A big, not so beautiful book of reptiles, foreign edition, with the bromancer and "Ned" leading the way ...

 

Inescapable.

Even the local reptiles couldn't look away from the fruits of News Corporation's American endeavours.

A little shiver of delight ran through the pond reading about simpleton Sharri, full, complete and utter disrespect, quailing and wailing, as in the Weekly Beast ...

‘Crushing and terrifying’ midterms result leaves media in fear of civilisation and capitalism crumbling
Caitlin Cassidy

...The Australian, in a frenzy of alliteration, called it the “Donald deflation” and a “MAGA mauling”, brought on by “Trump the trasher”.
The national broadsheet also found room on the front for a piece on Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, headlined “Far out: far-left radical to be first Muslim senator”.
El-Sayed’s victory had some commentators proclaiming the end of western civilisation. Over at News24, Sharri Markson began her program with: “Far-left extremist Abdul El-Sayed wins in Michigan, in a shocking result.
“This is the most crushing and terrifying result of the evening,” she continued, going on to repeat a false claim that El-Sayed has links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
“How can Americans vote for an anti-western, anti-American lunatic, as Trump describes him? What does this say about American values, and about the strength of western civilisation? You can’t help but worry that it’s crumbling, and capitalism with it.”
The “extremist” platform of El-Sayed, a former county health official who describes himself as a “capitalist who understands how capitalism works”, includes backing universal healthcare and regulating monopolies, as well as ending US military aid to Israel, while calling its war in Gaza a genocide.

If El-Sayed can carry out another part of his platform - dethrone Chuck Schumer and his imaginary friends - and the pond's delight will be complete ... Chuck Schumer should quit – but would his imaginary friends agree?

The pond will report on a couple of the local jihadists carrying on standard local jihads on the morrow, but for the moment, the pond must go with the flow, and brood about local reptiles brooding about what News Corporation helped wrought.

The pond makes no apologies for length - this is a beautiful bumper book for boy and girl herpetologists - and what better way to begin the flow than with a lengthy urination by the bromancer?

It's in the small print, but warning, the reptiles timed this as a ten minute read, which is way above the time taken for a standard sex act by the average Australian male, so be cautious ...

Good old bromancer, always looking on the bright side of life, but currently the United States hasn't any discernible means of correcting the excesses of a mad king, deep in the grip of dementia, and able to make all kinds of forays into foreign affairs, not least offering covert and overt support to said Vlad the sociopath, while carrying on his own foreign adventures, as the pitiful and the cowardly try to bail out from the adventures they offered their full support for ...

Did the pond mention that there would be cartoons as well as the lengthy and turgid exegesis?

Now marvel at the way that the bromancer can't contain two conflicting thoughts in his head.

Apparently the mad king is a much diminished figure. Apparently at the same time, he'll have the power to attempt spectacular and foolish things ...(oh and the weakness will also be a danger)...

The pond has already covered the couch molester with a cartoon. 

What to say about the bromancer's analysis? Much the same as might be said about former Texas governors ...

Truth to tell, without a few 'toons, the pond would find this a hard ride ...as the bromancer, in classic Australian Daily Zionist News style, does his best to exonerate Benji for his role in the Iran folly ...

Is there anything more shocking than all of that?

Perhaps the way that the facilitators and enablers at Faux Noise - the bromancer's American kissing cousins - stayed loyal right up to the bitter end, and were rewarded by a bigly drop in ratings and rats in the far right ranks rushing to allocate blame ...

The pond would have loved to share more of the infighting and ankle biting, but it's there at Media Matters ...

“A clown show”: The right-wing media blame game over the midterms is full steam ahead
Reeling from Republican losses, conservative hosts blamed each other, the party, and Donald Trump himself
Written by Noah VanDowe & Zachary Pleat

Never mind, the pond is stuck with the bromancer ...almost bringing himself to say that the mad king was almost worse than Biden (as if such a thing could be):

Ross Douthat? Didn't he head off to help ruin CBS?

