In which the bromancer sounds the King Donald alarums ... as fear sweeps through the lizard Oz at what Faux Noise has wrought ...

 

Might as well begin with a joke because it's going to be a short serve today.

The only matter of major interest is the way that the reptiles have decided to cloak the digital edition in a decidedly woke colour, looking full Priscilla ...

Come on. reptiles, enough purple already, have you forgotten your anti-woke mission?

Over on the extreme far right, top of the world ma, only the bromancer caught the eye ... in a state of rampant hysteria, as is the bros wont ...

The pond never bothers with simpleton Simon and refuses to get involved in the reptile Macquarie law crusade - the pond has seen that form of reptile blitz before.

Marcus's piece was interesting only for what it portended ..."the US nay (sic) may longer be our reliable friend."

...any intent of acquiring further US weapons has to consider whether we want to double-down on an erratic and increasingly unpredictable partner. Some NATO countries are reconsidering their F-35 acquistion plans. Hedging our risks is crucial, but acquiring capability from Europeans will also be challenging as they seek to rapidly rebuild their militaries.

Oh dear, doomed, double doomed. 

What has the Emeritus Chairman and Faux Noise done, what have they wrought?

That thought juddered through the reptiles this day ...

Mein Gott had been a disappointment. He'd wasted an entire column complaining about big pharma and prostate cancer treatment, but in an incidental moan, he also showed he had the fear ...

Meanwhile, over in the US, American drugmakers are attacking the Australian medical benefits scheme.

While the issues are different, the fact that we rolled over in such an important area will give the Americans great confidence that under pressure the Australian government in health matters “goes to water”.

Fear of what the Emeritus Chairman and their Faux Noise kissing cousins have wrought seems endemic in the reptiles at the moment and the bromancer has caught the disease ...

It's allegedly only a three minute read, but it felt like a much longer case of the fearful wobbles ...

‘This is defence policy for Fantasy Island, not Australia’, Labor’s defence shuffling of $1bn, a direct shot at the Trump administration, is not even new money but funding moved forward in an attempt at deceiving the Australian public.

Naturally it began with a snap of the chief villain - there always has to be a villain in Oz lizard land ...  Defence Minister Richard Marles announcement on the accelerated delivery of Australia’s first High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) at the Avalon Air Show.

There was the usual bizarre warning too ... This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

We're there, and the bro was in a state of shock and indignation ...

The Albanese government has not only snubbed the Trump administration with its decision to make no significant change on the defence budget, it has also snubbed Australia’s strategic reality.

At a time of record increases in government spending, the best Defence Minister Richard Marles can do is shuffle forward about a billion dollars on a range of ­projects.

As usual, the government’s information is vague and woolly. When asked what timeline would be accelerated by this alleged bringing forward of money, Marles had to admit no timeline would accelerated.

The money brought forward would simply help government meet its existing time lines.

Given that these are already so woolly and amorphous, we have no idea what this allegedly accelerated money will buy.

Importantly, even this amazingly paltry $1bn is not new money – just money moved to a slightly earlier date in forward estimates.

Then came the projection ...Monday’s announcement confirms the Albanese government have no idea in how to respond to US President Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

Perhaps what the bro really meant to say, but couldn't bring himself to say, couldn't bear to say it was Monday’s announcement confirms the bromancer and the rest of the reptile pack have no idea in how to respond to US President Donald Trump.

The projecting bromancer went into listiclemode ...

The decision can only be construed as the Albanese government having a laugh at the Australian people.

It demonstrates three things beyond dispute.

One, the government doesn’t believe Australia’s strategic circumstances are at all threatening. The alternative, that it believes in the threat but couldn’t be bothered doing anything about it, is surely implausible.

Two, Anthony Albanese and his ministers have absolutely no idea of how to respond to the challenge of Donald Trump in the White House. They either don’t take the US President seriously or hope he just won’t notice them before the next US presidential election in a little over 3½ years.

Three, Marles as Defence Minister has absolutely no influence in cabinet at all.

