In which prattling Polonius is the only reptile of note, and the pond does a Tootle off the reptile tracks ...

Yesterday the pond decided to ban any number of reptiles rabbiting on about antisemitism, the dog botherer included.  

The dog botherer, for example, attempted to downplay the current genocide:

...too many world leaders, the UN, global activists and advocates, and most media have tried hard to unremember the hostages, along with the 1195 people slaughtered on October 7.
Instead they have put pressure on Israel and cited Hamas’s statistics on Palestinian casualties that list most deaths as women and children, drastically underplaying terrorist deaths.
(Even the UN halved the overall number of women and children killed in one overnight data adjustment in May, and Pennsylvania University statistics professor Abraham Wyner deduces that the numbers coming out of Gaza “are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked”.)

The smug, sanctimonious dog botherer, full of a righteousness rare even for him, ended his piece this way:

...It can never be too late to examine one’s conscience. And it can never be too late to find some moral clarity.
In the wake of the latest attack, we have heard more words of condemnation from Albanese and Labor. But over 14 months we have seen no strong action against anti-Semitism, and only a retreat from moral clarity on the central issues in the Middle East.

Moral clarity? Is there soap to hand to apply to the mouth of this humbug?

The lizard Oz editorialist drew the whole propaganda machine's agenda together, using a criminal act for political and propaganda purposes, in Synagogue burns on worst day of anti-Semitic shame, Unless the government acts, terror will be embedded in our nation:

Friday’s images of gentle-faced Australian Jews, heartbroken and afraid, looking at the burnt-out shell of their beloved Adass Israel Synagogue at Ripponlea in Melbourne’s southeast, reveal a horrifying story. It should never have been let unfold on our shores and was reminiscent of more evil, dangerous times in Europe 90 years ago and in earlier centuries. The crime was about religious hate, pure and simple. Not race – the victims are proud Australians. They have lost their place of worship and their community hub.
Yes, the perpetrators who threw accelerant and lit the blaze must be caught and feel the full force of the law, as several political leaders have said. But the real problems, which run far deeper, must be faced and addressed. In a bipartisan stance, opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson and Labor MP for Macnamara Josh Burns joined Jewish leaders to denounce the attack. While good, it was not enough. Anthony Albanese should invite Peter Dutton to stand beside him and do the same to show support for the nation’s Jewish communities, which have suffered torrid abuses since Hamas launched its brutal unprovoked attack in Israel 14 months ago.
Taking such a stand, Chris Kenny writes, would require the Prime Minister to examine his conscience. In the wake of the Ripponlea attack, we heard more words of condemnation from Mr Albanese. But we’ve had enough of worthless words. Too often since October 7, 2023, government leaders have been lukewarm in their reactions to demonstrations of anti-Semitism, drawing irrelevant moral equivalence with Islamophobia that has scarcely surfaced.
Words are not leadership, unlike effective action. Despite countless ugly instances of anti-Semitism, nothing effective has been done, causing a retreat from moral clarity. Hate preachers still rant with impunity. Friday’s attack came after a recent outbreak of vandalism in Sydney’s east. A car was burned and Matt Moran’s restaurant covered with anti-Semitic insults.
More poignantly, the synagogue was burned just a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a story reported on Friday’s front page, warned that Australia’s “disappointing” change in its longstanding bipartisan position towards Israel at the UN would “invite more terrorism” and “more anti-Semitic riots” on Western campuses and city centres, “including in Australia”. His understanding of the dynamics of anti-Semitism was pinpoint accurate.
Australia’s change of position, for which Mr Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong are responsible, was not promised or foreshadowed before the 2022 election. Neither has it been explained or discussed with Australians. On Wednesday, Australia voted in favour of Israel withdrawing its “unlawful presence” from the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. The resolution also called for a conference in June 2025 in New York to chart an “irreversible pathway” ­towards a Palestinian state. Important details about what that would entail, who would lead such a state and whether conditions were right for such a development are vague, however, with no foundation for a difficult, complex process. As Mr Netanyahu said, Palestinian Authority leaders have not denounced the October 7 atrocities. It was a shame, he said, “that the current Australian government wants to award these savages with a state”.
Rather than focusing on the Melbourne attack, Senator Wong doubled down on Friday, insisting the Jewish state could not punish Palestinian civilians for the actions of Hamas. It is Hamas, however, that puts civilians on the frontline, basing itself in hospitals, schools and residential areas to misuse Palestinians for propaganda purposes. Senator Wong’s refusal to condemn the International Criminal Court for its arrest warrant for Mr Netanyahu also reflected poorly on the government’s attitude to Israel at the time of its greatest need since 1948. Labor, to its shame, has weaponised the issue for political gain. Industry Minister Ed Husic, the party’s most senior Muslim member, revealed the realpolitik when he urged Muslims in Labor seats – such as Blaxland (Education Minister Jason Clare’s electorate), Watson (held by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke) and Werriwa in western Sydney – to stick with the party. His pitch pointed to bad moves: “particular advocacy within the UN and the international community, the way we’ve worked with others, particularly around ceasefire, the most recent efforts we’ve made in terms of Palestinian sovereignty”.
As Jews begin to replace the holy books and Torah scrolls destroyed and police hunt the terrorist arsonists, December 6 must be a turning point. Governments, belatedly, need to recognise why Jews are living in fear, their children cased in iron-clad security as they move to and from school. This is not what Holocaust survivors and their families found in Australia after World War II. Some, sadly, are thinking of leaving. A quagmire of hate opened up after October 7 as the existential war forced on Israel unfolded. Unless the terrorist foothold is expunged, the wider community will suffer.
Social cohesion has broken down, Josh Frydenberg writes in an open letter to Mr Albanese. Anti-Semitism has been normalised: “So toxic has our environment become, one of our most distinguished Australians, former governor-general Sir Peter Cosgrove, has felt the need to say ‘Hitler would be proud’. … Prime Minister, what will it take for the penny to drop?”

