In which the lizard Oz's current jihad strikes again, and the pond is left with a Groaning, King Donald, editorials, Jack the Insider and YouTube links ...

 

The reptile jihad in the Australian Daily Zionist News is picking up even more steam - how is it possible? - with cartoonist Cathy Wilcox the latest target of the jihaders.

As this branch of the lizard Oz is under a prohibitorum, the pond can only provide an archival link to Nine accused of trivialising mass murder as chair urged to investigate 'Jew-hating' cartoon.(that's an archive link).

Luckily the pond is in a deep ratings dive, so no one has noticed the appearance of the cartoon here, but the pond was proud to feature it, and will feature it again if the fuss continues.

In related jihad news, the creation of an RC has ensured that the reptiles are in full 'howling at the moon' mode.

In other news, the draft terms of the RC advises that the Australian Government has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of anitsemitism.

Inter alia, the wiki on the IHRA working definition included these comments:

In March 2005, Brian Klug argued that the definition's examples proscribed legitimate criticism of the human rights record of the Israeli Government by attempting to bring criticism of Israel, and criticism of Israeli actions and criticism of Zionism as a political ideology into the category of antisemitism and racially based violence towards, discrimination against, or abuse of, Jews.
In December 2016, David Feldman wrote: "I fear this definition is imprecise, and isolates antisemitism from other forms of bigotry." He also said: "The text also carries dangers. It trails a list of 11 examples. Seven deal with criticism of Israel. Some of the points are sensible, some are not." He added: "Crucially, there is a danger that the overall effect will place the onus on Israel's critics to demonstrate they are not antisemitic."
In February 2017, a letter signed by 243 British academics, who asserted that the "violation of the rights of Palestinians for more than 50 years" should not be silenced, contends "this definition seeks to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism" and raised concerns about muddying the definition of anti-Semitism and restricting free debate on Israel.
In July 2018, Antony Lerman wrote: "investing all in the IHRA working definition of antisemitism is just making matters worse. This is the time to take the path to working with other minority groups, civil society organizations and human rights bodies to confront antisemitism within the context of a wider antiracist struggle, not to perpetuate the notion that Jews stand alone."He later stated that "the case against IHRA is so strong" that "the fundamental principle [is] that IHRA is so flawed it should be abandoned".[93] In August 2019, he wrote: "The vagueness of the 'working definition' of antisemitism has licensed a free-for-all of interpretation, delighting opponents of Palestinian demands for equal rights." (footnotes at the original).

Is it anti-semitic to note this example of the egregious and outrageous behaviour of the current government of Israel?

And so endlessly on.

Of course asking the mendacious Minns to help out in this matter would be a fool's errand ...

Never mind, the pond reserves the right to criticise the ethnic cleansing policies of the current government of Israel, and to continue to reference Haaretz, such as its thorny discussion of the government's recognition of Somaliland (archive link) as a state, which came to entirely the wrong conclusion (at least for the hive mind)...

 ...supporting Somaliland independence should strengthen the argument for Palestinian recognition. Palestine doesn't even raise the problem of secession, and international law has repeatedly affirmed its right of self-determination. Palestinians have longed for statehood for decades. If countries will be recognizing Somaliland, there should be no question about recognizing Palestine – and no excuses.

Enough of all that, but the prohibitorum leaves the pond with very little to do.

Once upon a time, this part of the year - with sizzling heat waves and alarming bushires - would have produced a splendid bout of climate science denialism, with attacks on climate science zealots and blind worship of the wonders of sweet, dinkum, innocent Oz coal. The Riddster would have popped up to explain the reef was in tremendous shape, and the Bjørn-again one would have blathered on endlessly that (a) there's nothing to worry about and (b) a little technology investment will fix what ails ya.

At this point, the pond would take anything.

But the reptiles are now such a one trick Daily Zionist News that not even the current climate calamities break through the monolith of the hive mind.

Correspondents might have thought the Minneapolis murder by an ICE officer would have featured, but it was well down the digital page, and came from "agencies", at which point it's wiser to read those "agencies" at a hundred other sources.

