In which only the bromancer in a state of terror, and Jennie nuking renewables made the cut ...

The saga of comrade Dan living rent free in the hive mind of the lizard Oz continued apace this day ... just look at him glowering away in a fabulous collage which had the pond calling out "artiste, artiste", only for no one to be credited ...

For those that might care ...

INSIDE STORY
‘C-bombs, f-bombs and secrets’: the deal that landed Andrews and Marshall in IBAC
Intercepted phone calls, text messages and secret hotel meetings … here’s how IBAC tracked Dan Andrews and Peter Marshall.
By Damon Johnston

DAMNING VERDICT
‘Intolerable’ stench of Dan Andrews pollutes new Victorian Premier
As Daniel Andrews insists he has been vindicated, Victorian Premier Ben Carroll has labelled his predecessor’s conduct ‘intolerable’ and pledged sweeping integrity reforms following IBAC’s eight-year investigation.
By Damon Johnston, Anthony Galloway and Lily McCaffrey

How could petulant Peta resist howling at the moon? 

How the reptiles yearn for at least one state election victory ...

COMMENTARY by PETA CREDLIN
State Labor’s integrity crisis deepens
Victoria’s new Premier has vowed to restore integrity, but his response to a landmark IBAC corruption report proves nothing has changed under Labor.

Meanwhile, in another place, with fancy numerical rotating graphic...

Analysis Operation Rosny
From ‘Nun Runs’ to factional funds: ICAC’s unholy six degrees of separation
The extended Perrottet family.
A small group of people from a number of large families feature prominently in a bombshell inquiry into branch stacking and illegal donations.
By Kate McClymont

And there was a Wilcox to go with that ...

It seem that the reptiles ability to indulge in selective blindness has now reached the level of the United States, where it's Faux Noise against the world, with coverage of inquiries here limited to whatever panders to the base.

The pond stepped past all that - comrade Dan is but an ancient memory, even for his ardent followers within the extended family - with that lesser member of the Kelly gang setting the pace on more interesting matters.

Progressive triumph in Democrat primary, but a gamble come November
Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Democratic primary is a key progressive win, but his greater challenge is showing progressive politics can prevail at a statewide general election
By Joe Kelly
Washington correspondent

The reptiles were terrified ...

KEY PRIMARY
Progressive candidate wins Michigan Democratic Senate nomination
Out-spent nine-to-one and written off by the party machine, Democratic socialist Abdul El-Sayed has won Michigan’s Senate primary in a result that could cost Democrats control of the chamber.
By John McCormick and Anthony DeBarros

The bromancer leapt in to the fray, and that, of course, made the pond's day ...

The header: Far-left’s Abdul El-Sayed defeats party favourite in major blow to Democrats; The victory of far-left candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for November’s Senate race is an earthquake in American politics.

The caption for the snap of a candidate whose very appearance would send a shiver down the spine of any dinkum white Xian: Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Democratic Senate primary winner Abdul El-Sayed. Picture: Finn Gomez, AFP

The bromancer could only muster three minutes of hysteria, but how sweet it was. 

Some might think the real earthquake was the second coming of mad King Donald, but not in bromancer la la land ...

Extremism rules!

The victory of far-left candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for November’s Senate race was narrow in the end, but it’s an earthquake in American politics.
It opens up a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon between normal, progressive, centre left Democrats and the wild new radicals mounting a far-left insurgency against the party’s values, traditions, history and policies.
El-Sayed beat four-term congresswoman Haley Stevens to become the Democratic candidate for Michigan’s Senate seat in the November midterm elections.
Stevens was supported by the retiring Democrat senator Gary Peters, the Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Chuck Schumer. She’d been a strong election winner before, taking a seat from an incumbent Republican congressman.
El-Sayed, who if elected will be the first Muslim in the Senate, was supported by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the far-left activist base beyond the Democratic Party.
Some of El-Sayed’s campaign was standard progressive populism – tax the rich, expand healthcare, all perfectly respectable.
But a lot of his positions, the ones which got the young activists’ juices going, were extreme, intolerant and plain horrible.
As with all these far-left insurgencies, hatred of Israel and hostility to Jews were at the heart of things. El-Sayed says Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza and rejects Zionism, the idea of a Jewish state in Israel, as illegitimate. He condemns Israel as an “ethno-state”.
Of course he wants to end US military aid to Israel, but also to Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Presumably this is to keep the Middle East safe for Iran.

Of course he's wrong about Israel being an ethno state. It's just an old fashioned fundamentalist theocracy, intent on ethnic cleansing, and carrying out the task with passionate conviction.

But steady on bromancer, credit where real credit is due, the main man who has kept the middle east safe for the mad Mullahs of Iran is mad King Donald: Iran and Oman agree on coordinates of route through strait of Hormuz, says Iranian foreign ministry

Has anyone done more to help the repressive regime stay in power, and perhaps score a new revenue stream, while mad King Donald indulges in stolen valour?

It used to be that stolen valour was a crime in the US, not least for a draft dodger who used the cheap ploy of bonespurs to get out of doing time, but mad King Donald can get away with pretty much anything, and the bromancer will never show the slightest sign of interest.

Instead the reptiles decided to insert another snap designed to terrify the hive mind...El-Sayed beat Hayley Stevens to become the Democratic candidate for Michigan. Picture: Finn Gomez, AFP

Is it wrong for the pond to enjoy the sight of the bromancer writhing in agony and terror?

He has previously condemned US police forces as “standing armies” and called to “defend the police”. Naturally, he wants to abolish immigration enforcement agencies. Some of these positions he moderated slightly during the campaign, and unlike a lot of the left insurgents he’s not formally a member of the Democratic socialists of America.
But he was proud to campaign alongside the influencer Hasan Piker who hates modern America and has called the Chinese dictator, Mao Zedong, one of the world’s great leaders. Worse, Piker said America deserved the 9/11 terror attacks. He’s also said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel.
This is the company El-Sayed chooses to keep, indeed sees as useful to his political campaign. It’s the left-wing equivalent of a Republican campaigning alongside neo-Nazis.
El-Sayed’s primary victory is thus a deeply disturbing sign of the polarisation and growing extremism of American politics.
It’s not so clear that he will win the Senate seat in November. Michigan is a peculiar state. Donald Trump won it in 2016 and 2024. Joe Biden won it in 2020. However, Democrats dominate statewide elections. It has a large white working class but it also has the biggest Muslim population in the US.
The actual American working class has very little time for the uber-left identity politics, hatred of Israel as the first issue, anti-American rhetoric, gross radicalisation and all the other twitches and pathologies of the far left.
That is much more a movement of college-educated young people, awash in ignorance of basic facts of geopolitics, and indeed of much of life.
That means Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who in 2024 came within 20,000 votes of being the first Republican senator elected in Michigan since 1994, has a stronger chance against El-Sayed than he would have had against Stevens.
The Democrats need to win four seats in the Senate and hold all their own seats to have a chance of taking control of the Senate. If they lose Michigan, that will be a huge setback for them, and massively help Trump.
But Michigan’s large Arab minority greatly disliked Biden’s residual support of Israel and many of them sat out the 2024 election. They, like the college educated junior bourgeois Bolsheviks, will be full of enthusiasm for El-Sayed.
Whichever way you cut it, this was a dark day for American politics.

How about recent dark days for America in battle, with General Bonespurs throwing everything at Iran?

What else?

Just to keep the indigenous fuss alive, the reptiles dragged in Mandy from some distant void, so she could yammer away ...

Skip go-betweens, go straight to the remote community
Governments don’t need to give Indigenous Australians a voice – they simply need to listen to the one they already have.
By Amanda Vanstone

Yet again that'd be the voice, not the Voice.

Did the pond need to heed this ancient? Nah, with the pond at last turning off its VPN - d'oh - it could send this Noel Pearson devotee off to the intermittent archive.

That done, some will enjoy it, especially this line ...

I’ve got three-quarters Irish blood (incidentally, potato-farming stock, not lace curtain). I don’t wear green on St Patrick’s Day nor do I blame the English today for the famine that drove so many away from Ireland. I have Irish heritage. Full stop.

Full weird, full pathetic, and who might she blame for the famine that drove so many away from Ireland if not the English? Not so much to mount a culture war, but just to observe reality...

Sure, there was the blight and a number of other factors, but as the Great Famine's wiki also noted, there was this ...

...Longer-term reasons for the scale of the famine's impact included the system of absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence. Initial government actions to alleviate famine distress, which were constructive but limited, were ended by a new Whig administration in London that pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine. Additionally, some members of the British government believed that the famine was divine judgement or that the Irish lacked moral character. Aid resumed only to some degree at a later stage. Large quantities of food were exported from Ireland during the famine, and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy. This controversy contributed to the exacerbation of the Irish issue in British politics, the intensification of anti-British sentiment, the intensification of Irish nationalism and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in the eviction of tens of thousands of households, a situation exacerbated by a provision that forbade access to workhouse aid for those possessing more than one-quarter acre of land.

There's your saviour at work, indigenous Australia, scribbling away and showing what a fabulous historian she is ...

Mandy really is a silly old chook. Full stop.

The pond also walked around Geoff chambering another round.

The poor lad had dropped down the page because of the way that comrade Dan occupied the hive mind ...and the pond felt a little pity, what with him trying hard every day ...

Minister’s no-show exposes Labor’s over-reliance on PM
Labor’s long-awaited immigration crackdown has collapsed in Anthony Albanese’s absence, handing the opposition free hits on one of the election’s most explosive issues.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Credit where credit's due, he did try to stir the pot and help the beefy boofhead and Gina's pet ...and the opening uncredited art work was a major zinger ...

That's the best the reptiles could do? Are they as enthralled with gambling as the Labor party is?

All in all, the pond rates this a better reptile Thursday than most, despite Jack's attempt to introduce some sense of normalcy ...

Have you taken complete leave of your census?
Refusing to complete Census 2026 will cost Australians far more than skipping an election – and the gap reveals exactly where the government’s priorities lie.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Come on Jack, how could you hope to compete with the pond's favourite mad aunt, who routinely loses her senses whenever renewables are mentioned?

The header: Chris Bowen’s absurd plan neglects our energy security, Australia remains the only G20 nation banning nuclear energy while its Energy Minister urges the world to abandon the fossil fuels that still power 90 per cent of the country’s economy.

The caption for the snap, which takes comical portraits of the villain to a new level, and if it's not AI, why on earth would a minister provide the reptiles with this sort of heaven-sent air of quizzical stupidity? The Hon. Chris Bowen MP, Minister for Climate Change and Energy, speaks at the National Press Club. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Sadly the reptiles thought so little of Jennie's rant that after the splendid opening snap, they didn't bother with any visual distractions for what they rated a four minute read, though it really only deserved a one minute noodle skimming:

During his recent visit to Australia, the head of the International Energy Agency warned us “that the dark and long shadows of geopolitics are all over the energy sector now”.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday, on the theme of Energy Security in an Uncertain World, was perfectly timed, coming on the eve of a possible breakthrough in the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
However it turned out to be an opportunity lost. Instead of an energy policy reset, integrating energy security with national security, Bowen remained steadfast in his support for a transition to an intermittent, weather-dependent renewables energy system. His announcement extending financial support for the installation of solar systems on commercial rooftops was an admission that the government would not meet its 82 per cent renewables grid by 2030.
Bowen defended the renewables transition, sticking by his earlier comments that “no war can impede the flow of sun to Australia” and “no sanctions can be applied to wind”. He claimed “no one had said we need more fossil fuels … it was not a conversation being had anywhere around the world”.

Would Jennie mention the recent burnings of Europe and Canada?

Of course she wouldn't.

Would Jennie go the coal, gas and oil route?

Of course she would ...

Bridging the deepening divide over energy policy is a necessary first step. The energy crisis made clear the importance of fossil fuels, with coal, gas and oil accounting for about 90 per cent of Australia’s primary energy mix. Diesel, the industrial fuel, is indispensable for freight, transport, agriculture, mining, defence and emergency services. When diesel stops, the economy stops.
Bowen appears oblivious to this reality and from early days has refused to recognise gas as a transition fuel. He continues to promote an anti-fossil fuels agenda, even in international forums.
As COP31’s president of negotiations he made media headlines at the recent UN climate meeting in Bonn, urging “we need to get off fossil fuels”. It has been his constant theme since COP28 in Dubai in 2023. Speaking on our behalf, he argued that “we don’t need to phase out fossil fuel emissions, we need to end the use of fossil fuels … they don’t have a future in our energy system”. It was an astonishing statement coming from the minister of one of the largest exporters of fossil fuels.
Bowen well knows that achieving consensus about fossil fuels at COP31 is problematic. Even the agreement struck at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels in a “just, orderly and equitable manner” was short-lived. It collapsed last year at the gathering in Brazil. Undeterred, along with 24 nations, Bowen signed Australia up to the Belem Declaration, pledging to pursue the issue outside the auspices of COP and the UN.
Australia was one of 57 nations that participated in a recent Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference in Colombia. The conference’s decisions, including support for a fossil fuel treaty, will be considered at the coming COP31 in Turkey. Australia’s delegation extended from climate groups to Fortescue and was led by an official from Bowen’s department. We still are to learn what Australia signed up to.
A new electrification target of 35 per cent by 2035 is also on the agenda. A catchy slogan shouldn’t mask the impacts domestically on manufacturing, minerals processing and all forms of transport.
There’s bound to be lively debates in Turkey, testing Bowen’s “middle-power diplomacy” as COP’s president of negotiations.
Bowen has never explained how he reconciles his opposition to fossil fuels at COP with Labor’s Future Gas Strategy. It explains that gas “will remain an important source of energy through to 2050 and beyond”, needing “continued exploration, investment and development” and plays “a crucial role supporting our economy … and our export partners”.

Would Jennie go the nukes? Of course she would.

Would she ignore recent events in Europea relating to climate change, including but not limited to, Hungary avoids nuclear shutdown by 'millimetres' as Danube rises, Hungary's prime minister said on Tuesday that the key EU waterway runs dangerously low

Of course she would ... 

Nuke away, Jennie, apparently to solve a problem that's not a problem for the hive mind, what with climate science a hoax and/or a religious cult, though the pond must confess to some disappointment that she didn't go full SMR:

While these debates will continue in international forums, at home there’s growing support for an energy plan that aims to secure energy independence. The recent uranium deal with India gives momentum to this ambition. We are the only G20 nation with a ban on nuclear energy, dating back nearly 30 years.
In a country blessed with energy resources, people rightly question why we are fuelling the future prosperity of other nations but not our own. It makes no sense, particularly now that energy policy can no longer be separated from geopolitics. Nuclear power is not just another energy technology but would also provide sovereign capability. The nuclear ban should be lifted and the market tested for next-generation micro and modular reactors. They could make a positive contribution in meeting the energy demands of data centres.
Bowen will have the opportunity to see the benefits of nuclear energy while at COP31 in Turkey. One unit of Turkey’s first nuclear plant will be operational soon. It’s the first step in its plans for 7.2 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2035 and 20GW by 2050. The plan is for an energy mix using nuclear, domestic coal and gas as well as renewable solar, wind and hydropower. It’s a useful case study, considering Turkey is a late adopter of nuclear energy.
Our national interest is best met by securing our energy independence. We have all the means to make it possible. It just needs an acceptance of reality and the political will to make it happen. We didn’t find this in Bowen’s contribution on Wednesday.
Jennie George is a former federal Labor MP and a former president of the ACTU.

Splendid stuff, and Jennie has almost reached the exalted status of the Bjørn-again one, so monomaniacal, repetitive and obsessive are her contributions to the hive mind...

And now this, because who doesn't enjoy a flutter? 

It could be worse ...