In which everybody continues in a state of panic, with nattering "Ned" leading the way ...

 

The reptiles continue in a state of hysteria about the American situation, as do many Americans ...

Jack Black's gone - woke cancel culture strikes again - Morning Joe went down for a morning - fear grips the suits - and Sekta and the CFMEU must be pleased, because they're right down the bottom of the digital edition, as the reptiles grudgingly pick up on the Nine story.

On the downside, there's nauseating spectacle, with former chairman Rudd allegedly boasting about being in with America's Himmler. 

On the upside, the pond doesn't have to spend much time with Dame Slap, rabbiting on about judicial activism, apparently unaware of the deep corruption at play in SCOTUS ...

In her rant, she managed to ignore the likes of Thomas, busy scoring lavish perks, or Justice Scalito of the flags saga, and instead uses her lecture to derive a set of points that serve her own activist judges obsessions, in a way that only Dame Slap can ...

...If you doubt all this, return to the US. The US Bill of Rights uses language every bit as flowery and pious as any potential Australian Charter of Rights. The US courts, ultimately supervised by the US Supreme Court, are charged with interpreting it. Their activism is not a distortion of their system; it is a deliberate design feature of the US constitutional set-up.
The court seemed to delight in overcoming the dereliction or downright stupidity (as the court saw it) of legislatures in enacting enlightened policy.
The problem with all this was that while half the country may have cheered all this enlightenment, half the country hated it. Sure enough, Newton’s Third Law outed itself. Conservatives of all stripes united in an effort to get the courts back under control.
Many years ago, after the then Labor government under Kevin Rudd toyed with a charter of rights for Australians, I interviewed US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He warned this country to steer clear of America’s mistakes.
He said that once Americans figured out the court was rewriting the constitution from term to term, they wanted someone on the court who’s going to write the constitution that they like. Scalia warned us not to take the American road where every appointment, every decision and their aftermath are bitterly political.
The court’s recent decision on presidential immunity crystallised simmering anger at the change in the court’s philosophical approach. Dissenting liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor typified the existential fear provoked by the majority decision.
She said the decision made “a mockery of the principle … that no man is above the law”, and argued that the decision would allow the president to indulge himself or herself in all kinds of outrageous mayhem free from legal sanction.
While Sotomayor seemed untroubled that presidents have long enjoyed immunity from civil suits for their official actions, and they can face impeachment, the Supreme Court’s extension of presidential immunity for criminal acts does raise real questions.
That said, the critical point is not whether you like or dislike this judgment – or any others. The point is that politicisation of the American judiciary is a deliberate feature of a system that gives courts sweeping power to adjudicate matters of social policy. That politicisation has delivered division, discord and anger. Those features permanently stalk US courts and the American polity.
The lesson from America is that the tables can always turn. Power is seductive, and corrupting. Conservatives can be expected to be every bit as creative as left-wing judges, once they control the bench. They might be more likely to invent new forms of obligation or mutual responsibility than new rights, but invent they will. This is the dystopian future an Australian Human Rights Act will bring.

For decades under the Warren and then the Burger Supreme Courts, the US Supreme Court was an activist’s delight, expanding civil rights, civil liberties, judicial power and federal power. The legendary Roe v Wade ruling, creating a national right to abortion, was but one of many decisions where the court eschewed traditional legalistic methods of statutory interpretation in favour of progressive interpretations introducing policies that legislatures could have introduced but did not.

All that from a woman who slipped on a MAGA cap and strode out into the night in the streets of New York to celebrate the elevation of her orange Jesus ...

Instead of giving Dame Slap the caps treatment, the pond turned to nattering "Ned", deep into fear and hysteria ... with "Ned" apparently unaware the role that Faux Noise has played in the return of the mango Mussolini ...

There were a set of snaps to go with the hysteria, with a couple featuring America's newly appointed Himmler:

  

The pond did a late arvo splash on JD, but the yarns keep coming.

That's a summary of the yarn you can find at ProPublica under the header In Private Speech, J.D. Vance Said the “Devil Is Real” and Praised Alex Jones as a Truth-Teller, Vance gave the speech to the secretive Teneo Network. The GOP vice presidential nominee has been a member of the Leonard Leo-backed group, which seeks to cultivate conservative influence in business and culture.

Speaking of secretive networks, over at The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last threw in the towel, with this popping into the pond's email: It’s Time to Prepare for the Worst, Trump will probably win. What can small-d democrats do to get ready?

In it, he threw in a celebration of JD:

Well, it finally happened. A rich person finally bought his way onto a presidential ticket.

Of all J.D. Vance’s hypocrisies, the best is that this proud, self-described hillbilly is the cat’s paw of Peter Thiel—the gay Silicon Valley tech titan who wants to live forever using the blood of young people.

