: 1.5C is for the birds anyway, and we will go through 2C.”
Helm has long been a proponent of technology as the ultimate solution. Machines will find a way. He isn’t much liked now by environmental groups, which disagree with his assessment of the ultimate cost of renewables.
This is not to say Helm’s view would in any way be consistent with the Coalition’s new position. Far from it; Helm would be too green for the Liberals, while ironically not green enough for the activists.
Ah the machines will find a way ...
Lucky we're going to be helped by the face planting Ruski Rocky-themed robot ...
Having done his best to confuse and conflate, simpleton Simon introduced a snap of the solar-supporting Sauron, ‘Recipe for chaos’: Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen on Saturday, criticising the Liberal Party move to abandon net zero policy. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw
Then it was on to a final flourish of simplistic fury ...
No surprises as to where some of Taylor’s thinking on all this began.
But herein lies the problem with the Liberals’ proposal to abandon net zero and a target on anything at all, by replacing it with almost nothing.
Without a credible emissions reduction pathway, or indeed attention to the sequestration issue, the Coalition has no hope of appealing to a majority of voters, whether they are in teal seats or elsewhere. While energy costs may be the primary political argument Sussan Ley wants to make – and this will have appeal – the key to flipping voters will be an ability to convince enough of them there is a credible plan beyond a rhetorical commitment to bring down emissions at the same time as bringing down power bills.
Any measure of opinion in Australia will tell you that up to 75 per cent of voters support net zero. This would include some who probably don’t know what it means.
So, even if the Coalition can win the cost and prices argument (and that’s a big if), unless it also has a believable narrative on emissions and how it intends to reduce them, voters are unlikely to be turned, or at least enough of them to make any difference.
It’s not clear yet whether those who are still celebrating their political victory last week inside the Liberal partyroom are yet aware of this challenge or whether the Coalition in its current state is capable of managing such a balancing act.
Strange, not a single mention of the need to nuke the country to save the planet, nor any indication that SMRs are currently waiting to be shipped to backyards around the land.
Maybe next week... but we'll always have the barbie...
That just left the Caterist.
Usually he would be in simplistic Simon's turf, but this day he took a slightly different angle ...what with the dastardly globalists, those devious internationalists, trying to ruin the reptiles' valiant attempts to destroy the planet ...
The header: UN rapporteur’s move to block Woodside reeks of overreach, A federal government with an ounce of courage would throw everything it has into blocking Astrid Puentes Riano’s challenge to the approval of Woodside’s extension.
The caption: Minister for the Environment and Water Senator Murray Watt. Picture: Getty
In this outing, the caring, concerned environmentalist - shattered by the way renewables was ruining the environment - reverted to his more predictable flood waters in quarries whispering form:
Fresh from a landmark victory in an international court, the Colombian human rights lawyer has turned her attention to Woodside’s planned expansion of gas extraction in Australia’s North West Shelf.
On Friday, Puentes Riano’s lawyers presented her credentials as the UN special rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment to the Federal Court. She seeks standing as amicus curiae in three lawfare claims challenging the federal government’s approval of Woodside’s extension.
It follows an International Court of Justice warning in July that states failing to take “appropriate and proportionate” climate action could be in breach of international law.
This conclusion pushes the UN into territory once reserved for elected governments.
Invoking the slippery notion of international law to block by far the most significant resource investment application in Australia is no small thing.
Since the Hawke government gave its approval in the early 1980s, the North West Shelf has proved to be one of the most productive and wealth-creating projects in Australian history.
The outcome of Woodside’s application for a 40-year extension is not merely commercial; it is a strategic imperative for Australia’s economic security.
With much of the core infrastructure built and paid for, every additional decade of production will deliver billions in export earnings, stable tax and royalty flows, and thousands of high-skill jobs that cannot be offshored.
Yes, yes, gas the planet, go gas ... Woodside chief executive Meg O'Neill. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe
The quarry whisperer was frantic with fear ...
It would suspend funding and co-operation with the UN Human Rights Council until the body orders Puentes Riano to withdraw from the action. Intervening in a court action against a sovereign government is an audacious extension of the rapporteur’s role as an independent investigator.
The chances of a robust defence by this government against this outrageous example of UN mission creep are not high, however. Not when our Climate Change and Energy Minister has flown to Brazil to ingratiate himself with the UN’s climate change body, flashing his vanity carbon targets in the hope of persuading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to hold its next meeting in Australia.
The first question government lawyers should put to Puentes Riano’s counsel is: Who is bankrolling her application? Surely not the UN, since rapporteurs are unpaid and rely heavily on external funding for travel, research and staff.
Puentes Riano may be paying her own legal expenses and airfares. A more probable explanation, however, is that she is dipping into the vast resources of US activist philanthropy, tapping the same left-leaning activist foundations that funded her career as an activist.
Luckily we know who's been funding the MRC ...
Was the tap turned off? Is that why they ranted about Taxpayer money squandered on questionable grants?
Never mind, time for a snap of the villainess ... There are ample grounds to challenge Astrid Puentes Riano’s independence.
It is, it goes without saying, a vast international conspiracy ...
She is a former vice-president of International Rivers, which claims to have stopped the construction of 2000 dams worldwide, in part thanks to funding from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
The UN’s increasing reliance on philanthropic funding from private philanthropists has been a cause of growing concern in recent years.
The Gates, Ford, Open Society, Oak and MacArthur foundations, as well as private corporations such as Microsoft, have been generous in their gifts to bodies such as the UN Human Rights Council, raising questions about the influence of private individuals on the UN’s independence.
The independence of so-called special procedures mandate-holders, including rapporteurs, has been the subject of particular concern since 2021, when a report revealed that many received funding directly from private philanthropists, including Soros.
The European Centre for Law and Justice identified 37 so-called experts who received 134 direct financial payments totalling $US11m between 2015 and 2019. Soros’s organisation gave $1.5m to the UNHCR alone during that period, including grey-area direct funding of rapporteurs, who are not obliged to disclose donations. One former rapporteur expressed alarm that some experts practise “industrial” or “extreme” fundraising.
Similar concerns have been raised over the UN’s approach to Palestine.
The Trump administration has sanctioned Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for Palestine. Announcing the sanctions in July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Italian lawyer had launched “political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel”.
Could it truly be a Caterist piece without a salivating snap of gas at work? Woodside Energy’s Karratha gas plant.
And so to a former Pom blathering on about "the new colonialism"...
Clearly not the UN, since she has no official mandate.
Will she appear under the auspices of AIDA, which shamelessly exists to combat the “triple planetary crisis” of climate change, human rights and inequality?
Is it International Rivers, which has argued for “environmental personhood”, a legal concept that entails granting rivers, trees and other environmental entities the same status as human beings in court proceedings?
Or is she representing herself, presumably in her capacity of a self-proclaimed expert on the human right to a sustainable environment?
If so, for the sake of the court, let’s hope Puentes Riano can keep her interventions brief and to the point. And let’s hope she can avoid the mumbo-jumbo that makes her latest report to the UN all but impenetrable.
We can only guess what she means by “a holistic, comprehensive, integrated, gender-responsive and human rights and ecosystem-based approach to the ocean”, apart from the expression of a broad world view of the anointed, people who see all forms of resource extraction as evil except those that serve to sustain their First World lifestyles.
The Prime Minister’s decision to delay the North West Shelf decision until after the federal election for fear of losing votes to the Greens is hardly a sign that he can be relied on to take up the fight.
Yet a Federal Court decision in favour of activists will be another step in the downgrading of parliament to a mere talking shop. When judicial bodies begin to act as alternative legislatures, or when parliament behaves as though they ought to, government drifts away from the people and towards a legal aristocracy that was never meant to rule.
There is a deeper danger still. If our courts start deferring to the UN’s quasi-judicial bodies, we weaken not only parliament but also the courts themselves.
It would be an act of surrender to the new colonialism, condemning Australia’s future as an outpost of an unaccountable international bureaucracy.
Strange, back in the day, the reptiles used to run a disclaimer ... a tag to identify the way that the Caterist worked for an unaccountable, government-funded mob of wild eyed ratbags ...
The pond began to doubt - the pond double checked, and there was no tag visiible.
What a relief to discover he was still inside the tent, p*ssing out (*blogger bot approved) ...
And so to wrap up with the immortal Rowe ...
It's always in the detail, and what details there were in all those tats...