...Despite being an early skeptic of Donald Trump’s politics and popularity, Douthat has since downplayed the president’s authoritarian and fascist tendencies while attempting to rationalize Trump’s behavior.

He has also criticized Democrats for their “resistance” showcases, spurring condemnation from those on the left that Douthat has been incorporated into a sort of “anti-anti-Trump” persona among the American intelligentsia, apparently ready to castigate Trump’s critics even as he himself scrutinizes the president and his policies.

Good enough to score a sit down with the mad king ...as the reptiles decided to add to the burden of the read with a couple of graphs ...as if wading through fundie tykes blathering on about core Western values wasn't enough to produce a Technicolor yawn ...

"The brilliant Rod Dreher...?"

That lickspittle fellow traveller supinely selling his soul?

...Dreher's experience as a 2021 fellow at Hungary's Danube Institute and his observation of Viktor Orbán's government persuaded him that Christian conservatives could still win and wield substantial political power. "Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture", Dreher told The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz in 2022. "It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it's serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness." Dreher also argued that the U.S. Republican Party needs "a leader with Orbán's vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals' toes." (much more, and even worse, at his wiki)

With all these fundie tykes floating about, it's inevitable that the bromancer would reveal his Islamophobia and turn his piece into a medieval crusade ... with an image designed to terrify and horrify the hive mind ...

The bromancer can never help himself... Trump had many good instincts. 

Yeah, sure ...

The pond shouldn't leave the bromancer's analysis without noting the way that many in the hive mind were determined to stay loyal ...

That's the spirit "C", doing an "O" for the mad king ...

And so to "Ned", and the good news is that this Everest was remarkably short and easy, as if for once words had failed the portentous, pompous pundit ...

Eek, it's Bond ... Caleb Bond ...

Well he's not going to be the new one ... so on with "Ned", with Hannity making a guest appearance, to remind the pond of the many ways and means the Murdochians helped stuff the Unites States...

Stop right there. Full marks? The excesses of progressive culture? Suck on it "Ned" ...

Cruelty has always been a feature ... and the pond was reminded of a couple in recent readings...

Why Immigration Agents Don’t Quit in Protest

How a culture of dehumanization and denial keeps ICE and Border Patrol personnel “at war with an enemy that does not fight back.”(*intermittent archive link)

By Francisco Cantú

...In early 2026, after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during Operation Metro Surge, in Minneapolis, the journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that many immigration agents were “getting seriously paranoid” about the public backlash to the shootings. The operation was so unpopular with the rank and file that Border Patrol and ICE struggled to find personnel for the deployment. By July, morale among immigration officers had dipped below its nadir during the Biden Administration, with agents now complaining of being overextended, inundated with novice recruits, and undermined by inflammatory rhetoric from on high. Agents said that they had previously found motivation in their jobs by “being able to stop bad people and narcotics from coming in,” and expressed frustration that the Administration’s political posturing was distracting from their duty to “protect the public” and to focus on “the very worst of the worst.”

The sociologist Irene Vega, in her 2025 book “Bordering on Indifference,” draws on a series of interviews with Border Patrol and ICE agents to analyze the “moral economy” of the immigration-enforcement workforce. From the moment agents arrive at the federal law-enforcement academy, she writes, they “are trained and socialized as police officers, and taught that their raison d’être is to protect America by preventing the entrance and executing the removal of noncitizens deemed unwanted by the state.” The inherently bureaucratic nature of enforcing immigration law has always been at odds with the paramilitary image that is sold to most recruits. Agents prepare for violent criminal encounters and cultivate a “warrior mentality” despite the fact that they are most often, as Vega writes, “at war with an enemy that does not fight back.”