And yet there's nary any consideration of the current genocide.

Meanwhile, in an actual newspaper, you could read Nir Hasson's piece for Haaretz, A Massive Database of Evidence, Compiled by a Historian, Documents Israel's War Crimes in Gaza

A woman with a child is shot while waving a white flag ■ Starving girls are crushed to death in line for bread ■ A cuffed 62-year-old man is run over, evidently by a tank ■ An aerial strike targets people trying to help a wounded boy ■ A database of thousands of videos, photos, testimonies, reports and investigations documents the horrors committed by Israel in Gaza

Footnote No. 379 of the carefully researched, wide-ranging document that historian Lee Mordechai has drawn up contains a link to a video clip. The footage shows a large dog gnawing something amid bushes. "Wai, wai, he took the terrorist, the terrorist is gone – gone in both senses," says the soldier who filmed the dog eating a corpse. After a few seconds the soldier raises the camera and adds, "But what a gorgeous view, a gorgeous sunset. A red sun is setting over the Gaza Strip." Definitely a beautiful sunset.
The report Dr. Mordechai has compiled online – "Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War" – constitutes the most methodical and detailed documentation in Hebrew (there is also an English translation) of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. It is a shocking indictment comprised of thousands of entries relating to the war, to the actions of the government, the media, the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli society in general. The English translation of the seventh, and to date latest version of the text, is 124 pages long and contains over 1,400 footnotes referencing thousands of sources, including eyewitness reports, video footage, investigatory materials, articles and photographs.
For example, there are links to texts and other kinds of testimony describing acts attributed to IDF soldiers who were seen "shooting civilians waving white flags, abuse of individuals, captives and corpses, gleefully damaging or destroying houses, various structures and institutions, religious sites and looting personal belongings, as well as randomly firing their weapons, shooting local animals, destroying private property, burning books within libraries, defacing Palestinian and Islamic symbols (including burning Qurans and turning mosques into dining spaces)."
One link takes readers to a video of a soldier in Gaza waving a large sign taken from a barber shop in the town of Yehud, in central Israel, with bodies strewn around him. Other links are to footage of soldiers deployed in Gaza reading the Book of Esther, as is customary on the festival of Purim, but every time the name of the wicked Haman is uttered, instead of simply shaking traditional noisemakers, they fire a mortar shell. A soldier is seen forcing bound and blindfolded prisoners to send regards to his family and to say they want to be its slaves. Soldiers are photographed holding stacks of money they plundered from Gazan homes. An IDF bulldozer is seen destroying a large pile of food packages from a humanitarian-aid agency. A soldier sings the children's ditty "Next year we'll burn the school" – while a school is seen in flames in the background. And there are plenty of clips of soldiers modeling women's underwear that they looted.
Footnote No. 379 appears in a subsection titled "De-humanization in the IDF" that's included in the chapter called "Israeli discourse and de-humanization of Palestinians." It contains hundreds of examples of the cruel behavior displayed by Israeli society and the state's institutions vis-à-vis Gaza's suffering inhabitants – from a prime minister who talks about Amalek, to the figure of 18,000 calls by Israelis on social media to flatten the Strip, to Israeli physicians who voice support of the bombing of Gazan hospitals, to the stand-up comic joking about the death of Palestinians, and includes a chorus of children sweetly singing, "Within a year, we will annihilate everyone and then we will return to plow our fields," set to the melody of the iconic War of Independence-era song, "Shir Hare'ut" (Song of Camaraderie).
The links in "Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War" also lead to graphic footage of bodies strewn about, in every possible condition; of people crushed under rubble; of puddles of blood; and of the cries of people who lost their entire families in an instant. There are items attesting to the killing of disabled people, humiliation and sexual assaults, the torching of homes, forced starvation, random shooting, looting, abuse of corpses and much more.

