In which the pond runs with Polonial prattle for its Sunday meditation, with Dame Slap for stale leftovers ...

 

The pond regrets that it must insist on not enabling the lizard Oz enablers enabling a genocide, so no dog botherer this meditative Sunday ...

The pond also regrets not being able to pursue obvious distractions of the Ghislaine kind, the nonsense encapsulated in the Politico header, Ghislaine Maxwell, who wants a pardon, says she never saw Trump ‘in any inappropriate setting’, In her interview with DOJ, Ghislaine Maxwell had nothing but praise for the president. (What a pity she thinks he was murdered, another conspiracy gets more fuel).

Nor can the pond dabble in the persecution of John Bolton, who has many reasons to be persecuted, but not the ones being pursued, they being King Donald thought crimes, per The Bulwark. (At last a justice system that recognises that the baddies are in reality are actually King Donald-approved Tina Peters type goodies).

The pond could have celebrated the painting of the border wall black ...

"We Are Governed By The Dumbest People In America": Kristi Noem Announced Trump's Plan To Paint The Border Wall Black, And People Have A LOT Of Thoughts
"They know there is no sun at night, right?"

There are so many distractions organised by the master of distraction...

Nor is the pond going to relitigate the sordid business of the current Zionist government. 

Best leave that to Jon Finer in The Atlantic, scribbling The West Bank Is Sliding Toward a Crisis, Unless it changes course, Israel is closer to triggering a second war with West Bank Palestinians than to ending the disastrous conflict in Gaza.(*archive link).

Some might prefer to head off to Joshua Yaffa in The New Yorker, War Without End, With Ukraine drained by more than three years of fighting, time is on the side of Vladimir Putin ... (*archive link)

But when there are matters concerning King Donald or Ukraine (soon to be sorted in just two weeks time - said by the genius that he is), is there any reason to go beyond prattling Polonius?

The header: If history’s a guide, Donald Trump’s Nobel dream may end in nightmare, It seems that Trump is annoyed that Barack Obama received the gong for not doing much at all. And Trump reckons he should get one for doing something substantial.

The caption, for those visiting from Mars and unable to sort a mango from a king: President Donald Trump. Picture: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

It was only a four minute read, so the reptiles said, and the pond might seize the chance to indulge in a few 'toons ...

But first Polonius had to walk a very careful path ...

I am not a Trump-type conservative. Neither am I suffering from Trump derangement syndrome.

Is there a middle ground?

Apologies, infallible Pope, for mingling you with Polonius, but life is short and the need was urgent ... because the pond immediately copped a billy goat butt, in the form of a "however" ...

However, there is reason to be concerned about President Donald J. Trump’s incessant wish to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
As The Australian reported on August 15, Trump recently called Norway’s Finance Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, when he was walking in Oslo. The US President wanted to talk about tariffs, trade co-operation and the like. But then the conversation took a new dimension.
According to a report in the Dag­ens Naeringsliv newspaper, Trump told Stoltenberg that he wanted to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in October this year. It seems that Trump is annoyed that president Barack Obama received this gong for not doing much at all. And Trump reckons he should get one for doing something substantial.
Interviewed by Fox News’ Sean Hannity on August 15 about whether the President might win the Nobel Peace Prize if he man­ages to end the Russia-Ukraine war, the response came in Trump-speech: “Well, interesting because somebody said if I get this, you know, the Nobel Peace Prize. I said, well I’m not involved in it but what about the other six wars or whatever it is? I mean those were big. Those were wars. As an example, you go to Africa, the Congo against Rwanda.”
Trump’s focus on peace prizes reminded me of what British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in his irreverent book The Thirties, which was published in 1940 when World War II was under way.

King Donald's lies about the wars he sorted might have been a focus for Polonius. He might have referenced The Conversation, Did Trump really resolve six conflicts in a matter of months? We spoke to the experts to find out, or perhaps The Independent, with a surging count, Trump ups number of wars he claimsto have ended from 7 to 10: 'If you think about pre-wars' ...

The Beeb also took the bait, as did the Graudian ...