Looming up were the troublesome, pesky, difficult greenies... Greens leader Adam Bandt says Australia needs to start “detaching” from US President Donald Trump. Mr Bandt and his party are pushing to end the AUKUS agreement. “Now is the time for us to get out of AUKUS – it wasn’t a good deal to begin with,” Mr Bandt told Sky News Australia. “Having Australia’s defence policy based on the hope that Donald Trump will ride to their rescue is something that has clearly, when you look at Ukraine, been shown to be something that should not be the cornerstone of Australia’s defence policy.”

Well yes, if you look at Ukraine or the pathetic Witkoff or the gloating Ruskis or quisling Tucker doing his best Lord Haw-Haw impersonation, you might get more than a whiff of the wobbles ...

 

The pond always relies on Rosenberg for news from Vlad the Sociopath's land ...

The pond developed its own case of the wobbles reading Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker.

Kolbert started her piece for The New Yorker with a roll call of political hacks and previous disasters who were put in charge of the E.P.A.

That was then, this is now ... The E.P.A. vs. the Environment, With the help of the agency, the Trump Administration is doing everything it can to make emissions grow again. (archive link)

...Among this not so august company, the E.P.A.’s current administrator, Lee Zeldin, still stands out. In the two months since he was confirmed, Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from Long Island, has announced his intention to roll back dozens of environmental rules and to shrink his agency’s spending by two-thirds. Reportedly, he wants to eliminate the E.P.A.’s scientific-research arm, which employs more than a thousand people. In a two-minute video released earlier this month, Zeldin, wearing a green striped tie, seemed to go so far as to renounce the agency’s foundational purpose. The E.P.A., he said, would work to “lower the cost of living,” by making it cheaper to buy a car, heat a home, and run a business. Nowhere, the Times noted, “did he refer to protecting the environment or public health.” Zeldin’s assault on the E.P.A. is so broad that it could affect everything from arsenic pollution to zebra-mussel control. But the administrator has trained his heaviest ammunition on efforts to limit climate change.

The same day that Zeldin released his video, he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he boasted of “driving a dagger through the heart” of climate regulation. To carry out this bloody deed, the E.P.A. is planning to rescind a set of Biden-era rules aimed at curbing CO2 emissions from power plants, unravel another set of rules aimed at curbing emissions from cars and trucks, and revise the way that the government assesses the damages of climate change. (This last move involves the so-called social cost of carbon.) Most gruesomely of all, the E.P.A. wants to revisit what’s known as the “endangerment finding.”

The finding, issued by the E.P.A. back in 2009, labelled CO2 and other greenhouse gases a threat to the public’s health and welfare, and this, in turn, became the basis of the agency’s efforts to regulate them. The finding relied on scores of peer-reviewed studies and on voluminous reports by groups such as the National Research Council. Since then, the United States has experienced one climate-related calamity after another—including, most recently, the Los Angeles fires—and the evidence that increasing CO2 levels are dangerous has only become more overwhelming. “There is no possible world in which greenhouse gases are not a threat to public health,” is how Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University, put it to the Associated Press.

With the help of the E.P.A., the Trump Administration is doing everything it can to make emissions grow again. It is bestowing favors on the fossil-fuel industry, by, for example, opening up more land in Alaska for oil drilling. It is also kneecapping the industry’s competitors: the President, in an executive order issued on his first day in office, announced that he would halt leases for offshore wind development. The other day, on social media, he said that he wanted the country to burn more coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel.

Undoing regulations of any sort—lawfully, at any rate—is an arduous and time-consuming process. The first Trump Administration went about the effort so sloppily that, more often than not, it lost in court. The same could be the case with “driving a dagger through the heart” of climate regulation; ultimately, the victim may survive. But the E.P.A. could squander years on the endeavor. The task of limiting climate change, meanwhile, could not be more urgent. Last week, the World Meteorological Organization released its annual “state of the global climate” report for 2024. It noted that signs of human-induced warming have “reached new heights,” with consequences that will be “irreversible over hundreds if not thousands of years.”

One person who seems to have foreseen this disaster is Ruckelshaus, who died in 2019. The E.P.A.’s first administrator was probably better known for his subsequent role as Deputy Attorney General. Ruckelshaus resigned from that post on October 20, 1973, when Nixon tried to get him to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. (The events that led to his resignation became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.)