Speaking of links, if you follow the link to Haaretz, you'll find links within the story to other relevant stories:

• Why there's no excuse for Israelis not knowing what's happening in Gaza (nor, it should be added, any excuse for reptiles at the lizard Oz)
• Rashid Khalidi: 'Israel has created a nightmare scenario for itself. The clock is ticking'
• The chilling testimony of a U.S. neurosurgeon who went to Gaza to save lives

The pond must stay its current course and sample a little bit more about the war crimes:

Even if not each and every one of the testimonies can be corroborated, the picture that arises from them is of an army that in the best case has lost control of many units, whose soldiers proceeded to do whatever struck their fancy, and in the worst case is allowing its personnel to commit the most atrocious war crimes imaginable.
Mordechai cites evidence of the horrific predicaments the war has forced upon Gazans. A physician who amputates his niece's leg on a kitchen table, without anesthesia, using a kitchen knife. People eating horse flesh and grass, or drinking sea water to ameliorate their hunger. Women compelled to give birth in a classroom crowded with people. Doctors helplessly looking on as wounded people die because there's no way to help them. Starving women being pushed in a chaotic line outside a bakery; according to the report, two girls, 13 and 17, and a 50-year-old woman were crushed to death in the incident.
In the DP camps in the Strip in January, according to "Bearing Witness," there was an average of one toilet cubicle for every 220 people and one shower for every 4,500. A significant number of physicians and health organizations reported that infectious diseases and skin disorders were spreading among a great number of Gazans...

And so on and on, and there was also this in Haaretz...Entire Families Were Crushed in Gaza by Israeli Airstrikes. Not Even Memories Remain, In some strikes, as many as four generations in the same family have been killed as residential buildings get bombed. Including many small children. For some families, there is absolutely nothing left to tell their story

That was equally depressing, so the pond only sampled a bit of it:

The al-Nasr, Doghmush, Salem, al-Masri and al-Astal families in Gaza have one thing in common. "In these families, dozens of people have been killed, and in some even over 100," a Gazan journalist said. "They've been erased from the Palestinian Population Registry and there's no trace and no documentation of them – not even someone who will tell their story."
The journalist, who reports on the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, requested anonymity in order to describe how the war is hitting civilians in Gaza, and to explain the significance of the wiping out of entire families. As proof he mentioned what happened to the al-Nasr family this past October 28 in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza.
"In early September tens of thousands of people remained in the northern Strip," he said. "In such situations, family members stay in a single place that serves as a refuge."
Israel's army investigates if it breached international law by killing hundreds of Gazans
Accordingly, the members of the al-Nasr family – a grandfather, grandmother, mothers, fathers, grandchildren, children, uncles, aunts and cousins – were staying in the same apartment building.
"When a bomb hits a building, the immediate result is usually the killing of whoever is inside," the journalist said. "That's what happened to the al-Nasr family: An entire building above them was bombed, and they were killed."
The story of the al-Nasrs became known when it was covered in the foreign media. According to the civil defense authorities in Gaza, 93 people were killed in the bombing, while over 40 are considered missing because their bodies have not yet been found in the rubble.
"This isn't the first time that such a thing has happened," the journalist said.
In a report, Airwars, a British nonprofit group that keeps track of wartime airstrikes, specified the precise location of the strike and wrote that 50 children were believed to have been killed.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, which is under Hamas control, 7,160 families have been bombed between the start of the war and November 1 this year. Of them, 1,410 have been wiped out entirely; 5,444 people dead. In 3,463 families, 7,934 people have been killed with only one member per family surviving. In 2,287 families, 9,577 people have been killed with two or more family members surviving.

