Never trust politicians in suits of armour carrying chickens, and taxes, and spending on roads, and never mind what the climate scientists say ...

(Above: as it panders to the outer west of Sydney, the Daily Terror gets a dose of the class warfare broken promises blues)

If faux patriotic fervour, and paranoia, and xenophobic moat-building, and law-breaching behaviour is the first refuge of the scoundrel politician intent on alienating Indonesia, while displaying a casual cruelty and unChristian contempt for humanity, where does that leave "trust"?

 “What we would ask is people across Australia to trust us,” Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said ...

Trust? Sensible people never trust snake oil sales people or politicians.

As soon as you draw attention to or plead for trust, you know you've never had it, and you'll never get it.

“We are not doing this for fun.”

So it's all about your suffering?

Watching your painful, inept bumbling and stumbling isn't much fun for the rest of us ...

Prime Minister Tony Abbott today emerged from frantic last-minute Budget preparations in cabinet to say “we are all in it together”...

No, we're not. Go and stew in your own juices, and your broken promises, and your ineptitude.

Meanwhile, some readers are no doubt anxious about the Sydney Morning Herald and other Fairfax rags being able to hold the government to account, and bring its reading public the stories that matter, and batter, and splatter. You know, what with the 24 hour strike by journalists, and all.

Fear not:

We keed, we keed. This was the front page of the tree killer edition:

And what's so funny about that?

Well the pictorial lead - Why Gyngell took a fall for Packer - displays a most profound schizophrenia, and not just because it's by Elizabeth Knight, credited as a "business columnist" while writing as a common gossip:

The fallout from the weekend's public punch-up between billionaire James Packer and Nine Entertainment boss David Gyngell has all the hallmarks of a public relations stitch up -- where Packer plays the victim and Gyngell falls on his sword...
...Placing the main blame at Gyngell's feet all but ignores the pictorial evidence of Packer pinning the smaller Nine Entertainment boss to the pavement and being ultimately pulled off by bodyguards. 
The trouble for Gyngell is that Packer has more powerful allies in the media - Seven Network's largest shareholder Kerry Stokes and News Corp's co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch both held meetings with Packer in the days following the fight. Meanwhile, News Corp's tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, carried the front page headline on Wednesday I'M THE THUG, alongside a photo of Gyngell. 

The pond fell about laughing hysterically. The Fairfaxians had splashed big with Paul Sheehan, whose blatantly partisan spray, here (forced video at end of link), had opened with this line:

David Gyngell has behaved like a thug and he should be charged for the crimes he has committed. He stalked. He threatened. He assaulted. Now he can pay.

Conclusion? No one at Fairfax bothers to read the Magic Water Man.

Or if they do, like decent schizophrenics, they ignore the voices in their head. I mean, the Daily Terror might have been part of a Murdoch stitch-up, but what was Sheehan drinking and sewing?

As for the other story which led the rag, the EXCLUSIVE by James Massola and Mark Kenny was remarkable for the way it started off, and then kept on drinking the kool aid:

The Abbott government will unveil a new $10 billion infrastructure package in its first budget offsetting the political pain of a harsh blueprint winding back social security, cutting family payments, introducing 'user pays' in health and education, and featuring increased taxes. (here, forced video at end of link)

So the federal government's got money to piss against the wall on roads, roads, roads, in these times of direst budget emergencies, and that'll make everything okay, and the tax pain will pay ...

Trust this sort of incoherent logic, drummed up by a desperate government, already deep in Gillardism denial syndrome, and then peddled by the Fairfaxians as some sort of EXCLUSIVE?

What about the bizarre logic that says the federal government can invest in the infrastructure of local and city roads, but not in public transport?

So what's the alternative?

Well over at the lizard Oz Greg Sheridan is still thinking it's Anzac day, and like a washed up bum taking a dive in a three rounder in Jimmy Sharman show tent, he's still punching at shadows:

No, it's not Tamworth, it's Ballarat in 1934, but it could have been Tamworth. But back to that wretched shadow boxer:

When you've got nothing meaningful or useful to say, adopt the posture of an armchair general.

If you can summon up the energy - you need a crate of Red Bull to cope with the bull - to read Cherishing our brave Diggers is not glorifying war, you'll discover it was all Germany's fault, and it was all about noble sacrifice and courage and heroism, and we taught those filthy Huns a lesson, and if a few unfortunate things happened after the war, why blame it on free will and autonomous choices.

