In which our Henry and Killer of the IPA take diverging roads. Guess who's on the lowest road of all?

 

At last a chance to do a traditional lizard Oz posting, and a contrast in styles, the sort of thing that would please a student doing final year herpetology exams ...

Sure the front page is a desolate wasteland, given over to Coles and Gina's mob, the oligarchical rich, maintaining the reptiles' devout Xian attitude to filthy lucre ... (gotta love the moneylenders in the temple) ...

Sure the bromancer is still missing, and so is the ethnic cleansing and destruction of Gaza. 

For that the pond would have to turn to the Graudian and stories such as Netanyahu is waging war on Gaza and on us – his ‘enemies within’. It’s the path to autocracy, though "path to" seems something of an understatement, and "already arrived at" might be more fitting ...

But look over on the extreme far right, look who was top of the world ma, while down near the very bottom was Killer of the IPA ...

And so the pond's course was set, and other topics had to be delegated to the cartoonists, including the infallible Pope ...

Up first was our Henry and this week he traded as a conventional conservative, a tad shocked at what Faux Noise had helped wrought, and he spent a goodly five minutes, so the reptiles said, worrying about the Cantaloupe Caligula in Rule of law at risk in Donald Trump’s war on courts,The Trump administration’s attacks on the judiciary and flouting of court orders risks provoking a brutal and destructive struggle between the presidency and the courts.

The reptiles hastened to reassure the hive mind that the mango Mussolini was ridgy-didge legit with the opening snap, President Donald Trump, left, points to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after taking the oath of office, though the pointing might look like a sign of threats to come:

Whatever, the snap didn't stop the hole in the bucket man and his tale of woe...

Since January 20, when Donald Trump was inaugurated, 142 cases have been brought against the new administration – and additional cases are being launched every day.
With the courts already issuing 30 preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders, Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has been their primary target, has denounced what he claims is the “TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY”, while lambasting federal judges as “corrupt”, “radical” and “evil”.
Not to be outdone, Trump this week called Judge James E. Boasberg, who sought to pause the deportation to El Salvador of more than 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang, a “Radical Left Lunatic”, and urged his impeachment – prompting a rare rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
To make things worse, despite the White House’s denials, there are compelling reasons to believe Judge Boasberg’s order to pause the deportations was simply ignored. Given that yet more injunctions and restraining orders are certain to be issued in the weeks ahead, the stage seems set for a major confrontation between the presidency and the courts.

Our Henry didn't bother with trivial matters such as the deeply weird press secretary's blunders ....

She gets her facts wrong?

She's attacking the Judge's wife? Is that a people in weird glass house marriages thing?

She's clueless in a quintessentially blonde stereotype way? 

Perhaps she's angling for a Faux Noise gig ...

The reptiles offered another inspirational distraction, US Associate Supreme Court Justices.

The question was when our Henry would take his usual deep dive into history, and whether it would be Thucydides, or some other suitable ancient Greek or Roman (or even a medieval theologian at a pinch). 

It turned out that our Henry looked to the new world, and Hamilton was just a warm up ...

Quite how the clash would play itself out is hard to tell. The federal judiciary has often been referred to as “the least dangerous branch”, following from Alexander Hamilton’s assertion that the Supreme Court “is possessed of neither force nor will, but merely judgment”. The judiciary, wrote Hamilton, has “neither purse nor sword” and hence “must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments”.
But the contemporary reality is more complicated. It is settled law that no one has the right to ignore a court ruling, regardless of their view of the ruling’s correctness. As the Supreme Court stated in 1911: “If a party can make himself a judge of the validity of orders which have been issued, and by his own act of disobedience set them aside, then are the courts impotent, and what the constitution now fittingly calls ‘the judicial power of the United States’ would be a mere mockery.”
It follows that the federal courts both “possess inherent authority to initiate contempt proceedings for disobedience to their orders” and “cannot be at the mercy of another branch in deciding whether such proceedings should be initiated”. As a result, courts can impose penalties that include arrest and imprisonment for “civil contempt” – that is, for disobeying their instructions.
Normally, those penalties would be enforced by the US Marshals Service, which sits within the executive branch and is potentially subject to direction from the attorney-general. However, should the Marshals Service refuse to carry out an arrest, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure allow the courts to assign that task to any “person specially appointed for the purpose”, including state and local police forces, which are not under the attorney-general’s control.

The reptiles supplied a clue by digging into the cheap stock archives to come up with an inexpensive image of Andrew Jackson

Then it was time for the traditional plunge into the past, featuring the notorious Andrew Jackson ...

