The pond dissembled ...it's not over yet, Dame Slap and the rest of the reptile pack have seen to that ...

 

The pond has taken to showing its homework as a way of defending its reptile choice of the day ... but can there ever be any defence for returning to that ineffable, inexplicable wellspring of far right bigotry, Dame Slap?

Well yes, examine the choices on the extreme far right of the digital lizard Oz this morning ...

"Ned" doing Albo and on a Wednesday and what's more, straying from his mission to bore readers senseless on the weekend? 

The bromancer doing defence for the umpteenth time and in his usual predictable way, more reliable than a Shinkansen service? At least Dame Slap offered the chance to sing along to a musical ...

On what's allegedly the news side of the digital rag, the reptiles were full of it, idle speculation until the cows and the voters come home ...

Simplistic Simon doing a hard place rock routine? 

Not likely, ,please hand the bigot's wayward bigot's copy, over beginning with the header ...

Democrats pack a risk to Supreme Court’s integrity

Donald Trump is often described as a threat to democracy. His behaviour after the 2020 election was despicable. But only dills would claim democracy is automatically safe in the hands of Kamala Harris.

Say what?

His behaviour after the 2020 election was despicable.

Could this come from the same keyboard warrior who strode out into the New York night in ecstatic, neigh orgasmic, triumph?

The pond never gets tired of running that one, but rarely runs a bit of the accompanying text in Trump's people take back their Capitol, but wotthehell, toujours gai Archy, this is Dame Slap day....

Ah the glories of the layout in the reptile archives.

And the pond also has a desire to reproduce the Dame Slap origin story:

What’s all this? she shouted, in a very fierce voice. Form up in a line. March past me at once!

To the children’s dismay every one got a good hard slap as they passed the cross old lady.
Now, please, answer the questions written on the blackboard, said Dame Slap. You have each got paper and pencil. Any one putting down the wrong answers will be very sorry indeed.
Jo looked at the questions on the board. He read them out to the others, in great astonishment.

• If you take away three caterpillars from one bush, how many gooseberries will there be left ?
• Add a pint of milk to a peck of peas and say what will be left over?
• If a train runs at six miles an hour and has to pass under four tunnels, put down what the guard’s mother is likely to have for dinner on Sundays?
• How many far right loons of the Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito kind will it take to satiate Janet Albrechtsen's bigotry?
• How many women must be killed while seeking health care in the USA? 

Everybody gazed at the board in despair. Whatever did the questions mean? They seemed to be nonsense.
I can’t do any, said Moon-Face, in a loud voice, and he threw down his pencil. It’s all silly nonsense! said Jo, and he threw down his pencil too.
The girls did the same, and Silky tore her paper in half! All the pixie and fairy-folk stared at them in the greatest astonishment and horror.
Indeed! said Dame Slap, suddenly looking twice as big as usual. If that’s how you feel, come with me!
Dame Slap led them to a small room and pushed them all in. Then she shut the door with a slam and turned the key in the lock.
You will stay there for three hours, and then I will come and see if you are sorry, and agree to appointing at least three more far right loons to the Supreme Court, so it's properly balanced, she said.
Nobody liked it. They all sat on the floor and looked angry and miserable. If only they could escape from Dame Slap’s silly old school.

Perhaps the pond can help the children with one of those tricky questions, but first a note that, as is the reptiles current wont, they began with a snap identifying the Satanic anti-Christ about to be berated by Dame Slap for being a witch, and showing her toil and bubble and endless trouble, while speaking during a campaign rally in Philly ...

Oh come on, this one's for Philly lovers, courtesy of The Bulwark ...

Eagle eyed jokes aside, lay on, Dame Slap ...

Donald Trump is often described as a threat to democracy. His behaviour after the 2020 election was nothing short of despicable. But only dills would claim that democracy is automatically safe in the hands of Kamala Harris.
Should she win the US presidential race on Wednesday (AEDT), and if the Democrats hold the US Senate, then democracy may suffer a wild ride of a ­different sort.
If Harris and her fellow Democrats succeed in their plans to “reform” the US Supreme Court, Alexander Hamilton will not just roll in his grave, he will surely rise up and hand deliver copies of one of his most famous founding documents about SCOTUS.
Harris has said that she wants “some kind of reform” and Democrats have lined up with a range of proposals that she has not ruled out. We’re familiar enough with a president trying to “stack” the court with preferred judges.
Some Democrats have something more radical in mind. They want to pack the court. They propose increasing the number of justices from nine (the composition of the Supreme Court since 1869) to 15 over three presidential terms.
The reason? Democrats aren’t shy. They don’t like the decisions of the current conservative-leaning court. They claim that Americans have lost confidence in the nation’s highest court, especially after the Dobbs decision that overturned the progressive invention of new abortion rights in Roe v Wade. Proposing to pack the court is a great way to fire up your political base in the lead-up to a presidential election.

Ah, something more radical in mind, a packed court, a wild ride. 

Is that wild ride the same ride as this woman took in Georgia?

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late. (ProPublica)

Or perhaps it was the wild ride this woman in Texas...

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.
The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.
But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”
For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.
Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection. (ProPublica)

Oh noble Jurists, oh infinitely wise Supreme Court. Please let Dame Slap continue to sing your praises ... but first for some strange reason the reptiles decided to slip in a snap of A protestor outside the US Supreme Court.

Who knows why that rabid ratbag was protesting? What's wrong with the divine right of kings and presidents? (And if you happen to stage a coup, remember to carry your immunity card).