The reptiles didn't help by distracting Polonius with a snap, Norway's Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg. Picture: Fredrik Varfjell / NTB / AFP

Polonius was determined to celebrate Muggers, a devotee of Mother Teresa (all the best people) ...

Muggeridge looked back in mockery at the inter-war peace movement in Britain. He pointed out that “pledges were earnestly registered never in any circumstances whatsoever to take up arms”. And added: “Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded to (Arthur) Henderson, Sir Austen Chamberlain … and in France a Golden Book of Peace was inscribed with several million signatures.” Muggeridge mentioned that Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933. But, in the end, it was all in vain. Nazi Germany, under the rule of Adolf Hitler, was not in give-peace-a-chance mode. Hitler wanted war and his regime was ended by military defeat on the western and eastern fronts after many German cities were almost in a not-a-stone-upon-a-stone devastation due to Allied bombing.

Not to mention Henry Kissinger, but then came a splendid bit of both siderism ...

Trump has his strengths and his weaknesses. 

Possibly also offering Opportunities and Threats, but do carry on ...the pond loves to visit cliché city to celebrate a bumbling, blathering disaster ...

But his greeting of Russia’s (elected) dictator Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, August 15 (local time), was not his finest moment. There was something nauseating in seeing the US President clapping the Russian President as he reached the red carpet before their talks began.
In this sense Putin was welcomed back to Western society, despite his brutal war on Ukraine’s civilians and the kidnapping of many Ukrainian children.
Here the US first lady – Melania Trump – has a better understanding of Russia’s leader than her husband. She wrote a letter to Putin about the kidnapped Ukrainians that Trump handed to him.

She has a better understanding? 

Displayed in that ridiculous word salad about the children, down there with Helen Lovejoy in its impotent piety.

You don't have to be Anna Navarro to call out its performative hypocrisy ... (*archive link)

“Melania Trump is telling Putin to preserve the innocence and purity of Ukrainian children,” Navarro says in the video before offering the First Lady a few weak claps for the letter. “Yay for her. That’s a good thing. But you know, maybe she should turn around and say the exact same thing to her husband—because there are children in America crying, suffering, going to bed in fear, returning to homes that are abandoned and empty, not knowing where their next meal is coming from because of what her husband is doing.”

Then Polonius played the GWB card, as if that both siderism amounted to a hill of beans excuse ...

If history’s a guide, Donald Trump’s Nobel dream may end in nightmare, It seems that Trump is annoyed that Barack Obama received the gong for not doing much at all. And Trump reckons he should get one for doing something substantial.

And then there is the fact that the Russian President presides over the murder of his political opponents living outside Russia. And then there is the death during incarceration of Alexei Navalny whose only crime was to advocate freedom for his fellow Russians.
Sure, Trump is not the only US President to exhibit weakness in the presence of Putin’s strength. When they met in Slovenia in June 2001, president George W. Bush said this about Putin: “I looked the man in the eye … I was able to get a sense of his soul, a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”

Cue a snap to celebrate the decisive man of action, and his caring companion ... US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump. Picture: AFP

Some might prefer to read Cathy Young in The Bulwark, offering Putin Tanks Trump’s Supposed Peace Effort, But don’t expect actual tough measures to penalize the Russian dictator’s obstructionism, but then they'd miss Polonius offering all sorts of alternatives to make King Donald look not so bad ...

Enough said. A few years later, Russia conquered Crimea during the time of Obama. The US did nothing.
After the meeting in Alaska, Putin was the first to address the international media. He spoke about the relationship between the (then) Soviet Union and the US “during the second world war”.
But Putin made no reference to the fact that the Soviet Union was in an alliance with Nazi Germany between August 23, 1939, and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Trump said not very much at all but exhibited friendship to the man he called “Vladimir”.
It is too early to say what will be the outcome of the current discussions. Trump has succeeded in convincing European leaders they must do more to protect themselves. He said this during his first term, to limited effect. But now it seems most European leaders have got the message. But it would be foolish if the US deserted Ukraine.
However, there is some history here. In 1975, the US failed to honour its pledges to non-communist South Vietnam before it was conquered by communist North Vietnam in April 1975. North Vietnam was supplied by the Soviet Union. The US congress cut off support for South Vietnam.