Thiel personally wrote the checks that pushed Vance across the finish line for his Senate seat. No, really. Thiel spent more money on Vance’s Senate campaign than anyone, ever, on a single Senate race.

Thiel bought Vance’s Senate seat for him in the hope that Vance could then get on the ticket with Trump and—fingers crossed!—wind up in the White House some day. What an amazing investment.

That Vance positions himself as the champion of the downtrodden, “traditional,” white masses while owing his selection entirely to a super-weird, gay tech billionaire is perfection.

JD also featured in a Beast story, and the pond found this the most poignant bit about his wife:

Before and after she became a senator’s wife, she was said to seldom talk politics. She maintained public silence when the man she met at Yale Law School condemned universities—perhaps Sixth College, University of California which her mother runs—as ”the enemy,” saying, “They do not pursue knowledge and truth. They pursue deceit and lies.”

The same applied when he professed to be “astonished when I learned that people listened to classical music for pleasure…” Usha is currently a board member of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and is an honorary trustee of the Washington National Opera.

Speaking of Yale, another story came up with this:

J.D. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio selected on Monday to be Donald Trump’s running mate, is a graduate of Yale Law School. But you wouldn’t know that from Yale. The Yale Law website makes no mention of the affiliation.

An item published on Tuesday afternoon describes “a reading group on Taylor Swift” organized by current students. A section titled “In the News” meticulously chronicles media appearances by alumni—but in recent weeks has not included a single mention of Vance, 49, who graduated from Yale Law in 2013 and is now just an election win and a heartbeat from the Oval Office.

The main Yale page also displays a telling lack of pride in one of the GOP’s most promising prospects. You can read a news item about how “routine violence shaped European empires,” but nothing at all about the man who may shape conservative politics for years to come.

A school-wide strategy seemed to be in the works, at least as of Tuesday morning. Yale Law’s account on X shared messages about Frank Jimenez ‘91, counsel for GE HealthCare, and Becca Heller, ‘10, chief executive of the International Refugee Assistance Project—but ignored how one of its own could one day sit in the Oval Office.

Mutual hostility and alienation or what, but America's Himmler is already a boon to cartoonists ...

Sorry, the pond should get back to "Ned", still in a funk about what his American kissing cousins have helped wrought, because greed is good ...

Only "Ned" could write, with sublime stupidity, "which way will Trump go?" He went JD, the new Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel, ready to do the dirty work - the first Islamist country with nukes and never mind Pakistan is just the beginning - but then the mango Mussolini has always been top of the dial on 11...

Meanwhile, "Ned" seems to be dimly realising that Faux Noise and its minions have helped sell out Ukraine, and the long absent lord knows, what and who else ...

If the mango Mussolini is manifestly a threat to democracy, if it's extraordinary how many people have become craven apologists for Trump, what to say about Faux Noise and the money-grubbing Murdochians? 

Well, at least it's grand times for cartoonists ...

And so to the last "Ned" gobbet ...

Yes, but while we have cartoons, at least we can enjoy the most dire circumstances ...

For a bonus, the pond with relief could turn away from the American situation to note that valiant "nuke the country to save the planet" Ted was served up as a reptile distraction ...

He's doing the lights will go out in London routine?

At that point the pond would usually run tales of the planet ... you know, the climate crisis making days get longer, or the ever expanding stories of extreme heat in the States, or the keen Kean making his first speech  in his new role, reported in Matt Kean tells clean energy industry to speak out against vested interests 'undermining the transition'.

Speaking of vested interests, that's a nice segue back to Ted.

Yes, yes, we'll all be rooned and all of that, but what's curious about all this is the muting of the message about the need to nuke the country to save the world.

There is some high comedy, in the form of "To be clear, this is neither a criticism of renewables nor of China", when patently it's all about a deep fear of renewables and beating the Chinese gong yet again as loudly as possible... and yet all Ted can do is gas light on about the need to gas the country ...

The pond did an actual word search and while there were some nineteen mentions of "gas", there wasn't one mention of "nuclear" ...

Amazing times, amazing scenes, and a truly amazing Ted ...

And another thing:

Why Guy Rundle is a doofus, part 1. 

Here in part he was in Crikey (paywall) doing his best Bob Ellis impression:

...The attempted assassination of Donald Trump is already fading, despite the media's attempt to make it last. But that doesn't matter to the Republican nominee, who is surging to victory either way.

That’s how things have been for a while, and with a sense of grinding invariance, which is why there’s a curious lack of intensity to this assassination attempt. Can you feel it slipping away into the background? Weird isn’t it? It’s got all the elements of a great assassination, it’s a lot like the JFK shooting, and yet it feels like it has little real impact. Everyone’s talking about the Evan Vucci photo as one of the great photos of the century blah blah. Does it feel that way? Not at all. It has about the same impact as any one of a half a dozen shots on your phone. 

