In which the pond catches up with the bromancer in a special late arvo slot ...

 

The pond prides itself on being something of a record of certain reptile scribes, the bromancer, his hysteria and his war mongering ways being one of them ...

The stupidity and the vanity of this pride always escapes the pond, but then the pond always regarded sliding down the big snake in Snakes and Ladders as great fun ...

The Pride snake would get you right back to the start, and that's a sensation the pond always feels when reading the bromancer.

Never mind, the point of this late arvo special edition is simply to keep up with the bro, because the pond missed the chance on the weekend to celebrate the latest bout of epic bro FUD ...

It's designed for specialists and like the lands above the faraway tree, it will be swept away by morning

Now because it's a catch-up, the pond isn't going to be constantly interrupting. 

This will be relatively pure and undiluted bromancer fare, though that title is deceptive. The bro in his original splash had the world at the bring of world war ...

World war or world chaos? In the end, it's all one to the bro in full hysterical flight ...

Whether world war or world chaos, it means the call for the bro to be dragooned in as Generalfeldmarschall grows more urgent by the day ...

You see? We need a Generalfeldmarschall to whip the country into shape, and it can't be this useless dogbody ...

Give the bro full rein and we can have a decent, dinkum war by Xmas ... and for those who wonder what good we did in places such as Iraq or Afghanistan, for shame, armchair generals of the bro kind had much fodder to scribble about from the safety of their armchairs ...

At this point the reptiles helped out with a snap ...

Anything to break the monotony of the screeching and the caterwauling ...

Ah the Ruskis, and a snap followed ...

Pause for a moment and reflect. What's happened to the US Ukraine package? Blocked by the GOP. And who runs Faux Noise, which routinely issues running orders to the GOP on behalf of the tangerine tyrant? 

Why it's the Emeritus Chairman and his spawn, and haven't they spawned some doozies ...

...Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene defended the prospect of Tucker Carlson interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin amid rumors that the former Fox News host is in Moscow.

Carlson was spotted in Moscow in the audience at the world-famous Bolshoi Theater, according to Russian Telegram channel Mash.

The report that Carlson is in Russia sparked speculation that he might interview Putin while there, who has been largely isolated from the world stage following his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

"Democrats and their propagandists in the media are spasming at the prospect of Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin," Greene wrote on X.

The Georgia Rep. added: "They HATE when someone like Tucker goes 'off script.' We have a free press in this country and its people like Tucker Carlson who we depend on to speak the truth!"

Carlson, who has defended Putin and echoed Kremlin talking points, said last year that he had previously tried to interview the Russian leader but that the US government had stopped him.

He has been one of the strongest voices of opposition to US support for Ukraine and implied that the West is to blame for the invasion after admitting Ukraine into NATO.

Carlson is often mentioned on Russian TV by propagandists. Leaked memos from the Kremlin to Russian state media in the week after the invasion instructed them to use "as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson."

Back to the bro, still ranting on, apparently unaware that his bosses have done much to help Vlad the Impaler ...

As for Israel, it was this reading that originally set the pond off, Simon Tisdall in the Graudian ...At war both within and without, Israel is experiencing a brutal coming of age.

The pond will allow a mention of "democracy", because Israel has been democratic in the way that the southern states were before the civil war ...

...Fears for Israel’s democracy have deepened since the Gaza war began. Netanyahu has refused to resign, allow fresh elections or take personal responsibility for 7 October security failings. Recent polling suggests most Israelis are unhappy with him and his war cabinet’s diktats – and want an immediate 7 October inquiry. A majority also opposes releasing large numbers of Palestinians to secure the hostages’ freedom.

Polarisation within Israeli society plumbed new depths last weekend. At a Jerusalem rally, thousands of rightwingers, including Ben-Gvir, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, government MPs, rabbis and soldiers, called for Jewish resettlement of Gaza and expulsion of Palestinian residents.

“If we don’t want another 7 October, we need to go back home and control [Gaza]. We need to find a legal way to voluntarily emigrate [Palestinians] and impose death sentences on terrorists,” Ben-Gvir said. “We are rising, we have a nation of lions,” said Smotrich.