The reptiles stepped in with an AV distraction, to help with the notion that King Donald was a peacemaker ... Strelmark President and founder Hilary Fordwich discusses United States President Donald Trump’s tireless push for global peace. “This is really significant, and none of this would have happened without President Trump, because look, he wants to be the president of peace,” Ms Fordwich told Sky News Digital Presenter Gabriella Power. “You can tell that he’s out for a Nobel Peace Prize, and these European leaders, they didn’t get it done.”

Shouldn't that be a piece prize?

And so to a final gobbet of what seems to have been a litany of many follies, but with not so much time spent on King Donald's Whitmanesque capacity to produce multitudes of them on a daily basis...

There was another such instance when, during Joe Biden’s time as president, the US pushed its planned withdrawal forward from Afghanistan in August 2021, leaving many of its local supporters and much weaponry to the Taliban.
And now there’s Ukraine. Under the Budapest Memorandum of December 1994, Ukraine agreed to eliminate nuclear weapons. It had the world’s third biggest nuclear arsenal at the time. An agreement was reached that Russia, the US and Britain would ensure Ukraine’s security. However, Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and is now at war with Ukraine again. It might not have done so if Ukraine was a nuclear power.
It appears that the nations of the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) along with Poland are reassessing their attitude to landmines in the face of Russia’s aggression. All four nations were victims of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
The Baltic states were taken into the Soviet Union and Poland was invaded by Germany in the west and Russia in the east. All four nations are considering withdrawing from the 1999 Ottawa Convention that bans landmines. They need this protection against a Russian invasion.
Meanwhile the Australian-founded International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is unlikely to gain any recruits among the nations threatened by Putin’s Russia. ICAN won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Perhaps they can instead join up with the pundits on Russian state television, who routinely threaten to nuke Europe and destroy the planet, on the basis that a planet not being run by Vladimir Putin is no fun at all, with not nearly enough people falling out of windows or toppling down stairs ...

Polonius's outing was an effort that the NY Times might want to emulate ...

He needs expertise? He's flying blind?

The pond has seen Michael Wolff on YouTube, and knows King Donald can't shut up, can't read, never listens to anyone, and always wings it ...

Likely all you'll get in the end for offering your "expertise" is an FBI raid, as if keeping files at home was problematic for the Sun God ...

All the same, the pond should thank Polonius for his contribution, a big help for Ukraine, just like King Donald's considered support ...

All things considered, it was time to move on, and here the pond's banning of reptile genocide lovers and ethnic cleansing enablers meant a scratching around for a bonus ...

The pond eventually, with great reluctance and an impending sense of ennui, succumbed to Dame Slap ...

The header: Judges are not infallible that’s why they must be critiqued, Judges often justify their usurpation of the legislature by arguing that parliament is too slow or too stupid to do what judges think they should do. But skipping the democratic process to get to the political outcome you prefer is a recipe for authoritarianism.

The caption: High Court Chief Justice Stephen Gageler this week said it is more important than ever for the judiciary to ‘do law and only do law”’amid decreasing trust in courts worldwide, in a veiled rebuke of a growing trend of activism from the bench. Picture: Jane Dempster/The Australian

The pond realises that featuring yet again an activist journalist doing over activist judges is tedious to the point of tears, but Dame Slap might help keep the King Donald theme going.

After all she has form ...

So let's hear her celebrating activist politicians of the luddite kind ...

The recent warning by High Court Chief Justice Stephen Gageler that Australian judges need to avoid judicial activism was perfectly timed. Fans of judicial activism are growing ever bolder. Only last weekend we heard from a devotee of judges as modern-day philosopher kings.
Former judge Mark Dean KC tried a venerable debating technique when launching into a full-throated defence of judicial activism. If you want to defend the indefensible, it helps to disguise what you are doing.
Cunningly, Dean tried to cloak his claims. So we will remove the cloak.
First, Dean put forward a statement that is uncontested. He said judges have a great deal of discretion when it comes to sentencing. The legislation gives judges that power. And so, Dean said, “there is no one correct sentence in any case”. It is a matter “for the judge by reference to the maximum penalty available, the facts of the case and the circumstances of the offender”.
No arguments here.

