Follow the iron-brick road to get to Murdoch land ...

(Above: more Pope here)

By golly that David Pope knows how to get on the sweet side of Dorothy.

Click of the steel-toed brown heels, chocolate factory, oompa-loompas,  iron-brick roads, it's all there ...

Hang on, hang on, Tony Abbott as Dorothy?

Why that's defamatory Mr Pope, we'll be doing a Chris Kenny and seeing you with lawyers at ten paces at dawn ...

Speaking of Chris Kenny, the litigious one today has managed a little hesitant criticism of the coalition government:

If you can be bothered getting around the paywall to read Appointed to keep the peace, MP Fiona Nash disturbs the Coalition balance - have you thought of peeling a grape instead? - you'll discover it's all the fault of the wretched Nationals.

Why Alistair Furnival might have been a Liberal but he had been working with some Nationals!

Say no more ... there's a thought crime of the first water. As for Nash (psst, a clue, she's a National)?

Questions remain about Nash’s oversight of this episode and her grasp of the portfolio. 
There is even doubt about whether she had the authority to take down the food standard website that triggered the controversy, given it is the collaborative initiative of a ministerial council involving all the states and New Zealand. 
A spokesman for Nash’s office says there was a delegated authority for management of the website. However, it seems to be a murky area and insiders suggest the other ministers should at least have been consulted before the website was taken offline. 
Nash now can ill-afford any further mistakes. 
Apart from Labor, she is being scrutinised carefully by ambitious colleagues. 
The Nationals have had a good run from Abbott with the Nash appointment, the GrainCorp decision, the support for Nash and the tolerance for Barnaby Joyce’s cabinet pre-emption on drought assistance. The murmurings are minor so far but, with NSW state cabinet colleagues (Liberal Pru Goward and National Katrina Hodgkinson) contemplating a head-to-head battle in the NSW state seat of Goulburn, Abbott needs to be wary. 
 The Prime Minister doesn’t need overt green-on-blue friction in federal ranks.

This sort of brooding about a government riddled with dissent, envy, incompetence, greed, and naked ambition, so shocked Kenny that he immediately had to take a verbal hatchet to Scott Ludlam.

Kenny put Ludlam's viral YouTube speech at 400k hits, but when the pond checked it had reached 560k and counting, and you will add to that number if you click here.

Cue Chris Kenny:

Ludlam spoke of “predator capitalism” and a “murderous horror unfolding on Manus Island” as he launched an attack on the Prime Minister and his government. He suggested Abbott treated WA as a “caricatured redneck backwater” and that it was “kind of revolting” that the Prime Minister consulted with “mining billionaires and media oligarchs on the other side of the world”. 
Ludlam provided no serious evidence or justification for his slurs. He even talked about Abbott - who I first met 20 years ago through a mutual gay friend and who has been publicly loving and supportive of his gay sister - as “waving (his) homophobia in people’s faces”. 
We know the Greens are a party of protest but this invective was simply hateful.

To which all the pond can say is:

Or perhaps:

True, the pond has a few quibbles. Murder hasn't been established on Manus Island yet, and the attempts to bury any proper investigation might succeed, and the gulag will go on creating hell and misery for its inhabitants. And it is unfair to talk about mining billionaires on the other side of the world, when Gina Rinehart is really much closer, yet the phrasing linked her with demented plutocrats elsewhere.

But what was Kenny smoking when he said there's no serious evidence for Abbott being a recalcitrant conservative?

As for the gay friend routine? Well it's risible. If we may break Godwin's Law - take a guinea to the swear jar - Hitler had gay friends, and the "some of my best friends" line of argument was given a solid pummelling in Rick Santorum: A Brief History of the 'Some of My Best Friends' Defense.

It's simple really. If Abbott was such a loving and supportive sibling, he'd be supporting his sister in her support of gay marriage. And if he isn't threatened by gays, why did he say he was threatened by gays? (Abbott still 'threatened' by homosexuality) Can it be brushed off as just a gay bit of spontaneous banter?

But what's really amusing to the pond is the way the apparatchiks have a fainting fit when someone gives back to Abbott as good as the headkicker gave out.

They turn weak-kneed, they go to water, they get the wobbles, they moan and miaow. They talk about low blows and life being unfair, just because someone's given as good as they routinely get. You really need to 'go Tamworth' to evoke the quivering, shivering jellies - cowardly custards, gutless wonders, bully boys who can't take the heat in the kitchen.

Oh okay, that was Harry S Truman, here, but Harry grew up on various farms around Missouri, and that's close enough to Tamworth.

The point is that Abbott routinely dished it out as opposition leader - years of simply hateful and vicious boofhead attacks, and now it's disingenuous to moan that someone might occasionally point out that the emperor doesn't have many threads to wear ...

Is it possible to imagine a more nauseating spectacle than Abbott declaring himself a feminist? (Tony Abbott says his three daughters helped him 'turn into a feminist')

And using Julia Gillard as an example!

Well Senator Michaelia Cash soon put an end to all that jibber jabber feminist nonsense, as you can read in Minister for women doesn't have to identify as feminist, says Senator Michaelia Cash. (forced video at end of link).

Meanwhile, bearing the litigious Kenny in mind - and his decision to sue the ABC over a bit of satire - there's been more movement at the station in relation to the Bolter clause:

If you read PM may soften stance on Racial Discrimination Act, inter alia, you'll come across this:

In an open letter to the attorney general in December, 155 groups ranging from Amnesty International, the Australian Manufacturers Workers Union, the Mental Health Association NSW and the NSW Council for Civil Liberties called for the section to be retained because of the uncertainty that repeal would create. 
“Community groups are concerned that any repeal of these provisions would produce a situation in which there are no clear limits for racist hate speech in Australia,” it said. 
The chief executive of the Australian Council of Social Services, Dr Cassandra Goldie, said when the letter was delivered: “Several high-profile incidents in recent years demonstrate that we still have a long way to go as a community and that laws protecting people from racial vilification are necessary.”

And that's the problem in a nutshell.

What you might call the Bolter dilemma.

The Bolter has continually moaned about being constrained, about being held back, about not being able to say what he really thinks about many things, though it seems most of the many things involve pesky and difficult blacks who simply can't understand that under the skin there's a pure white Dutch streak itching to come out ...

So what if the law is amended, and the Bolter, in a rush of blood to the head, hits the keyboard and puts his foot in it?

It's the Bolter dilemma, right up there with The Bolter Identity, The Bolter Supremacy and The Bolter Ultimatum ...

Could he help himself? Do lemmings really rush off cliffs? Well maybe not lemmings but how about the Bolter?

It's a delicious dilemma and in future days it seems that the Abbott government might be thinking of breaking yet another election promise - so many in so little time - and at the same time alienating the Bolter by preferring new pet Warren Mundine over the old, trusty and loyal Hollandse Herdershond.

And now thanks to the bouffant one, a thought for the weekend:

Indeed. Indeed.

The pond suspects the public has no interest in protected-species status for papers which wrap themselves in the false flag of patriotism by calling themselves the Weekend (and daily) Australian, while actually being servile hive mind foreign owned mouthpieces for some demented plutocrat ...

Surely you pick a hive mind at work. Just look at the twittering tweets:

(Below: part of a series of slides found here by Gee working the old patriotic un-Australian routine)