In which the pond is distracted by odds and reptile sods before being reminded of the pending apocalypse ...

 

The pond woke up this morning to a cracking Crace, A Tory party addicted to chaos enters its next stage of self-destruction,  and realised it needed to join Chaos Anonymous. The pond hadn't managed to stay awake for PMQs at 11 pm, so seeking help was the next best thing...

“My name’s Lord Big Dave and I’m an addict,” said Lord Big Dave. “I don’t really know why I’m here. I actually think I’m a relatively high functioning politician but people keep telling me that I’m just glib, greedy and totally superficial. That I am responsible for fucking up the country by not paying attention during the Brexit referendum.”
“Believe them, Lord Big Dave,” the group replied in harmony.

And so on, and the pond is a reptile addict and wondered if it should head off to the local Woollies and vandalise it, not for price gouging, but ongoing thought crimes, with Bobby the latest reptile to keep bob bob bobbing along ...

Shockingly and shamefully, the reptiles had hidden it from the digital front page by early this morning but it had stayed up all yesterday, tempting the pond to do a late arvo post ...

Now there's no need to go over such stale, soggy ground, we've heard it all before ... but it did give the pond a chance to throw in the relevant infallible Pope of the day ...

And the immortal Rowe had decided to bring out the heavy roller ...

Speaking of haunted figures and divisive politics, and given Bobby's brooding about interfering corporations, the pond was tempted to draw attention to Christopher Warren out and about yesterday in Crikey with (C)old friends: How Lachlan is leading Murdoch media back to a triumphant Trump, with the lede Trump has forced the Murdochs to choose between money and power — and Lachlan has chosen the money. 

If Bobby had wanted to see a corporation keen on staying in divisive politics for reasons of pure, undiluted greed, he needed only to look at his own corporation's relentless fluff gathering ...

The early returns from the Lachlan era of Murdoch media are starting to come in. In the United States, they’re already showing a big shift from the brash ideological leadership of the father Rupert to a more cautious follower-ship in the son, who’s displayed a willingness to sacrifice political power for the comfort of cash flow.
Meanwhile, News Corp’s Australian mastheads — left to their own devices while Rupert and Lachlan were busy across the Pacific juggling the hot potato that is Trump — have spent the summer break desperately scratching around for an issue that will ignite the local culture war and reverse their continuing declining revenues.
Surprisingly, it was Florida Governor (and wannabe Republican presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis who called out the sudden weakness of Murdoch media. 
Fox News was now just part of Trump’s Praetorian Guard, he said last Friday: “They just don’t — they don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers and they don’t want to have the ratings go down.”
His complaint followed Fox’s “pathetic surrender” to Trump earlier in the week by agreeing to a live town hall discussion at a time and in a format demanded by the former president to spike the official Republican debate on CNN.
DeSantis should know. Rupert’s Fox News spent its last couple of years desperately trying to turn the governor into a national figure. It was just the latest in a rolling series of efforts by the older Murdoch since he sacked Fox News founder Roger Ailes in 2016 to wrestle ideological leadership of the political right back from Trump. 
After paying the price for whipping up the “stolen election” conspiracy in 2020, Rupert spent his final Fox News years making Trump a “non-person” (as Brian Stelter says in his latest book Network of Lies). Yet, this week, as the US primary season began with the Iowa caucuses, all the polling shows that the Republican Party is still firmly — happily — stuck in Trump’s MAGA world. 
Lachlan’s Fox News has seemingly figured it needs to go along, if it wants to get along. 
But this is a story about more than just another right-wing institution falling underneath the Trump juggernaut. It’s about the end of the Rupert business model (and the model of his father, Sir Keith), which saw money and power go hand in hand, each boosting the other. Trump has forced the Murdochs to choose — and Lachlan has chosen the money. 
DeSantis demonstrates that the US political class has recognised that Trump has shattered the perception that the older Murdochs traded on: the fear that the family’s media could make and break candidates and governments. 
“It’s The Sun Wot Won It” bannered the UK masthead following the 1992 election with a boastful honesty. “Tasteless and wrong” a more humble Rupert reckoned some 20 years later, in the wake of the hacking scandal, relying, it seemed, on the public protestations of politicians that media bias cuts both ways — on average, at least. 
But “The Sun Wot Won It” brag in the UK and the 1996 launch of the overtly right-wing Fox News on US cable encouraged academics to have another look. An analysis of British elections between 1997 and 2010 put a number on it, concluding The Sun’s support was worth about 2% of the vote. In the US, a 2007 study found that between 1996 and 2000 both the Republican turnout and vote went up significantly (in a statistical sense, at least) in towns where Fox News was on cable.
It’s not just Trump forcing the change. The fragmentation and siloing of audiences shift focus from the power of persuasion to the revenues arising from confirming the biases of the audience you already have. (It’s why Lachlan figures having a Biden to attack is good for Fox.)

