In which the pond discovers itself in a time warp and is taken back to olden times ...

 

Have the reptiles gone full sociopath or are they just deeply weird ... examine the digital Oz edition entrails and discuss ...

The pond almost fell off its perch to see jolly Joe return to claim the far right top spot in the digital Oz. It was almost like Hamlet being confronted by the ghost of his father ... and then the pond had to take a deep gulp at the nauseating Freudian implications involved in using that as a metaphor.

Jolly Joe's no Hamlet, perhaps more fitting for a comedy about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but sadly the pond is no Tom Stoppard. Jolly Joe however is dead to the pond and no fake Poor Things reptile reanimation is going to convince the pond otherwise ...

Down below petulant Peta had joined in nuking the county to save the planet, but she's on semi-permanent exile and the pond had already nuked blogger yesterday, and besides the infallible Pope this day summed up the state of the debate...

Meanwhile, Dame Slap was continuing her monomaniacal obsessive compulsive campaign and as usual the pond refused to go there ...

But the pond did decide it would be timely to note a couple of observations about Dame Slap ...

The pond couldn't help but notice this outing in the Graudian as it directly impinges on herpetological matters of interest, with Geoffrey Watson scribbling The Sofronoff saga has shattered whatever confidence we had in our legal system. Here’s what went wrong

Mr. Watson opened with a declamatory flourish:

It is getting worse, not better – and there is no end in sight...

That's true enough, there is no end in sight, and after a few explanatory pars, Mr Watson cut to the reptile heart of the matter ...

...The law was not the only important institution shown to be flawed – so was the fourth estate, our free press. Not only did the commission bellyflop, it went down together with our “national broadsheet”, the Australian.
So what went wrong? Justice Kaye carefully exposes this with agonising detail. After Lehrmann’s aborted trial, questions arose regarding the conduct of the police, the prosecutor and some politicians. Allegations and counter-allegations. An independent inquiry was the only way to get to the truth. A retired judge, Sofronoff, was appointed.
But things went awry straight away. A connection was made between Sofronoff and a “conservative columnist” at the Australian, Janet Albrechtsen. Albrechtsen had written many, many articles attacking the prosecution of Lehrmann as political and severely criticising Drumgold. It was clear that Albrechtsen had taken a position on the very matters which Walter was supposed to be examining. They went to lunch together in Brisbane and commenced personal contact relating to Sofronoff’s inquiry.
Sofronoff has defended this, saying he was following a practice that commissioners make direct personal contact with the press. Sofronoff might think that, but no lawyer I know agrees with him. Everyone has been shocked by his conduct.
But even so there are varying degrees of personal contact. The constant contact between Sofronoff and Albrechtsen, as set out in the judgment, was pretty striking. It started even before the inquiry opened. It continued with a surprising intensity. Sofronoff and Albrechtsen shared more than 50 telephone calls for over 7.5 hours. They exchanged a huge number of text messages, many in a single day. Some emails were sent “secretively” to a private email address. Much of the traffic was initiated by Sofronoff. Meanwhile, Albrechtsen continued banging out negative articles about Drumgold on a daily basis.
The content of their contact was equally surprising. Even before the hearings started, Sofronoff sent Albrechtsen parts of the evidence with comments critical of Drumgold. During the public hearing, Albrechtsen even proposed to Sofronoff that he put particular questions to a witness – and Sofronoff agreed!
It gets worse. During the crucial phase during which Sofronoff was drafting his report, he was actually sending successive versions to Albrechtsen. Changes were made, but Justice Kaye did not make a finding as to why the changes were made or who suggested them. We do know, however, that Sofronoff’s final report closely matched Albrechtsen’s anti-Drumgold narrative. Justice Kaye found it would be reasonable to think that Sofronoff was under Albrechtsen’s “influence”.
Given all of this, it was inevitable that Justice Kaye would find that Drumgold had been denied procedural fairness. Nothing is more fundamental to procedural fairness than a fair hearing conducted by an unbiased decision-maker. Drumgold did not get that. Every finding adverse to Drumgold was made in the absence of a fair hearing. Because of Justice Kaye’s findings, nothing said by Sofronoff retains validity. The report should never have been published – but that decision was denied to the ACT government when Sofronoff gave a copy to Albrechtsen days before he gave it to the chief minister.
Justice Kaye’s decision does not mean that Drumgold has received justice. It is some redress, but nowhere near enough. He has lost his job. He has lost his reputation. I do not know him, but I would be amazed if he was not emotionally damaged.
And Justice Kaye’s scathing finding has not stopped Albrechtsen. The day after the judgment, she pumped out yet another article attacking Drumgold. Why? What further do you want? It is time to stop...
Geoffrey Watson is a former counsel assisting the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption and a director of the Centre for Public Integrity

The pond appreciates the update, though it's already out of date. 