Many agents who have quit for moral reasons cite this tension. In a 2019 article for The American Scholar, Brendan Lenihan, a former Border Patrol agent, wrote, “The federal government taught me how to shoot an assault rifle from a moving vehicle and how to fast-rope from a hovering helicopter, but never did anyone explain how to go home at the end of a shift and forget about the migrants I’d apprehended and their stories.” As with Childress, the accumulation of nonthreatening encounters eventually made his job untenable. “I left the Border Patrol because I was exhausted by the tragic stories,” he wrote, “and because the more I saw, the less affected I was by events that had once seemed shocking.”

How is it, then, that so few agents seem to arrive at this moral breaking point? Nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown. It has become customary for agents to mask their faces from public view—D.H.S. maintains that this is to prevent doxing, but it is also emblematic of a growing perception of this work as shameful. In off-duty social situations, agents often obscure what they do to avoid awkwardness and scorn, even hiding the nature of their employment on dating apps. “We can’t always support what happens just because it’s one of us,” a Border Patrol agent had told a private group chat in the wake of Pretti’s killing. And yet, even as their work has grown increasingly cruel, there has been no exodus of agents who reject it.

And so on, and now the mad king has replaced Wildes with Stephen Miller so that the cruelty can continue, while over in The Bulwark Anderew Eggers noted the routine casual cruelty directed at TG folk, something the reptiles at the lizard Oz also have an appetite for ...

...Which is exactly why the issue proved so useless for Trump and Republicans in 2026. They forgot that the whole implicit promise of their own anti-trans stuff in 2024 was about building a case that they were better equipped than Democrats to deliver on affordability—a case that they then spent two years blowing up. Instead, Republicans somehow got it in their heads that what voters wanted was a bunch of gratuitous cruelty against trans people just for the sake of it: We can say “retard,” “pussy,” and “tranny” again! Use AI to put James Talarico in a dress in ads and dub Annie Andrews “Tranny Annie”—that ought to do the trick.

What a shock, in retrospect, that it blew up on them so spectacularly.

And yet Stephen Miller is now the CoS. There's cosplay for you ... and then came relief. A final short gobbet ...

Again the pond should note the deep ambivalence in the hive mind, shown in a sample of comments attached to "Ned's" outing ...

And so to the lizard Oz Editorialist, with quirky opening snap ...

The lizard Oz editorialist was ambivalent ...but as they've got their caps-hating AI bot well trained ...

... why should the pond think the lizard Oz editorialist would be any better? 

Dissemble away ...

And now Stephen Miller is the CoS ...and maybe it wasn't an election, so much as a jail break ...

The pond realises that it's now officially way over length, but as he's thematically related, the pond should give Stewie a break, even as he rabbits on at great length ...

The point is that perversely Stewie manages to offer a spotlight on the incredible futility and gigantic waste involved in the AUKUS scheme...

Well yes, all that and more ...but the reptiles preferred to fling in a gif of a missile on the move ...

Stewie was on the side of the subs... (and a war with China, though perhaps not by this Xmas) ...

Um, maybe disentangle those bases? Or should we experience Musk Ukraine syndrome?

The reptiles flung in a reminder ...

Stewie had just a couple of shorter gobbets left in him ...

The pond interrupted there so it could admire the billy goat butt dressed as an "However"... as Stewie reluctantly admitted a few saucy doubts and fears ...

The pond isn't too worried about "people power", not when the subs show promises to be the new Snowy 2.0 of defence projects ...

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is the new CoS, and just as in the failing days of the Roman emperors, what a spectacle there'll be for the next few years, with Australia tailing along behind, ready to suck up whatever kicks come our way ...

And the kicks keep on coming ...

In which Killer and Our Henry see off the Red blues in their own ways ...

 

Boring.

The reptile Jimbo jihad is getting exceptionally tedious ...

There was the canny Cranston rabbiting on yet again, briefly top of the digital world ma ...

The pond couldn't wait to click him into EXCLUSIVE intermittent archive oblivion ...