All that seemed a logical cue for the pond to spend time with Killer, out and about with his letter from Amerika ...

Sadly, Killer had been gazumped by the bromancer yesterday, and already the news from abroad had moved on and turned to sundry disruptions to a certain trial in New York, with grunting and moaning from the pit, and a stray legal eagle wanting to interrupt ...

So all the pond could do was indulge Killer in a few highlights ...

For all the former president’s obvious and resurgent popularity among Republicans, his victory in November is far from certain given the ignominy of his previous departure.
If Trump had gone quietly in 2020 he’d be a shoo-in to win this year, but he didn’t. He disgraced himself in the eyes of most American voters, whatever the ultimate legality of his behaviour.

Phew, the pond thought Killer might be hinting that the mango Mussolini was a crook, a con artist and s a snake oil seller, but remember ...

Biden is probably the weakest US presidential candidate ever, in rapid decline and presiding over domestic and foreign policy dis­asters. 

What could they possibly have to counter that?

...They want to talk about Trump’s existential threat to democracy, however exaggerated.
It seemed to work in the 2022 midterm elections, where candidates endorsed by Trump performed badly in the wake of the regular presidential warnings. 

Yes, it's all just fearmongering ...

The most recent YouGov poll put Trump’s support at 50 per cent compared with Biden’s 48 per cent. But that’s before the full symphony of Democrat fearmongering strikes up after Trump’s likely Republican coronation at the party’s July national convention.
The American electorate is divided roughly into thirds: Democrats, independents and Republicans. It’s unlikely the former president gets any votes from the first group, given the intense polarisation and tribalism surrounding perceptions of Trump’s behaviour in office and especially his alleged criminality.
Independents, who don’t have the same disdain for the mainstream media or judicial system as most Republicans, will prove decisive. A conviction for Trump therefore could be politically lethal, even for something silly and academic as petulantly keeping classified documents at Mar-A-Lago, which legal analysts consider almost a open-and-shut case if it gets to trial.

Indeed, indeed, there's nothing like keeping nuke secrets for being silly and academic, and luckily the fix is in with the judge on that one.

Then Killer did a bit of defaming of his own corporation, usually thought to be a member of the mainstream mejjia ...

Republican trust in the US mainstream media – understandably, after years of obvious and relentless bias against Republicans and Trump in particular – has hit rock bottom: 11 per cent according to an October 2023 Gallup poll, down from 52 per cent in 1998.
Almost 30 per cent of independents, however, still had confidence, it found – a big enough share to potentially sway their vote amid a forthcoming 24/7 cacophony of warnings about a second Trump presidency.

Ah, the old cacophony thingie, and blather about obvious and relentless bias, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, but that talk of the mejjia did allow the pond to throw back to Warren and some interesting stats ...

... in a more relaxed, less MAGA-polarised Australia, News Corp is struggling to implement this US-shaped “give them what they want” content, with the company’s latest summer range — from pin-wearing flight attendants to Australia Day merchandise — set for the remainder bin.
The company’s tightly paywalled Australian news mastheads seem to have hit a ceiling, with under a million subscriptions (and, by my guestimation, around 650,000 subscribers, taking into account people who take both The Australian and the tabloids).
The Murdoch’s flagship tabloid franchise, the increasingly hysterical Herald Sun — the heir to the mastheads that founded the family’s power through its patriarch Sir Keith — languishes at about 150,000 print and digital subscriptions (according to the Delaware company’s filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission).
Once, its front pages were feared by state and federal governments alike. Now, they’re publicly laughed off. That’s the cost of trading power for cash flow.

Meanwhile, Killer was endearing himself to the pond with his singular devotion. 

It comes, the pond suspects, from an elective affinity, the tribe of mask-fearing vaccine deniers. The pond didn't note the bromancer pumping up RFK, who has largely disappeared in the post-Iowa wake for many pundits, but not Killer, he's still all in with hopes and dreams...

Then it was on to a closing celebration of how the most deranged loon in the pack was now working hard to get the king of loons elected ...