And so on and is it any wonder that the pond feels a singular contempt for the dog botherer and the rest of the ranting, raving, ravening reptiles?

In relation to the matter of the criminal Benji, there was this Haaretz editorial: There Is Only One Defendant in the Trashing of Israel's Democracy: Netanyahu

The impending start of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's testimony in his criminal trial, which will happen on Tuesday at 9 A.M. in Tel Aviv District Court, has been accompanied by massive verbal bombardments from Netanyahu and his cronies against the law enforcement system, the attorney general, the media and the heads of the security services.
The cease-fire in Lebanon freed up a lot of time for the governing coalition and the man who heads it, and they have used it to severely worsen the prime minister's relationship with the prosecution, the attorney general and the heads of the Shin Bet security service and the Israel Defense Forces. This is not an accident. It's an inseparable part of the regime coup he has been trying to advance ever since this government was formed.

Again, if you follow the link, you'll find links to other relevant stories:

• Netanyahu's 'blame the IDF for October 7' strategy is working
• Why is Netanyahu so afraid of an October 7 inquiry?
• Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir complain about the 'deep state.' It turns out they're running it

The pond can't do a Tootle and instead must stay on the Haaretz editorial tracks:

Netanyahu is currently fighting two battles that he deems critical. The first is his trial and the start of his testimony, which he tried repeatedly to postpone (a strange approach given his claim that "the cases have collapsed"). The second is the battle over the narrative of the failure of October 7, 2023. This includes shifting the blame to the army and the Shin Bet, shirking all responsibility and opposing the establishment of a state commission of inquiry to investigate the worst failure in the country's history.
In the second battle, he and his colleagues are taking no prisoners. Nor are they bringing the hostages home. The crude attacks by Netanyahu and his ministers on IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari – who said the so-called "Feldstein Law" is "a law that's dangerous to the IDF. It will enable every soldier to steal documents. It endangers national security" – reflects the state of the government.
Hagari was talking about a security risk. Yet they rushed to put him in his place, saying he is forbidden to intervene in political matters. On that, they are right – this is a wholly political law whose entire purpose is to serve Netanyahu's false narrative that the security services "never told me."
The fact that Defense Minister Israel Katz is siding with Netanyahu on this issue is shameful. He apparently hasn't yet grasped that his job is to tend to the country's security, not the political interests of the man who appointed him.
Criminal defendant Netanyahu has been attacking the law enforcement system nonstop. He has also sent his ministers to attack Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and the heads of the Shin Bet and IDF, who began the investigation against Eli Feldstein over leaking classified documents, and to weaken independent media outlets that aren't his fans.
This evil culture of attacking the law enforcement system, which Netanyahu has embraced ever since the criminal investigations against him began, has also infected the rest of the governing coalition. Now National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is also claiming "they're trying to topple a right-wing government" in response to investigations of his cronies, senior police officer Avishai Mualem and Prison Service Commissioner Kobi Yaakobi.
As the date of Netanyahu's testimony approaches, the threats to public servants, the heads of the defense establishment and the media will intensify. But they must not be afraid. There's only one defendant here, and his name is Netanyahu.

You'll never see any of that in the lizard Oz, and the pond is so over it, just as it's so over Vlad the Sociopath and his North Korean co-conspirators ...

...so it was a vast relief to turn to prattling Polonius for the day's obligatory lizard Oz column, there being the need for at least one reptile for herpetology students to contemplate.

