In which the pond does a jig with Jindal and spares a thought for the Caterists ...

Even the reptiles were grateful for the distraction.

Everyone knew the banks were guilty, guilty as hell, but the report was long, and there was much to do, and everyone knew Josh wasn't up to the job, and absolutely nothing would get done until after the election… so the onion muncher was inspired, inspiring, inspirational, and everyone clapped hands with glee and danced with delight at the sight …

There's more at foul-mouthed Junkee here, but even news.com.au joined in, recycling the twitterati here …

Even the accompanying story couldn't resist mocking a man who clearly realises he's in a pickle …

It put the pond in a most excellent mood and ripe for more totally useless reptile distractions … and what do you know …

Talk about weird … a dropkick loser from faraway Louisiana turning up to berate the left in the lizard Oz's pages …

Oh the pond's aware of the lineage … it's by way of Chairman Murdoch, out of the Wall Street Journal where loser GOPs go for rest and recovery, but even so, globalist multinational 'leet capitalism doesn't get much more peculiar than this …play on, McJindal ...

Around this point, the pond should probably note that Jindal, as a result of his terms as governor of Louisiana, left the state with a financial crisis they still haven't solved. He made a remarkably inept tilt at the presidency in 2016 and now, having fucked things up comprehensively, seems to want to get back in the game (The Advocate, here).

The pond suspects turning up in the lizard Oz isn't going to do much for the Guv. It was all there back in 2016 in the WaPo under the header Battered by drop in oil prices and Jindal policies, Louisiana falls into budget crisis …

Louisiana stands at the brink of economic disaster. Without sharp and painful tax increases in the coming weeks, the government will cease to offer many of its vital services, including education opportunities and certain programs for the needy. A few universities will shut down and declare bankruptcy. Graduations will be canceled. Students will lose scholarships. Select hospitals will close. Patients will lose funding for treatment of disabilities. Some reports of child abuse will go uninvestigated. “Doomsday,” said Marketa Garner Walters, the head of Louisiana’s Department of Children and Family Services. If the state can’t raise any new revenue, her agency’s budget, like several others, will be slashed 60 percent. “At that level,” she said in an interview, “the agency is unsustainable.”

It was there in the Graudian too …

Scaling back on tax cuts, especially overly generous corporate ones, was the obvious solution, but Jindal – who ignominiously crashed out of the GOP presidential race in November – refused to consider it. Bowing to anti-tax groups such as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, Jindal and a sympathetic legislature spent year after year cobbling together ad hoc budgets, seizing money from rainy-day funds and cutting money to public services instead of forming any long-term budget plans. (A request for comment from Jindal’s office went unanswered.) 

And yet there's never any shame, never any comment, never any remorse, just onward and upward in the shameless lizard Oz, recycling droppings badly in need of a Manly portaloo …

What is it with these grifters, these snake oil salesmen, peddling talk of liberal 'leets, and all the rest of the guff chairman Murdoch loves to hear,  yet when let loose can fuck a state in a finer style than the onion muncher can fuck up a tweet?

Well, we'll probably never know, because Bobby is too busy congratulating himself on his comeback to remember what he contributed to the rapid collapse of Louisiana ...

The liberal 'leet are responsible for Donald Trump? As noted in The Advocate, Bobby seemed to think he might be the man to save America …

"Mr. Trump is a man, not a movement; he embodies executive strength, not a philosophy. When his time in office is up, he may leave behind millions of frustrated, voiceless people facing a status quo government and two limp, self-serving political parties eager to return to what they were, which wasn’t much," Jindal wrote. And he concludes that "we need to take over and reinvent the GOP. Mr. Trump won’t be the man to do it. We should create a more populist — Trumpian — bottom-up GOP that loves freedom and flies the biggest American flag in history, shouting that American values and institutions are better than everybody else’s and essential to the future."

What a shameless grifter, and speaking of shameless grifters, the pond luckily had left-over Caterism to fill up the rest of the post …

In a way, it's good to recycle drivel from a taxpayer-funded institute a day after the report on the banks dropped. It gives the scribbling a piquant edge ...