Additionally and importantly, it has, ever since the Supreme Court’s decision in Ex parte Grossman (1925), been settled law that while the president can pardon criminal contempts (which involves disrupting or impeding proceedings that are under way, for example, by improperly refusing to testify), civil contempts – which occur once a decision has been handed down – are not within the scope of the president’s pardon power.
The president himself may be protected by presidential immunity; but anyone else who breaches, or assists in breaching, a court order inevitably incurs very serious risks. Nor does the mere fact of having been instructed by the executive to breach the order provide any protection from prosecution and conviction.
Whether it will come to that remains to be seen. But the similarities between Trump and Andrew Jackson, whom he idolises, are telling of what may lie ahead.
Jackson notoriously set a precedent in 1832 by ignoring a Supreme Court order that upheld the rights of Cherokee Native Americans. “John Marshall,” Jackson allegedly said, referring to the then chief justice, “has made his decision; now let him enforce it” – which, in the circumstances of the time, Marshall was unable to do.
Jackson was the first president to claim he was invested with a “mandate from the people”: a mandate that, by its very nature, overrode any constitutional limitations. Unlike his predecessors, he did not see the presidency as a conventional balancing institution, hemmed in by congress and the courts; it was, he maintained, the direct embodiment and highest expression of the popular will.
Convinced that the president was the guardian of the national interest against “the predatory portion of the community” – that is, the elite, who he described as a “leech” on the body of the people – and that the fate of liberty was at stake, Jackson claimed he was fully entitled to sweep aside those who “from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition and inordinate thirst for power” threatened the popular will, including the courts.

Now our Henry might have noted the rich irony of that talk of 'leets, what with it having been the cover for years for Murdochians intent on befuddling their hive mind followers, but instead the reptiles offered another visual distraction ... US President Donald Trump greets US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Our Henry pressed on, and did manage to drag in Napoleon and the Kaiser ...

This was, in other words, an all-or-nothing battle against a uniquely cunning and dangerous adversary; and reminding his countrymen that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”, Jackson assured them that “whatever disguise the actors may assume”, those who sought to “bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes” could not and would not be allowed to triumph.
That set of beliefs – in an overriding popular mandate that impels a fight to the death against “corruption” – is at the very heart of Trumpism; it is, indeed, its most enduring feature.
Thus, stating his mission as being to defend ordinary Americans from a “global power structure”, Trump has described the situation the United States faces as “a crossroads in the history of our civilisation that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government”.
“This is,” he claims, “a struggle for the survival of our nation” in which “for them (that is, the adversaries) it’s a war, and for them nothing at all is out of bounds”.
Little wonder then that he has rebutted the claim that his administration is cavalierly flouting court orders by saying that “he who saves his country does not violate any laws” – a phrase, commonly attributed to Napoleon, that was used by Kaiser Wilhelm II to justify Germany’s invasion of Belgium in August 1914.
Of course, it may be that the administration will back down. The almost farcical lengths to which it has gone in trying to explain its failure to implement Judge Boasberg’s injunction, and the somewhat more cautious wording of its most recent executive orders, suggests a growing awareness of the possible dangers.
What is clear, however, is that it passionately believes the country is in the midst of a potentially fatal emergency, justifying whatever action it considers necessary. If Donald Trump continues to act on that basis, Americans may be about to discover whether their republic, which was the modern world’s first successful experiment with mass democracy, can and will remain blessed by “a government of laws, not of men”.

The pond had to rate the result a "Thucydides fail", but in a good cause.

It all sounded very ominous, as if a dictatorship was in progress, but really, just to stay true to Faux Noise, isn't the mango Mussolini fighting for all that's good and true in the land ...

Who cares for blather about laws and dictators and such like when you need to slash and burn to lower the price of eggs and burgers ...

...or so Killer of the IPA thinks, in Voters are sick of spending splurge, but our pollies don’t listen, It’s a depressing time for anyone hoping to wrench Australia away from shuffling mindlessly down the path to European-style economic sclerosis.

Gina's man opened with a snap of head villain ... Prime Minister Anthony Albanese holds a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

Then it was on to that study of a contrast in styles. 

As befits being one of Gina's minions, Killer of the IPA had drunk the Uncle Leon supplied Kool-Aid, and had got out his chainsaw ...