Yep, it's mind-boggling in its vacuousness, shallowness and stupidity, the only benefit of its superficiality and flag-waving mendacity being to remind the pond to link to How I learnt to love Tony Abbott - A bromance for the ages ... wherein you can read such nostalgic bon mots as:

Tony Abbott has had an extraordinarily successful first trip to Indonesia as Prime Minister. [3 October 2013]

Those were the days, but what else have the lizards got to offer?

Well Hedley Thomas keeps on toiling in the field of tearful sorrows, waging relentless war on Clive Palmer, as he's been doing for months, perhaps years, one of those unsung soldiers, those courageous warriors celebrated by Sheridan:

The trouble, of course, is that the more attention the lizards have paid to the buffoon, the better he's done in the political arena. Foolish NT politicians have rushed to join, Queenslanders have been beguiled, WA gave him a senator, and Hedley Thomas's investigative reporting has begun to take on the tone of the Black Knight.

You see, it's not enough to say Palmer's been accused of wrongfully siphoning off this or that. For example, Palmer has been in the news time and again for his behaviour in relation to Coolum time share investors - here at the ABC, and here on the ABC's 7.30 and it's water off a duck's back.

The reptiles really need to re-think the manner and method of their war against Palmer, or find something big that will stick. Have they thought about shunning?

Right at the moment the lizard behaviour plays into the Palmer narrative of a hapless billionaire persecuted by a deviant Murdochian conspiracy, when all he wants to do is look after all the mug punters out there. Trust me, he says, sounding like ... the Liberal party ...

Ah dear, it's tough times for the poor old reptiles.

Talk of trusting Clive Palmer reminded the pond how the right wing commentariat are suffering. Dame Judith Groan for example sloaned away this morning Looking more like the Hindenburg Mathias:

The hapless reptiles made the Groaner premium content in an attempt to tickle the pond into a subscription, but this trout isn't for tickling ...

You see, the two grabs above - the Hindenburg and the high marginal tax rates  - say it all, and what's left to add? Why be interested in a groaner who discovers she's been worshipping a false, graven idol?

But if you're keen you can head off to that relentless pillager, that pirate of content, the Bolter, and get a good gobbet of the groaning:

What is the government doing? We know that higher-income earners already pay virtually all the income tax. The top 25 per cent pay more than two-thirds of the tax take. The top 10 per cent pay close to 45 per cent. Obviously, the government doesn’t think this heavy lifting is heavy enough. 
These top earners — and don’t we want everyone to aspire to be a top earner through education, hard work and risk-taking? — have already suffered through losing the private health insurance rebate. Most top earners send their children to private schools, saving the taxpayer along the way. 
They look after themselves and their families with very little assistance from the taxpayer, but somehow it is seen to be fair that they should further shoulder the burden of repairing the budget. 
But, let’s face it, the sums of money being quoted by the government are not huge — maybe an extra $2 billion over four years. This is not because the higher marginal tax rate will not slug higher-income earners; it is simply the case that there are not very many of them. 
The Government is not waging class war. It is doing the next worse thing: pre-emptively giving in the class war it expects from Labor. It does not want to defend “the rich”.

There you go, the groaner, with a couple of lines added by the Bolter, no need to click on the Groan or the Bolter,  and by the end of the piteous read, the pond was wailing and gnashing teeth and splashing ashes and donning sackcloth and declaring it a black day for class warfare ...

The Bolter himself let out an anguished howl:

Ah the Bolter. When he's not doing over Marcia Langton, he's standing up for Tony Jones and democracy ...

Yes, the Bolter is fiercely in favour of democracy, which is why dissenting voices which dare to dissent must be crushed mercilessly so that democracy can be restored. It's the democratic way, and perhaps only true democracy can be guaranteed when the only voice left in the land belongs to the Bolter ...

Of course he only takes his cues from government - remarkable how slavishly devoted to government the commentariat is - and naturally that means not paying any attention to the latest report from the climate scientists.

For that you have to head off to the New York Times to read U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods, or The Graudian's Climate change wreaking havoc in America's backyard, or the report itself, available here for browsing or downloading as a pdf.

Climate science and they didn't consult the Bolter, the world's leading climate scientist? Pshaw ...

Fortunately David Rowe - more Rowe here - provides the solution to all the commentariat's problems.

A good keel-hauling, or at least a free trip to Indonesia.

Now there's a fair and Christian policy we can all trust in ...