In which the pond is startled to find jolly Joe at the head of the Monday reptile pack ...

 

 

 

 

What a disappointing line-up the reptiles managed this morning at the news emanating from those whacky, zany Kiwis. Why even The New Yorker offered a better angle ...

 

 

Besides, the immortal Rowe seemed to shut down the conversation with this effort, and more such work can always be found here ...

 

 

 

 

And that's how this day - the pond can barely believe it, how did it come to pass, how could such a thing be? - jolly Joe occupied pole position in reptile la la land ...

 

 

 

 

Thank the long absent lord that Bondi Partners has so little to do that out of the kindness of its heart it makes jolly Joe available for his psephologistical insights on a Monday... 

For a starter, it allows the reptiles to provide an arcane illustration of the bemusing kind, and then it only gets better from there ... because if the cult of the Donald isn't going away, could that also mean the cult of jolly Joe is here to stay in reptile la la land?

 

Indeed, indeed, and speaking of rides ...

 

 

 

It turns out that Joe speaks fluent bromancer, though the bromancer generally prefers to pronounce something "nuts" rather than crazy...

 

 

And now, to show why jolly Joe had the ability to deliver that wonderful 2014 budget, Joe will show how to balance the 'crazy' with a belief that the Donald might well bounce back ... because in reptile la la land, there must always be the hope that the crazy and wild rides will win out. Who wants a quiet life? Who wants to pretend to be a conservative? No, better to do a Slim Pickens' ride all the way to the ground, cowboy hat flailing about until the bomb goes off, or as Bruce Willis quaintly put it, "yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" ...

 

 

What a coach, what a caller of the shots ... and over the weekend, the infallible Pope also helped out ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles were still busy with their war against comrade Dan, with the lad top of the digital pages and assorted columnists sounding off. 

The pond has tended to ignore the ranting and railing. The pond realises that the reptiles need to let off steam, and while some get agitated by that dreadful Kiwi woman, others settle into the steady groove of Dan bashing.

Given this Monday is a very slow day at reptile HQ - perhaps they'd all flown off to celebrate mass with the Pellists and the onion muncher in Rome - the pond decided to give Major Mitchell a day pass, and have at it ...

There he is, the demonic beast that terrifies the reptiles so ... but what beguiles the pond are the times when the Major urges journalists to stick with the facts ...

Why on the weekend, "investigative" reptile journalist shameless Sharri beguiled reptile readers with an astonishing interview with Steve Bannon, so full of tabloid, sensationalist "facts" and hot steaming piles of bullshit, that the pond reeled away, thinking that not even the pond could recycle such an accumulation of garbage and nonsense ...

As for other facts, has not the Major himself repeatedly demonstrated an astonishing grasp of climate science ... down there with his unrelenting hunt for that lost Order of Lenin medal ...

 

 

Yes, yes, it's true that things are going splendidly in Europe and the UK ... and we should do our very best to emulate them ...

 

Did the pond ever recommend this daily aggregation of cartoons on Twitter, here? Never mind, it's done now, and back to that expert scientist in the science of everything, that accumulator of climate science "facts" and lost medals ...

 

For some strange reason, the pond was reminded of that story about former Chairman Rudd in the Graudian here ... which the pond will pick up a bit after it started, as the Ruddster blathered about his Murdochian petition ....

...“Obviously, the beneficiaries of the Murdoch protection racket, the Liberal National party, will not do that [act],” Rudd says. “It will take some time to convince the Labor party that it’s in their interest as well. That will be influenced directly by the volume of public support.”
Australia has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world. News Corp Australia owns about 70% of newspaper circulation and has a monopoly in some states. It also owns the 24-hour channel Sky News Australia which, in its evening line-up, increasingly resembles Fox News in the US. It’s stacked with rightwing commentators, climate change deniers and advocates for lifting all coronavirus-related restrictions.
Rudd has been calling for a royal commission into News Corp, which he blames for his loss of the prime ministership, at least since the second volume of his memoirs were published in 2018. Why ramp it up now?
His home state of Queensland goes to an election at the end of the month. A federal election is likely next year. Is Rudd trying to inoculate the public against Murdoch’s anti-Labor campaigns?
He launched the petition without consulting the leader of the Australian Labor party, Anthony Albanese. “I thought it would be less complicated for him if he didn’t know,” he says.
Albanese, meanwhile, has said Rudd is acting as a private citizen and a royal commission is not Labor policy.
But Rudd says the bias is getting worse. In Queensland, in the lead-up to the 31 October poll, Labor has been subjected to what he calls “a rolling campaign … every story, every edition of every paper”.
In the state of Victoria, which has been battling a second wave of coronavirus, the Labor government’s lockdown restrictions and handling of the pandemic have come under continued attack, with the tabloid Herald Sun describing the premier, Daniel Andrews, as “Dictator Dan”.
Former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, now a Sky News commentator, attends Andrews’ media conferences and engages in trenchant exchanges that have gone on for more than 15 minutes at a time – all livestreamed.
Rudd also points to the fact that James Murdoch’s comments on the reason why he left the family company, published in a New York Times interview last week, have not been mentioned by any Murdoch newspaper in Australia.
James Murdoch said he had stepped away partly because his father’s media empire legitimised disinformation and obscures facts.
As for his own record, Rudd makes no apologies.
In the memoirs of the Australian’s former editor, Rudd is described by Mitchell as “the gift that keeps on giving … an important source, contact, contributor and subject”.
The two men had known each other since Mitchell was editor of the Queensland Courier Mail and Rudd was a senior state public servant in the late 1980s. Rudd is even the godfather of Mitchell’s son – although both men agree that was organised through Mitchell’s then-wife.
Mitchell gave accounts of extraordinarily intimate meetings and drunken carouses with a succession of prime ministers, particularly Rudd and Abbott.
Mitchell claimed that Rudd asked the Australian opinion columnists to approve the party’s industrial relations policy. He also wrote that later, when foreign minister, Rudd organised a secret tete-a-tete, held in the sauna of a five-star Sydney hotel that had been closed to the public and set up as a private dining room.
Is this true? Mitchell’s account of the sauna meeting, says Rudd, is “just a lie”. “The culture of News Corporation is that they believe they can get away with lies because nobody challenges,” he says.
As for the industrial relations policy, Rudd says he discussed it with many people. That doesn’t mean he was seeking approval. “That is an example of Mitchell’s inflated view of his own significance in the galaxy,” Rudd says.

The story goes on to discuss whether it was actually a sauna, and the Major seems to concede it might not have been, but it did happen somewhere, and so on and so forth, but who cares about whether it was just a lie or bad memory, the important line at which the pond stopped was that talk of the Major's inflated view of his own significance in the galaxy... though the pond might have stopped at Jimbo's talk of the way his dad's media empire legitimised disinformation and obscured facts.

Why stop at "inflated view"? Well the Major's balloon-like ability to look and act like a vastly over-inflated balloon still oozes through everything emanating from the Major's swamp ...

 

 

The idea that the Murdochians conduct good journalism, as opposed to crusades, campaigns, and feral denunciations of the witch hunting kind makes the pond regret it had already used its witch cartoon ... but here, celebrate another way that the Murdochians have helped fuck Britain ... not to mention the assorted other ways the empire has fucked the United States, and with their epic climate science denialism, the entire planet ... usually accompanied by the sort of Major major bullshit, faux, blather about forensic analysis, when what he really means is pandering and lying, distorting, conflating and confusing.

Why the pond has every confidence that if the Major could, he really would try to fuck the galaxy while he's at it ... but the pond will settle for Boris for the moment ...