Sssh, it's Monday, don't mention the planet ...

 

It's a difficult time for the reptiles, and the pond suggests that they need kindness and understanding. 

Climate science denialism and daily donning of blinkers is a hard act, and there's a bunch of irrelevant fools blathering about a warming world, and what can a reptile do?

Send in a gormless, feckless Sharma, apparently unaware that he's scribbling for climate denialism central ...

To be fair to the Major, he did manage to work in his usual assault on renewables in the context of other legislative matters, but the pond had to skip down a few gobbets to get there ...

The pond apologises for cutting the Major short, but should note that in his final gobbet he did finally manage to love the colour teal ... the enemy of mine enemy etc ...

Apart from the feckless, feeble Sharma and the odd glance from the Major, it was left to the lizard Oz editorialist to do the hard yards ...

Luckily the pond had a stray infallible Pope to hand which supported the lizard Oz editorialist in their unselfish stance ...

Meanwhile, on another planet and in another newspaper ...

You see? How's a reptile to cope with that sort of malarkey ... except perhaps to bring back nasho ...

What a splendid distraction. Once again the IPA and the onion muncher have done it again ... with the onion muncher's proud record of military service a stark reminder to vulgar youff that the hard yards must be done if we're to be ready for the reptiles' third world war in the new year ...

Oh those bloody New Zelunders, always ruining things ... unlike the onion muncher, who did sterling service in the war on the NBN, and the country still carries the scars of his heroic fighting ...

Meanwhile, both the bromancer and the Killer were on hand to observe the United States. As always, the bromancer was the first the pond turned to ...

This is going to be a slog, so have a cartoon ...

Now back to defeating those Satan-worshipping pedophiles ...

So J. D. Vance is the bromancer's idea of a more impressive Republican? A mango Mussolini arse licker shows his integrity and hillbilly spirit?

More comedy was to follow, with the bromancer apparently unaware that paper is used in many places in polling, and the ballots are retained for the record and for checking and the machines do the tabulation, and aren't connected by the intertubes to Italy or Venezuela ... and that recently it's been demonstrated that hand counting is both laborious and unreliable, though loons in the United States have been trying to bring it back, per stories regarding Nevada back in late October ... (WaPo, paywall)

PAHRUMP, Nev. — Jay Goldberg, a retired electrician who enjoys four-wheeling with his wife, Bonnie, in the dusty hills that loom over this desert town, sat in a tiny government office here this week counting ballots by hand because he believes the 2020 vote was rigged against Donald Trump.

“If something can be manipulated, it eventually will be,” said Goldberg, 70, referring to unproven claims that tabulation machines made by Dominion Voting Systems threw the presidency to Joe Biden. “It’s that simple.”

And to Goldberg, there’s a simple answer: Go back to hand counts. It’s a solution being embraced this fall in Nye County, a rural outpost of 53,000 where officials who deny the results of the 2020 election hold sway.

Should Republicans prevail statewide in November, officials could be pushing it across Nevada next year. Like-minded GOP candidates nationwide have offered similar proposals, even as election experts and Democratic candidates have argued that such steps are only likely to further undermine faith in American democracy. They argue the hand count, which began this week with tabulation of early votes, could deepen distrust in elections by opening up the possibility of lengthy delays or serious mistakes.

The rejection of voting machines and embrace of 2020 conspiracy theories make Nye County — a vast area that boomed, then busted, on the back of gold and silver mining more than a century ago and today thrives in part thanks to legal prostitution — a harbinger of the country’s future should election deniers take charge.

Leading the push in Nevada is Jim Marchant, the GOP nominee for secretary of state — a position with authority over the battleground state’s elections. If Marchant is elected — a strong possibility in Nevada, where races for governor, attorney general, U.S. Senate and secretary of state are all neck and neck, according to polls and campaign operatives from both parties — he would wield broad power to implement his agenda across the state.

