In which the pond tunes out, but provides a few links for those still keen to pursue their herpetology studies ...

 

The pond was so bored by today's reptile offerings that it decided to take a raincheck on the offerings.

There would be links, for anyone who cared and had the patience to delve into the archive (sometimes faster than watching paint dry), but that would be it.

Oh there'd be a few 'toons too ...

The key reason?

Dame Slap was in "journalist mode",which is to say there was yet another rehashing of the Lehrmann affair ...

Nah, not really ...so, so over it ...

EXCLUSIVE
Secret documents reveal alleged plot to stitch up Reynolds over Higgins payout
A cache of letters has spilled the beans on the Albanese government’s manoeuvring to gift Brittany Higgins a $2.4m settlement – leaving Linda Reynolds swinging in the breeze.
Janet Albrechtsen and Stephen Rice

Inside Story
‘You can still make this right for Fiona,’ Rowland told
As the Attorney-General left a swanky Barangaroo building, her staffers formed a guard around her. Linda Reynolds was approaching. She congratulated Michelle Rowland on her human rights work, and asked her to do the right thing on another front.
Janet Albrechtsen and Stephen Rice

The reptiles even offered a video supplement with Dame Slap looking particularly weird ...

Inside the $2.4m deal
Inside the $2.4m deal: How the Commonwealth cut Reynolds out of the Higgins settlement
The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen reveals explosive new letters showing how the Commonwealth sidelined Linda Reynolds to fast-track a $2.4 million settlement with Brittany Higgins.
Now Playing
00:23 / 09:28
Inside the $2.4 million deal: How the Commonwealth cut Linda Reynolds out of the Higgins settlement
The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen reveals explosive new letters showing how the Commonwealth sidelined Linda Reynolds to fast-track a $2.4 million settlement with Brittany Higgins. The confidential documents expose a powerful legal juggernaut that Reynolds says steamrolled her right to defend herself.

Deeply weird ...

Oh those glasses. 

Will someone tell her?

As for Sussssan v the lettuce, the reptiles were also forced to jump the gun, what with the sell out to happen later in the day ...

COALITION IN CHAOS
Liberals prepare to dump net zero after mammoth partyroom meeting
The party is expected to back staying in the Paris agreement without a formal ambition to reach net zero at any stage, with moderate MPs aiming to use the Paris element to claim the Coalition retains a net zero objective.
By Greg Brown and Jack Quail

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Liberal rivals gang up on near-terminal Ley to blow up net zero
Angus Taylor, Andrew Hastie, Ted O’Brien and Melissa McIntosh have publicly and privately indicated their leadership ambitions. All of them voiced their opposition to net zero on Wednesday.

The pond only took a minute to celebrate that wording, "near-terminal Ley".

The lettuce lives!

As for the actual policy discussions, we all know what that will amount to ... a hill of beans in this troubled world ...

Over on the extreme far right, petulant Peta was at it yet again ...

Liberals have no choice but to bite bullet on net zero
Sussan Ley will have to become a tough political warrior, capable of overturning an elite consensus – something she has never been – if changing the policy is also to mean a lasting change in the Liberals’ fortunes.
By Peta Credlin

The pond never bothers with the puppet mistress and this gobbet will explain why ...