Haim Katz, a minister from Netanyahu’s Likud party, was in messianic mood: “Today, we have the opportunity to rebuild and expand the land of Israel. This is our final opportunity.”

Condemnation from the left was fierce. The government had shown its “true colours”, wrote analyst Alon Pinkas in Haaretz. “This was the coalition in an orgy of anti-state and anti-democratic euphoria... What you saw was not merely a theocratic-fascist strain in Israeli society and politics but [in] almost half of Netanyahu’s coalition... Religious-nationalistic Jewish supremacy has been normalised, legitimised, mainstreamed and encouraged by Netanyahu,” he claimed.

It’s plain the state of Israel, as a modern-day entity, is experiencing a brutal, illusion-shattering coming of age

Netanyahu’s thwarting of US president Joe Biden’s efforts to reduce civilian casualties and increase aid to Gaza, and his stark rejection of Washington’s preferred two-state solution, reinforces the sense of a turning point being reached. Defying an American president at such a juncture is a desperate strategy. Sensible Israelis know that, for them at least, the US really is what Madeleine Albright called the “indispensable nation”.

Likewise, all but the most idiotic headbangers realise the international court of justice’s careful warning about the perils of genocide in Gaza cannot simply be dismissed.

The ruling reflects how world opinion has been repelled by the Gaza carnage. The percentage of people globally who view Israel positively dropped by an average of 18.5% between September and December, decreasing in 42 out of 43 countries, a recent survey found.

Israel’s internal divisions and international isolation are real and growing. To the delight of Iran and like-minded foes, Netanyahu’s perpetual war promises deeper rifts and greater ostracism. Commentators warn gloomily of street battles between rightwing zealots and hostage families, of a democratic breakdown.

None of this sort of talk ever penetrates the thick hide of the bro ...

What follows is a listicle, though the pond did wonder if the bro might ever want to recant on behalf of himself, News Corp, the Emeritus Chairman, and all trapped in that monstrous machine.

Even Ann Coulter could manage it, while still remaining a prize loon ...

Would Dame Slap, famous wearer of a MAGA cap in a celebratory New York night, ever join the bro in an apology?

That came from behind a paywall, but don't expect the bromancer to admit he's a very stupid boy, and so on we go ... because now we've reached the listicle stage ...

Meanwhile, the genocide continues, but the bro has never worried too much about war crimes and collective punishment and genocide ... because here we go again. 

Despite all the evidence to hand, he seems to think a pack of fundamentalist theocrats are in the democracy business ... (there being Jewish as well as Islamic death cults devoted to ethnic cleansing) ...

At this point the reptiles slipped in a meaningless snap ....

And the pond could relax with a final short gobbet knowing it had done, belatedly, its bro surveillance duties ...

Meanwhile, in the United States, conservatives are consumed with matters of world-shattering importance ...

In which the pond remains stuck in reptile purgatory, or is it limbo?

 

Thanks to a link at John Naughton's usual piece for the Graudian, the pond ended up reading Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic: My McLuhan lecture on enshittification (30 Jan 2024), and once again the pond realised it had long been in a reptile rut ...

No doubt any correspondent could increase the pond's pleasure in the world by a good quintillion by providing links to more amusing reads than the vitamin-free, energy-sapping offerings of the lizard Oz ...

What's notable about this? Well last night the Major was perched in his favourite far right position at the top of the digital edition, and then he got bumped down a notch, so that the reptiles could pretend they cared a fig or a toss about the loss of an Aboriginal voice - given the attitude the reptiles took to the Voice, it's the sort of faux piety you'd normally find in a church ...

Meanwhile, there were the usual stories about tax, anti-Israel activists and more business about the Lehrmann matter ...

Down below the same dreary procession of predictable obsessions continued ...

There was "here no conflict of interest" simpleton Simon blathering about tax, while Dimitri was on hand to cut down on spending, and of course there was the Caterist, still on his crusade against renewable energy ...

These days the pond takes bets with itself as to whether such stories will start with a snap of Satanic windmills, though the odds are so short it's hardly worth the punt ...

Collect your five cent winnings and move to the gate. Meanwhile, the rest of the Caterist was just as predictable and as tedious ...