Luckily Polonius was in campaign mode, taking on the dreaded teals, which is a vast relief after those tales of genocide, Teals win friends on the left but offer little by way of influence, This week marked the beginning of the Liberal Party’s fight to win back the blue ribbon seats it lost at the 2022 election.

Polonius was in fine fettle and form, and the pond refused to lay bets on whether the ABC might cop a mention, as the reptiles opened proceedings with a snap, Federal Opposition leader Peter Dutton (right) with the Liberal candidate for Warringah, Jaimee Rogers, and Liberal candidate for Mackellar, James Brown, after a meet-the-voters roundtable held at the Stella Blu Italian restaurant in Dee Why on Wednesday.

It was the week of the Liberal Party fightback against the teals, who like to present themselves as community independents.
Campaigning on Sydney’s Northern Beaches on Wednesday, Peter Dutton delivered a blunt message: namely, “a vote for a teal candidate is a vote for Anthony Albanese”. The Opposition Leader added: “If we (the Coalition) win these seats back, we win government.”
Dutton maintained that the teals “are not interested in supporting the Liberal Party, they’re not disaffected Liberals, they are Greens and they’re Labor supporters”.
A couple of days earlier, on December 2, Liberal Party frontbencher Paul Fletcher addressed the Sydney Institute on his chosen topic: Why majority government is in the national interest and the teals are not.
Fletcher described the teals as a “giant green-left con job perpetrated on the Australian electorate by Melbourne billionaire’s son Simon Holmes a Court and a group of other wealthy people”.
But Fletcher also had a positive message. He maintained that “majority government is a good thing for Australia and the teals constitute the most serious threat to majority government in 80 years”. His position is that “unless a prime minister has a clear majority in the House of Representatives, it is virtually impossible to achieve substantive reform”.

Forgive the pond but at this point the pond must interrupt. There might have been a few who missed the pond noting the keen Keane's outburst in Crikey about the mighty Fletch, Paul Fletcher’s grand conspiracy theory is the most interesting thing he’s ever said, Paul Fletcher — a nullity of a politician who has occupied Bradfield for 15 years — is panicking over being replaced by a community independent. (paywall):

...Fletcher, after 15 years in politics, remains shapeless, formless, a blank space without feature or characteristic. Marise Payne was the elegant political equivalent of those elementary particles that can travel right through the entire Earth without leaving any trace or interaction. But Fletcher is dark energy, a phenomenon that can’t be observed and can only be inferred from precise calculations of the rates of movements of other objects, as he slowly increases the amount of nothingness in the universe. Left alone long enough in any room, Fletcher will expand the dead space within it until any other living creatures will find themselves so separated by a vacuum that communication becomes impossible.
Fletcher’s portfolio (I’m paid to follow politics and I still had to look it up) is “Government Services and the Digital Economy”, an indication that Peter Dutton ran out of things to give out while compiling his shadow ministry and cobbled together the portfolio equivalent of painting rocks white and turning them over.
But Fletcher rarely troubles the scorers on issues relating to his shadow ministerial responsibilities. His media appearances — 90% of which are either talking to the Coalition’s friends at Sky or to his twin brother Greg Jennett, whose obvious sense of family charity extends to having him regularly on the ABC political insider cognoscenti’s Afternoon Briefing — are usually confined to bagging Labor, something that must set Albanese government strategists shuddering with fear every time the media alert goes out.
But tonight Fletcher will grace the halls of the Sydney Institute to talk not about Labor but the teals. Fletcher will easily be Gerard Henderson’s most boring guest since I spoke there a decade-plus ago, but his perspective on community independents may be amusing given he’s the next Liberal in line to be knocked off by one — viz. Nicolette Boele, who, in 2022, despite barely featuring in the media coverage of teal seats, ripped 15% out of Fletcher’s primary vote in his northern Sydney seat of Bradfield, clinching second spot and a two-party-preferred outcome of nearly 46%.
Bradfield’s a huge challenge for a teal: it includes wealthy enclaves like St Ives, Turramurra and Wahroonga where voters bleed Liberal blue. But after the Australian Electoral Commission redistribution earlier this year, big chunks of the now-abolished North Sydney like Chatswood, Willoughby and Artarmon are now in Bradfield, and they went hard for Kylea Tink in 2022. Fletcher’s margin is now just 2.5% as he faces Boele once again. And he’s panicking.
How do we know about Fletcher’s Sydney Institute speech? Because he carefully dropped it to the Fairfax papers, which ran it without any fact-checking or scrutiny — presumably a service they will, in the interests of balance, offer Boele.