This means that old favourites such as Our Henry are no longer to hand, as in Albanese's grudging acceptance reveals much about our PM ...(that's an archive link for addicts)

The desire to bring down the government by using the massacre is overt, and all the pond can do is pluck a few pompous cherries from the morass ...

...The pressure exerted by public opinion became more extensive, broader, more continuous, and more insistent – surging to near-irresistible levels when shocking failures of policy and administration were exposed, as they were with devastating clarity during the Crimean War.

A crucial intellectual shift accompanied these developments. Thomas Hobbes’s assertion in Behemoth (1680) that “the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people” had long been a maxim of English political thought. But public opinion now came to be understood as a decisive check on the conduct of public affairs between elections, weighing constantly on the minds of ministers and parliamentarians alike.

Its function, wrote William A. Mackinnon in 1828, in the first monograph ever devoted to the subject, was to act as “the government of the government”; and nothing short of untrammelled accountability could hope to satisfy it. Concealment therefore became steadily less acceptable. As Walter Bagehot observed in 1867, the new spirit of the age was “not only the toleration of everything, but the examination of everything”.

Little wonder, then, that nearly 400 royal commissions were established in the 70 years from 1830 to 1900 – almost five a year – laying the groundwork for sweeping reforms of both policy and administration. Those reforms were central to sustaining public trust in, and the legitimacy of, the British state during a period of convulsive transformation.

How to make RCs sound incredibly dull.

And just how low could the pompous pundit go? 

Why he even cites a notorious war criminal and mass murderer approvingly ...

Whether the intensity of the public reaction to the savagery at Bondi has durably disabused Albanese of that calculation remains to be seen. But Henry Kissinger was right to observe that what distinguishes great leaders is “not simply physical power but strength reinforced by moral purpose”.

The pond wondered if the hole in bucket man would produce a sermon explaining the moral purpose of Watergate and the bombing of Cambodia, and the elongation of the war in Vietnam for Tricky Dick's political purposes, but was as usual disappointed.

Luckily Dame Groan was to hand, and the pond seized on her offering ...  

The header: Someone needs to tell the Treasurer Jim Chalmers he’s dreamin’; The May budget is likely to contain more measures to extract more revenue from the wealthy. A cut to the capital gains tax ‘discount’ is on the cards.

The caption for the smirking snap of a lad later to be shown in his usual downcast mode: Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Okay, the old grump is as boring as batsh*t (*google bot approved) this day, but the pond had to feature something, even day old reheated biddy musings:

I have always thought that the acronym for the Mid-year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, MYEFO, sounds a bit like a nasty disease. The doctor leans forward and informs you that you have been diagnosed with a bad case of MYEFO, and the prognosis is not good.

The MYEFO for 2025-26 was released in the week after the killings on Bondi Beach on December 14. This was always the Treasurer’s plan, and he was sticking to it. He could have changed the release date; there have been times when MYEFO was released in January. But the fact that very few people were paying attention was a plus, not a negative.

Consistent with his messaging in respect of every milestone economic release, Jim Chalmers boasted about his responsible economic management as evidenced by the latest MYEFO. You have to hand it to him; he’s not backward in patting himself on the back.

“We’ve been able to make the budget better still. That’s because of the difficult but responsible decisions we’ve taken to bank all the upward revisions to revenue. Because of those efforts, we’ve been able to get the deficits down in every year. We’ve been able to get debt down every year.”

But as I sit at my computer with the MYEFO tables in front of me, I wonder what planet he’s living on. Has he really caught the disease called MYEFO?

Let me take the last sentence first: we’ve been able to get debt down every year. Take government net debt, for example. In 2023-24, it was $491bn. This financial year, it will be $587bn. In 2028-29, the projection for net debt is $755bn. In other words, net debt has gone up, not down.

The pond stifled a yawn, and managed to muster a note that yet again Satan's little helper was pictured in downcast mode:

Labor’s goal of achieving a balanced budget has been pushed back as the federal budget is now expected to remain in deficit for up to a decade. Treasurer Jim Chalmers revealed the biggest drivers for this change after he handed down the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook on Wednesday. Interest on government debt, NDIS, defence, medical benefits, and the Child Care Subsidy were noted as the fastest-growing major payments. Meanwhile, a decrease in tobacco tax revenue and a decline in immigration are complicating the treasurer's job.