Listening to the two major parties a few days out from the budget, you’d think there is no significant constituency in this country for cutting government spending.
There certainly should be, given the nation’s increasingly dire fiscal outlook and the decline of Australia’s decade-long resources boom.
Even the extra billions of dollars in revenue raked in every year via bracket creep can’t keep pace with Canberra’s old spending commitments, let alone the new ones bound to emerge at next week’s budget.
It’s a depressing time for anyone hoping to wrench Australia away from shuffling mindlessly down the path to European-style economic sclerosis. But voters could be persuaded for some tough economic medicine, if only our political leadership would rise to the challenge.
It turns out around four times as many Australians would prefer the government to cut spending as opposed to increasing taxes to fix the budget, 57 per cent to 13 per cent, when presented with the basic fiscal facts.
That’s according to a survey of 1000 Australians commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs earlier this month and carried out by independent polling outfit Dynata. Only 15 per cent opted for “no change – debt isn’t a problem”.

Ah, an IPA poll ... funny, the pond could have helped out our Henry with a different poll ...

Then it was on with Uncle Leon worship, strangely absent Seig Heil and chainsaw, Elon Musk speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

Judging from that snap, you'd almost think the ketamine-fuelled fanatic was normal, at least if you thought you'd stumbled into a Blues Brothers look alike competition in a cheap, slot-machine littered, Vegas hotel, with chicken coop wire surrounding the band ...

Killer regurgitated his Uncle Leon devotion ...

It won’t be a shock that only 29 per cent of Canberrans wanted cuts, but it might be that calls for a little “austerity” were greatest in Victoria (59 per cent) and Tasmania (62 per cent), the two states that face the greatest fiscal challenges.
The surprises didn’t end there. Asked whether government overall in Australia was too big, too small or about right, 45 per cent opted for too large and only 11 per cent for too small, which is about the same primary vote as the Greens.
It seems voters have the right intuition, even before either side of politics begins to make the case for more expenditure sanity.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk deserve credit for highlighting waste in the vast US government, which hasn’t been exposed to a proper efficiency review since the early years of the Reagan administration.

The pond thought they deserved credit for turning the White House into a car sales yard, and there have been more amusing items about Uncle Leon's business in recent times...

That's at CNN ... celebrating a truck designed by a ten year old fantasising about driving around Mars in it ... what with him and his goons having helped fuck earth.

There was also a cartoon that suited the times ...

At least it's not a cybertruck. Sheesh, so much to mock, so little time.

Back to the abject hero worship ...

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has turned up some amusing examples, such as $US20m ($31.56m) for an Iraqi Sesame Street, $US59m on luxury hotel stays for illegal immigrants, and even $US1300 each for 25 coffee cups for the air force.
After trawling through thousands of US government contracts across dozens of departments and agencies, DOGE reckons it’s found around $US115bn in savings.
Musk still has a long way to go to reach his target of $US1 trillion, let alone find enough to close America’s gigantic annual budget deficit, which is easily double that. But his admirable efforts have reminded Americans just how bloated the government can become without regular scrutiny.

Admirable efforts?

At this point the pond must take a couple of detours. First up, in relation to the figures that Killer swallowed whole, as befits a Gina lackey.

There have been any number of alternative takes on those figures, including a new one, DOGE Goons Delete $140 Million Savings From ‘Receipts’ Website (archive link).

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has sharply reduced the number of federal real estate leases it claims to have terminated, suggesting it has not been as efficient at slashing government spending as advertised.
Musk’s cost-cutting department has been bragging for weeks that it had terminated 700 government leases since President Donald Trump assumed office, saving over $460 million in the process.
But at around 1 a.m. on Wednesday the group quietly removed 136 of the cancellations from its website, reducing its savings by around $140 million—nearly 30 percent of the gross total.
Although the exact reason for the deletions remains unclear, early signs suggest the cancellations mean DOGE is experiencing significantly more pushback from government agencies than initially expected.
Last week, the General Services Administration, which oversees the federal real estate portfolio, announced it was rescinding over 100 lease termination notices, according to The New York Times. Although the exact reasons for the cancellations remain unclear, some were rescinded due to “feedback from customer agencies,” while others had allegedly faced internal pushback from lawmakers and agency officials.
Other agencies which appear to have had success in staving off DOGE cuts include the Army Corps of Engineers, who fought off the closure of their office in Chicago by arguing the loss of office space could result in longer emergency response times. The National Weather Service and Indian Health Service also managed to save their offices from closure after working “closely with DOGE and the Administration,” the Times reports.
An Energy Department office in New Mexico that manages a nuclear waste repository also appears to have been saved from closure, although no official reason for it being rescinded appears to have been given.
DOGE also removed all mention of plans to cut dozens of local IRS and Social Security Administration offices from its website, although more than 30 properties used by the two agencies remain listed, suggesting the battle to save them appears to be ongoing.