That Nine story Coalition frontbencher says voters conned into backing independents (paywall)was a doozy, as supine as anything the lizard Oz might run, or a parrot might manage as a transcription of supplied copy.

Inter alia:

...In a speech to be delivered to the Sydney Institute on Monday night, Fletcher will accuse the teals of being part of a tradition of front groups created by “left-wing political operatives” whose sole aim was to lure voters away from the Liberal Party by “tricking voters about their bona fides”.

Fletcher will say that at the 2022 election, teal independents targeted Liberal-held electorates but made no such effort to go after Labor seats.

This extended to installing candidates with Liberal ties including Allegra Spender, daughter of former Liberal MP John Spender, who won the seat of Wentworth, and Kate Chaney, whose family has ties to the Liberal Party going back to the Menzies government and who won the West Australian seat of Curtin.

“Every aspect of the teal campaign was carefully designed to dupe traditional Liberal voters,” Fletcher will say.

“Is it a coincidence that in a third of the new seats they won in 2022, the teal candidate was the daughter or niece of a long-time Liberal MP, with the same last name? Of course it is not a coincidence: it was part of a deliberate plan.

“The strategy was clear: to appeal to traditional Liberal voters who would never vote Labor but who were disenfranchised with the Coalition after some tough years of COVID and all its consequences.”

Fletcher will say that voters know what they are getting with a majority government, be it Liberal or Labor, but the arrival of independents into the parliament had led to chaotic processes and abrupt changes in policy direction.

“Majority government is a good thing for Australia – and the teals constitute the most serious threat to majority government in 80 years. The stability of the two-party system is a good thing,” he will say.

“It has delivered many benefits to Australia. Stable majority government is a foundational requirement for achieving any serious reform and advancing our nation’s prosperity.”

So the mighty Fletch and Polonius are in it together, as thick as Sydney Institute thieves. 

It helps to know the SI sub-text when reading Polonius's pious plea for that shapeless, formless nonentity:

The point being that the last substantial economic reform in Australia occurred when Labor’s “Bob Hawke and Paul Keating lowered tariffs and floated the dollar”. And, later, when the Coalition’s “John Howard and Peter Costello reformed our tax system and introduced the GST”. Both Hawke and Howard headed majority governments. More reform is needed to overcome current economic problems.
The task for Dutton is to win all or at least some of the seats the Liberals lost to the teals at the May 2022 election. Mackellar (Sophie Scamps) and Wentworth (Allegra Spender) in Sydney, Goldstein (Zoe Daniel) and Kooyong (Monique Ryan) in Melbourne and Curtin (Kate Chaney) in Perth.
Kylea Tink won North Sydney for the teals in 2022 but this seat has been abolished in a redistribution. Zali Steggall defeated Tony Abbott in Warringah three years earlier. The teals have a high profile, partly because they are liked by many journalists who share their left-of-centre or “progressive” views.
However, most teals do not have what might be described as safe seats.
ABC election analyst Antony Green has assessed their margins to take account of the recent distribution. According to this estimate, Steggall has a margin of a relatively high 9.4 per cent and Spender 6.8 per cent. The rest have narrower margins. To wit, Scamps and Daniel 3.3 per cent each, Ryan 2.2 per cent and Chaney 1.3 per cent.
In other words, only Steggall and Spender have relatively safe margins.
It should be remembered that the teals won their seats in 2022 on Labor Party and Greens preferences. Their primary votes were as follows: Steggall (44.8 per cent), Ryan (40.3 per cent), Scamps (38.1 per cent), Spender (35.8 per cent), Daniel (34.5 per cent), and Chaney (29.5 per cent). Tink won in North Sydney with a primary vote of a mere 25.2 per cent.
Following his speech, Fletcher received a political battering on the letters pages of Nine newspapers. On the day after The Sydney Morning Herald reported part of his talk, 13 out of 13 letters to the editor were critical of Fletcher. In The Age in Melbourne, it was four out of four.