But the media and political establishment desperately want it to be a moment, an event. They want Trump either to be vengeful, or to come to the centre and bring everyone together, for something to happen. But things don’t happen like that anymore. The relationship between politics, media and events is moving beneath the surface. Hence the grasping at that image, as if it was a Life magazine classic — because there is a desire for the historical moment such as existed back in the day, when one magazine carried the world to us in photos.

There is a powerful nostalgia at work — especially among an increasingly irrelevant media — for the time when events would happen in a way predictable within the media-life nexus. The current disconnection is not merely a matter of structures; it is the breach between a mass no longer connected to the elite — a mass from which the shooter himself came — and unwilling to be guided by the elite’s political imperatives. 

That try-hard attempt at analysis produced an immediate response, no doubt desired, but also showing the limitations of the original provocation. These included, but weren't limited to, comments about that snap, with the photographer claiming it was a deliberate framing, though he was also lucky to be in the right place at the right time ...

Mavo

“Everyone’s talking about the Evan Vucci photo as one of the great photos of the century blah blah. Does it feel that way? Not at all. It has about the same impact as any one of a half a dozen shots on your phone.”

Clearly this photo has and will have more impact “as any one of a half dozen shots on your phone”. The Republican Party has already begun linking it directly to the deficiencies that Rundle has identified in Biden. The raised fist, the bloodied face, the “fight, fight, fight” call … this is Trump standing up for Americans whose country is being invaded, who are being told that their candidate is attempting to overthrow democracy when all he is concerned about is making America great again, who face losing their superpower status because of Biden’s weakness and submission.

Life magazine may no longer carry the world to us in photos but that photo is carried to hundreds of millions of Americans by the phone in their pocket.

Drandy Reply to Mavo

Yes, it was a very interesting shot looking upwards and capturing the flag. All other shots showed a balding very scared person cowering behind the SS brigade who were all taller and younger than him.

Frank Dee Reply to Mavo

Yes. The endurance of the image – and it’s a pretty good shot (unlike the sniper’s) – depends on whether Trump wins. If he wins, and that looks likely, the Right will never allow the image to diminish. Should he not, the photo will fade in interest, but it will still be around on the covers of flattering biographies and hanging on the walls of Republican die-hards.

Well yes, that image has been turning up in all sorts of places, with all kinds of variations ...

The very same day in Crikey Tom Doig opened his report from the RNC convention this way:

“A photo like that, it’s worth more than 100 million in campaign ads.”

So said Brett. Brett was a good-natured oil and gas lobbyist from Colorado, and I was sitting next to him on our flight from Denver to Milwaukee, en route to the 2024 Republican National Convention, the day after Thomas Matthew Crooks took his fateful shots.

Brett pulled out his phone. “I never thought I’d get an email that says ‘In light of the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump…’” he muttered.

The point of course is that it doesn't matter what the clueless Grundle posits either by way of aesthetics or relevance. 

It's what cult worshippers at the shrine make of it, and so the image was blessed by a couple of "unapologetic Christian conservatives" by way of their T-shirts.

No doubt the image will recede in time, but "It has about the same impact as any one of a half a dozen shots on your phone"?!

Only in Grundle la la land, with Chinese pirates and T-shirt makers knowing a lot more.

It's an obvious point, but your "any one of a half dozen shots on your phone" don't make it on to T-shirts and other iconography for the faithful. Why diss it, why Grundle the image this way? Because perversity and contrariness is all the Grundle has to offer by way of analysis.

And so to another note that dropped into the pond's email box. John Hanscombe scribbled in The Canberra Times' newsletter The Echnida about the current situation, The real miracle is it took so long to happen, and ended this way ...

...while it probably doesn't stand as hypocrisy, President Joe Biden managed to mangle reality in his address to the nation after the shooting.

"There is no place in America for this kind of violence - for any violence. Ever. Period. No exception," he said. "We can't allow this violence to be normalised." Sorry, Mr President, it's a fine sentiment but with more guns in circulation than people in the US, with mass shootings so frequent not all get media attention, with gun violence the leading killer of children, that ship sailed long ago. Violence is normalised. Period.

What was truly miraculous about the Trump shooting was not so much his survival but rather that it had taken so long for someone to take the shot. The former president merely reaped the whirlwind of his own violent rhetoric. It's not excusable but entirely understandable. The deepest irony is that it might just assure his second presidency.

Well yes, and thanks to the newsletter, as a bonus, you also score the infallible Pope of the day, and perversely his 'toon is on another matter entirely ...

What a relief ...

How good it is to see bikies being bikies ... and the big four still clipping away ... 

It almost feels like normal ways in normal days ... and the pond will treasure these days while it can ...