...If Australians better understood this reality, and the true cost of net zero, the public mood would shift. But as long as the centre-right is joined at the hip with Labor on climate policy, they’re absent from this fight. Should they change course this week, they might just find they’re back in the game politically.
The Liberals have been in this position twice before: in 2009, in opposition, when Malcolm Turnbull wanted the Coalition to support Labor’s Emissions Trading Scheme; and in 2018, in government, when Malcolm Turnbull wanted the Coalition to adopt the so-called National Energy Guarantee, thus ending the “climate wars” (he said) with a policy that Labor would support.
On both occasions, Turnbull lost the leadership in a Liberal partyroom revolt – and on both occasions the Coalition went on to do far better than expected at the subsequent election: Tony Abbott reducing a first-term government to minority status in 2010; and Scott Morrison winning his ­“miracle victory” in 2019.
After winning the Liberal leadership by just one vote in 2009, Abbott had a further formal ballot; with the Liberal partyroom voting 54 to 29 to oppose then-PM Kevin Rudd’s ETS and a united Coalition soon forcing Rudd to dump his own policy.
After abandoning the NEG in 2018, in the face of MPs’ threats to cross the floor, Turnbull spilled his leadership and ultimately lost to Scott Morrison, who never revived the NEG (even though it was originally promoted by the man who became his deputy ­leader and treasurer, Josh Frydenberg). Morrison won the subsequent election, in part by campaigning against the claimed half-trillion-dollar cost of Labor’s then policy to cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2030
There are two lessons here: first, that the Coalition prospers when it is a strong contrast to Labor, not a weak echo; and ­second, that fundamental policy differences can’t be fudged, they must be resolved.
What’s required is not ­compromise but for the leadership to adopt a clear position and then to vigorously make the case to voters.
If the Liberal Party does dump net zero, which is the only way to oppose an energy policy that has net zero at its heart, Ley will need to argue with great conviction every day that cutting emissions at the pace Labor demands is not worth the cost to the economy, the loss of jobs, the destruction of habitat, the price rises to consumers, the changes in lifestyle, and the deindustrialisation of Australia that net zero by 2050 necessarily entails.
She will have to maintain that a strong economy rather than a weak one will enable us to cope much better with any emissions-driven climate change; the “adaptation” model that former climate zealots like Bill Gates now favour.
In other words, Ley will have to become a tough political warrior, capable of overturning an elite consensus – something she has never been – if changing the policy is also to mean a lasting change in the Liberals’ fortunes.
As for senator Andrew Bragg’s announcement that he’d resign from the frontbench if the party dumps net zero, that just reinforces the argument for change.
If he were to take some others with him, even better; give me a frontbench of lions, not lambs any day!

Why did the pond even bother with that bit of blather?

Well it was the perfect set up for the infallible Pope of the day ...

Just look at the details, a fragrant summary of the follies listed by petulant Peta ...

And that fireplace? What a comely, hearth-warming pair ...

Put it another way ...

There was also the usual TG bashing on parade ...

False consensus on puberty blockers is a danger to our kids
In the face of a health bureaucracy steeped in gender identity ideology, we need new guidelines for treatment of gender-distressed minors.
By Bernard Lane

Bigots r' us...

Why it's as unforgivable as Charming Potato hanging out in Toys 'R Us in the dire b/o flop Roofman.

And the pond was frankly astonished to discover Phillip Adams was still a thing...

Not anti-Semitic to deplore Netanyahu ‘overkill’ in Gaza
While it’s true that I’m sympathetic to the Palestinians, I am no anti-Semite.
By Phillip Adams
Columnist

It was just a two minute effort, and the pond did the decent thing and ignored it, it being another attempt to make Gaza all about Adams - in fact, almost anything in the world is always all about Adams:

I was born a few days before Hitler fired the starting pistol for the official opening of World War II, and was a six-year-old when the US evaporated Hiroshima in August 1945. My nickname at East Kew Primary? Adam-bomb.

And so on, and so a hard, hard pass.

Jack the Insider was also present, but the pond never bothers with Jack ...

Health’s smoking gun as crime fight upstages tobacco excise war
The commonwealth and the states are fighting a predictable battle on two fronts with revenue in terminal decline while having to spend money from other coffers to fix a problem we didn’t have five years ago.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Nothing like celebrating cancer sticks, eh Jack?

The reptiles did purport an interest in the world, with lesser member of the Kelly gang on hand to report ...

New Epstein emails allege Donald Trump 'knew about the girls'
The emails from Jeffrey Epstein suggested Donald Trump was aware of the disgraced financier’s sexual abuse and had ‘spent hours’ with one of his victims at his house.
by Joe Kelly

Without the bromancer's legendary hysteria, the pond was at a loss as to its import.

Isn't it just being as American as apple pie?

Besides, the pond was more interested in the notion that King Donald had now earned the official status of a lame duck president, or so Martk Leibovich suggested in The Atlantic ...Donald Trump Is a Lamer Duck Than Ever, Even though he doesn’t want you to think so (*archive link)

...Beyond the undertones of lost influence, being a lame duck can also suggest a president distracted, disengaged, and biding time. Again, these notions would seem anathema to everything Trump wants to convey. Theoretically, at least.
Voters keep identifying the high cost of living as their chief concern. Trump, meanwhile, has displayed a Marie Antoinette–like indifference to the economic struggles that so many Americans keep mentioning. He has recently devoted time to overseeing the construction of a new White House patio and ballroom, hosting a Great Gatsby–themed party at Mar-a-Lago, and reportedly trying to have the future home stadium of the Washington Commanders named after him.
“His gold-leaf excess and ‘Let ’em eat cake’ tone-deafness will likely wear ever thinner,” Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and the head of the LBJ Foundation, told me. Updegrove, the author of a book titled Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House, predicted that Trump would never “back off his ballroom ambitions,” regardless of how they might be perceived. Trump clearly enjoys the idea that he can build and adorn as he pleases. He will insist on these projects, Updegrove said, “like a toddler unwilling to surrender a lollipop.”
Trump’s Oval Office photo snafu notwithstanding, even casual observers would expect that he will do everything possible to keep himself at center stage for as long as he can. Histrionics are definitely possible. “Like the mob boss with terminal cancer” is Murphy’s comparison, by which he means that Trump will be sure to make himself dangerous to anyone who questions his full authority and treats him as a lame duck.

More to the point, can a viper ever become a lame viper?

There's a lot more golden glitter to be shoved in the peasants's faces before the flushing is done ...

The pond hates to admit it, but such was the dismal nature of today's lizard Oz that the pond strayed to another place, to a naming and shaming of Nazis... Engineer. Teacher. Postie: The neo-Nazis who rallied in Sydney

There's nothing like a naming and a shaming, though perhaps some of them were on the lizard Oz subscription list,  so the reptiles didn't want to play that game.

What else?

Well the pond just had to share John Hanscombe in The Echidna (sorry, newsletter, no link, and this version might be paywalled), what with it being in the pond's Newtown turf ... A strange amnesia that honours a tainted man ...

Inter alia ...

...My introduction to Richardson came in the first week of my career in journalism. It was 1980 and I'd just been hired as a cadet at the Newtown Guardian, a shoestring independent weekly owned by a colourful Sydney identity.
The week before I started, local Labor MP Peter Baldwin was beaten so violently he was barely recognisable. Loud whispers, never proven, were that the assault was part of a bitter factional dispute in the local ALP in which the left and right were brawling over control of local branches in Sydney's inner west. Whispers, too, that behind it all was Graham Richardson, leader of Labor's right faction.
My time at the Guardian was short but eventful. On publication days, we often had Tom Domican, a mate of Richardson's, visit the office to pick up a copy. He was always polite but physically intimidating. Years later, Domican faced charges of murder, attempted murder, and five conspiracies to murder but was acquitted of all of them.
The factional brawling went on, tit for tat. Branch meetings disrupted, fire extinguishers thrown through windows, allegations of branch stacking from both sides. And a sense of menace hung over the neighbourhood. We joked at the Guardian that whenever a car backfired on King Street, we'd instinctively hit the floor.
Through the 1980s, scandal followed scandal with Richo not far from the centre. The Love Boat, in which Sydney prostitute Virginia Perger alleged leading NSW businessmen and politicians, including Richardson, had sex with her on harbour cruises. The Offset Alpine fire, in which a press mysteriously burnt down receiving an insurance payout far greater than its worth. The Swiss bank account linked to disgraced stockbroker Rene Rivkin. The Multiplex involvement in renovating Richardson's family home in Killara. The mentorship of Eddie Obeid.
It was all classic NSW murkiness. Classic Richardson too. Which begs the question: why a state funeral? Of all the people who should be across Richardson's chequered record, it was Anthony Albanese - who as PM leapt to his feet to offer the taxpayer-funded honour immediately after Richo's death.
Albo, from the left faction, who should have remembered the violent shenanigans of 1980s inner west Labor politics. After all, he's occupied one of the key seats all his political life.
It's said a week is long time in politics, which is true. A lifetime is so long, it seems it can erase memories which, for those who watched from the sidelines, remain vivid and disturbing.

Well yes, as Setka was to the Victorian Labor party, so the Swiss bank account man was to Sydney, spoken of in hushed tones as a fixer, a knee capper, a mover and a shaker, a bit like those two endearing hams, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren going at it in MobLand as sociopathic Irish villains, a splendid bit of gangster soap suggesting that at last Guy Ritchie found something useful to do ... (and special mentions to Tom Hardy as their exceptionally droll and laconic fixer, and Paddy Considine and Joanne Froggatt as the mugs trying to be relatively sane gangsters).

As if only the Irish knew how to do it ...

Good old Newtown ...

And speaking of gangs, time to sign off with another celebration of local gangsters...