Isn't it grand that contending oligarchs can spend billions trying to buy an election, thanks to the infinite wisdom of those ineffable jurists?

Please, let Dame Slap defend Clarence hanging around with said billionaires and making out like a luxury RV owning bandit, and Sam the man on board with spouse hanging flags to celebrate the coup:

Ever since an earlier Democrat president, Franklin D. Roosevelt tried and failed to pack the Supreme Court in 1937, proposals like these have been mere daydreams on the fringes of the mad left. So mad that a Senate judiciary at the time said this: “It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.”
Never say never. Packing the court with more judges to change its ideological bent has become part of the progressive mainstream. That doesn’t make this proposal any less dangerous. Hamilton will explain why in a moment.
The other “reform” proposals include congress enacting term limits for judges, laws to govern judicial ethics, and a law to require a two-thirds majority of judges to declare an act of congress unconstitutional.
This is a radical attempt by congressional Democrats to grab power from the Supreme Court. It will drown the Court in political games regardless of who’s in charge of the White House and congress. If the Democrats pass these laws to undermine the court’s independence, it’s likely that when the tables turn, a Republican president and congress will return fire.
First principles should guide us every day of the week. And they need to be shouted from the rooftops when politicians try to undermine the independence of courts.
Those first principles are set out in The Federalist Papers. Written after the American Revolution by Alexander Hamilton, John Madison and John Jay, the Federalist Papers convinced the states to ratify a new federal constitution. They argued, successfully, for a series of fundamental checks and balances between three arms of government to ensure America was equipped to respond to the challenges of nationhood.
We know from the musical that Hamilton was a genius; and that he wrote 51 of the 85 essays in the Federalist Papers. Among them is Federalist 78, written in 1788. It’ a gem that Harris and fellow Democrats have tossed aside.
The judiciary, Hamilton wrote, will always be the “least dangerous” branch of government – provided it remains independent from the executive and the legislature.
“The executive not only dispenses the honours, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”

You see? Dame Slap learns things from watching musicals, and to celebrate the reptiles ran a cheap arsed stock photo of Alexander Hamilton:

Perhaps it's better to live in the past than dwell in the present:

Now please allow Dame Slap to explain how the spirit of Hamilton is alive in Clarence the supplicant, and Sam the flag man, and the beer swilling Brett and gor blimey billionaire loving Gorsuch, and weird religious cultist Amy, frequently joined by enabler little Johnny G. Roberts ..

More on Clarence and his mates at ProPublica and that last snap was also from ProPublica, but on with the singing and the dancing Dame Slap style...

Hamilton explained that although “individual oppression may now and then proceed from the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter … so long as the judiciary remains truly distinct from both the legislature and the executive. For I agree that ‘there is no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers’.”
Long before the Democrats’ radical plans to play political games with the US Supreme Court, Hamilton understood that the courts are “in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its co-ordinate branches”. “Liberty,” he wrote, “can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other ­departments.”
Hamilton explained why courts must check the power of parliaments that try to act beyond their legislative power. “There is no position which depends on clearer principles than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void,” he wrote.
“No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the constitution, can be valid. To deny this would be to affirm that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves.”
He said that a constitution must not enable “the representatives of the people to substitute their WILL to that of their constituents. It is far more rational to suppose that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the ­legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.”
Using capitals to fine effect, Hamilton reminded judges of their place too. He said if judges are “disposed to exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT, the consequence would equally be the substitution of their pleasure to that of the legislative body”.
Hamilton understood that, in coming years and centuries, when sufficiently annoyed with judgments of the US Supreme Court, politicians would try to chip away at the court’s independence.

As Dame Slap was in a musical mood, it's only fitting that the reptiles interrupted with a snap of Jason Arrow as Alexander Hamilton. Picture: Daniel Boud

At this point the pond thought a cartoon might be more to the point:

As for climate science, abortion and such like, don't you worry about any of that. Dame Slap understands the infinite wisdom of the learned jurists, expert in all manner of things scientific, and adept on ruling out any pesky regulation that might ruin the arduous work of fucking the planet:

A recent edition of The Harvard Law Review claimed that those calling for reform after recent Supreme Court judgments on climate change and abortion are not sore losers. Instead, the court’s judgments “crossed a moral line” and are “causing grave substantive harm” to the country.
Translation: court “reformers” aren’t angry about Supreme Court decisions; they are VERY angry. And that warrants undermining judicial independence. Those are my capitals, not Hamilton’s.
When Hamilton’s brilliant enunciation of the separation of powers is ignored even by legal academics, and by those in high political office, it’s little wonder that ordinary people struggle to appreciate the importance of judicial independence.
It’s worth reading (or re-reading) Hamilton’s Federalist 78. If more among our current elected representatives understood these first principles well enough to defend them, simply and forcefully, our future would be brighter. As Abraham Lincoln said in his ­famous Gettysburg Address, liberty is unfinished business. The living must fight for the principles that secure the liberty of future generations.
Hamilton II – The Musical, anyone? The next musical could put Federalist 78 to music, add a touch of rap, and hey presto, even the left might learn something about the role of the courts.

The pond suspects that last short paragraph is an actual attempt at Dame Slap humour or wit, but for some reason the pond's attempt at laugher was cruelly aborted ...

And so to a concluding immortal Rowe, reminding the pond that there are things outside Dame Slap's school to dwell on ...