The reptiles slipped in a snap of the reprehensibly cunning and cloaking villain, Mark E Dean KC in 2010 when he was appointed a judge in the County Court of Victoria. Picture: Supplied

That sent Dame Slap off, much like her Faux Noise heroine ...

Take it away Dame Slap, show the learned activist judge how an activist journalist tries and convicts, and all in the space of a very brief hearing ...

Where the common law and statutes clearly confer discretion in these areas on judges, they will set the sentence.
The existence and acceptance of this discretion is so well understood that controversy intrudes only when attempts are made to limit the discretion, for example, by way of mandatory sentencing laws.
Dean assured us judges are very smart people and will make very smart decisions using their own view of human reasoning and judicial experience. He said when judges are appointed, governments put great store in the life experience, professional judgment and legal training of the judge.
We will (mostly) accept that too, quibbling only with the extent of life experiences of some judges who, quite possibly, have not seen a great deal of the vicissitudes of life.
Now we reach the flawed part of Dean’s argument. Dean took a big leap from areas where the law explicitly confers discretion on judges to areas where, as Dean put it, “there is no specific law to answer a contested question before a court”.
What happens then goes to the core role of judges in a democracy.
Dean said where there is no specific law to answer a contested area in court, it is only right for a judge to step in and decide the matter.

The reptiles slipped in a quality example of how to ignore congress and the courts, proving the pond's point that King Donald would inevitably turn up so that the divine right of kings might be argued in heaven, American Culture Project Senior Fellow Corey DeAngelis says US Judge William Warwick’s statement defying US President Donald Trump’s executive order on sanctuary cities is “judicial activism”. “In some cases, it’s even worse than that where you have this judicial activism,” Mr DeAngelis said. “It’s a huge problem. “You have to ask yourself, how bad does it have to get before things change – California’s hit rock bottom, and at some point, the voters have to figure these things out. “The GOP, Trump’s party, is leading the way towards prosperity and freedom.”

Needless to say, Dame Slap was outraged ...

Dean used slavery as an example, defending Lord Mansfield, former Lord Chief Justice of England, whose “personal moral views informed his work as a judge in arriving at a decision in relation to a then hotly contested political issue”. Similarly, Dean lauded the judgment of Sir Gerard Brennan of our own High Court in the Mabo case, which involved “a significant political issue”.
The essence of Dean’s argument appears in this sentence: “Could anyone seriously suggest that Mansfield or Brennan got it wrong?” There we have it. According to Dean, the end justifies the means. These were good and moral decisions so we should, apparently, ignore that these same good and moral decisions should have been made, and could have been made, by parliament.

There you have it. 

Dame Slap is a biblical slavery kind of gal...

What a perfect excuse to celebrate ...

Dame Slap presented her case...

I have a different answer to Dean’s. The contention that in particular cases there is no specific law to answer a contested issue is usually a pretence to give judges a free rein to indulge their hankering for lawmaking.
An obvious example is Mabo. This was not a case where there was no pre-existing law. It was a case where there was plenty of pre-existing law – the so-called terra nullius doctrine – but the High Court thought that was wrong and overruled it.

Of course she was going to be a terra nullius kind of gal, it goes with the Voice-hating turf, and the reptiles got her even more agitated with a snap of that threatening miscreant, Eddie Mabo.

Barging on, Dame Slap insisted judges had no business barging in, not when she was busy barging in on their barging ...

Even in those rare cases where there’s genuinely no pre-existing law, judges should resist barging in to invent their own, particularly where their proposed change is controversial or political in nature.
If at all possible, judges should abstain from lawmaking and let the parties know that, as wise as judges are, and perhaps because they are so wise, they know that this is a matter is for parliament, not for the court.
If that is not possible, judges should make the smallest possible incremental change and leave the balance of the job to politicians. Dean misses this critical point: it is entirely irrelevant that Brennan or Mansfield made good decisions – the question is whether they should have made the deci­sion at all.
Dean’s acknow­ledgment that both famous decisions he cites were hotly contested politically should force any rational critic to wonder if the courts were the right place to settle such controversies.
Judges often justify their usurpation of the legislature by arguing that parliament and politicians generally are too slow or too stupid to do what judges think they should do. But skipping the democratic process to get to the political outcome you prefer is a recipe for authoritarianism. Judge-made laws lack democratic legitimacy.