In addition to championing hand counts, Marchant has promised if elected to “decertify” the 2020 Nevada result because he believes Trump won. Marchant could also attempt to thwart certification of the popular vote in the 2024 presidential race — something he has said he would have done had he been in office in 2020. And he plans to spread his gospel across the nation. “Some of you may have heard that I convinced a county here in Nevada to implement a new prototype for the election system that we’re going to deploy all around the country, with your help,” he promised from the stage of a Trump rally this month in Minden, Nev.

And so on, and of course the bromancer is on side with all of that ...

Sorry, the pond knows that the mid-west is deeply concerned at the level of crime in Chicago and New York, even though "red" states statistically have more crime ... We have a murder problem in America — especially in red states ...

And the pond was only recently reading a story in The New Yorker ...

The Shoddy Conclusions of the Man Shaping the Gun-Rights Debate

John Lott is the most influential pro-gun researcher in the country. But his methods and findings have been repeatedly debunked. (sorry, possible paywall)

But the pond can't let that voting thingie go, with this at the bottom of the WaPo story ...

Around the country, only a handful of jurisdictions count ballots by hand, mostly counties and towns with tiny populations concentrated in New England and Wisconsin, according to data provided by Verified Voting. Together, voters living in these communities represent just 0.2 percent of registered voters nationwide.

But so far this year, communities in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Nevada and New Hampshire have discussed switching to hand-counting of ballots. Just last week, the clerk of Elko County, Nev. — about the same size as Nye, with roughly 53,000 residents — announced plans to conduct a hand-counted audit after the Nov. 8 election.

Experts say that if hand counting is adopted on a broad scale, election results could be thrown into chaos by errors and delays. That could give bad actors more time to sow doubts and to slow or even block certification. Time and again, post-election audits have confirmed that machine counts are accurate. No proof has emerged that the machines were hacked in 2020.

“If the whole point of this is to engender more trust in the correctness of the election outcome, then I think the first thing is to understand the existing process and what is already in place to make for a trustworthy election,” Smith said. She noted that jurisdictions in Nevada already audit results by hand-counting a sample of ballots. They do so after unofficial results have been reported, encouraging confidence in the result without gumming up counting on election night.

And so to the bromancer doing an obligatory mention of climate science and those bloody green activists ... though this week it isn't nuking the country that's needed, we need to gas it ... because, you know, renewables ...

A terrific muddle? Is that a bromancer way of saying the United States and the planet is deeply, comprehensively fucked, in no small part thanks to News Corp and Faux Noise?

Just to make sure the pond dropped in on Killer's report ...

Sorry, it's going to be another long one, so perhaps a cartoon to go with the pelvis and the battered wife syndrome and the hard way to the top of the Murdochian greasy pole ...

Of late the reptiles have taken to putting in big snaps, which are admittedly easier to read than the reptile print ... though strangely the mango Mussolini was notably absent from the snaps ...

It takes an experienced hack to report the mango Mussolini's rhetoric with a straight face, but Killer was up to the task ... though once again the reptiles seemed to prefer a snap of Obama to break up the small print ...

What else could be done? Perhaps a click bait video, which the pond had to neuter ...

Note the easy way that Killer tosses off "hand-picked", when referring to a quack given unto the world by Oprah, and a loon of the first water ...

A week before January 6, Mastriano gave the invocation at a Zoom gathering called “Global Prayer for Election Integrity”: “God, I ask you to help us roll in these dark times,” he said. “That we fear not the darkness, that we will seize our Esther and Gideon moments, that we will stand in the gap, and when you say, ‘Who shall I send?’ we will say, ‘Send me.’”

Indeed, Mastriano chartered buses to the insurrection. He has claimed he was far from the action that day, but videos have shown him taking cellphone photos close to the violence.