..Iowa has paved the way for a near certain Trump Republican nomination. It’s significant that Vivek Ramaswamy, the dynamic 38-year-old entrepreneur who achieved a respectable 8 per cent in the vote, didn’t simply retire from the race.
He immediately flew to New Hampshire to start campaigning for Trump. Ramaswamy’s remarkable rhetorical ability, not to mention his support base, will bolster Trump’s campaign.
The November election is still too far away to start predicting, but many Democrats will be rooting for Trump too until then.

Remarkable rhetorical ability? So that's what they're calling barking mad loons howling at the moon these days? For no reason, that reminded the pond of listening to Webster in the Domain way back when ...

What else? Well the pond got sold a pup by the ho hum digital edition's headlines ...

Real estate in the prime far right perch? Were the reptiles doing a Nine papers routine in a bid to boost flagging numbers?

Over on the other side, the war with China seemed to be off to a good start, and sharp eyes would have noted that anonymous pointer beneath the lesser member of the Kelly gang's rage: PM must stand up to Beijing ...

The pond just knew it, the bromancer was back, the war with China was on and that would fill up the Thursday ...

Imagine the pond's surprise to discover that the reptiles had chambered a dud blank ...

Where was the bromancer in the pond's hour of need? Did the reptiles expect that the pond would immediately follow on and chamber a dud Chambers? 

Wasn't the splendid irony of the Ambassador sipping on an Australian red before launching into his nonsense enough? Wasn't the blaming of Japan sufficiently comical?

The pond also noticed that there seemed to be an unusual supply of """ contributors this day, while Jack was his usual insipid self ...

In his survey, this is the best he could manage on the state of the States ...

In the US, Donald Trump is the Vegas favourite to win the November election but early head-to-head polling (no great predictor of the final result) has Nikki Haley further ahead of Joe Biden than Ron DeSantis and Trump, who leads the incumbent by less than a point. Down ballot, the likelihood is the Republican Party will regain its Senate majority but lose its majority in the house, a swings and roundabouts tilt at legislative dysfunction. 

Lordy, long absent lordy, that's beyond the valley of the bland, and barely justifies another cartoon ...

The pond decided to reach back for an EXCLUSIVE which had disappeared far too quickly ...

Was there any point to this EXCLUSIVE? Well it did give. the pond a chance to run a couple of cartoons ...

Another EXCLUSIVE gobbet ...

And another cartoon ...

And then a final gobbet ...

And then congratulations to Rosie, emulating Randy Stone, as she covers the teal beat for the daily ...

But something was lacking,  something was missing, and the pond quickly realised what it was. 

The pond was still suffering withdrawal symptoms. The last the pond had heard from nattering "Ned" was way back on 1st January, wherein he had urged Albo to seize the moment to face future challenges ... it was cliché city from the get go and full of the usual apocalyptic Chicken Little stuff ...

The future will be a picture of many, different contradictory forces, operating across intersecting domains. It is likely to be a story of rapid changes in global power amid a multilateral world, wealth expansion, the struggle in democracies to retain the social impact, periodic crisis triggered by climate, environment and financial institutions, technological breakthroughs that enhance human life, the risk of pandemics, the prospect of large-scale people movement, rising cultural conflict between traditionalists and progressives, tribalism based on sex, gender and race, biological experimentation and the ever-increasing risk of catastrophic conflict from weapons of mass elimination.

That's what the pond had been missing, and so it turned to Boyes of The Times, if not quite the real deal, then at least a decent form of methadone ... you know, apocalypse, global upheaval, crisis upon crisis ...

Indeed, indeed, is there anything more pleasing than railing at the 'leet, with a note that The Times of London is far from 'leet and ever so 'umble, and even more lowly than the lowly Sun, because it's ever so 'umble ... and just look at the snaps, as good a kind of kit as you might find....

Indeed, indeed, but the pond already knew what needed to be done to sort out the bloody mess. The useless, incompetent Saudis were only good at slicing and dicing journalists and repressing women. What was needed was a gunboat from down under to sort out the situation ... that'd soon put the Houthis back in their box ...

Ah yes, the good old Suez, what a triumph that was for the plucky British empire, well down the road to becoming Little England ...

Those were the days, when a gunboat was a jolly good gunboat ...

It was the fix the pond needed, well done Boyes of The Times, carry on regardless ...

The pond has no doubt that the Murdoch empire will help in every way possible, provided that there's money in it for the empire ...

And so to end with an infallible Pope that arrived late yesterday, but better late than never ...