Indeed, indeed, leave it all to the politicians, what could possibly go wrong?

Just to make sure you could recognise the real villain, the reptiles slipped in another snap... Mark Dean KC in 2023. Picture: NCA News Wire/Glenn Campbell

It goes without saying that Dame Slap isn't much into that nasty business of womyn trying to retain control of their bodies.

All that tosh about inalienable rights is just woke nonsense ...

This ought to be obvious even to a first-year law student. And if it isn’t obvious to them, then they’re not getting a decent legal education.
Even if, objectively, judge-made laws lead to good outcomes, vesting lawmaking powers in judges will risk causing dissent simply because of the way they were made. The heated and polarised debate about abortion in the US is a classic example of this judicially boosted social dissent.
Fans of judicial activism cheered when the US Supreme Court invented a right to abortion in 1973. When the Roe v Wade decision was overturned in 2022 in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, critics uttered exact­ly the same fulminations that legal conservatives did about Roe v Wade: the court should not be in the politics business.
Many on the left were outraged – they had thought their kind of judicial activism was the only kind allowed. But Americans learned the law of legal physics the hard way: what one activist court can do, another can undo.

The reptiles illustrated the point wth a snap, orman McCorvey (L), also known as Jane Roe, with lawyer Gloria Allred outside US Supreme Court. (sic, the pond has no idea why her first name is "orman" with no cap, but the pond merely transcribes the joys of the hive mind)

Couldn't the reptiles have dug up an image more suited to Dame Slap's purpose?

Fixed, as Dame Slap wrapped up proceedings, blathering on about judicial activism and judicial legitimacy, sublimely unaware of journalist activism and journalist legitimacy...

The sort of journalist activism that turned up in Crikey the other day ... Empty chairs, net-zero whinging and a pre-recorded Gina Rinehart: Dispatches from News Corp’s ‘Bush Summit’, The event in Broome was a sparsely attended — and very expensive — ‘propaganda piece’, according to one attendee. (*archive link)

...The executive director of Environs Kimberley, Martin Pritchard, told Crikey that: “The Australian Bush Summit in Broome [yesterday] was clearly being used by Ms Gina Rinehart to platform her anti ‘net-zero’ campaign”.
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“Ironically the [image] backdrop to the speakers was a large photograph of James Price Point on the Kimberley coast where Woodside planned one of the biggest LNG refineries in the world, but they abandoned the plans in 2013,” he remarked.
Pritchard also said that the event itself was “not well attended … I’d say less than two-thirds full”, sending an image of a sparsely populated room with plenty of empty chairs.
“Commonwealth Bank was handing out free coffees, and there was T-bone steaks and free wine after. A very expensive propaganda piece.” 
Rinehart herself also addressed the summit — albeit via a recorded video message from her Bannister Downs Dairy property in south-west WA. Rinehart said that farmers and their families were “already suffering from net zero ideology”, and that Australia “still being in the Paris Accord will saddle them with net zero restrictions, paperwork and huge expense”. 
CSIRO and BoM modelling shows that the Kimberley would be unliveable if the current emissions trajectory was maintained.

That journalist activism also made the Weekly Beast ...