Dame Slap barged right past Mr Watson and was at it again today, forcing the pond to duck and weave.

 It might be time to stop, but there is no way for it to stop. There is no end in sight, there never will be an end in sight.

The pond doesn't know Mr Watson, but is amazed he has not done his herpetology studies. Dame Slap is incapable of stopping. No call on her to stop will stop her. You might as well call on Homer Simpson to stop eating in an 'eat all you want' restaurant ...

'Tis no woman. Dame Slap is a remorseless, relentless, implacable hate machine. That's the beginning and the end of it. The pond doesn't know why - it isn't even likely that keeping a Freudian in the house would help. 

If you beat her with truth or insight, she won't cower, she'll snarl and lunge again and again, like some wild phantom beast let loose on the moors. Even Sherlock Holmes himself would be intimidated by a fiendishness that would put Prof Moriarty to shame ...

Then knock the pond over with the sight of jolly Joe Hockey imitating a bowling ball, there was Michael Bradley yesterday in Crikey asking What should we make of Walter Sofronoff’s contact with News Corp’s Janet Albrechtsen? (paywall)

The pond rarely intrudes in a full-blown way on Crikey, but this one also featured the Dame Slap matter ... It's not a clean win for Shane Drumgold, but then again nobody ever wins in this messy affair.

One thing lawyers and journalists have in common is a shared and ancient maxim: don’t make yourself the story. Unless you’re Janet Albrechtsen, of course.
Having just played a starring role in the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory, where Acting Justice Stephen Kaye ruled that her relationship with Walter Sofronoff KC had caused there to be a reasonable apprehension of bias on his part in his handling of the inquiry into the conduct of former ACT chief prosecutor Shane Drumgold, the opinion columnist for The Australian declared herself the clear winner.
While Kaye has yet to make orders, he will formally declare that Sofronoff’s inquiry, and therefore his report, was infected by that apprehended bias. The inquiry report had no legal consequences, so it cannot be “overturned” as such. However, Kaye’s finding means that Sofronoff’s report is rendered valueless, since no credence can be placed on it.
Albrechtsen’s response: an article in The Australian, immediately, headlined “Shane Drumgold’s reputation remains in tatters”.
Her declaration: 
"Drumgold sought a declaration that the Sofronoff report, or those parts about Drumgold, were invalid and of no effect. Drumgold didn’t get that. The Sofronoff report remains standing. Seven of eight damning findings by Sofronoff against Drumgold remain standing."
Now, the whole point of the apprehended bias principle is that nobody can stand in judgment of their own actions, or of matters in which they have a personal interest. A ruling by a court or tribunal of any description, in circumstances where the decision-maker was actually biased one way or the other, is a nonsense and the law will not allow it to stand.
The law goes further, applying the same outcome where the bias hasn’t been proved to exist but where there are circumstances that would cause a fair-minded punter looking on to think that maybe the decision-maker might not be impartial.
For example, if a judge were to sit in judgment in a case against a company in which they held a few shares, while we could probably accept that they wouldn’t be swayed by that circumstance, the perception of risk could not be ignored and the judge must recuse themselves.

That was the case Drumgold brought against the Sofronoff inquiry. He also asked the court to declare that eight of the adverse findings that Sofronoff made against him, in respect of his handling as lead prosecutor of the Bruce Lehrmann rape trial, were legally unreasonable. He failed, except in respect of one of the findings (regarding his cross-examination of Linda Reynolds at the trial).