In the summer of 2016, Ruckelshaus grew so alarmed at what he was hearing from then candidate Trump that, together with another former Republican E.P.A. leader, William K. Reilly, he endorsed Hillary Clinton. “That Trump would call climate change a hoax—the singular health and environmental threat to the world today—flies in the face of overwhelming international science,” the two men wrote in a statement. Speaking to Greenwire shortly before the election, Ruckelshaus predicted that, if Trump won, he would appoint someone to lead the E.P.A. “who didn’t believe in it and would try to dismantle the agency.” He added, “I think Trump is scary.”

Oh he's scary, and the pond is scared, and all we've got that passes for alternative forward thinking?

Still, you can always rely on the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way for a laugh, he's the cartoonist's friend ...

And so dire has it become that WaPo, where democracy dies in billionaire memos, decided it needed to put out a travel advisory, Entering the U.S.? Here are your rights at airports and border crossings. Amid reports of travelers being questioned, detained or refused entry, here’s what officials can legally do and how to protect yourself. (archive link)

Inter alia:

What precautions should I take before traveling?

Zafar recommends that travelers, especially noncitizens, keep the phone number of an immigration attorney or another emergency contact on hand if they are detained at the border and need legal advice.

Travelers should also consider the data on their personal electronic devices, which can be subject to search, said Esha Bhandari, the deputy director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

What can I be questioned about?

U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents only have to answer questions establishing their identity and citizenship or permanent residency, according to the ACLU. Refusing to answer other routine questions, though, may delay your entry into the United States.

Noncitizens and visa holders can be denied entry if they refuse to answer officers’ questions.

Can an agent search my electronic devices?

Yes. All travelers are subject to search by Customs and Border Protection officers, according to the agency’s website. The CBP says searches of electronic devices are rare — less than 0.01 percent of arriving international travelers had their electronic devices searched in 2024.

You are not obligated to unlock your devices if an agent asks to search them, but refusing may affect your travel. Foreign nationals may be denied entry to the U.S. if they do not cooperate with a search. U.S. citizens will not be denied entry, but they could be detained and their devices might be seized by authorities.

CBP policy states officers can hold onto electronic devices for up to five days (though it may be longer if officials consider there to be “extenuating circumstances”). If your devices are seized, you should ask an officer for a custody receipt, which they are required to issue and will contain guidance for retrieving your devices.

What do electronic searches entail?

There are two types of searches that officers conduct on electronic devices: basic and advanced. Basic searches generally involve an officer manually reviewing a device without external equipment and can be performed on anyone.

In an advanced search, an officer connects external equipment to a device to review, copy or analyze its contents. Officers require reasonable suspicion of a violation of law and manager approval to conduct an advanced search, according to the CBP.

CBP policies for electronic searches state that officers should handle sensitive information, including medical records or work-related information from journalists, “in accordance with any applicable federal law,” though this can be murky in practice, according to the ACLU.

You should tell an officer conducting a search if your device contains legally protected information, Bhandari said.

Sheesh, if they caught whiff of the pond, it'd be off to an El Salvador jail licketty-split...

Double sheesh, you have to ditch the phone, and have a lawyer on tap?

Back with the bromancer, and he seemed to have only one solution ...

The Albanese government’s performance on defence is so much less than it briefed journalists to expect in its early days in office that the conclusion is inescapable that Marles has been completely unable to get his government to take defence seriously.

The government constantly tries to sell a three card trick to the public on defence spending.

It constantly talks about $50bn of extra defence spending in the decade, but this is almost all years away, with the only real increase beginning either in the last year of the government’s putative second term or first year of its third term.

The government produces colourful graphs showing how much its spending trajectory increases over that which it inherited from the Coalition government but the only real divergence in that graph occurs years into the future.

Governments must be judged on what they do, not what they say, and the Albanese government has done almost nothing except cut capabilities to make way for huge expenditure on AUKUS subs.

It was forced to admit that it could not handle even a life of type extension on our existing Collins-class submarines, yet expects us to believe that in a few years it will be crewing and running nuclear subs, and a few years after that manufacturing nuclear subs.

This is defence policy for Fantasy Island, not for Australia.

The bromancer's one solution? 

Turn to Marcus ...Marcus Hellyer is a senior analyst focusing on Defence economics and military capability.