The aged biddy kept on berating the wretch:

Perhaps the Treasurer was referring to gross debt. But here the story is the same. In 2023-24, the figure was $907bn. It will come in at $993bn this financial year and will top $1.2 trillion at the end of the forwards, in 2028-29. Someone probably needs to tell Chalmers he’s dreamin’.

A similar story applies to the (headline) cash balance. This financial year, we are expecting a deficit of $59bn, which is 2 per cent of GDP; next year, it is expected to be around $63bn or 2.1 per cent of GDP. And bear in mind here that the earnings of the Future Fund are now incorporated in the budget figures.

The Treasurer is not expecting the budget to return to surplus for 10 years – that’s right, for a decade. This will inevitably add further to government debt. Projecting successive deficits for a decade is simply impossible to square with the definition of responsible economic management.

The semantic game that Chalmers plays is to choose a counterfactual (a base that suits him) and to claim that “things have improved”. And by playing the game of creative accounting by putting large chunks of government spending off budget, he then makes self-serving, but fatuous, claims.

For example, the small improvement to the underlying cash balance relative to the March budget (one of Chalmers’s chosen counterfactuals) is offset by higher off-budget spending. This shows up in the headline cash balance, which is worse than the March budget. Not surprisingly, this result is not highlighted by the Treasurer.

Chalmers also makes some further heroic assumptions, particularly in relation to low rates of real spending growth in the future. This financial year, real government spending will rise by 4.5 per cent; it grew by 5.5 per cent last financial year.

The size of government (government payments as a percentage of GDP) has grown from 25.1 per cent in 2023-24 to 26.9 per cent this financial year. Leaving aside the Covid years, this is one of the largest proportions over the past 50 years.

We are now expected to believe that annual government spending will grow by only 1.7 per cent on average for the next 10 years, notwithstanding several elections occurring in that time frame. In other words, it completely lacks credibility.

There is in fact a strong case for Chalmers simply to be upfront about the true state of the budget. Every serious economic commentator can see through the ruses he uses to hide the deteriorating fiscal position and burgeoning government debt. He has no intention of reducing the size of government. He’s no Paul Keating, more Jim Cairns. And just wait until the Prime Minister has his way with the introduction of universal childcare, which will add many billions of dollars to annual government spending.

The reptiles managed to drag in petulant Peta, and this time Satan's little helper was shown in quizzical, pursed lips mode ... Sky News host Peta Credlin exposes Jim Chalmers boasting about the 2025-26 MYEFO, saying Labor’s problem is “addiction to spending.” “Chalmers boasted that this was some sort of economic wizardry,” Ms Credlin said. “The reality is, is that there’s still debt and deficit as far as the eye can see.”

The pond never thought this conventional, dry as dust assault on Jimbo would have to pass for reptile entertainment, but with the current jihad all the go, these are desperate times ...

In the meantime, Chalmers is doing handstands trying to convince us that government spending is not a factor in the uptick in the inflation rate or the likelihood of an increase in the cash rate early this year.

He misinterprets the tact of Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock. But here are her words. “What we’ve been saying for some time is that total demand, which is private and public together, has been above the level of supply in the economy; the ability of the economy to supply what is being demanded, and that’s what’s driving inflation.” The bank clearly does take government spending into account when making its decisions.

The monthly inflation figures, released this week, provide little comfort to Chalmers. The trimmed mean figure was above the bank’s target band. Much now hangs on the quarterly CPI figure, due at the end of this month, in terms of the direction of interest rates.

The challenge for Chalmers is where to secure additional revenue given his obvious reluctance to do the hard yards to reduce the size of government. Notwithstanding the minor income tax cuts announced in last year’s March budget, the reality is that revenue from income tax will fill an increasing space in the revenue requirements courtesy of bracket creep.

But this will be insufficient, which is why the Treasurer is seeking out new sources of revenue, targeted particularly at those on higher incomes and with wealth.

Having botched his first attempt to impose a tax surcharge on large superannuation balances, he is now in position to achieve a modified outcome on this score. The May budget is likely to contain more measures – Chalmers will claim these as “reforms” – to extract more revenue from the wealthy. A cut to the capital gains tax “discount” is on the cards.

The key problem is that high-income earners already pay the lion’s share of tax revenue and measures that increase the tax burden on them run the risk of creating perverse incentives to work hard, save/invest and stay in the country.

But, one way or another, a bigger size of government must be funded. The Labor Hawke/Keating days are a distant memory.

Nothing new there with which to greet the New Year, but at least it's done, and the pond has tucked the first Groaning under its belt. No doubt further bouts of tedium and nausea will follow.

And King Donald is an ongoing distraction, with Seth Meyers (YouTube link) featuring this gorgeous snap ...

It came in handy a couple of times ...

(More on YouTube distractions below)

Sadly the local reptiles outsourced the King Donald job to the WSJ, but these days it's any port in a storm for the pond ...

The header: Trump’s Greenland gambit: A gift to Putin? Trump’s threat to use military force against NATO ally Denmark over Greenland has sparked warnings the alliance could collapse entirely.

The caption for the mad monarch: US President Donald Trump, alongside (L/R) Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth. Picture: AFP

It was just a two minute read, so the reptiles said, but the reptiles dressed it up with a few snaps:

Americans are trying to figure out Donald Trump’s goals in Venezuela, but spare a thought this week for Greenland. The President has good strategic instincts about the world’s largest island, so it’s regrettable that his interest is devolving into a self-defeating exercise in US bullying.

“We need Greenland,” President Trump said on Air Force One this weekend. “It’s so strategic. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”

The US does need to hedge against future Russian and Chinese inroads in the Danish territory. Nearby are vital submarine lanes, and the island hosts US missile-defence radars that protect the homeland. Beneath the ice are reserves of rare-earth minerals. Liberals booed Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton in 2019 when he suggested buying the island, but he had a point.

The caption for the first interrupting snap: Members of a packing crew in Nuuk, Greenland. Picture: Getty Images

The pond should bite its tongue, and avoid suggesting that this was what News Corp had voted for, and now they were in full FAFO mode ...

Yet the operative word was buy – a free agreement among the US, our NATO ally Denmark, and Greenland’s 56,000 people. This week presidential adviser Stephen Miller, in one of his familiar beat-the-press showdowns, declined to rule out military force: “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”

A White House statement Tuesday said President Trump is considering several options, including use of the military.

The invasion talk is probably Trumpian bluster to prod a negotiation to buy the island or end up with some other expanded US presence. But even the suggestion of force is damaging America’s interests across the Atlantic.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was candid that “if the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything will come to an end,” including NATO. The truth of that statement is what makes military action from President Trump hard to take seriously.

But feuding with friends over Greenland is giving Vladimir Putin another wedge to divide America from Europe to his benefit. That means less US leverage for driving a good and durable Ukraine settlement.

Nothing precludes President Trump from shoring up America’s position on Greenland, including mining to reduce US reliance on China. A bipartisan statement from US lawmakers this week noted that Denmark has accepted “every request to increase our military presence on the island.”

There came another interrupting snap: Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the leader of the Demokraatit party and the Prime Minister of Greenland. Picture: Getty Images

The WSJ reptiles were alert, and possibly even a tad alarmed ...

The US could restore its larger military footprint on Greenland from the Cold War – and perhaps ensure enduring access even if Greenland someday changes its political relationship with Denmark.

President Trump could also continue leveraging US relationships as a force multiplier in the Arctic. An under-appreciated Trump Administration achievement is a deal last fall to build 11 icebreakers with Finland.

The Danes spent 3.2pc of their economy on defence last year, up from 1.15pc in 2014, so they can contribute. These alliances are better for US interests than grabbing a new territory – and its domestic politics – against the will of the locals.

President Trump has enough on his hands elsewhere that the Greenland spat may blow over. But Mr. Miller’s line in the same interview that the world is “governed by power” and force is revealing. The left is deploying absurd false equivalences to accuse PresidentTrump in Venezuela of violating international law, which exists only as long as civilised nations exist. Western military power is indispensable.

But the corollary is that successful US presidents don’t reduce America’s role in the world to might-makes-right. Maybe the Greenland affair is merely what now passes for online MAGA entertainment. But President Trump would help his own cause in every hemisphere if he dropped the invade-Greenland routine.

The Wall Street Journal

Poor old chastened Wilcox was reduced to doing the "peace/piece" routine, a staple for 'toons in recent times ...

Meanwhile Jack the Insider did try to offer a local reptile perspective, only to insist that the narcissistic man baby was just doing business as usual ...

The pond decided to strip him of his illustrations, what with time being short. Anybody wanting them can head off to the archive link ...

Donald Trump wants Greenland just because it’s there

The US has been asserting its strategic, economic and political interests in Latin America for more than a century. Venezuela is nothing new.

Jack the Insider

Usually the pond pays no attention to Jack the Insider, but these are desperate times, and the pond turned to him to do a bit of normalisting just because it was nothing new for the hive mind, and he was there ...

President Donald Trump is always treated differently. This was confirmed in the mainstream media who would have us believe that Trump’s military action in Venezuela on Saturday was an isolated attempt by the US to assert itself in the western hemisphere.

Earlier this week, The New York Times excitedly proclaimed via vague superlatives that the US military action in Venezuela was “Washington’s most overt attempt in decades to carry out regime change in Latin America”.

This sort of commentary is driven by an anti-Trump fixation with history not quite erased but sent to the back of the room.

The US has been asserting its strategic, economic and political interests in Latin America for more than a century. It has continued to do so by soft and hard diplomacy and clandestine subterfuge during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

A coup in Honduras in 2009 where a democratically elected president was forced from power by the Honduran military, did draw criticism from the Obama administration but the US did not intervene or extend sanctions. US allies in Latin America regarded the Obama response as tepid.

More pertinent is the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s clandestine operation in Venezuela known as Money Badger, which commenced in 2013 and was ramped up during Trump’s first term. Initiated during Obama’s second term, Money Badger ultimately led to the indictment of Nicolas Maduro for which the former Venezuelan president could now face a lifetime in a US federal prison.

When the immense economic wealth and industrial capacity of the US emerged through the Gilded Age, it became a superpower on the rise, although it remained coy on expansion beyond the continental US.

In April 1898, US Navy battleship the USS Maine was sunk in Havana Harbour, precipitating the Spanish-American War.

The war lasted less than four months with theatres in the Caribbean and the Pacific. At its conclusion, the US emerged victorious and with colonies of its own in Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico and The Philippines. The end had finally come for the crumbling Spanish empire in the western hemisphere, and it vacated the region never to return.

Since then the US has actively engaged in regime change, occupying Nicaragua in 1912 as part of the Banana Wars, seizing Veracruz in Mexico in 1914, establishing a military regime in Haiti in 1915, and supporting military coups often involving CIA black operations in Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1961, Ecuador in 1963, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1970 and so on until the invasion of Panama and the arrest of military leader Manuel Noriega in 1989, which presumably was the reference point in The New York Times.

The rationale for US engagement in Panama was similar to that of Venezuela. At least overtly, it was democracy and drugs. Obviously, the strategic importance of the Panama Canal could not be overlooked, nor can Venezuela’s enormous oil resources.

It must be said that Panama today is a democratic success story post-US intervention. Noriega was convicted of racketeering, drug trafficking offences and money laundering. He spent 17 years in a US federal prison and died in custody in Panama City in 2017 after receiving three 20-year sentences in Panama for his role in extrajudicial killings.

Students of American history have battled with the meaning and purpose of the Monroe Doctrine for almost as long as it has been in existence.

Its initial intent was to restrict the push of European power in the western hemisphere but it has been used to justify mutually exclusive concepts of isolationism and interference in sovereign nations. The foreign policy dictum was written by then secretary of state John Quincy Adams during James Monroe’s presidency. Monroe referred to it in his State of the Union address in 1823.