Albrechtsen is, as usual, right and completely wrong. It is true that Drumgold’s challenges to the detail of Sofronoff’s findings largely failed, the judge concluding that they were reasonably open to Sofronoff to reach on the evidence before him. Which is not to say that Justice Kaye agrees with him, because that is not the test he had to apply. They just weren’t so unreasonable as to be declaratively wrong.

Which brings us back to what Justice Kaye concluded regarding Sofronoff’s dealings with Albrechtsen –the 273 interactions just between them, as has been widely reported and dissected.

Kaye exhaustively analysed every scrap of it, nauseating as that must have been. First, he said, “it is clear that Ms Albrechtsen consistently expressed views [in her many articles in The Australian] that were particularly critical of [Drumgold] in his decision to commence the criminal proceedings against Mr Lehrmann, and in his conduct of those proceedings.” He also noted that, in her articles, she “alleged serious breaches by [Drumgold] of his duties as a prosecutor”.

Further, nobody had been able to find a single article by Albrechtsen “which were supportive of [Drumgold]’s conduct of the prosecution, or which in any way countered the criticisms”.

No problem with that, Albrechtsen is an opinion columnist, fully entitled to wage one-sided campaigns against her enemies with no regard to balance or fairness. The point is that, as Kaye found, she had a dog in this race. The question therefore, he said, was whether a fair-minded observer “might reasonably have apprehended that Mr Sofronoff might have been influenced” by her in his determination of the issues in his inquiry.

One example of many will suffice to illustrate what went on between them — a text exchange on May 23, 2023. Albrechtsen texted Sofronoff asking whether the inquiry was looking into what a police officer meant by a comment he had made. Sofronoff replied: “Yes, he should have asked Moller what he understood by it. He’ll do that this morning and follow up with Chew.”

Kaye: “That text exchange is relevant for two reasons. First, Ms Albrechtsen felt free to communicate with Mr Sofronoff, and express an opinion to him, about the issues that were being agitated at the inquiry. Secondly, Mr Sofronoff saw fit to express to Ms Albrechtsen his agreement with her suggestion as to a question that ought to have been asked of a witness”.

All of the communications between the pair were private, never disclosed to anyone else. The storm didn’t break until it was revealed that Sofronoff had given Albrechtsen drafts of his final report via his personal email address, before presenting it to the ACT government.

Kaye’s conclusion, under this mountain of evidence (“the amount, context, nature, manner and content of the communications”), was that there was a reasonable apprehension “that Mr Sofronoff might have been influenced … by the views held and publicly expressed by Ms Albrechtsen”.

The court will ultimately make that declaration. It never had the power to make Sofronoff’s report void. However, it follows as night follows day that, because Sofronoff’s performance of his function has been found to have been infected by apprehended bias, and specifically the apprehension that he might have unwittingly ended up doing the bidding of someone with an axe to grind, his findings are legally worthless.
It’s not a clean win for Drumgold, but nobody ever wins in the Lehrmann/Higgins catastrophe. Everyone gets burned.

When the pond shares huge gobbets from outside the reptile paywall, it usually notes the source and there was this note on Bradley:

Michael Bradley is a freelance writer and managing partner at Sydney firm Marque Lawyers, which was created in 2008 with the singular ambition of completely changing the way law is practised.

Everyone gets burned, and yet still the burning continues this day in a variety of ways, and Dame Slap at the centre of the burning ...

That's why the pond has always tiptoed by the sight of Dame Slap in crusade mode and will keep on tippy toe, and prance on to the latest reptile news.

That's when it got deeply weird.

Killer Creighton had tag teamed with Cameron Stewart to celebrate the juggernaut Trump going for Biden's jugular - how they love to feast on blood - and down below the bromancer was wildly excited ...

The pond is very reluctant to get involved in US politics at a level outside a cartoon, but what else to do? The pond has no time for that Monk lurking outside the cloisters and couldn't imagine spending time with simplistic "here no conflict of interest" Simon, and dullard Jack was still rabbiting on about Dunkley ...

If the pond wanted to speak of the mutton Dutton it would be to celebrate his love affair with Gina of the IPA ...

It was there in the Graudian Peter Dutton flew to Perth for one hour at lavish Gina Rinehart birthday party then back to cost-of-living campaign in Dunkley and there was a lovely snap of the couple together in the Herald coverage ...

By golly he knows how to bend the knee. 