Yep, just as the reptiles pretend to shed a faux tear at the loss of an Aboriginal voice, the Voice gets a routine slagging from the Caterist, and then somehow a snap of Monash appeared, probably because it cost nothing for what's left of the ravaged and enfeebled graphics department...

The Caterist decided to enrol Monash in his cause, in one of those "what if?" games that are beyond meaningless ...

What's most nauseating about a inner city Sydney city slicker pretending that he's down with the cockies and the rustics?

Probably those last few lines, which suggest that the Caterist never made it to the Hunter valley ...

Valleys of the moon ...

Sadly you'd have to be able to get behind the Newcastle Herald's paywall to read the 2022 story Hunter residents object to Muswellbrook's Mt Pleasant coal mine expansion

Residents and community members lined up to fight another 22 years of mining at Muswellbrook's Mt Pleasant coal mine on Thursday which they fear will have serious impacts on the community's health and welfare, as well as heading in the wrong direction to tackle climate change.

With the likes of Bulga a long forgotten memory of rampant destruction, the Caterist comes to the standard reptile solution ...

One of the problems of peddling the NIMBY line about renewables is that the Caterist, stuck in his Sydney 'leet world where there'd be no chance of a nuke in his backyard, is that he's sublimely unaware of the amount of NIMBY-ism that would take off at the first civil engineering works designed to stick a nuclear plant in Newcastle ... while it would be impossible to imagine the shrieking if Sydney's lower north shore was designated a fine spot for an SMR ...

At this point the reptiles attempted another visual distraction ...

But the pond just wanted to get it over, so many other things to read, and the Caterist such a moronic repetitive waste of time ...

And so the Caterist is the country's mood? The Caterist can decipher the country's mood the way he deciphers the movement of floodwaters in quarries?

The long lost lord help the climate-science denialist country then, because there's bugger all help from the lizard Oz ...

And so to the Major, and a much diminished splash ...

The splash alone sent the pond off. 

The wording is deliberately deceitful and tricky, but then the Major is a notorious liar, dissembler and distorter ... but at least the pond could provide these figures about middle east demographics, available here ...

And so on, but the pond knew its duty and carried on with the Major ...

Actually the pond is glad the Major mentioned dissenting voices, because the pond recently read Haaretz and came away with this ...

You won't find the Major referencing any of that ... you'll just get standard Major humbug and horse manure ... (to conjure up a Doctorow image) ...

Meanwhile, back at Haaretz ...

...But sure – and here I'm talking to U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken – you can keep pretending that you're engaging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a geopolitical dialogue over a reconfigured Middle East. Let's see how that works out for you.
What you saw Sunday wasn't "Startup Nation" Israel. It wasn't "13 Nobel Prizes" Israel. It wasn't "Weizmann Institute of Science" Israel, nor "Iron Dome technology" Israel. It was not liberal-democratic Israel.
What you saw was messianic ecstasy and religious fervor in a position of power.
What you saw was not merely a theocratic-fascist strain in Israeli society and politics but almost half of Mr. Netanyahu's coalition (27 lawmakers), including five ministers in his government.
Attendees at the conference calling for the resettlement of Gaza and North Samaria, in Jerusalem on Sunday, with a map of the Gaza Strip in the background.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
This strain of religious-nationalistic Jewish supremacy has been normalized, legitimized, mainstreamed and encouraged by Netanyahu.
What you saw was not some wishful-thinking, abstract idea of resettling Gaza with Jews, but a cry for the expulsion and displacement of Palestinians. What you saw was more about the West Bank – biblical Judea and Samaria – than it is about Gaza.
Lastly, what you saw was not just the far-right elements in Netanyahu's government trying to make a point by demonstrating that they completely control him politically. This is him. Unadulterated, unhinged Netanyahu, trying to distance himself far from the debacle of the October 7 massacre.
This strain of religious-nationalistic Jewish supremacy has been normalized, legitimized, mainstreamed and encouraged by Netanyahu. So, President Biden, the next time you talk to him about "postwar Gaza," a "Palestinian state" or a "reconfigured Middle East," go back to the footage from Sunday's spectacle. Listen to the exultant, vociferous, rapturous delight there. And don't bother searching for Netanyahu's response. You won't find it. Israel is your ally; Mr. Netanyahu is a liability to your interests.
Now that the majority of Israelis have caught a clear glimpse of the future and realize what's in store, they may have to make a choice. The masks are off and the masquerade is over.
From the attendees' perspective, the timing of the event was impeccable. In fact, the issue of sensitivity to timing is not a concern or consideration for them at all. Two days after the International Court of Justice in the Hague rebuked Israel and recited incendiary Israeli rhetoric bordering on calls for genocide, some of the culprits were at it again with full force.
On the very day the head of the Mossad was meeting in Paris with the Qatari prime minister, Egyptian intelligence minister and director of the CIA to discuss a possible hostage deal, they were chanting "Return to Gaza." At a time when the United States – after the enormously generous aid it provided Israel, and encouraged by Saudi and Qatari overtures – is sketching and shaping an axis of stability and order, Netanyahu's coalition went on a road show to prove it is not a partner to a "postwar" anything.
But there's a flip side to this political horror show. Paradoxically, it is a necessary spectacle because maybe, just maybe, it will force Israel to decide. There is a liberal-democratic majority in Israel. The ultranationalists, extremist Orthodox Jews and settlers are the minority. Yes, Netanyahu put them in power because they serve his legal and political survival. Yes, they were and remain his willing partners in an obscene attempt to instigate a constitutional coup that would have turned Israel from a democracy into an undemocratic, illiberal semi-theocracy.
Now that the majority of Israelis have caught a clear glimpse of the future and realize what's in store, they may have to make a choice. The masks are off and the masquerade is over. The messianic eruption is inextricably linked to both the occupation and uncertainty over the future of the territories, and the constitutional coup Mr. Netanyahu has tried to impose on Israel. They are connected vessels and are conducive to each other's existence.
The strain of "atchalta de'geulah" – Aramaic for the beginning of the redemption, prior to the coming of the Messiah – is as old as religious Zionism. It was enhanced by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and nurtured after 1967's Six-Day War, which to a growing number of religious Zionists was a sign of the coming of the Messiah. From there, the settler movement evolved and had its outsize influence on the policies of right-wing governments. The settlers sought to create an irreversible reality and assumed that the Palestinians would either assent or flee. Religious Zionism sought to integrate into Israel's elites, partly succeeding, and gained limited political power.

A parallel cultural-religious-political process saw the religious Zionists become more ultra-Orthodox, while the ultra-Orthodox community, reclusive and suspicious of the state, has increasingly become nationalistic, xenophobic and racist.
This was the ideal airtight coalition Netanyahu needed to evade his legal problems and ongoing corruption trial. But with the constitutional coup and October 7 massacre (and subsequent war) exposing his weaknesses and vulnerability, the messianic bloc feels it needs to assert as much power as possible.
One hundred and fifteen days since 1,200 Israelis were killed, with some mutilated and raped, and while Israel Defense Forces soldiers are fighting in Gaza, a sect of religious zealots put on a carnival-style show complete with singing, dancing and chanting. So, President Biden, the next time you discuss the "Mideast security architecture" with the Israeli premier, bear in mind Sunday's scenes. Those weren't just messianic. That was Mr. Netanyahu himself.

The pond has to offer something other than the Major himself ... off with the racist nationalist xenophobes and the pixies ... repeating himself, in a bid to make the pond repeat itself and mention that assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a crazed Jewish fundamentalist ...

The only amusing thing the pond can offer from all this is that in googling the Major's name, the pond came up with this site ... an ancient hit job on the Major ... which perhaps should now read "sick profile of a typical-ego driven reptile scribbler..."

It never gets old, even if Crickey isn't really a thing ...

