In which the bromancer lowers the tone and the swishing Switzer continues his rehabilitation tour and the rest is teaser trailers ...

 

Only in King Donald's America:

We were horrible in Vietnam until we did Thunder One – Rolling Thunder One and Rolling Thunder Two, and then we won.

We were horrible in Afghanistan and Iraq until we did surge ops, and then we won. Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) (Mediaite)

So much winning. If only he hadn't had those baleful bonespurs, King Donald could have been part of that glorious victory which produced incredible footage of the fall of Hanoi (recorded, it should be remembered, by Australia's own war correspondent Neil Davis, though for some strange reason he imagined he was the only western cameraman filming in Saigon in 1975).

Speaking of horrible ... the current excursion rolled on, but the reptiles were obsessed with the home front ...

They desperately tried to stay up to the minute by holding out hope that there was a new regime of moderates in power ready to do the deal, a deal, any deal, provided the deal was done quickly ...

The pond thinks King Donald's current strategy is positively Lincoln-esque or even Churchillian.

The pond vividly remembers the time when Lincoln made a national address advising the South if they just held on for a couple more weeks, victory would be theirs, and who forget Churchill's memorable speech advising Adolf they certainly saw no reason to fight them on the beaches or defend the English channel. (It's not just Americans who can warp the historical record for AI's benefit)

Naturally the bromancer invoked this spirit of Lincoln in his take ...

The header: This was no Gettysburg Address, more Dame Edna on a bad night; The Albanese government is as empty of policy ambition as any government we’ve ever seen in Canberra. It will never willingly pay any political price to secure a good policy outcome.

The caption: Anthony Albanese after a prerecorded address to the nation in his office at Parliament House, Canberra, on Wednesday. Picture: AAP

Poor bromancer. This day the lizard Oz's Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches could only manage a feeble two minute splutter ...

The Prime Minister’s address to the nation reflected the character of his whole prime ministership – short, tactical, small ‘p’ political, pretty hollow if not altogether vacuous, and nothing to offer but surface blandness and a fistful of dollars, or in this case 26c a litre off the price of petrol.
Apart from making sure the biggest number of people possible get to hear about the government putting cash in people’s pockets through the temporary cut in the fuel excise, it’s all but impossible to discern any real purpose in Anthony Albanese’s remarks.
A prime ministerial address to the nation should be a solemn affair, certainly offering reassurance but also a way forward in national policy and resolve. But the Albanese government is as empty of policy ambition as any government we’ve seen in Canberra.
This government will never willingly pay any political price to secure a good policy outcome.
The gravity of the national crisis we face is mocked by the bland emptiness of the PM’s address. The Iran war should necessitate four urgent debates – our lack of oil, gas and fertiliser security; our acute fiscal delinquency and exposure as increasingly a high-debt country; our general inability to mobilise as a nation in the face of any external crisis because we lack relevant capabilities; and our woeful lack of any defence muscle.

No mention of the real villains who have produced this grave national crisis, just a dumping on Albo ...The PM addresses Australians as the nation braces for what he describes as an unprecedented global crisis.

The Reichsmarschall couldn't do anything because of his lack of kit ...

Thus we couldn’t send navy ships to help clear the Strait of Hormuz if we wanted to because we don’t have modern warships equipped to handle simultaneous missile and drone attacks, much less modern mine-clearing vessels.

And what of King Donald and his minions, and their contribution to the new strategy of "we broke it, you own it"?

The pond couldn't help but scrape this from last night's Colbert monologue ...

Some days the pond wonders if the Pope's a Catholic, other days whether the bromancer is one of them, or just a war monger whose prayers for the kit to wage war in the straits should be rejected ...

These glaring inadequacies all reflect the supply side strangulation we’ve imposed across our economy.
We don’t produce our own fuel, we can’t transport our own cargo, we don’t process or transform the vast natural resources we possess, we are so expensive and suffer such dismal productivity that no manufacturing enterprise would locate itself in Australia without massive government subsidies.
This is completely unsustainable. And history teaches a bitter lesson – if a situation is unsustainable, it won’t be indefinitely sustained.
Yet the Albanese broadcast addressed none of this. There was not a speck of recognition of the deep structural reforms we need to undertake to build national resilience.
There is an embarrassing quality to this address – so bland and banal that you would think it had been written by Barry Humphries as a parody of Australian mediocrity. This was no Gettysburg Address, more Dame Edna on a bad night.