In the early 19th century, the then superpowers of Europe – Great Britain, Spain and France – held sway. The Monroe Doctrine explicitly set a thus far and no further line in the sand in terms of the colonisation of the Caribbean and Latin America.

The Monroe Doctrine might be open to broad interpretation but the Trump administration has adhered to its principles with the military action in Venezuela and the arrest of Maduro and his wife.

That action has not, as many have opined, brought an end to international law, ushering in global chaos based on the old rough rules of diplomacy that might is right.

Similarly, subsequent threats made by President Trump towards Venezuela’s neighbour, Colombia, which produces more cocaine than anywhere else in Latin America, should be taken seriously. Colombia has significant oil reserves, too, which must give the government led by economist Gustavo Petro a shudder. Often mischaracterised as Colombia’s Maduro, Petro, an economist and leftist, was elected fair and square in 2022.

But it is the continuing vigorous rhetoric over the enforced annexation of Greenland from the Trump administration where logic has taken a holiday. This is the Monroe Doctrine defenestrated with logic hurled out the window immediately afterwards.

Beyond the bluff and bluster, Trump and his urgers in the White House claim Greenland is a crucial strategic land mass. But through the Cold War, the US had seven military bases in the Danish autonomous region. It has since abandoned all but one. The other argument is that Greenland’s rare metals are there for the taking but Greenland’s autonomous government has welcomed exploration by the US and received only silence in reply.

The only way a potential US annexation of Greenland does make sense sits in another element of US history: expansionism. West of the Appalachians, the US has subsumed vast tracts of land by act of war, treaty, purchase and by annexation, forced or otherwise. US military action in the frozen Arctic land mass, a quarter the size of Australia, would plunge the world into chaos for no good reason other than a kind of reinterpretation of Sir Edmund Hillary’s rationale for scaling Mt Everest; that Trump wants Greenland because it’s there.

Make of that what you will ...

Finally, the lizard Oz editorialist was also keen on normalising King Donald, again peddling the bizarre notion that somehow the gilt gold clad emperor might mean Vlad the Sociopath harm ...

Yes, by way of reptile magic, we've gone from the WSJ's "gift to Putin" to "Putin humiliated".

The pond was fatigued at this point and decided on a screen cap ...

It's a wonder there's still a war in Ukraine, what with King Donald being such clever foe for Vlad the Sociopath (if you happen to wander down the lizard Oz editorialist rabbit hole of delusion).

Speaking of rabbit holes, following a recent note by a pond correspondent, the pond thought it should confess to assorted rabbit holes it occasionally goes down on YouTube ...

The Russia Media Monitor is always worth a laugh if you like the company of sociopaths, while the Daily Beast Channel features Michael Wolf rabbiting on endlessly (some might think tediously), and there's Mediaite doing its usual business looking at the disunited states media mess. (The pond also has a soft spot for the Beeb's Steve Rosenberg's survey of Russian papers, though he's been on holydays and is inclined to play the piano at the drop of a hat).

With the Young Turks now aged and well past prime, having been caught selling out to try to widen their sphere of influence, these are three who turn up regularly, even if you haven't subscribed to their channels.

It's more a matter of having your insistent, dumb logarithms ruin your day.

All three are relentless posters - you have to keep hamster wheel churning to make a living - and all three use other sources for recycling and to maintain the flow of content, though Kyle does this by speeding up the other content, perhaps to avoid a copyright strike, or perhaps just because he's bored ...

Kyle's channel is labelled Secular Talk and this is a typical rant - the pond uses the word advisedly - which reuses other content like sea food extender ...

Then there's the David Pakman show, as referenced by the pond's correspondent ...this time recycling Megyn Kelly so you don't have to watch the original ...

Lastly - there are so many others but enough already - there's Keith Edwards, an indefatigable poster ...

And there's always The Bulwark, which has taken to live streaming and everything else to keep the clicks happening ...

The pond doesn't recommend any of this, the pond is just following up a pond correspondent comment.

The only upside the pond can see is that by definition almost anything is better than the lizard Oz in its current jihad mode ...