Many correspondents maintained that in 2022 Fletcher was threatened by a teal in his seat of Bradfield. So he was. But Fletcher won 45.1 per cent of the primary vote to his community independent rival who scored a primary vote of 20.9 per cent.
This underlines the point that the teal and other community independents in 2022 won because of the preferences of Labor-voting social democrats and/or green-left ideologues.
This gives vent to Dutton’s argument that a vote for the teals is a vote for the return of the Albanese Labor government.
It remains to be seen now whether Albanese or Dutton will lead a majority or minority government after the election.

That's the sort of stunning political prediction that marks Polonius's contributions, and it only remains to be seen if his casting of the runes, the sifting of the entrails, the consultations with the oracles will result in his prophecy coming to pass, and the next election will indeed result in a federal government of some kind.

Of course a passing comet or a coup might tilt the odds, but the pond has enduring faith in Polonial powers for prophetic insight.

At this point the reptiles provided some relief with an AV interruption:

New polling reveals Peter Dutton is favoured to win the next federal election, with the Coalition on track to form a majority government. The seat-by-seat analysis conducted by Accent Research and the Redbridge Group revealed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has zero chance of securing a majority government. The shock survey predicts nine seats will flip from Labor to Liberal in the next federal election.

New polling eh? The mutton Dutton's the winner, which ups the ante for the sitting on the fence Polonius.

Polonius was determined not to be swayed, instead getting agitated by the perfidious teals and the wretched ABC, as he always does:

Unless there is a minority government, the teals and other independents will have no real influence on the new government, unlike the Greens and independents in the Senate.
Labor has had a majority in the House of Representatives since the 2022 election and the teals have had scant political influence despite their extensive media coverage.
Last Thursday, ABC News online carried a story headed “Teal MPs push for changes to small business definition as election looms”. And so they did. But Labor has no intention of allowing such legislation to pass since it is not dependent on this group of eight – seven teals plus Helen Haines, the MP for Indi in central Victoria. A couple of weeks earlier, Daniel got a run on the ABC proclaiming the value of her private members bill. Maybe it is valuable. But it is most unlikely to be enacted.
Come election time, the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster effectively runs a clock on various candidates to ensure they receive equal time according to their level of support while the campaign is under way. It remains to be seen how the ABC will treat the teals.
In response to a question at his recent speech in Sydney, Fletcher said: “The ABC has a very long track record, regrettably, of giving an amount of attention to historically the Greens and now they’ve done the same thing with the teals which is well out of proportion to the number of Australians who support them.”
He added that “ABC journalists seem very excited about the teals – Zoe Daniel herself is a former ABC journalist”.
Last Tuesday, Spender posted a message on X to the effect that, unlike Fletcher, when she spoke at The Sydney Institute recently: “I set out my program for economic and tax reform.” Quite so. But it is unlikely to be embraced by either Labor or the Coalition.
Fletcher, on the other hand, made a case for the continuation of majority government. After all, after the next election either Albanese or Dutton will be prime minister.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

There's another stunning, shamelessly bold, utterly fearless prediction, and as a result, the pond feels hugely informed. Either Albo or the mutton Dutton will be the winner. Quite so.

You go Fletch, Polonius has your nonentity back.

And with that obligatory reptile content done dusted, insights delivered, polished and admired, the pond can pause to note another singular sight - the arrival of a billionaire oligarchy.

Axios provided a tidy illustration here:

But there were other stories about the phenomenon. 

The Graudian offered Trump assembling US cabinet of billionaires worth combined $340bn, President-elect tapping mega-rich backers for positions that will give them power to cut spending on public services.

That's not to demote others, valued and esteemed contributors as they might be:

WaPo offered Trump has assembled an uber-wealthy Cabinet, raising risks of ethics conflicts, President-elect Trump is stacking his cabinet with billionaires and centi-millionaires, whose financial entanglements pose conflict of interest challenges.

Cat Zakrzewski's piece started this way ...