The complete cheek - scribbling that prepper isolationist tosh for a rag that's an outpost of an American corporate empire...

There's got to be a 'toon to celebrate where that sort of yearning for the chance to join in the excursion might take us..

Beyond the valley of the pathetic...

... but how lucky is the pond that the intermittent archive continues to be broken, and so the pond can avoid petulant Peta, always a Thursday blight ...

That's more than enough of a teaser trailer for those wanting to know what they missed.

The pond couldn't give two hoots about the hapless Victorian Liberal party, paying endlessly for their importation of bizarre far right Xians and transphobic warriors.

The nub of PP's piece was transphobia and bigotry, and naturally petulant Peta was deeply sympathetic to the bigot in chief, a troublemaking troll intent on destroying any hint of moderation (all the more comical because a moderate "liberal" in Victoria is usually to the far right of Genghis Khan):

...Deeming is the upper house Liberal MP who helped to organise a women’s rights rally in 2023 that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis; who was accused by her then leader, John Pesutto, of herself being a neo-Nazi sympathiser; who was subsequently expelled from the Liberal partyroom, only successfully to sue Pesutto for defamation; and who was then readmitted to the partyroom and promoted – only to be beaten last weekend for preselection by a serial candidate accused of ethnic branch-stacking. Who was then dumped as the endorsed candidate himself for giving a convicted pedophile a glowing pre-sentence personal reference despite knowing what it was for and subsequently denying that he’d done so.
You cannot make this stuff up, can you?
There are recent precedents where head office has simply endorsed candidates, but instead of doing this with Deeming – beaten by someone who should never have been allowed to run – the Victorian Liberal Party has now called for a fresh preselection with nominations to close at noon on Thursday.
Already, moderates are hitting the phones to marshal the ousted Dinesh Gourisetty’s bloc of votes against Deeming, so it is hard to see that she will face a fair fight. Gourisetty, it should be noted, donated to Pesutto’s legal defence, as disclosed in the latest parliamentary returns (as did Heath Williams and former MP Louise Staley, who both publicly abused Deeming online this week).
Right now, Deeming is considering her position, unsure whether to give the Libs one last chance to treat her fairly or to walk, perhaps to join One Nation, a party that would welcome her with open arms, as a conservative woman who has become a hero to everyone who thinks trans rights should not trump women’s rights.

Update: Huzzah, the intermittent archive is back. It's very slow and constipated, but it can help out those who want the whole bloody mess...

The pond usually avoids transphobic bigots, but couldn't resist this 'toon comment:

(More from Dudley Dursley at The Independent)

Speaking of the batty fair right, Jack the Insider attempted to cope with a cop killer in a bog standard way, by reverting to Ned, the real one, not the fake ones that scribble for the lizard Oz:

The pond apologises for the bittiness sans archive, but the pond has about as much time for sov cits as it does for Victorian liberal party loons.

Eventually Jack got around to noting that in fact it was a movement deeply embedded in the far right, and therefore in sympathy with Pauline, Barners and the lizard Oz's radical agendas:

...On ABC radio on Tuesday, Anthony Albanese faced criticism for stating it was “good” that Freeman had been killed.
Meanwhile, there was nowt but an eerie silence from Pauline Hanson and One Nation. The second rising of the PHON souffle has brought with it a substantial boost to the party’s membership.
Many of those self-identifying financial members of PHON were active on X declaring without evidence that Freeman was murdered by police or offering some twisted justification for Freeman’s calculated crimes.
A clear statement from the One Nation leader denouncing Freeman and offering support for police would be the best way to settle those concerns.
For much of the past seven months the media has attempted to define the sovereign citizen phenomenon, often in a confusing and unhelpful way. Suffice to say, those who hold these views have been taught that the state is illegitimate and its foot soldiers are the enemy. Often falsely described as doomsday preppers who largely keep to themselves, sovereign citizens sanction and promote violence against their communities.
The movement’s influencers use a grab bag of pseudo-legal concepts. Some argue Australia’s Constitution is invalid because it was not ratified by the UK parliament (untrue) while others claim the Australia Act (1986), which severed the remaining legal ties with the UK, was unconstitutional (also untrue). A lot of legal cherrypicking goes on. Some sov-cits cling to concepts in 17th-century Portuguese maritime law. Regardless, the view is that the state has no jurisdiction over the individual and thus taxes are not payable, fines can be ignored and, at its most deranged, police and members of the public are fair game.
The sovereign citizen movement began in the 1980s in the US midwest. 

And this is why you might be better off to reverting to the wiki on the subject:

The movement appeared in the U.S. in the early 1970s and has since expanded to other countries; the similar freeman on the land movement emerged during the 2000s in Canada before spreading to other Commonwealth countries.

Out by a decade or so Jack.

And again ...

The sovereign citizen movement originated from a combination of tax protester ideas, 1960s–70s radical and racist anti-government movements and pseudolaw, which has existed in the U.S. since at least the 1950s. The movement's belief in the illegitimacy of federal income tax gradually expanded to challenging the legitimacy of the government.
The concept of a "sovereign citizen" whose rights are unfairly denied appeared in 1971 within the Posse Comitatus as part of the teachings of Christian Identity minister William Potter Gale. The Posse Comitatus, whose name derived from the historical militias led by local sheriffs, was a far-right, anti-government movement that denounced income tax, debt-based currency, and debt collection as tools of Jewish control over the United States. The roots of the sovereign citizen movement were thus strongly associated with white supremacist and antisemitic ideologies. Gale's racist beliefs were far from unique, but he innovated by devising a "legal" philosophy about the government's illegitimacy. Posse Comitatus members used the term "sovereign citizens" to convey the idea that they were entitled to enforce their interpretation of the Constitution.
After originating in that particular group, the sovereign citizen concept went on to influence the broader tax protester and Christian Patriot movements. Until the 1990s, observers primarily classified the Posse Comitatus as a tax-protest movement rather than an outright far-right extremist group. The Posse Comitatus, Christian Identity, and militia movements did not fully overlap, but they shared members and influenced one another. (see the wiki for the footnotes)

Yes, it's the hippies and bloody weird Xians again, never a good mix.

And the Xians can now count the likes of the bloodthirsty Pete Kegsbreath amongst their white nationalist membership.

Jack tried to cope by ignoring the Xian component:

..It was a two-way con and remains so. Sov-cit influencers would travel from town to town charging susceptible and financially vulnerable people the price of entry to the town hall meetings. Those who chose to take up the legal mumbo jumbo then would be charged an additional fee to receive worthless documents and dismal instructions.
This led to a whirlwind of tax fraud, and desperate farmers in the US being convicted and sentenced to long spells in prison. In 2015 the FBI declared the movement a domestic terror group. Fraudsters and charlatans were replaced with gun-toting nihilists.
There are various hubs of the movement around Australia, including in the wheat belt district around Geraldton in Western Australia, 400km due north of Perth. Sov-cits bob up with alarming frequency in the courts in the Northern Rivers region of NSW, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland in Queensland and in Freeman’s old stomping grounds in Victoria’s Alpine district.
It is these people who radicalise others that police and intelligence agencies should be keeping an eye on. They are the nihilistic equivalent to Islamist hate preachers.
The Islamists may offer greater risks to the community but they have structure and organisation, making it easier to prohibit one group or another. The sovereign citizen movement is amorphous and dislocated. In some places the movement is restricted to relatively harmless idiots who choke up the courts with pseudo-law nonsense. Others demand violence in internet echo chambers directly to the gullible.
The greatest concern is not that Freeman may have received assistance from people of like mind in the sovereign citizen space but the sheer number of people who regard him in life and now in death as a hero.