Last September, Mastriano’s extremism got him kicked out of the Republican caucus in Harrisburg and barred from its internal meetings—no small feat in a body that leans far to the right. He had fought with State Senate Republican leaders whom he accused of “stonewalling” his efforts to investigate the 2020 presidential election and to subpoena voting equipment and information on individual voters. To be clear, his colleagues were also election deniers, but he was too aggressive even for them.

During the Zoom, Mastriano had prayed for the electoral vote in Pennsylvania to be overturned, asking God to bless letters that Trump had asked him to send to Republican leaders and to “embold them to stand firm and disregard what happened … until we have an investigation.” Part of his “election integrity” plan involves a proposal to make every voter in the state reregister—meaning that Pennsylvania would experience a moment in which it had zero eligible voters.

Mastriano’s campaign for governor has paid $5,000 for consulting services to the social network Gab—a haven for anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. It is the platform that Robert Bowers, the accused shooter in the 2018 Tree of Life attack in Pittsburgh, posted on just before 11 people were murdered inside the synagogue. At one of Mastriano’s recent rallies, a Texas evangelist who preceded Mastriano to the podium warmed up the crowd by asking them to swear an oath to “sweep down the hill to victory,” as Union soldiers did at Gettysburg. (At least it was a reference to Union soldiers!) Everyone raised their right hand in the air.

To dwell too deeply on Mastriano’s politics produces a kind of vertigo. Everything’s upside down. Shapiro, Mastriano’s opponent, is an observant Conservative Jew. Mastriano has responded to charges of anti-Semitism by pointing out that some of his own events begin with the blowing of a shofar by a man who wears a tallit, or Jewish prayer scarf. “We had a shofar, a prayer shawl, and then suddenly … you’re an anti-Semite,” he complained in August. “Like, make up your mind.” (The man blowing the shofar at his events is referred to as “Pastor Don,” which doesn’t sound terribly Jewish.)

In late August, when Mastriano was a guest on the podcast The World According to Ben Stein, one of the hosts attacked Shapiro as a “self-hating, anti-Semitic Jew.” Mastriano, he said, was different: “You, Doug, are an Israel supporter, and more than an Israel supporter, you are a Jew supporter.” (A lot more of  Michael Sokolove's October piece for The Atlantic here, possible paywall).

Confronted by such weird loons, Killer does an extraordinary job keeping a straight face, only to be reduced to the usual in such circumstances ... a vox populi ... but not before discovering an unexpected move which was to be entirely expected, given the orange Jesus's fear of Judas ... with Kristin Tate in The Hill talking up the rivalry some four days ago ...Yes, Ron DeSantis can beat Donald Trump in the GOP primary ...

There is no bigger indicator of who will be a superstar in the Republican Party than where the media focuses its vitriol, and mainstream media journalists are increasingly busying themselves attempting to take out one Florida man whose name isn’t Donald Trump — Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

A mere glance at recent headlines reveals a markedly ratcheted-up nastiness in rhetoric surrounding the governor: “Gov. Ron DeSantis’s racist ‘Election Integrity’ crusade”; “Ron DeSantis should be prosecuted for his treatment of immigrants”; “Ron DeSantis’s War on LGBTQ People.” The hostile tone and the sheer number of news stories and editorials regarding DeSantis suggest that the journalist class realizes that he represents a formidable threat ahead of 2024. And although Trump may see himself as the king of the GOP, DeSantis could very well beat the former president in a primary race. 

Good on ya Kristin, there being just one problem ...

Et tu Donald and Killer, at one with the lamestream media? Talk about nasty lamestream rhetoric about that nasty Ron De Sanctimonious, and not just from the nasty Murdochian journalist class ...

All that noted, he image of Killer plumbing the heart of America by talking to a couple of 18 year olds and a bar tender suggested to the pond that Killer remains top of the heap when it comes to hackery and punditry ...

All the pond can do to match Killer's noble work is to do a vox populi of cartoonists, with the immortal Rowe on hand for a closer ...

Works for the pond, and with due respect and regard to the pond's American correspondent, JM, what a strange country it is ... and speaking of sources ...