Oh it's rich in irony, a man so mired in mediocrity that the best he could do was rip off Donald Horne and call his book "The Lucky Culture" … remember when it was ravaged by - the pond can hardly believe it - Mark Latham in The Monthly way back when …

In a 361-page work, one would have expected these people to be identified and dissected – outed for their unsavoury contribution to left-wing aloofism. There is, after all, little point in throwing around labels unless they can be supported by detailed research, giving examples of the offending elites and the things they have been elitist about. I had great expectations for the intellectual firepower mustered in The Lucky Culture. In the book’s acknowledgements, it is clear Cater has collaborated closely with the best and brightest of Australian conservatism, most notably his News Ltd colleagues Paul Kelly, Christopher Pearson, Henry Ergas and Rebecca Weisser, plus fellow travellers Peter Coleman and Gerard Henderson. This was to be their magnum opus. But the results are feeble. I have read the book thoroughly and compiled a list of the “lefties” supposedly in control of Australia. They are, in order of appearance: John Faulkner, Deborah Cameron, Peter Garrett, David Marr, Kevin Rudd, Barry Humphries, Liz Jackson, Catherine Manning, Fran Kelly, Marieke Hardy, Bernard Keane, Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan, Christine Milne, Kerry O’Brien and Denise Bradley. For a class grouping, this one lacks cohesion, given the time and intensity with which its members squabble among themselves. Its influence is highly fragmented and easily diluted. For the ABC presenters named, a democratic discipline applies. If the public does not like what is being said, they can switch to another channel.

Latham was probably disappointed at not making the cut, and sadly his increasing eccentricity means no-one pays any attention at all …

But just lie back, think of the report into the banks, and then relish the Caterist in full cratering flight …

To which all the pond can add is …come on down mother Teresa and do a little linking...

Nelson Mandela: Union Man He defended collective bargaining, championed international solidarity and proudly carried a UAW card.

Ghandi as a trade union leader …

This chapter presents an essay on the life of Mahatma Gandhi as a trade union leader. Before Gandhi stepped onto the centrestage of Indian politics, he led a labour strike at Ahmedabad in the spring of 1918, during the First World War. Though the strike attracted little attention, it had significant long-term results and implications as an experiment in the application of Gandhian ideas to industrial relations. This chapter traces the sequence of events immediately before and after the strike and attempts to place them in a historical perspective.

Martin Luther King and Union Rights …

The second phase of the civil rights movement, King said, would have to be the struggle for “economic equality.” To that end, he came to Memphis as part of his Poor People’s Campaign. He sought to organize a mass movement to demand that Congress shift its priorities from funding military buildup and war to funding jobs, housing, health care, and education. The richest country in the history of the world, he said, could easily afford to eliminate poverty. What it lacked was the will to do it. In that regard, King reminded strikers and their supporters in Memphis of the story of Dives in the Bible, who went to hell because he passed by the suffering Lazarus every day without ever paying attention to his brother’s plight. “And I come by here to say that...if America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.” Today our government and media seem incapable of grasping King’s moral vision – but King emphasized throughout his life that human rights include labor rights. Republicans today have targeted the very union King helped to build in Memphis. Founded in Wisconsin, AFSCME flowered after King died in the successful fight for union rights in Memphis in 1968. AFSCME became one of the largest unions in the country, with King regarded as an honorary member and practically a founder of the union…

Such an ignorant man, and so stupid too.

Perhaps Manly needs a sanitation strike …

The pond could go on and on, in the Caterist style - look, over there in The Conversation, Peter Cole scribbling Martin Luther King Jr,, union man …

If Martin Luther King Jr. still lived, he’d probably tell people to join unions. King understood racial equality was inextricably linked to economics. He asked, “What good does it do to be able to eat at a lunch counter if you can’t buy a hamburger?”

Indeed, indeed. Of course these days King would realise that the best way to buy a hamberger is to scribble furiously anti-union diatribes, while holding out a shameless paw for a Department of Finance grant ...

The upside? Unlike Bobby Jindal, the Caterist thus far hasn't managed to fuck a state, he just wanks away on an upmarket form of the dole, blathering about the state of the modern union movement, when news of the state of banking in Australia was about to drop …

And now for the banks, and the pond knew that its reporting could be left to the infallible Pope and the ravaging Rowe …

More Pope here, and Rowe was also in sparkling form here …

There was another …

For some strange reason, that reminded the pond of a famous Tenniel cartoon, Dropping the Pilot, which, Greg Hunters will know, earned its own wiki here, featuring sundry variations…

Of course back then the first world war followed. All we have coming up is an election …remember the portaloos of Manly, or else we'll all - including 'leet Surry Hills reptiles - be in the shit!