Oh Jack, Jack, does that small bunch of weirdos in any way compare to the sheer number of people who watch Faux Noise, and have King Donald as their hero, a hero who accepts the advice of the Emeritus Chairman that an Iranian excursion might be a golly good vacation? (The archive clapped out again, please leave a link in the comments if you get it working

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fwhy-sovcits-cast-dezi-freeman-as-a-hero%2Fnews-story%2Fc09baaaae91c8fdb77a94e75e1c7a433?amp).

And speaking of naughty boys, so to the swishing Switzer, who lost his cool this day, while still on his extended rehabilitation tour ...

The header: I love America but this President is a detestable figure; Rarely, if ever, has the US stumbled so swiftly to the brink of a disaster, and done so despite clear warnings of the risks involved.

The caption for the King: President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters after signing an executive order in the Oval Office. Picture: Alex Brandon / AP Photo

That image has to be worth a 'toon ...

The swishing Switzer was careful to make sure he didn't tread on too many reptile toes, and so opened by paying cautious homage to the bromancer ...

I have long admired America – its power, its ideals and its central role in underwriting the global order. I have no time for what Greg Sheridan calls reflexive anti-Americanism. I want the US to thrive. Its success matters to the world – and to Australia.

Oh dear, that could only mean a giant billy goat butt was coming, and the swishing Switzer let it rip ...

Yet I have reached a deeply uncomfortable conclusion: the current President is a detestable, pitiable figure whose reckless conduct over Iran will have damaging consequences. Rarely, if ever, has the US stumbled so swiftly to the brink of a disaster – and done so despite clear warnings of the risks involved.
The Iran debacle reflects not only Donald Trump’s poor judgment but also his impulsive intervention abroad, untethered from clear objectives or a coherent definition of success. This was a President who devoted barely one minute to Iran in a two-hour State of the Union address days before launching this war. Yet, when presented with a rare opportunity to strike at the regime’s leadership, he acted without any serious regard for the likely consequences.

And ditto the Emeritus Chairman who encouraged the excursion?

Let's not get too racial ... A resident weeps while talking on the phone near a residential building that was hit in an airstrike in the west of Tehran, Iran. Picture: Majid Saeedi / Getty Images

The pond always marvels at the way that the reptiles can ignore their US kissing cousins and cheerleaders in chief at Faux Noise ...

Before February 28, Tehran’s leverage over global energy markets was contained; it sat astride the Strait of Hormuz, controlling a mere 4-5 per cent of the world’s energy exports – essentially its own output.
Now the consequences may be far graver. Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz means its influence could extend over as much as 20 per cent of global energy flows. Factor in the Houthis’ ability to disrupt commercial shipping in the Red Sea, and close to a third of the world’s energy supply could fall under Iranian-aligned control – an astonishing and wholly avoidable strategic reversal.
Let’s be clear: the US-Israeli strike all but guaranteed retaliation. A regime that once exercised its leverage with caution is now acting as if it faces an existential crisis – which, from Tehran’s perspective, it does.
It is exploiting its strategic position to disrupt vital arteries of global commerce. And Washington’s allies, never consulted before the February 28 operation, are left to absorb the economic and strategic shockwaves.
Increasingly, Trump appears to be operating in a world of his own making. There are no direct talks with Iran, only faint, indirect contacts through intermediaries. And the Iranians, in no hurry to negotiate, are content to let Trump dangle in the wind – a spectator to a process he neither controls nor fully understands. At the same time, Trump is now so deeply enmeshed we are told he must stay the course, finish the job and topple the regime. If that requires ground troops, so be it.
The notion that the US could topple or subdue the regime with 10,000 or 20,000 troops is fanciful.

Switzer was interrupted by a snap of King Donald and war minion Kegsbreath ... US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and US President Donald Trump walk to board Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. Picture: Jim Watson / AFP

Credit for this rehabilitation tour. At least the swishing Switzer didn't take the bromancer's easy way out with cheap jibes about Lincoln and Dames (as if the pond would ever joke about a Dame Slap or a Dame Groan) ...