And so on and so it goes, and there have been endless stories of this kind  (archive link)...

Then there was Andrew Eggers at The Bulwark, with a pitiful howling, a cry of pain ‘We Won’t Know It’s a Different Country’, Trump is causing incredible harm. Whether we learn to live with it matters.

It goes without saying that Killer loves to live with it, relishes the pain ...

In yesterday’s newsletter, Bill quoted Philip Larkin’s “Homage to a Government,” on Britain’s quiet post-WWII retrenchment: “Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home for lack of money, and it is all right.”
I want to dwell briefly on another line from the same poem: “Our children will not know it’s a different country.”
The damage being done today, the scope of the global cruelty and tragedy, is hard to take in. It is the sort of stain that should be remembered. Will it be?
For decades, U.S. aid in Africa—in HIV prevention and treatment, in vaccines, in clean water and food—has been a lifeline for millions. Now that aid has simply vanished, and experts estimate that, if Trump stays the course, millions may die within a year. There will be some news cycles, some indignant punditry, probably some harrowing Pulitzer-grade photojournalism. And then, a slow hardening into the new normal. The victims’ surviving families will remember them. Will we? Will our children?
For two years, the United States has spent millions tracking one of Russia’s vilest war crimes: The abduction of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children into Russia for forced adoption by Russian families. The Conflict Observatory, a group funded by the State Department, had assembled a trove of data on missing children—crucial information for any future attempt to reunite them with relatives at home. But the State Department has now terminated their contract, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers fear that it may even have carelessly deleted the database. How many children’s best chance of seeing their families again may have vanished, just like that? Their families will remember, if they survive the war. So will the kids, the ones who are old enough. Will we?
We humans are master rationalizers; we adopt the new normal faster than we realize. Donald Trump rode a wave of forgetting back to the White House in 2024. His love affair with foreign dictators, his mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, his attempt to steal the 2020 election—all were washed away, in the minds of many voters. They were overshadowed by the irritations of the moment: the price of groceries, the price of rent. And he prevailed in no small part thanks to shocking strength with young voters who had no memory of a time before he dragged our politics down to his own base, amoral, post-truth level.
So Trump and his allies know that, as they work to build a future that is smaller and crueller, more paranoid and more violent, human nature is on their side. We rationalize the current, block out the past, and imagine something brighter can emerge in the future.

Yep, that's the world Killer wants, smaller, crueller, more paranoid and more violent, and no time for old-fashioned yearnings ...

The philosopher Roger Scruton said that conservatism starts in “the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.” America as formerly constituted—warts and all—was a good thing. Its current demolitionists claim they’re trying to go back to that good thing. But really, they’re in the game of destruction, not reclamation. They go about their work cheerfully, glibly shouting that anything they break by accident, they’ll get around to unbreaking eventually. If only it were so simple, even if they really wanted to.
Getting out of this starts with remembering. It was good to be a country that cared about babies born with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, that was willing to save their lives for pennies a day. It was good to be a country that cared about Ukrainian children torn from their families by a hostile power, that strove toward a future that saw them home. Maybe someday we can claw our way there again—if we remember.

The reptiles tried to row it back a little by pretending that Killer and Gina's mob were at one with Ronnie Raygun, aka Ronald Reagan

Really? Depends what you read ...

In September 1982, in its first effort to repair the damage, the Reagan administration followed the "largest tax cut in history" with the "largest tax increase in history." But there was no catching up. By the end of Reagan's first term, the supply-side logic was discredited in the eyes of many, and the inability to bring taxes and spending down together stood in marked contrast to Volcker's victory over inflation. David Stockman, Reagan's first director of the Office of Management and Budget, left the administration dejected, disillusioned with supply-side economics, and chastened by the realities of the political process. Failure to achieve fiscal-policy change, he argued, was a clear vindication of the "triumph of politics" -- of entitlements over austerity, and of the enduring pork-barrel tradition of American legislation over any cold economic logic. "I joined the Reagan Revolution as a radical ideologue," he wrote. "I learned the traumatic lesson that no such revolution is possible."
The triumph of politics and what Stockman called the "fiscal error" that went with it spawned a new monster, which would come to occupy center stage in policy debate: the deficit and the federal debt. Between the beginning and the end of the Reagan presidency, the annual deficit almost tripled. So did the gross national debt -- from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion. Or, as Reagan and Bush administration official Richard Darman put it, "In the Reagan years, more federal debt was added than in the entire prior history of the United States."
There simply was no quick cure to the scale of spending. In the minds of some, however, there was another logic to tax cuts: Reduce taxes and government revenue, and eventually the pain and scale of deficits -- and the threat of national bankruptcy -- would force a retrenchment of government spending. That thought was not restricted to fervent supply-siders, and ultimately it would end up true. But not for some years, and certainly not during the Reagan years.

