On its road trip across the United States, the pond fully intended to get to Dollywood, and drove up the road to the main entrance, only to discover it was closed.
It was a bitter disappointment, and the pond's only Dolly anecdote. The pond did make it to Gracelands, and took away the lesson that you can never have enough TV sets ...
It's a measure of Dolly's place that for a nanosecond the lizard Oz abandoned its sundry
top of the digital "news" jihads to go all in on Dolly ...
Agreed, it was a lot of borrowed plumage, from the likes of The Times and AFP, but at least they had a go...
No need to bother with the reptile coverage, there were tributes all over the place, and outside paywalls...
Just below all that however, the Australian Daily Zionist News went about its usual business ...
Top brass issue plea to extend Bondi royal commission
Antisemitism royal commission a ‘lost opportunity’ without an extension: security chiefs
Thirty of Australia’s most eminent national security leaders, including former governor-general David Hurley, say the inquiry could be a ‘lost opportunity’ unless urgently extended.
The reptiles want it to go on forever, an endless treasure trove of daily Zionist news.
For news of a fanatical religious zealot at work you had to head off to Haaretz...
Down below that the lizard Oz added other jihads to the day's offerings...
Eek, is that the poodle?
The indefatigable Geoff was at it again ...
PM, Treasurer face internal unrest, as business chiefs slam mediocrity
The Business Council of Australia has warned Anthony Albanese that Australia’s ‘mediocre’ global competitiveness ranking must be urgently reversed as Labor MPs voice internal budget concerns.
By Geoff Chambers and Sarah Ison
In the full header, the reptiles made clearer their targets ...
Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers face internal unrest, as business chiefs slam mediocrity
Could it be that the reptiles manage to label so many stories as EXCLUSIVE because nobody else can be fagged to join their assorted crusades?
As usual Geoff wielded a double barrelled shottie and chambered another shell ...
Business leaders flirt with Labor after being dumped by conservatives
Union leaders don’t blanket Coalition governments with compliments when the conservatives are in power. They go for the jugular. So why is the Business Council love-bombing Labor?
The pond felt the urgent need for a bit of relieving business humour ...
Go sandgropers.
Just as tiresome as the chambering Chambers was Dame Slap, raging over on the extreme far right ...
The Albanese government is making a mockery of the merit principle within the Australian Public Service.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist
The obvious irony is the entirely meritless Dame Slap rabbiting on about merit, but the only thing to note here was the way that the reptiles traduced a fine Brit sitcom, as if trading off on that made Dame Slap less of a prat ...
The day the humourless Dame Slap manages to match Yes Minister will be the day she resigns from the lizard Oz.
She's in the intermittent archive, personally placed there by the pond for any stray masochist, though perhaps they should try the Percy Grainger solution and get a nice bit of birch for their daily flagellation fix ...
It's difficult to imagine anyone being more tiresome and more humourless than Dame Slap, but Linda somehow manages it ...
I will enter mediation with the government ready to resolve the case on fair terms. If that’s not possible, I look forward to going to court.
By Linda Reynolds
Contributor
For the love of the long absent lord, just go away.
Still making it all about "me, me, me", as if she's the one that was raped.
It was with particular relish that the pond personally stored her in the intermittent archive.
Fortunately, as he often does, the bromancer turned up to save the pond's day.
(Would he adopt the new argot of referring to Lake Ontario as Lake America?)
The header: Will Donald Trump walk the talk on Iranian sanctions? The US President bombed Tehran while letting it sell oil abroad – now he is betting the toughest sanctions ever imposed can force open the Strait of Hormuz.
The caption for the snap of the gesticulating mango monster: US President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday (AEST). Picture: AFP
The pond has taken particular pleasure in the way that the bromancer of late has seen the scales fall from his eyes, his hopes dashed by his Faux Noise kissing cousins' preferred authoritarian leader ...
First, it’s the right tactic for the US. A maximum economic boycott, sanction and blockade of Iran should have preceded military action. For most of the time the US was bombing Iran, it actually allowed Iran to continue exporting its oil, apparently out of a desire to minimise disruption to global energy markets.
Now, Trump says, he will impose the toughest economic conditions on Iran ever seen.
The critical question is whether Washington can get Iran’s most important trade partners – China, Turkey, Russia and the Gulf states themselves – to enforce the US sanctions regime.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared: “Let there be no ambiguity as to the position of the United States. An economic engagement of any kind with this murderous regime will expose those responsible to the full reach of American power.”
To help out the hive mind, the reptiles introduced a graphic so that the readership wouldn't replicate the ignorance of Americans in vox pops when asked a geography question ...
The bromancer kept trying to talk up the notion that the mad King had hit on the right tactic, and - even more risibly - that Bessent had left a shred of personal credibility:
It’s noteworthy that the White House got Bessent to make the announcement. He and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are the two cabinet secretaries with the greatest personal credibility. Though passing all the Trump loyalty tests, the two rarely speak in the hyperbole-charged MAGA Trump dialect of often hallucinatory exaggeration and wish fulfilment.
Is that the same loon who joined mad King Donald in doing battle with the bond markets, perhaps even sending in the military?
Bessent’s attempts to battle the financial markets are ironic, as he worked alongside Soros when he beat the Bank of England and forced the pound to crash out of the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992.
That drama, which became known as Black Wednesday, showed how hard it is for a government to defend a currency when investors believe it is overvalued.
But despite that experience, Bessent took part in a joint operation with Japan to prop up the yen earlier this month – seemingly to prevent Tokyo selling US bonds to fund yen purchases.
“The irony of the guy working for Soros and Druckenmiller who broke the Bank of England back in 1992 pretending that you can do FX intervention alone, and lastingly defend a currency, is just amazing,” Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute and an expert on the Japanese economy, told the Financial Times earlier this month.
But the penny had to drop and it did so quickly, with a "nonetheless" billy goat butt ...
Although Trump likes to wield economic instruments of state power, this circumstance exposes his own distinctive weaknesses. Sanctions that are meant to cripple a nation should be a very rare policy effort. They work much better if they are multilateral rather than unilateral.
An earlier president, a George W. Bush, say, would have brought a formidable posse of allies with him in the Iran operation. Trump instead insults and alienates allies, often imposes absurd tariffs on their economies, and then is surprised that they are slow to respond to his calls for support.
Trump’s general proposition, that the US has done the lion’s share of security work and allies such as the European NATO members and Australia, are, if not free-riders, certainly not pulling their weight, is true. His demand that US allies do more on defence is thoroughly justified. Australia is among those doing very little, notwithstanding the AUKUS agreement.
And it was certainly a mistake for some European allies to prevent the US even using its own military bases in Europe to conduct the initial campaign against Iran. Even the Albanese government, no profile in courage by any standard, nonetheless in contrast to most of the Europeans gave in-principle support to the initial US operation.
Insults allies? Oh come now, surely not ...
Sorry, at this point the reptiles actually dropped in another geography lesson, with little pop ups, though the pond could only be bothered with one example ...
The bromancer wended on down his gloomy path ...
Trump has discredited many of these economic instruments through his promiscuous, chaotic and endlessly changing deployment of them. The Wall Street Journal is surely right to label the tariff slugfest Trump has initiated with Canada, for example, as “the dumbest trade war in history”.
Because Trump never abides by a trade deal for more than a few months, and is always wanting to reopen any deal, engage in new threats, impose new tariffs, international actors, allies and adversaries, have grown very wary of putting any faith at all in any trade arrangement, even a sanctions arrangement, that Trump proposes.
Moreover, Trump’s wildly gyrating rhetoric on Iran, his near constant alternating announcements of peace at hand or the biggest military offensive since World War II – neither of which has ever eventuated – has destroyed Washington’s credibility on Iran across the board.
At this point the reptiles introduced an image which was perhaps a metaphor for mad king Donald, as well as for the lizard Oz and the bromancer, raging at clouds... Project not found
The pond has every confidence it would have been as tedious as the previous two geography lessons ...
Even more important, it’s clear that Trump, for the moment at least, cannot coerce Beijing to do, or refrain from doing, anything. Trump imagined a brutal US-China trade war, which he thought he would quickly win because the US is a bigger market for China than China is for the US.
Instead, Beijing achieved “escalation dominance” by cutting off supply of rare earths and critical minerals that, with astute strategic planning, it had developed a near global monopoly in. Many of the weapons Trump has used against Iran depend on Chinese critical minerals. Since the critical minerals episode, Trump has ceased making any threats against China at all.
All the way through the Ukraine conflict and the Iran conflict, Beijing has flouted any US sanctions and provided critical trade, money and technology to both Iran and Russia.
Far from subjecting China to secondary sanctions, Trump has not even made this a significant issue in the bilateral US-China relationship. Similarly, Trump is once more courting North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Kim too flouts all American sanctions without adverse consequence.
For all that, the Iranian economy is certainly a desperate mess. It may be that at some point Tehran seeks an accommodation, even if the US-led sanctions are not watertight. But the Iranian government is now more hardline and determined than before Trump began his military operation.
It still looks likely this messy impasse has a long way to run.
Relax bromancer, there are new wars to be fought, and what a triumph they are.
How long since anyone mentioned the Epstein files, as opposed to trying to work out the one night Melania stayed over in the White House in the last year?
A friend sent this clipping from Zuck's ravaging of minds:
At this point the pond should note the presence of the swishing Switzer, another reptile the pond personally consigned to the intermittent archive.
What all the critics underestimated was how important deterrence of unauthorised maritime arrivals would become to the integrity of Australia’s immigration settlement.
By Tom Switzer
Contributor
The pond had no time for his nonsense, because he failed to explain how the integrity of the Australian system managed to allow in the likes of the floodwater-whispering Caterist and Switzer ...
The pond also knows what he's trying to do ... reassure punters drawn towards Gina's pet, but how can a ponderous, pompous drongo inclined to drivel match the immortal Rowe and Golding?
And so to the bonus.
Instead of the swishing Switzer, the pond turned to the man most likely to fulfil the pond's ambitions for its correspondents ... to make them so bored and so appalled that they resolved never to read another reptile emanating from the lizard Oz...
The header: Too punitive, too weak: our free speech dilemma; Section 18C is a bad law that has many defenders. But defending a bad law only guarantees social dissent.
The caption for the two snaps: Pauline Hanson and Mehreen Faruqi.
Free speech in Australia is trapped in a damaging legal bind – it is both too punitive and too weak, locked in a maze that damages our society, with politicians, parliaments and judges apparently unable to settle on urgently needed improvement mechanisms.
Pauline Hanson is moving towards centre stage. She seeks leave to appeal to the High Court, having been found by the Federal Court to be in breach of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, and if the case proceeds the High Court will rule for the first time on this provision. It follows years of fruitless political dispute about section 18C.
Consider the disreputable condition of the country on free speech. Hanson’s comment that Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi should pack her bags and “piss off back to Pakistan”, while impolite, is deemed to be illegal in Australia; while pro-Palestinian demonstrations demanding the elimination of Israel “From the river to the sea” along with calls to “Globalise the intifada” – encouraging the murders of Jews – are permitted and apparently beyond the reach of our laws. A good and decent society is broken under such inconsistency and hypocrisy.
How we got here is a complex story. How we escape is equally complex but must begin with recognition of our dilemma.
What a fatuous attempt at both siderism, what a typical Australian Daily Zionist News ploy.
At the heart of "Ned's" blather? The usual images designed to terrify the hive mind: A Pro-Palestine demonstration marches through Melbourne’s CBD. Picture: David Crosling
"Ned" kept up an incessant whining and moaning, in a bid to outdo Linda:
Former NSW Supreme Court chief justice Jim Spigelman said: “The freedom to offend is an integral component of freedom of speech. There is no right not to be offended. I am not aware of any international human rights instrument, or national anti-discrimination statute in another liberal democracy, that extends to conduct that is merely offensive.” He said “offend” and “insult” impinged on free speech in a way “humiliate” and “intimidate” did not. Former human rights commissioner Sev Ozdowski said a threshold at “offend” was too low and contributed to distrust.
But Labor was unmoved and crushed Tony Abbott’s reform. It branded the proposals a surrender to racism and racists. Labor made the debate about racism, not free speech – a winning play. The Abbott government, hindered by its political ineptitude, had no chance. As prime minister Abbott beat a retreat, with public opinion, the ethnic lobby and many Liberals forming a tidal wave of opposition.
Claims by right-wing ideologues that Abbott had “chickened out” were nonsense. Abbott lost in the parliament and with the public, and nothing has changed to this day. There is no way the parliament will reform section 18C. Any effort by the Liberal Party or Abbott to reignite the issue these days would be blind folly.
As if defending the onion muncher wasn't bad enough, the reptiles flung in a couple of wild cards ... Former Attorney General Senator George Brandis; Retired NSW Supreme Court chief justice Jim Spigelman
How desperate is it? "Ned" has to defend that tired old racist trope about furriners needing to pack their bags and piss off back home, the sort of lowbrow humour and vicious personal insult you might find in a pathetic blog when talking about the likes of the swishing US Switzer and the quarry-whispering Pom Caterist:
Having lost two cases in the Federal Court, Hanson said she was going to the High Court to protect free speech. Abbott was supportive. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke was true to form: he played the race card: “If the Liberal Party thinks there should be more racist things they’re allowed to say, tell us what they are.”
But constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey criticised the Federal Court and has raised doubts about the constitutional validity of section 18C, saying the treaty on which it relies, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, does not seem to include the low-level conduct that 18C outlaws. The treaty deals with far more serious offences. Constitutional lawyer Louise Clegg said in The Spectator last month she believed the High Court would invalidate section 18C.
A victory for Hanson would be a remarkable event, securing the victory the Coalition had long unsuccessfully sought. Hanson would become a political heroine. It would be a devastating blow for Labor – being exposed for running repeated campaigns attacking the critics for promoting racism only to finish up humiliated by relying for decades on a provision found to be unconstitutional.
And of course the reptiles would be right on board, because how sweet it would be to add new layers of racism and bigotry to their unrelenting campaigns about furriners, Islamics and the like.
Catholic fundamentalist bigots of the onion munching, mother England worshipping kind would have a field day ... Liberal Party Federal President Tony Abbott
Jackman argued that contemporary judges, notably the NSW Court of Appeal, influenced by the “implied freedom” judgment, were stopping parliaments, notably the Minns government in NSW, from enacting laws to better protect the Jewish community and the wider public. He stated the obvious: that Australia is now “a severely fractured and divided society” far different from the Australia of 30 years ago when the High Court handed down this judgment.
“It would not have occurred to Australians in the 1990s that other Australians would abuse their freedom of political communication to publicly intimidate and vilify Jews,” Jackman said. “The idea that that might have taken place on the campus of the University of Sydney for weeks on end was simply unthinkable. Back then, we associated that behaviour with Nazi thugs in the Germany of the 1930s. There are many, probably the vast majority, who regard it as their democratic duty to stand against this hatred and wickedness and, if they can, to stop it.”
Actually muh lud, if the pond might be so bold, back in the 1930s, a reptile hero thought that Adolf was the really great man of the century, doing great things ...
Still no news of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, a kind of modern times Kristallnacht?
To bring the pond down, the reptiles flung in a snap of the beefy boofhead, though seeing how despondent and bemused he looked did restore spirits a little ... Angus Taylor during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
To cap it all off, "Ned" had the cheek to talk about damaging the best interests of "our society", while scribbling for a rag that's part of a foreign-owned empire that has done its very best to debase public discourse, not least by mounting relentless jihads on anyone who has the temerity to disagree with them...
Jackman delivered two strong messages. First, that this change in Australia’s life should drive the High Court into a “prompt reconsideration of the proper limits to our general freedom of political communication”; and second, that the appropriate branch of government to determine those limits is the parliament, not the judiciary. He said some people might admire the “dogmatism” of the High Court but the parliament had “wider and deeper sources” of information in terms of gauging and acting on the risks to the public. These included advice from the executive, the police and multiple viewpoints.
After 30 years it is unrealistic to expect the High Court to abandon its “implied freedom” doctrine but Jackman has made a convincing case for a revision to this doctrine and for the judiciary to recognise the balance between freedom and protection is essentially a political decision, best made by parliaments, not judges. Until that is accepted, misplaced and outdated views of freedom will damage the better interests of our society.
Actually, it's perfectly easy to point out things in a polite way, as shown by the immortal Rowe ...
What a reference to the pond's favourite painting, seen many a time on many trips to the NGV ...
See if you can spot a grim-faced "Ned" in the crowd ...he's old enough and grey enough ...
And now a little quavering, wavering Dolly, worthy of a lived Tamworth experience ...
"Catholic fundamentalist bigots of the onion munching, mother England worshipping kind would have a field day ... Liberal Party Federal President Tony Abbott"
ReplyDelete"The beefy boofhead loves himself the religious zealots ...but no wonder he wanted to brush aside a discussion of the church.
As an institution, it's inclined to the barking mad" ...
The barking mad religious zealots are in charge...
"National Right (Liberal Party of Australia)
...
"but lost many prominent members, including Tony Abbott, Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews,[3] as well as former Liberal Party Senators Cory Bernardi[dubious – discuss] and Mathias Cormann.[15]
The faction has the largest and most of the young membership out of all the Factions, with Andrew Hastie, James Paterson, Phillip Thompson, Jonathon Duniam, Henry Pike, Ben Small, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Jessica Collins, Aaron Violi, Simon Kennedy, and Claire Chandler all being millennials.[16] Furthermore, former New South Wales Premier, Dominic Perrottet, is from the faction.[17][18]
"After faction member and party leader Peter Dutton[19] lost the 2025 Australian federal election the faction underwent a significant change in leadership as Michael Sukkar (faction boss[citation needed]) and Dutton himself both lost their seats. However, the faction maintained its position as the largest faction
...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Right_(Liberal_Party_of_Australia)
“When a stupid man is doing something that he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”
~ George Bernard Shaw
and - video, or it didn't happen -
ReplyDeletehttps://youtube.com/shorts/WMAAIYUAsp0?si=qzhB3ka1hn0_xi88