A month after securing the White House with populist promises to working class voters, President-elect Donald Trump has chosen at least half a dozen billionaires and several other ultra-wealthy business leaders to serve in top administration roles.
Trump’s Cabinet is on track to be one of the richest in modern history, on par only with the team of millionaires and billionaires he assembled during his first term. He’s picked billionaires to serve as commerce secretary and education secretary, and he has tapped other super-rich leaders for treasury and interior. He’s also offered noncabinet positions, including NASA director and deputy defense secretary, to billionaires.
Throughout the transition, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been by Trump’s side, serving as “first buddy” and establishing the nongovernmental “Department of Government Efficiency.” On Thursday night, Trump tapped tech investor David Sacks — who made his fortune in part through the $1.2 billion sale of the software company Yammer to Microsoft — to serve as his artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar.
Trump’s team of rivals stands in stark contrast to Biden’s Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $118 million in the first year of his presidency, according to Forbes. Trump’s picks have not yet released their financial disclosures, but his 2025 Cabinet is likely to be even richer than the first Trump Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $6.2 billion.
Linda McMahon, whom Trump says he will nominate for education secretary, shares a net worth of $3 billion with her husband Vincent McMahon, according to Forbes. Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick for commerce secretary, has a net worth of at least $2.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Trump’s treasury choice, Scott Bessent, managed billion-dollar hedge funds, but his exact net worth has not yet been reported. Doug Burgum, Trump’s pick for interior, is worth at least $100 million, Forbes said.
The median net worth of an American family is $192,900, according to a 2023 Federal Reserve report.
Wealthy Americans who have had successful careers in business have long served in government, but watchdog groups say the high concentration of ultra-wealthy picks for roles in Trump’s Cabinet presents distinct conflict of interest risks and could work against promises Trump — a billionaire himself — made on the campaign trail. As he crisscrossed the country to host rallies, Trump repeatedly promised to fight for the rights of working and middle class Americans by bringing back manufacturing jobs and limiting inflation.
Trump’s selections may be more inclined to look out for the interests of their own businesses and their fellow billionaires than for working-class voters, said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
“It is hard to see how a Cabinet made up largely of the very, very wealthiest of Americans is going to have an understanding of what the needs of regular Americans are,” he said.
Trump, who has an estimated net worth of $5.5 billion, has long aligned himself with other wealthy business leaders, delighting in attention and praise from those he regards as successful executives.
Trump-Vance Transition spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in a statement that Trump has made “brilliant decisions” on picks for his second administration and cabinet...

Mix oligarchs with Congress and it's going to be a wild ride:

The pond couldn't help but marvel at the way that the mad punters in the US thought they were going to upset the system by electing a cabal of billionaire oligarchs keen to strip them of their entitlements.

Cat Zakrzewski's piece ended this way

...Watchdog groups are concerned about the new conflicts of interests that Trump’s nominees could present. Trump’s first-term commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, violated an ethics agreement by improperly reporting his stock holdings and faced scrutiny for his financial dealings while in office.
Many business leaders who enter government roles put their assets in blind trusts to preempt concerns that they could abuse their political power to benefit their personal portfolios. But watchdog groups are skeptical that even those vehicles provide an adequate shield against ethics risks.
“People who spend their entire lives getting rich do not automatically forget their economic stakes when they enter government,” said Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project.
Trump himself has not promised to divest from any of his businesses, which have now soared and include a cryptocurrency business and a stake in a social media company. And with Trump’s own party controlling both chambers of Congress and a Cabinet packed with his allies and loyalists, he can expect little oversight over his finances, Bookbinder said.
“People in government take a cue from the top,” he said. “This time around, Donald Trump, is not — at least as of now — even making a show of addressing his own conflicts of interest.”

Well yes, he's going to make out like a bandit, as he's always done ...Smell like Trump: 'victory cologne' for sale as president-elect hawks his wares.

Ozonic!

Sorry, sold out, a snip at US$119 (free shipping for orders over US$120) as those with enough food stamps to hand rushed to buy up stock ...

Inevitably that reminded the pond of the trend to FAFO cartoons, as in Tom the Dancing Bug (click on to enlarge):

Tom had a very bleak vision of 2025 for cartoonists and bloggers:

Still there'd always be the Christian white nationalist movement to provide some fun: