In which the reptiles offer sundry news items, including Tamworth's eternal shame, before the pond turns to the Ughmann for an abysmal closing ...

 

The reptiles went big with ISIS brides this day, as any dinkum fear-mongering foreign-owned corporation would do:

Taking a break from her MAGA cap, climate science denialist, court and judge bashing themes, Dame Slap led the way ...

How Tony Burke’s electorate politics sparked ISIS brides national security debacle
How much longer will Australians tolerate Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke reacting to political pressure rather than making considered decisions in the national interest?
By Janet Albrechtsen

Fundamentalist Catholic, the Angelic one, chipped in ...

Our values on trial: The ISIS brides, their children — and who we choose to be
As debate rages over the return of Australian ISIS brides, sympathy flows to their children but rarely their mothers. The controversy exposes deeper fears about Muslims — and tests what we mean by ‘our values’.
By Angela Shanahan

The pond thanked the long absent lord for the intermittent archive, which allowed the pond the chance to present this dross to correspondents, without having to do anything more with it ...

It was only down the page that the reptiles were reluctantly forced to pay attention to King Donald and rats in the Supreme Court ranks ...

Joe Kelly, lesser member of the Kelly gang, was on hand to observe the folly ...

Joe was full of gloom, as the war with China surged to the surface ...

...Initial reports suggested that Trump was enraged by the news, with sources saying he attacked the Supreme Court and its ruling – labelling it “a disgrace” – during his White House breakfast with governors on Friday morning local time.
Posting on his Truth Social platform last year, Trump warned that an unfavourable decision by the US Supreme Court would be “1929 all over again” and plunge the country into a second “great depression.”
The Supreme Court decision now overturns the basis on which the US President was able to negotiate his sweeping global trade deals and obtain leverage over a host of other countries including China, with the ruling leaving America vulnerable should the trade war with Beijing reignite.
Trump, who is visiting Beijing in April, will meet with Xi Jinping from a position of weakness with his trade policy in tatters after China emerged as the sole nation last year to retaliate against the US President’s trade war.
The Supreme Court on Friday local time found that the IEEPA tariffs were illegal because they gave the US President no grand authority to impose tariffs and that this authority would need to be granted by the US Congress.
Writing the majority opinion of the Supreme Court decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the President “asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorisation to exercise it.”
He said that while IEEPA did grant the President the authority to “regulate” importation, this was not sufficient to justify the sweeping tariffs that had already been implemented.

This is a China war crisis of the first water for the reptiles, yet where was the bromancer? Still MIA ...

He was last sighted on 24th January, furiously scribbling...

A tale of two Trumps: good, bad and bluster
The US President seems to value NATO’s vast security network at nothing. That’s not only insulting, it’s untrue.
By Greg Sheridan

Not a peep since.

Sorry world, we're on our own, and what a sorry mess it is ...

“The Constitution lodges the Nation’s lawmaking powers in Congress alone, and the major questions doctrine safeguards that assignment against executive encroachment,” Gorsuch said in his opinion. “Under the doctrine’s terms, the President must identify clear statutory authority for the extraordinary delegated power he claims. And, as the principal opinion explains, that is a standard he cannot meet.”
“Whatever else might be said about Congress’s work in IEEPA, it did not clearly surrender to the President the sweeping tariff power he seeks to wield.”
In his dissenting opinion, Brett Kavanaugh warned that the “United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others. As was acknowledged at oral argument, the refund process is likely to be a ‘mess.’”
Earlier this month, The Tax Foundation – a Washington based think-tank – estimated that the tariffs imposed by President Trump had raised a total of $132bn in net tax revenue over 2025. Over the decade, the group said the tariffs were forecast to raise $1.6 trillion.
The decision by the Supreme Court now means the administration will need to resort to fallback options to salvage its trade policy and preserve its revenue stream – but the back-up options do not offer the President the same level of flexibility.

That's enough of that - the intermittent archive will sometimes provide, if it happens to be in the mood...

Besides, there are plenty of other non-paywall sources to have a chuckle over King Donald's dismal day with the rats, as he laughs all the way to the bank ..

As a result of these shenanigans, the former prince now known as randy Andy slipped way down the page ...

The malignant Magnay could only summon up three minutes of brooding about what the monarchist rag had helped FAFO into the ether...

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor: Caught in headlights, downfall complete ... nightmare just beginning
After 12 hours in custody, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor faces an expanding misconduct inquiry tied to Jeffrey Epstein emails —plunging the monarchy into fresh turmoil.
By Jacquelin Magnay

Over on the extreme far right, Fergo decided he had to drag Queen Liz into the action ...

Did Queen Elizabeth II think Andrew was above the law?
No senior British royal has faced trial in 500 years. Now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor stands accused, friendless and titleless. Elizabeth I put the Crown before family. Elizabeth II could not. Her legacy is now on trial too.
By Richard Ferguson

It was doom and gloom all around...

...We all want to remember Elizabeth in the best possible light. She was the last great link to the world before World War II and after it. The last stateswoman everyone respected. But Elizabeth was not just some Mother Earth who appeared in delightful skits with Paddington Bear and James Bond. This was a powerful, savvy head of state who knew her deeply flawed children were often the greatest threat to the monarchy’s survival.
The queen had access to enough damning information about her favourite son and Epstein, and did next to nothing. While she retired Andrew from public duties, she never considered taking away the protection of the titles. Andrew still stayed with her and went to church. She even left his disgraced ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, some of the corgis in the will.
What else was a mother to do, you may ask. But if anyone knew she was queen before she was a mother, it was Elizabeth. Her namesake, Elizabeth I, didn’t want to punish her Scottish Catholic cousin Mary either. Good Queen Bess feared spilling the blood of another anointed queen would send her to hell. But the last of the Tudors ultimately put the institution before the family and silently allowed Mary’s trial and execution.
It is now clear Elizabeth II could not summon up the same steeliness when it came to Andrew. At best she was soft. At worst, she thought her son of royal blood was above the law. This trial may yet prove her critics right, that Elizabeth acted more as if she were the last great monarch than a queen who cared about securing the monarchy’s future.
For her not-so-favourite son and successor, Charles III, time will tell what this trial will mean. This King has had enough personal dramas in his short reign already: his cancer battle, his daughter-in-law Catherine’s cancer issues, his never-ending feud with his youngest son, Harry.
Maybe this will allow Charles and his heir, William, to move on. But it is likelier that it will cement the idea that Charles’s short reign has been defined by turbulence and trouble.
When Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I were on trial, even their greatest haters were impressed with them. They were both doomed to die, and dreadful in their own ways, but during their trials both monarchs were eloquent and dignified.

Eloquence and dignity are not two concepts associated with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Andrew’s peers will now judge him, as will God. But the legacy of his mother, the future of his brother and nephew, and the fabric of Britain are about to go on trial alongside him.

Great days ahead ...

After indulging in that republican fantasy - there's always a Cromwell to follow - the pond was more more than bemused by this item ...

Mortified, as Jason pandered to the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The federal government seemed determined to enhance the traditional Australian value ... of chucking the useless bludgers out on their ears ... especially preening gooses caught in a pose-down ...

The pond knows all about the fair go ...

Will they be teaching about the current ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza and the West Bank, or the way that the some of the key founders of the state of Israel were judged terrorists by useless British colonisers?

Yes, and idle propaganda can turn up in the ballot box, and bring down governments that fancy themselves as untouchable.

Speaking of FAFO, the reptiles also went out of their way to celebrate Tamworth's undying shame ...

Barnaby Joyce demanded Pauline Hanson ‘stop the stunts’ in secret One Nation deal
The former deputy prime minister thought he could tame Pauline Hanson’s controversial antics, but colleagues warned this political marriage was doomed from the start.

By Jamie Walker and Sarah Elks

Say what? The reptiles had begun dumping on Tamworth's least favourite son?