Iraq required more than 200,000 personnel to conquer and occupy a smaller, less populous country. Iran, with a population of more than 90 million – nearly twice that of Iraq – and a landmass almost four times as large, would be an altogether more formidable challenge. To embark on such a venture without overwhelming force, clear objectives and any real public support in an election year is not strategy; it is madness.
Some have floated the idea of seizing Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil terminal. But even if tactically successful, it would solve little. Holding it would be difficult; destroying it – along with the desalination plants Trump has threatened to target unless a deal is reached before April 6 – would amplify the global economic shock.
Others point to precision raids to seize Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. But these facilities are buried, fortified and heavily defended – in many cases beyond the reach of conventional strikes. Any such operation would be immensely complicated and fraught with risk.
We should be angry. Trump is not our President; Australians did not vote for him. Yet we will bear the consequences of his reckless decisions: rising inflation, soaring petrol prices and the looming threat of fuel shortages.
We are paying for a war that was never properly planned. The goals – preventing Iran from going nuclear, perhaps even regime change – are noble. But to say again: there was no credible plan for what would follow the strikes, no thought for keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, no preparation for the economic shockwaves now rippling towards us.

Inevitably Albo turned up ... Anthony Albanese during Question Time. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

And the swishing Switzer had some splendid advice for him.

Keep tugging the forelock ... apparently on the basis of recent revelations about the quarry puppy killer's partner, King Donald might like a little cross-dressing of the bimbo or the Dame Everage kind ...

Yet anger is not a policy. Australia will soon find itself in a far more precarious position: short of fuel and increasingly dependent on others – the result of our crazy reliance on imported energy, compounded by our failure to reinvigorate domestic exploration and production.
Our Asian partners will help where they can but they cannot supply what they do not have. In a tight market, goodwill is no substitute for capacity. Our liquefied natural gas and coal will be in high demand, but any gains may be offset by the cost of securing the fuel we lack. Access will depend not only on our ability to pay but also on the willingness of key suppliers – above all the US – to prioritise our needs over others.
The cold hard reality demands diplomatic dexterity. However justified our criticism of the Iran misadventure, our leaders cannot afford to antagonise Trump. He is, after all, notoriously sensitive to slights and inclined to view alli­ances in personal, transactional terms. The national interest requires that we remain in a position to call on American support if circumstances deteriorate.
Australians are entitled to be upset by Trump’s conduct.
But these are not conditions in which we can indulge the comfort of outrage. In the end, prudence must prevail because we may yet find ourselves dependent on the power we most wish had acted differen­tly.
Tom Switzer is presenter of Switzerland, a podcast about politics, modern history and international relations.

Prudence, dear prudence is all ... won't you come out to play? Just ask the infallible Pope...

And so to a final teaser trailer because Marriott of The Times had been imported, and dressed up with a terrible stock photo opening image...

Because the pond was triggered by this, the pond decided to offer the rest as plain text:

...In my adolescence a smartphone was an incontestably glamorous object; the best indicator of prosperous and indulgent parents. And to teenagers in suburban Newcastle even a Twitter account signalled a certain cosmopolitan savoir-faire – what better sign of sophistication than an acquaintance with the moment-by-moment musings of Sir Stephen Fry?
Now everyone has a smartphone. And a social media habit, to judge by the popularity of the slang words slop and brainrot, no longer signals smart thinking. As we become more attuned to the deceits of online life, the kind of person who constantly posts about their holidays or career no longer seems desirable but rather desperate. A certain mysterious absence is the classier move.
After Christmas a friend remarked to me: “This year no one had their phones out at all and we talked about how this was something of a new decorum.” Some of his family, he suspected, now viewed mindless scrolling as “common”. Doubtless, many middle-class people are sincerely concerned about declining IQ and the teenage mental health crisis, but I think restricting your phone use may also work as a subtle status signal. Perhaps as a sign of willpower. Perhaps it shows you are in the know: you have read Jonathan Haidt; you subscribe to the kind of broadsheet newspaper that runs articles about “digital detoxes”.
Economically, at least, smartphone dependency is a sign of low status. It has sometimes been observed that the major divide in modern employment is whether you work “above or below the API” – the application programming interface.
Do you issue instructions to software or do you take instructions from software? Uber drivers, Deliveroo bikers and other workers in the digital precariat live at the mercy of their phones. The shrill ping of a delivery app is the 21st-century factory hooter. The higher you are in the economic hierarchy, the less likely you are to be fired if you don’t leap into action at the prompting of an app.
Importantly, middle-class status has long been defined by an ethic of ostentatious self-denial.
Think of those prosperous burghers of Amsterdam in the paintings of Rembrandt, the world’s first international capitalists, dressed not in purple robes but in sober black. In an age of abundant calories, you express your status more effectively through veganism and marathons than through obesity. It is not impossible to imagine that the statusful middle-class activities of the future will be book clubs, maths olympiads and tech fasts.
Even those middle-class parents who are unable to tame their own phone addictions now control their children’s screen time with hypochondriac vigilance. According to a recent New York Times report, you can lose your job as a nanny to an American upper-bourgeois family if you so much as look at your own phone screen in the presence of the child.
This environment is a major change from the atmosphere of unreflecting technological utop­ian­ism in which most adults were raised. It may be that in the coming decades the children of the upper middle classes will not be able to touch their phones without a twinge of the information-age equivalent of Catholic guilt. Another piece in The New York Times followed a cohort of university students giving up their phones. These students, obviously, were not studying at their local state universities but at an exclusive liberal arts college.
This is not to endorse snobbery, only to observe that status competition is an important driver of cultural change. Throughout history baby names, table manners and habits of dress have trickled down through society. The prospect of a zombified tech-addicted future is eminently possible.
But if we ever do manage to break the grip of the smartphone on human attention, I suspect the story will be as much about status as about legislation.
Though I suspect my own dream of an indoor scrolling ban remains elusive.
The Times

Good luck with all that, and this is probably not the right time to confess that the pond has never ever used Uber, and nor has it ever made a food delivery order of any kind.

Hold on a nervous tick, did the pond say that this was the last teaser trailer?

The pond should at least note that the meretricious Merritt was out and about ...

The pond won't go on with him, he's always a stupendous bore, and his conclusion was suitably boring ...

...There is one more issue. In support of its campaign, news.com.au cited the appalling treatment of Diane Lucas, administrator of the Canberra Rape Crisis Centre, who was jailed for refusing to hand over a rape survivor’s counselling notes when served with a subpoena.

But this predates Shaw’s 1997 legislation.

Robyn Gilbert, a senior solicitor with Legal Aid’s Sexual Assault Communications Privilege Service, outlined the Lucas prosecution for the NSW Judicial Officers’ Bulletin in February last year.

She wrote that after Lucas’s jailing in 1995, “calls for reform followed and in 1997 the (NSW) parliament created the sexual assault communications privilege”.

This history is important. Our criminal justice system has rightly addressed an imbalance that previously existed, where sexual assault survivors often faced aggressive cross-examination and significant barriers to conviction.

Now, we have a careful balance between the rights of accuser and defendant. Only by maintaining this equilibrium can we ensure our system is fair.

What's really notable about all that?

It's yet another attempt by the reptiles at the lizard Oz to pour cold water on a news.com.au campaign?

Note the way that the meretricious Merritt contends that the news.com.au campaign is "fraught">

Are the reptiles miffed about being beaten by the allegedly more "liberal" website? 

Is it another shot across the bows, in a war already noted by the venerable Meade last week in Murdoch mastheads at odds?

Whatever, and as usual, the pond will tune in to the Weekly Beast tomorrow to see what's what in reptile land.

For the moment, time to end with the news that Doonesbury still survives in a weekly format, and went on that march ...

Put it another way ...

The pond has no idea if anyone actually watches these on the deliberately smart phone unfriendly pond, but whatever, they amuse the pond ...

News from America ...

And news from Britain trying to cope with America ... wasn't Brexit an absolutely spiffing idea?