But Marcus didn't have a clue, he'd been in a complete dither...

...any intent of acquiring further US weapons has to consider whether we want to double-down on an erratic and increasingly unpredictable partner. Some NATO countries are reconsidering their F-35 acquistion plans. Hedging our risks is crucial, but acquiring capability from Europeans will also be challenging as they seek to rapidly rebuild their militaries.

Still the bro felt the need to grasp at the Marcus straw...

The best analyst of Australian defence spending is Marcus Hellyer, a former Defence Department official now with Strategic Analysis Australia.

When the budget updates were published a few weeks ago, Hellyer undertook sustained analysis of where we are now compared with the funding line projected in the 2016 defence white paper.

His conclusion is that between 2016 and now, there has been an increase of about $400m, or 0.7 per cent. He further calculates that because of a sustained burst of inflation during that period, the real purchasing power of the defence budget is substantially reduced from that which was envisaged in 2016, while the cost of all defence capability has risen even more quickly than inflation.

The government can claim it’s spending record amounts on defence simply because the population, the nominal GDP and the budget are increasing every year.

Yet when Labor came into office, the defence budget accounted for about 2 per cent of GDP. In 2023-24 it accounted for 1.99 per cent of GDP. And in 2024-25, according to recent budget updates, it will account for 2.01 per cent of GDP.

This is an undeniable sign of a government, and sadly probably a nation, that simply doesn’t take the idea of providing any inde­pendent, sovereign, deterrent capability remotely seriously.

Suddenly we're an independent, sovereign nation requiring our own deterrent capability apart from the benevolence of King Donald I?

Suddenly Mein Gott rabbiting on about ANZUS is null and void?

Suddenly the bromancer has a case of the AUKUS wobbles? 

Just to rub it in, the reptiles added a sub snap to add to the fear ... Australians are more dependent on the Americans for security than we have ever been.

Roll that fearful line around on the tongue again.

Australians are more dependent on the Americans for security than we have ever been??

And suddenly the bromancer is in a complete tizz, an utter funk?

There's an answer to that thorny problem:

Just kidding, just marvelling at the way King Chuck is allegedly ready to roll over to make room on the throne for King Donald I ...

All the bromancer had to offer in the end was a sensa huma ...

We are now more dependent on the Americans for security than we have ever been, at a time when the new Trump administration is telling us that the old American benevolence, which had allowed us to be free riders, no longer ­applies.

Rather than do anything for itself, the Albanese government is investing some billions of dollars into the US, and the British, nuclear submarine industries.

It presumably hopes that this quasi danegeld payment will insulate it from Trump’s cold stare, and from reality generally.

Yet was it only back on 10th March 2023 that the bromancer was in a state of singular ecstasy in On the surface, AUKUS deal is an excellent outcome, This brilliant nuclear submarine deal is a giant step forward for Australia.

The rapture was strong back then, lifting the bro up to the heavens ...

This brilliant nuclear submarine deal – in which we buy three or more Virginia-class nuclear submarines from the US, while simultaneously working with both the Brits and the Americans on a common sub design for a little further down the track – is a giant step forward for Australia.

It could revolutionise our military and industrial capability, at an expensive but affordable cost.

Frankly, it’s the first time a working Australian nuclear submarine under AUKUS ­arrange­ments has looked plausible.

The government is likely to send 1000 Australian personnel to the US to learn how to make nuclear subs. That’s a fantastic idea.

Defence Minister Richard Marles seems to have pulled off an astonishing policy trifecta: he’s convinced the Americans to provide full-scale Virginias for us; he’s broken the paralysing grip of Adelaide politics on our submarine programs; and he’s actually come up with a plan that has a fair chance of working. 

And so on and on, and yet what Faux Noise and the Emeritus Chaiman have helped bring about is a harsh mistress ...

Yet reality is a harsh mistress. Even the Labor Party will not be able to deny it forever.

In the meantime, with this ­ridiculous non-decision to do nothing, Marles shows us that he at least retains his sense of ­humour.

What a relief, the pond can always turn to the 'toons for a sensa huma ...

And so to the immortal Rowe of the day and a thief in stark daylight ...

The pond's solution? It's time for the reptiles to elbow up ...