The pond apologises, but what with having been born in the same hospital as Barners, the pond is always interested in the effects of the Tamworth sun on mad dogs and stray dinkums ...

The New England MP’s unease with her language was evident this week when he refused to endorse her blanket denunciation of Muslims. In a late-night discussion on Sky News on Monday about the ­Islamic State brides seeking to return to Australia from Syria, she said: “You say, ‘well there’s good Muslims out there’. How can you tell me there are good Muslims?”
Hanson subsequently issued a partial apology, saying she was sorry if she offended anyone who “doesn’t believe in sharia law, or multiple marriages, or wants to bring ISIS brides in, or people from Gaza that believe in a ­caliphate”.
The Australian Federal Police has now received “reports of crime” in relation to those comments, and is assessing them. The agency did not offer any further comment.
Joyce on Thursday suggested that Hanson’s interpretation of what constitutes a “good” Muslim had been misunderstood.
“I do believe there are good people who are Muslim,” he said. “The problem you’ve got is, if people are literal in their religion and that is defined by good as following a literal interpretation, then that is incompatible to Australia.”
His former colleagues in the federal Coalition partyroom and its merged Queensland division, the Liberal National Party, said Joyce’s move to One Nation was always going to be fraught.
“I told him ‘you’ve got to keep her (Hanson) on a leash or the wheels will fall off,’” said another Coalition MP who still talks to Joyce after his defection.
“And there we are, this is not unexpected. Pauline and Barnaby are both chronic narcissists. Most politicians are, but for both Barnaby and Pauline, ‘it’s all about me’. It’s only a matter of time before they clash egos.”

Chronic narcisssists? (To go the full Susssan)

One sure way of telling if the reptiles are intent on a hit piece is to look at the illustrations, and sure 'nuff ... Barnaby Joyce. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman; One Nation leader Pauline Hanson. Picture: Martin Ollman

There's Barners looking like a sunburnt prune who has spent a little too long in the pub and the sun, matched by a classic snap of Pauline, looking like a wrinkled, bitter, shrewish, pursed lip stewed prune.

It was on for young and old ...

Another Coalition MP who remains close to Joyce said his former colleague had been appalled by Hanson’s burqa ploy, the second time she had worn the garment in parliament. She was suspended for seven sitting days and formally censured.
It happened at a time when speculation was rife Joyce was preparing to jump to One Nation, and his then friends and colleagues on the Coalition side were trying to talk him around.
“She did the second burqa thing and he didn’t like it at all,” the MP said.
“I was trying to get him to – at least – postpone his decision for a few months. Get some distance,” the MP said, noting that Joyce’s relationship with Nationals leader David Littleproud had broken down.
“I think that was weighing him down more than it should have.”
The MP wasn’t surprised that Joyce would want Hanson to tone down her language.
“But any person with half a brain cell knows that’s not going to happen,” the MP said. “Pauline is Pauline. She is not going to change.”
The irony is that Joyce – on the outer with the ­Nationals due to his own antics, including the infamous 2024 incident in Canberra where he was videoed lying drunk on a footpath, and his barely concealed contempt for Littleproud - was clearly wary of Hanson and her crew. It took One Nation fully a year to woo him.

There was a lot of goss going down, and a snap of that staffer ...Pauline Hanson and her chief of staff James Ashby. Picture: Jane Dempster

The pond understands what it's all about.

To mix metaphors, the beefy prime Angus boofhead from down Goulburn way is a bear of little brain, and will struggle, and the threat comes from Pauline's mob, and so the reptiles know their duty ...

One conduit for Hanson was her chief-of-staff James Ashby, who gets on well with Joyce’s wife, Vikki Campion, a former journalist.
Ashby, 46, also has a media background. He has been at Hanson’s side since she entered the Senate in 2016, capitalising on the break then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull cut her by calling a double-dissolution election that halved the Senate quota.
Ashby has political ambitions of his own, having run unsuccessfully for Queensland parliament in 2024, and is seen as a likely ­successor to the 71-year-old were she to relinquish or lose her seat in the red chamber.
His relationship with Joyce will be intriguing. Ashby is used to running his own race as his ­mistress’s voice, the power behind the throne in One Nation, and so is Joyce, 58, reborn as a player in Canberra.
If the party’s surge in the polls stretches to the next federal election due in May 2028 – a big if – there might be room for both of them in the parliamentary team. If not, their jockeying could well add another layer of volatility to the mix. It was ever thus in Hanson’s orbit.
Joyce seems to be aware of the risks. A fourth former Coalition colleague told The Australian Joyce was warned by friends that he needed to “change One Nation’s business model”. This person said: “We told him they needed to look like someone who could govern and not someone to just throw protest slogans around.”
Another longtime Nationals identity, now out of politics, but who had cordial dealings with both Hanson and Joyce, said neither was a team player and that spelled trouble.
“When Barnaby was leader it was the Barnaby party, not the National Party,” the identity said. “Pauline runs the Hanson party, and good on her. I can’t see this ending well.”

How desperate were the reptiles in their desire to please the beefy boofhead's mob?

Why the even turned to the Canavan caravan ...Matt Canavan and Barnaby Joyce at the state funeral service to celebrate the life of former Nationals Senator Ron Boswell in Brisbane. Picture: Tertius Pickard

He should have been shown holding a shiv ...

Joyce’s former chief-of-staff, Matt Canavan, a one-time cabinet minister regarded as being one of the shrewder operators in the Senate, wonders what happened to his old boss. Writing in The Courier-Mail on Friday, he recalled how Joyce had taken on Hanson when she proposed ­banning Muslim immigration 10 years ago.
“Barnaby pushed back saying that ‘every group has their ratbags, even Catholics. We had, in the past, the IRA, but if someone says every Catholic is a member of the IRA, I’d say no. They have nothing to do with the religion that I practise. Islam at the moment also has a lunatic fringe’,” Canavan wrote, quoting Joyce.
He continued: “That was Barnaby speaking plainly and sensibly. It is disappointing that One Nation has now locked that Barnaby away.”
But for how long?

Pending the great rupture, the reptiles slipped in a snap of the rogue pair gone wild in the deep north ... Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce touring flood affected north-west Queensland.

Just to wrap up, there was time for a little Shakspere ... uneasy lies the head that wears a Tamworth crown ...

Canavan tells The Australian he was pleased Joyce had eventually sought to separate himself from Hanson’s comments. “Clearly, Barnaby’s the one with the experience and common sense, so if One Nation wants to become a serious alternative government they should make Barnaby the leader,” he says.
As for any second thoughts Joyce might have about joining One Nation? Canavan says it’s too late for that.
“I can’t see Barnaby changing now,” he says. He’s made his bed, he’ll have to lie in it. It might not be a restful sleep.”

Barners has murder'd sleep,
Shall sleep no more, Barners shall sleep no more

But enough of all that, because all these yarns qualify in their own way as reptile "news" stories, as the reptiles try to cope with the consequences of sundry monarchist, bigoted follies, and their own cultivation of the extreme far right ...

The pond's beat requires it to focus on certifiable loons, and who better qualifies than the Ughmann for an abysmal closer?

The header: Our past is not set in stone but chalk; From Arthur Stace’s chalked ‘Eternity’ to a Prime Minister’s silence on Lent, a meditation on memory, faith and the fight to reclaim Australia’s story before it fades from view.

The caption for just one of two illustrations designed to relieve the burden of the verbal sludge: The copperplate “Eternity” written by Arthur Stace on a Sydney pavement – a humble act that became a city legend. Picture: AAP

Here the pond must introduce a qualifier for this five minute ramble.

Australia is Sydney, and the Ughmann's memories of himself and the quaint old town ...but absolutely no more.

Anyone outside Sydney need not apply ...

The childhood memory may be unreliable but it is vivid: a chalk inscrip­tion of a single word slashed on the pavement in Sydney – Eternity.
Our family was usually a long way from Sydney in the 1960s, traversing the country following my soldier father’s postings. But between 1964 and 1966 we were within striking distance, living on the outskirts of a then embryonic Canberra, just a five-hour drive from the Emerald City along an old Hume Highway that used to weave through every town.
My maternal grandmother lived in a Housing Commission home in Malabar on the edge of the eastern suburbs and we visited her twice: once to go to the Royal Easter Show and once for Christmas. We made several journeys into the city on green and cream double-decker buses.
Everything in Sydney seemed big, brash and vibrant. On one of those trips, I recall Nanna drawing our attention to the word Eternity chalked in fading, fluid copperplate on the pavement and passing on the lore that no one knew who the mysterious draftsman was or why he scrawled this one word everywhere.
We do now. Illiterate reformed alcoholic and World War I veteran Arthur Stace converted to Christianity in the 1930s and spent the next 35 years writing the same word on walls and pavement in the hope that passers-by would turn their thoughts to heaven. Prosecuted in his day for defacing property, he was celebrated at the 2000 Olympics when Eternity lit up the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Stace’s Sydney and the mark he left on it are long gone, eroded by the ruthless footfall of time.

Actually it's never gone away, not since Martin Sharp became obsessed with it back in the 1970s ... and produced all sorts of images to match ...

.. and they've been flogging it ever since to hipsters, in the Sydney way ...

And that's just the half of it ... as the Ughmann turned Xian, as he always does ...

These memories of an exciting, optimistic and vanished Australia came flooding back on Ash Wednesday. The news was awash with stories about Ramadan and the Chinese Lunar New Year while Lent barely rated a mention. All three of these events move with the moon, and surely this rare convergence was noteworthy.
Anthony Albanese, had posted a video for the Chinese Lunar New Year and released a statement to mark the beginning of Ramadan. Again, there was no word about Lent from our culturally Catholic leader. Perhaps he had boned up on the scripture readings of the day, which cautioned against pompous displays of piety. Perhaps he just forgot.
But forgetting, too, tells a story.
It is good that the Prime Minister offered his best wishes to the Chinese and Muslim Australian communities, but surely the most important season on the Christian calendar also rates a mention. It is the tolerance of the Western tradition we inherit, with its deep roots in Judeo-Christian beliefs, that allows all faiths, and none, to flourish here.
You can over-read these things, but it is easy to place this wilful forgetting within the canon of a creed that deems white settlement an irredeemable stain on the national soul. Yet the fault is not shared. The burden of guilt falls only on what we might call, borrowing an old colonial insult, the currency lads and lasses. These locally born children of settlers were seen as lesser beings than the British-born “sterling”. The crime of dispossession is thus laid solely at the feet of the descendants of the various waves of largely British, pre-World War II settlers. Later migrants enjoy a kind of automatic absolution, despite sharing fully in the benefits of colonisation.

Sheesh, he's even worse than nattering "Ned", and for some reason, he had to drag Kenneth Slessor into it ... Poet Kenneth Slessor, whose work captured the shifting light and shadow of Sydney Harbour.

On and on he went in a way only an unreformed seminarian could manage...

This dismal doctrine of hereditary sin pervades our academic, bureaucratic and cultural institutions and stains our national discourse. It is a joyless, nihilistic cult with a discipline of endless penitence that is robbing us of hope. A once optimistic Australia seems trapped in a permanent Lent with no promise of Easter.
This caricature of our history is deeply damaging and our national story is sorely in need of resurrection. Former prime minister Tony Abbott has done the nation a great service in producing his short history of Australia, which does not shy away from the stains on our past but does seek to reclaim the good in it. And there is much good.
It is past time to redeem the stories and storytellers of the currency lads and lasses who built one of the fairest and freest nations on Earth. Among those storytellers was journalist and poet Kenneth Slessor. There is no one working in the media today who matches Slessor’s gift with words.
He was highly cultured, steeped in literature, and loved Sydney, warts and all. Save for a couple of “vexing intervals”, Slessor lived on the margins of Kings Cross for 40 years, with the harbour “never out of my window”. In a poem on the hidden virtues of a seedy William Street, his refrain is, “You find this ugly, I find it lovely.”
In an essay on the city he wrote: “The character and the life of Sydney are shaped continually and imperceptibly by the fingers of the Harbour, groping across the piers and jetties, clutching deeply into the hills, the water dyed a whole paint box’s armoury with every breath of air, every shift of light or shade, according to the tide, the clock, the weather and the state of the moon. The water is like silk, like pewter, like blood, like a leopard’s skin, and occasionally, merely like water.”