As for the reptiles bending the knee and kissing the ring in that mango Mussolini coverage, the reptiles began the kissing yesterday ...

You can see how it works. Not satisfied with their individual performances, Cameron and Killer turned themselves into a classic tag team straight out of The Iron Claw to perform today ...

The pond will ignore the wild-eyed excitement of Killer in a frenzy, agog at the wrestling ...

...and settle for the bromancer's bout ...

As usual there were a couple of snaps ...

Naturally the snap of Biden reminded the pond of a cartoon featuring the creationist ...

The pond's got to do something to relieve the agony, which will be longer than eight reptile fits or even a bro fit ...

Customary madness? That reminded the pond of a story by Igor Derysh in Salon, "He looks lost": Alarm after Trump's "mind blanks out" repeatedly during speech, "It is just so pathetic and sad,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough says after Trump confuses Biden and Obama — again.

Former President Donald Trump was called out for repeated verbal gaffes over the weekend amid right-wing attacks on President Joe Biden over his age.

Trump’s fans went quiet when he confused Biden and former President Barack Obama while claiming that he personally would “have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled” if he wins back the White House in November.

“I know them both very well and we will restore peace through strength. Get that war settled. It’s a bad war. And Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said during a speech in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Trump, who is 77, has repeatedly mixed up Biden and Obama on the campaign trail amid a series of other mix-ups, including recently confusing former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Republican presidential primary rival Nikki Haley. Trump has dubiously claimed that he mixes up names on purpose.

"When I purposely interposed names, they said I didn't know Pelosi from Nikki," Trump said at a rally in South Carolina last month, making another gaffe.

MediasTouch editor Ron Filipowski posted a montage of 32 clips from Trump’s speeches in Virginia and North Carolina on Saturday in which he “mispronounced words, got confused, mixed up names, forgot names, and babbled insane nonsense.”

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” played a supercut of Trump’s slips over the weekend and questioned what was happening with the former president.

"What happened there?” asked host Joe Scarborough. “He gets in the middle of sentences, he is reading teleprompters and his mind still blanks out — Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama for Joe Biden, and it is just so pathetic and sad. They're going, ‘he's doing it on purpose.’ No, he's not doing any of this stuff on purpose. Take the fact his mind blanks out and he looks lost."

Conservative guest Charlie Sykes expressed alarm that Trump is “less than 48 hours away” from effectively clinching the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday despite his 91 felony charges and “gaffe-filled speeches.”

"If there's any upside here, Joe Biden will be able to say, 'Yeah, I'm old, I'm stiff when I walk, but this guy is also old and crazy – he's dangerous, he's incoherent,'" Sykes said. "He needs to make that point. The other maybe upside is, you know, now that there's no way of denying it'll be Donald Trump again, it'll focus the mind… I think Democrats need to stop the bedwetting, but they need to get out of the bed and freak out a little bit because the reality is, maybe this is what it'll take for them to realize this guy could become president of the United States.”

Naturally the bro didn't care about any of this ... he was too busy talking up the tangerine wannabe tyrant's chances ...

For some peculiar reason it reminded the pond of the NY Times and another story in Salon by one Lucian K. Truscott IV, There is something wrong at the New York Times, From presidential polls to refusing to report on Trump’s stumbles, things aren’t adding up at the Gray Lady...

Two things — check that, three things — appear to have gone off the rails at the paper we used to call the Gray Lady. First, whoever is in charge of the paper’s polls is not doing their job. Second, whoever is choosing what to emphasize in Times coverage of the campaign for the presidency is showing bias. Third, the Times is obsessed with Joe Biden’s age at the same time they’re leaving evidence of Donald Trump’s mental and verbal stumbles completely out of the news.

Let’s start right there. At a rally on Saturday night in Virginia, Trump confused Barack Obama, who left office seven years ago, with President Biden for the third time over the last six months. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said, as his crowd of rabid supporters suddenly fell silent. “You heard that. Nuclear. He’s starting to talk nuclear weapons today.” You won’t find that verbal stumble and the crowd’s stunned reaction in the Times coverage of the campaign over the weekend. You’ll have to read other publications — for example, Salon or maybe the Guardian — if you want to learn how often Trump is losing his way mid-sentence at rallies and just mumbling incoherently.