EXCLUSIVE
Fresh ideas, stat! Chalmers’ productivity policy SOS
The Treasurer has asked Treasury officials to develop new productivity policies for next month’s mid-year budget update as Australia’s productivity rate sits at -0.2 per cent.
By Matthew Cranston

Ditto the Jess jihad carried out this day by Johnno, moving from potholes to smoking ceremonies (damn you, difficult, uppity black people) ...

EXCLUSIVE
Truth, treaty and Victorian Labor’s ceremonial smoking of taxpayer money
A $14,000 sand circle, a $218,000 production bill and free tickets – how Victorian taxpayers were hit hard for a single night celebrating Labor’s Indigenous treaty.
By Damon Johnston

On the other hand, any excuse for a couple of Goldings...

Over on the extreme far right, heroic David was casting stones in aid of the rich ...

Trusts tax is both wrong and unfair
Australia’s peak business lobby has warned the government’s proposed discretionary trust tax contains three foundational flaws that threaten small business owners and economic growth.
By David Alexander

Just a note on the completely disinterested source (allegedly):

David Alexander is chief of policy and advocacy at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Further research for anyone who cares ...

No wonder the rich are complaining. New research reveals that revenue equivalent to a quarter of Australia’s GDP flows through trusts.

...“No wonder some of the richest Australians are complaining about the new minimum 30% tax rate on discretionary trusts,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.
“For too long, many of the wealthiest Australians have used trusts to avoid paying their fair share.
“To say these changes are long overdue is an understatement. In his tax review way back in 2010, then-Treasury Secretary Ken Henry raised the alarm about trusts being used as a way to evade tax.
“The basis of a progressive tax system is those who have more, pay more – because they can afford to.
“When you close loopholes which enable rich people to pay less tax than low income earners you make the system fairer.
“You also raise more revenue to provide the services which benefit all Australians, like a good health system, schools, roads and supports for those living with disabilities.”

Or you can dwell in the Murdochian approved world of suffering billionaires... and speaking of tax and the rich paying their way, the pond had another question for the lizard Oz's caps-hating AI:

Guess that's what happens when your AI is restricted to the hive mind, and so can't catch up with the keen Keane in Crikey ...

Despite its pretensions to lecture Australia about its values and how it should be run, the Murdoch family’s News Corp really has nothing to do with Australia. It is a foreign company, and it serially pays no tax here, despite earning billions in revenue on our shores.
In 2024-25, according to the Australian Tax Office’s corporate tax data released today, News Australia Holdings — the official name of News Corp’s Australian subsidiary — racked up 10 years of paying precisely zero tax. For that year, it earned $1.89 billion in revenue, made more than $300 million in profit (a record for the past decade) and paid nothing in tax.
Indeed, there’s a peculiar steadiness to News Corp’s tax dodging. For the past four years, it has earned around $1.8 billion in revenue and paid no tax on around $300 million in profits in 2023-24 and 2024-25, and $200 million in profits in 2021-22 and 2022-23.
You can go all the way back to when the first corporate tax transparency data was released for 2014-15 — the result of a Rudd-Gillard government initiative (opposed by the Coalition) — and find News Corp’s main company has paid no tax across those years, on revenue of, in total, $23.9 billion and profits of $1.38 billion.
The only News Corp entities to pay tax in that time were an investment company, which paid $200,000 (sic) in 2017-18 on $291 million in profits, and a pay TV financing arm, which paid $8 million in 2015-16. Real estate listing oligopolist REA Group, which News Corp part-owns, paid $246 million in tax.
Otherwise, News Corp’s only contributions to Australia are social division and the fostering of hate and resentment.

Speaking of divisions, the infallible Pope was on top of them...

Enough already, the pond should get down to its herpetology studies, and luckily Killer Kreighton was to hand, koping as best he could with the American disaster.

In klassic Killer form, he came up with a kolossal kaper, a JD whiz for the ages ...

"His natural and more polished successor"?

Relax, that's just Killer speak. 

It's his way of window dressing the loser Vance, the cynical, humbugging, overweening, ambitious ratbag currently trying to put daylight between himself and the mad king...

...Yesterday, as the Republican blame game got going, Trump wasn’t the one laying out the case for how the GOP could regroup and recover. That job fell instead to Vice President JD Vance. And remarkably, the case Vance made was one more in keeping with his own views than with his own administration’s party line. In a long treatise on X, Trump’s veep laid out the ways his own administration had brought calamity upon itself.
“There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is,” Vance wrote. “But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. . . . The reason we lost is the war.”
To woo back the voters they lost, Vance argued, the administration would need to end the Iran war, refocus itself on cost-of-living issues, put America first, and “change our relationship to Israel.”
This would be extraordinary stuff from any vice president—let alone Trump’s, with his mobland obsession with personal loyalty. Vance has found plenty of ways this year to get the word out about his own reservations about the Iran war. But this is the first time he’s said fuck it and just started posting on main. And why not? What has he got to lose? Vance’s odds of winning the presidency in 2028 have never been lower, and even he must see that there’s certainly no path there anymore as Donald Trump’s Bestest Little Guy. Of course, it doesn’t seem very likely to work: There’s only so much you can do to distance yourself from a White House when you’re its second-in-command. And you can only bemoan so much about the need to end the war when you led the negotiations that failed to end it. (Andrew Egger in The Bulwark)

Say that line again ...

"...you can only bemoan so much about the need to end the war when you led the negotiations that failed to end it."

Music to the ear, but the couch molester has caught Killer's eye, as if somehow the taint of JD's craven, lickspittle toadying could be erased in a single blink ...

Now marvel at how Killer transforms an electoral disaster into describing Democrat positions as increasingly unpopular (has he ever been diagnosed as suffering from myopia?):

The pond was deeply touched by that snap of the mad King, waving a forlorn farewell and jetting off into the distance ... as if he'd do that before he got the chance to lead the first dance in his magnificent new ballroom...

In the past, fickle as he is, Trump could have acted as a pillar of order for conservative media: Get in line behind him or lose your White House access and audience. But with Trump inexplicably choosing to spend the election aftermath on Wednesday touring the under-construction White House ballroom, shellshocked Republicans ran wild. Even Brilyn Hollyhand, the Charlie Kirk knockoff who rose to a small level of prominence after Kirk’s assassination, criticized Trump for blowing a chance to rally the party.
So too did Walsh, who posted of the ballroom event, in which Trump seemed childishly gleeful watching beams being pulled by cranes: “This is far worse than I anticipated.” (Will Sommers, The Right's Election Meltdown Is Just Getting Started)

And he signed the beam "Love"! 

Sweet joy, this is far better than the pond anticipated. 

Killer kantered to a lame konclusion by celebrating the striking down of the right of women to control their bodies ... and the racist underpinnings of the Roberts court, with the Chief Justice himself devoting decades to the judicial art of punishing black people  ... (see the reformed Toobin's Mapping Mississippi White in the NYRB (*intermittent archive link):

If that's what Killer thinks will save Trumpism and advance couch-molesting JD into the stumblebum doomed world of Gerald Ford, then hello bottoms ...

Truth to tell, the pond had waited with baited (giant bear trap size) breath to see if Our Homeric Henry would apply Thucydides to the US election fall out ...

Alas and alack, he decided to stay true to his Australian Daily Zionist News duties ...

That made the pond wonder how things were going with Benji ... and just maybe he might yet face his day in court, because such is the depth of the loathing, most unlikely bridges are forming ... per Haaretz ...

Eisenkot Secures Parliamentary Majority, Paving Clearest Path to Forming Gov't
Both Arab-majority parties backed Eisenkot, while United Torah Judaism – traditionally aligned with Netanyahu and Likud – declined to endorse either candidate (*outside the paywall, but just in case)

Gadi Eisenkot emerged from President Isaac Herzog's consultations with the backing of 67 of the Knesset's 120 lawmakers, giving him a parliamentary majority of recommendations and strengthening his chance of receiving the mandate to form Israel's next government.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received 46 recommendations, from Likud, Shas, Religious Zionism, Zehut and Otzma Yehudit. United Torah Judaism, traditionally aligned with Netanyahu's bloc, declined to recommend either candidate and said it was "not committed to any bloc."
Notably, all Arab-majority parties decided to recommend Eisenkot. The Arab-led Joint List joined Mansour Abbas' United Arab List in backing him, saying the decision was aimed at replacing Netanyahu's government.

Sorry for that brush with the now, the point to Our Homeric Henry is tedious journeys into the past to shore up his fatuous positions ...

At that point, the pond wondered if the hole in bucket man still wrote his copy with a quill dipped in ink, and delivered it to the lizard Oz bunker in Surry Hills by way of carrier pigeon, or did he "follow the science" and use a computer and the full to overflowing intertubes?

The only certainty is that the level of argumentation in that last paragraph was garbled to the point of meaningless gibberish, trotting out words such as "new credentialed elite" and "hegemonic in academia and our cultural institutions" as if they actually meant something ...

What was he proposing in relation to Covid? Follow the anti-vax ways of RFK Jr? Follow the mad King's advice to inject bleach? Swallow horse pills?

How would he assess the impact of climate change? By ignoring the science and resorting to a tea leaf reading with the Delphic Oracle?

He can just blather away the implications of stories such as Cryosphere faces permanent damage when world overshoots 1.5C, scientists warn?

Never mind ... there's yet more tosh and blather to wade through, we are in verbiage stepped in so far that, should we wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er:

Is it odd to hear a Zionist-inclined loon blather on about salvation and fanaticism?

No, it's more than odd. 

To an atheist thanking god they're an atheist, it's deeply weird, and the final gobbet didn't sound like sanity might be returning soon ... as Our Henry patiently explained the rationale for Greater Israel, the colonial expansion of the state into Gaza and the West Bank ...

And yet, every so often, the worm turns, the disenfranchised get a break, and there's a break (however brief) from the persecution of the different and minorities...(though probably not to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, whatever happens to Benji) ...

And so to a bonus just because it was there ...(and also because it could be done in just two gobbets) ...

Dammit, it goes without saying that religious leaders shouldn't give the first toss about any so-called duty of care. 

Their only care is to consign sinners to an eternity of hellfire ... you know, womyn wanting a say in their bodies, shellfish eaters, rogues wanting to mix fabrics, the sort of rule breakers that infest Leviticus ...

Religious leaders' fears over digital duty of care ...

If you can't berate teh gaze, and TG folk and such like, what's the point?

Next thing you know you won't even be able to prey away teh gaze ...

And what happens when sinners flood the intertubes with doubt, as the pond found via a link in Will Sommers' piece for The Bulwark..

The Right’s Election Meltdown Is Just Getting Started
Everyone with a podcast is feeling terrible, and they’re ready to fight about it!

The pond can't get enough of doubting Laura ...

Carry on clucking, Chooka ...

The pond took it all terribly seriously, and was deeply moved, so deeply that it felt compelled to look up this foul bird preaching for the sanctity of church-enforced orthodoxy ... (if somehow that rabble of competing voices could be prevented from denouncing each other as heretical sinners and splitters destined for an eternity of hellfire) ...

Waddya kno, this chook infests the pond's old stomping ground, the UNE ... reminding the pond once again how pleased it is never to have endured an Armidale winter and Oxford refugees for decades ...

Ah, he's a bloody useless Anglican. 

Back in the pond's day, Opus Dei was all the go.

And with that done, time to wrap up proceedings with the immortal Rowe ...

The immortal Rowe really has captured the beast in his portrait. The pond realises it's wrong to tamper with art, but had an unseemly desire to zoom into CU to see the fine print ...

How is it not possible to gloat, in a very British and seemly way?