...Rinehart crafts the image of a dystopian future in which the Royal Flying Doctor Service cannot save lives because “we’ve exceeded our emissions permitted”. Nurses and doctors would be forced to buy electric vehicles before seeing patients, nursing homes would close. “Those who die,” she writes, “the funeral services can’t handle.
“The disruption and expense immense.”
And what of the poor farmers, who are some of the “many many many Australians” who’ll be hurt?
Gina Rinehart’s apocalyptic visions for bush summits just the latest in a history of climate science denialism
“They can increase the costs they sell us food for awhile, but then many Australians will be forced to buy inferior products from overseas, where net zero isn’t a burden, and where clean water and clean air may not or are not available like here in Australia, while our own delicious agriculture industry sadly shrivels up,” she writes.
The awkward clarion call to end net zero is only outdone by the awkwardness of its juxtaposition with stories about the impacts of climate change.
The liftouts include a piece from Daily Tele cartoonist Warren Brown on the “green drought” in parts of Australia – the more sporadic rainfall behind the phenomenon is linked to climate change. There’s a piece on bushfires threatening species with extinction, and other tales of droughts and floods, all of which are linked to climate change.
The cognitive dissonance was particularly painful while reading the Advertiser. A big pic lead on the front page covered the drought in South Australia, while page 2 was on the “devastating outbreak” of the algal bloom, which is – you guessed it – linked to climate change.

...and while at the Beast, and speaking of "journalist" activism, and muppets only capable of Dorothy Dixers, the pond couldn't help but note reformed former reptile Tory dishing it out to unreformed simpleton Sharri (full disrespect intended):

Now there's a first class enabler ...

Sorry, the pond hadn't intended on another distraction by drawing attention to an enabler enabling a sociopathic devotee of ethnic cleansing this late in the game, but it was irresistible.

Now it's time to let Dame Slap finish up, in her journalist activist way ...

If you admit the possibility of left-wing judicial activism, you necessarily invite the possibility of right-wing judicial activism, of an equal and opposite kind.
Alas, critics of the Dobbs decision should not have been surprised or disappointed when the court remitted abortion rights back to the states. If America’s highest court had done so in 1973, it’s far likelier that democratic processes over the past five decades would have settled on sensible abortion laws. Instead, the court’s intervention in 1973 inflamed extremes on both sides of the debate and, perversely, empowered anti-abortion activists to keep fighting.
It is shame that a former judge such as Dean did not acknowledge that allowing for these kinds of violent judicial swings – to the left or the right – will erode judicial legitimacy.
It is passing strange too that Dean didn’t put any guardrails around his support for judicial activism. Every time there is an argument in favour of untrammelled judicial activism, this column will repeat the bleeding obvious: judicial activism, once unleashed, is a two-edged sword.
As a refresher for Dean and others who appear not to understand the dangers, we will repeat Sir Owen Dixon, Australia’s greatest chief justice: “Close adherence to legal reasoning is the only way to maintain the confidence of all parties in federal conflicts.
“It may be that the court is thought to be excessively legalistic. I should be sorry to think that it is anything else. There is no other safe guide to judicial decisions in great conflicts than a strict and complete legalism.”
Finally, Dean says he is often puzzled by “commentators’ strident attacks on judges who bring their own experience of life to bear in their demanding, relentless and important work”.
There is no reason to be puzzled. Judges are not infallible. Their judgments should be analysed and, where appropriate, criticised.
Indeed, Dean’s flawed thesis to justify judicial lawmaking was so poorly argued that he unwittingly exposed why critiquing the judgments and other musings of judges remains an important task in a democracy.

Put it another way ...

There is no reason to be puzzled. "Journalists" dwelling deep inside the hive mind are not infallible. Their judgments should be analysed and, where appropriate, criticised. (This could lead to decades of blogging without any sign of a desire to reform or a display self-awareness by the "journalists").
Indeed, Dame Slap's worship of King Donald as a political solution to what might ail a country is a flawed thesis designed to justify political partisan lawmaking aimed at taking a country back to a medieval dark age where the law and notions of justice are conducted on the whims of the king by masked, armed and unidentified terrorists.

It's so poorly argued that she unwittingly exposed why critiquing the judgments and other musings of activist journalists and the activist foreign corporation they (and she) work for remains an important task in a democracy. (Especially when they play hanky panky with strictly confidential information relating to a matter even now before the courts). (Even if it produces decades of blogging without any sign of self-improvement or reform). 

If she doesn't watch out, she'll end up just like all the ICE Barbies seething at activist judges...

And so to celebrate with a cartoon celebrating Dame Slap's idea of justice, done by whim, persecution and FBI and ICE raids ...