There's a lot more to Slessor than serving in the Ughmann's ranks ...

...Slessor remained agnostic to the end of his days.
He dismissed the poems of 'Banjo' Paterson, Henry Lawson and all the bush balladists. To Slessor, poetry had only begun 'any consistent growth in Australia' 'with the publication of McCrae's Satyrs and Sunlight' (1909). In 1923-24 he helped Jack Lindsay and Frank C. Johnson, a bookseller, to edit Vision: a Literary Quarterly, which ran for only four issues. It was strongly influenced by Norman Lindsay; it tried to jolt Australian writing out of the bush and into the city; and it promoted Nietzschean ideas, discussion of sexuality, debate about aesthetics, and writing about the inner life. Allied to the magazine, and creating the same sort of stir, was an anthology edited by the trio, Poetry in Australia, 1923. (ADB here)

It would have been fun to see Slessor dishing it up to the Ughmann in the roughhouse Smith's Weekly, but alas, instead, we're confronted with one of those mystifying, and so far as the pond can see, utterly meaningless interruptions ...

At this point the Ughmann reminded the pond that there was a whole world of alternative reading available in the real world, none of which included him ...

The harbour looms large and foreboding in his masterpiece Five Bells. The poem meditates on time and the death of his friend Joe Lynch, a tall, gaunt, red-headed “mad” Irish cartoonist.
One rainy Saturday night, Slessor and Lynch heard there was a party in Mosman and jumped on a ferry. Lynch had his coat pockets stuffed full of beer bottles and, when the wake of a big liner hit, Joe fell into the water near where the Sydney Opera House now stands and drowned. His body was never recovered.
In Five Bells, Slessor says time “moved by little fidget wheels is not my Time”. He recalls when time on the harbour was measured by the tolling of ships’ bells and says he has lived many lives, including this one life “Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells”.
He is haunted by the memory of his friend, who has gone from earth, “Gone even from the meaning of a name”.

“Yet something’s there, yet something forms its lips
“And hits and cries against the ports of space,
“Beating their sides to make its fury heard.”

I remember a lunch with renowned Australian artist John Olsen who, even in his 80s, radiated delight as he retold the story of discovering Five Bells and of finding an ageing Slessor playing pool at the Sydney Journalists’ Club. The poet and his poem inspired the mural Olsen was commissioned to create, which now sweeps across the Northern Foyer wall of the Sydney Opera House. An echo of Joe Lynch can be heard there.

The reptiles couldn't be bothered showing a snap, even though they had one in their own files?

So quickly they forget ...

The poet and the artist are both dead. The old Journalists’ Club is long gone. But their stories remain, for those who care to look.
Memory is a strange custodian. It preserves, it disturbs, it distorts, softens and erases. Without actively working to protect memories, they can fade, and a nation’s understanding of itself can blur.
But forgetfulness is never neutral. If we do not reclaim our past, others will decide what is remembered. It falls to us to beat against the ports of space to make our story heard.
Or, like chalk on concrete, what was once vivid will vanish. 

Speaking of forgetfulness, of not paying attention, of not remembering, of wilfully distorting and avoiding and shamelessly hiding and erasing the past ... let the immortal Rowe wrap up with a reminder of the many ways that the reptiles have refused to dig into the Trumpstein files ...