The Times on Sunday, however, had this headline ready for your morning coffee: “Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to be Effective.” It’s another grab from the New York Times/Siena College poll they published on Saturday that is so outrageously flawed, a cottage industry has sprung up to pick apart its methodology and point out its glaring contradictions and straight-up bias. 

A favorite of poll skeptics is its sampling bias. How did the New York Times come up with a polling sample that included 36 percent rural voters when the 2020 proportion of rural voters was 19 percent? Somehow, the poll’s sample of female voters was equally skewed. The poll found Trump winning the female vote by one percent, when Biden carried women in 2020 by 11 points. The Times wants you to ignore that in between, all three of Trump’s Supreme Court justices quarterbacked the Dobbs decision overturning women’s constitutional right to abortion, followed almost immediately by states banning abortion all over the country, many with no exceptions for rape or incest. The Times doesn’t say how it squares its poll numbers with the fact that women turned out in huge numbers to help win referendums confirming a right to abortion, including in such Republican strongholds as Kansas and Kentucky, and handed every special election to Democratic candidates in the bargain. They just want you to believe there’s been a 12-point swing toward Trump among women, with no evidence except, poof!  It happened!

The truly incredible thing is that the New York Times provides the evidence that would cause any other reasonable journalistic enterprise to question the accuracy of its own poll. The poll shows that Trump still has the support of nearly every Republican who voted for him in 2020 — this in the face of the fact that between 30 and 40 percent of primary voters have chosen another candidate than Trump. Those people are not poll respondents. They’re voters. The Times/Siena poll also somehow comes up with 12 percent support among Democrats for Rep. Dean Phillips, who has yet to get more than two percent of the vote in a primary. Even Phillips himself posted a tweet that said “When the NYT/Siena poll shows me at 12%, you better believe it’s flawed. Only 5% even know who I am.” The poll also shows that among respondents who described themselves as unhappy with both candidates, they favor Biden over Trump by 12 points. So Biden has the utterly disaffected vote and carries independents by four points, and he’s losing to Trump by four points? 

Why is the New York Times missing the red flags in its own polls? More important, why has the paper decided to give its own deeply biased poll results such heavy play? I don’t want to bring up but her emails, but for crying out loud, why is the New York Times so clearly making the same mistakes of bias and emphasis they made in 2016 covering Hillary Clinton all over again? The Times was down on Clinton for months because of her so-called email scandal that wasn’t a scandal at all, and when Russian intelligence leaked Democratic Party emails through WikiLeaks in the fall of 2016, reading the Times you would think that each and every DNC email that nobody bothered reading was a smoking gun. None of the daily drumbeat of manufactured “news” added up to even a pinprick of a scandal, but as the Times did with Whitewater and the rest of the made-up Clinton scandals, the paper simply couldn’t resist filling its front page with negative stories about the Democratic candidate for president.

There are no scandals with the name Biden attached to them, unless you consider the lies Russian spies supplied the so-called impeachment committee with. So The New York Times has apparently devoted half a floor in its Eighth Avenue headquarters to a search for bad news about Biden, and then they reserve a space nearly every day above the fold on the front page for whatever grain of grim shit the Biden hunters have managed to come up with. They’re probably working on a story on how Biden is losing the pro-choice vote as we speak, while pointing out the wild success of Trump’s “move to the middle” on abortion with “centrist” voters. 

If you’re getting off the subway anywhere near Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, hold your nose. There’s something fishy at the New York Times.

So it's not just the lizard Oz, it's not just the bro ...

See if you can find a mention in this last bro gobbet of the mango Mussolini mangling his speech, or stumbling and bumbling. 

All the pond could spot was a bout of bad old NY Times dead fish rotting both siderism ...

But be fair. 

Could you find anywhere else in the world a scribbler scribbling The Supreme Court has a perfectly apolitical record in dealing with Trump with a straight face? ...

And so to the Rowe of the day ....

By golly that's a remarkably good likeness  to one of the reptiles, though whether it's Killer, Kameron, Dame Slap donning her famous MAGA cap,  jolly Joe or the bro is still provoking a raging debate in the pond household  ...

It's going to be a year when the pond might just run the cartoons ...