Killer of the IPA's not going to have any of that, it's out with the chainsaw, spreading intolerance, fear and loathing wherever he can ...

In Australia, a similarly determined effort could easily find spending ripe for pruning.
My own cursory examination of new measures introduced over the past few federal budgets reveals $38m to “increase diversity in STEM education”. There’s $22m for a First Nations Digital Support Hub, and $56m to establish a “Building Women’s Careers program to drive structural and systemic change”.
DOGE found that Washington’s USAID had been funding LGBTQ+ programs in Uganda and transgender operas in Colombia. Our own foreign aid arm, once dubbed AusAID, now under the auspices of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, will almost certainly be a source of similarly absurd expenditure programs.
It recently launched a New International Gender Equality Strategy, which aims to “prioritise gender-responsive and inclusive climate action on mitigation, adaptation and response … and promote disability equity and rights and LGBTQIA+ equality”, according to the DFAT website.
One can only imagine how these programs must go over in traditional developing countries, such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Maybe a security pact with China would be preferable for Solomons Islands to a moral lecture from DFAT bureaucrats!
In fairness, closing small programs piecemeal here and there won’t be enough to bring public finances back to a sustainable path, even if such cuts would help restore some much-needed integrity to public spending after the crazy Covid years.
Serious savings will require making serious inroads into health, welfare and the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which in a few short years has become as expensive as Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme combined.

Yeay, punish the sick, the suffering, the unfortunate and the poor.

Ah, those bloody crips, they're even more problematic than those tricky, difficult, uppity blacks ... and so to a Killer hero, Argentina's President-elect Javier Milei with his chainsaw

Does any of that disturb Killer? 

You know, our Henry rabbiting on about the courts, or another yarn signposted at The Bulwark link above?

NO LIBS ALLOWED: Remarkable how quickly low-level American functionaries seem to be adopting Trump’s posture that bullying is fun. Here’s the New York Times:
A French scientist was prevented from entering the United States this month because of an opinion he expressed about the Trump administration’s policies on academic research, according to the French government.
Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for higher education and research, described the move as worrying. . . .
Mr. Baptiste did not identify the scientist who was turned away but said that the academic was working for France’s publicly funded National Center for Scientific Research and had been traveling to a conference near Houston when border officials stopped him.
The U.S. authorities denied entry to the scientist and then deported him because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed his “personal opinion” on the Trump administration’s science policies, Mr. Baptiste said.

The yarn was everywhere ...

It wasn't just in the NY Times, (archive link); you could read it in the Graudian as well ...

Does Killer care about any of that? Nah, democracy and laws and such like are for girlie pussies and wussies and cucks, not for chainsaw men ....

Other Western governments have successfully made the political case for drastic spending cuts in the past, such as Sweden and Canada in the 1990s, which both had to slash vast chunks of their welfare states as they teetered at the edge of economic collapse.
Argentina is going through a similarly painful adjustment period now under President Javier Milei. Since World War II Australia has never had to take the axe to spending to the same extent, but the longer we wait the more painful the adjustment will ultimately be. The revenue tide is bound to go out in the coming years, exposing the unsightly wreckage of social programs unaffordable outside the boom years.
For all the reluctance to talk about cutting spending, these post-Covid years may actually be the opportune time to advocate for less intrusive and profligate government.
In the same survey mentioned above, the IPA also asked Australians what they blamed for the surge in inflation since 2021: lockdowns, government spending, big business, or foreign conflicts. The first two potential causes attracted the most answers, a combined 56 per cent.
Only 13 per cent opted for foreign conflicts, which politicians around the world have typically tried to blame.
The voters in our survey have a better understanding of our true economic position than politicians give them credit. They are just waiting for one of the major parties to rise to the challenge.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Thank the long absent lord that Killer's incredible talents have seen him limited to being "chief economist" at Gina's mob, and occasional scribbler for the lizard Oz ...

And so to an immortal Rowe to close the day, with another aspirational Killer in his sights ...

As always it's in the details, as the mutton Dutton tries to rise to Killer's demands ...

What a sly rogue he is, what a Killer look he can manage, befitting a Queensland plod...