The final lesson from the Clarke fiasco was the ruthless way Mitchell used his power in a one newspaper town in an effort to shut down dissenting views on the story.
One example. About 12 months after the original story, Steve Austin was filling in as presenter of ABC Local Radio's Morning Program and interviewed Steven Holt about fresh material he'd obtained from the National Archives that Holt believed discredited further The Courier-Mail's original story.
The next day, a brutal opinion piece by the paper's National Editor Peter Charlton (then based in Sydney so presumably taking his riding instructions from Mitchell) savaged Austin for the interview.
Interestingly, Mitchell refused an invitation to be part of the discussion, although it would have been difficult to cover some (of) a complex issue in three minutes. Nonetheless, Charlton tore into Austin, essentially for failing to adequately prosecute The Courier-Mail's line in his questions to Holt, which was neither true, nor of course was it Austin's role as an ABC presenter.

Meanwhile, the collective punishment, the collective displacement and the genocide continues, and the Major cheers it all on ...

As usual on the weekend the pond overdid the cartoons, so there's just time to celebrate where Benji's mob and the other fundamentalist mob are taking the world ...

In which the pond seeks as many distractions as possible, but at the end is still left with prattling Polonius and nattering "Ned" ...

 

The pond has started the year doing a lot of apologising, and with good reason. 

The pond isn't responsible for the dross served up by the reptiles, but it is responsible for exposing sane members of the world to the dross ...

In an alternative universe, the pond would much rather be starting off its Sunday meditation by referecing Ariel Bogle's piece for The Graudian, The Australian who ascended to the helm of a Republican-linked fundamentalist Christian group ...

Everything about it was beguiling from being reminded that Ken Ham, the man who contends dinosaurs and people roamed the earth together, was once a science teacher at Dalby state high school - "seek the truth" is the school motto - to his connections with the Speaker of the House ...

Johnson’s relationship with Ham and AiG has been a particular focus in the US press since the Louisiana congressman was elected Speaker of the House in October 2023. In 2015 Johnson represented the Ark Encounter in its fight against Kentucky’s tourism cabinet for refusing to grant it a tourism tax incentive, and has personal ties to Ham.
As well as blogging for AiG and hosting Ham on his podcast, Johnson has praised the Ark Encounter as a “strategic and really a creative means to defend and advance the truth of scripture”.
“It’s one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,” he said.
In April the House Speaker and his wife are due to speak alongside Iles at an AiG conference titled Answers for Women.
Johnson’s creationist beliefs as well as his attitude to environmental issues and the climate emergency are another area of alignment. Ham has written that climate action is “a false religion with false prophets” and Iles has echoed such views. In 2019 he made a video for the ACL in which he said “climate change alarmism is one of the many suits of clothes being worn in the modern west by Marxism”.

And so on, and so Creationism, and so a young earth, and so dinsoaurs romping with humans, and so a fun Sunday read.

Or the pond could be mentioning Cathy Young's coverage of the phoney Russian presidential election in The Bulwark, To Putin's Surprise, an Opponent is Rising ...

Apart from being an astute observer of the scene, she managed to drag in a couple of references to some favourite pond movies, Galaxy Quest and Roberto Rossellini's General Della Roverera, wherein a Gestapo-appointed small time crook shifts from posing as a resistance leader to being the real thing ...

Or the pond could be discussing how for once Marina Hyde, with her famous Hydeings, missed a trick. 

Sure in When Mark Zuckerberg can face US senators and claim the moral high ground, we're through the looking glass, she scores a couple of palpable hits ... on Zuck himself and on the likes of the fist-pumping Josh Hawley and Miss Lindsay ...

But she didn't cotton on to Tom Cotton's truly wondrous return to the 1950s days of Joe McCarthy, noted even in the mainstream press, as in NBC's Sen. Tom Cotton faces backlash for repeatedly asking TikTok's CEO about his citizenship. 

As Tim Miller noted in a Bulwark segment, the cotton-picker did more for TikTok than Shou Zi Chew might dare to dream of doing ...so inept was the questioning, so incapable of actually nailing the question of Chinese government influence ...

The pond might even have spent a little time basking in the afterglow of that trial, with Eric Lach in The New Yorker scribbling Nine Regular People Tell Donald Trump To Shut Up and Pay Up (paywall).

...On Tuesday, the networks called the New Hampshire Republican Party Presidential primary for Trump the minute the polls closed. The political reality is that Trump has a grip on the G.O.P.’s voting base—but the legal reality is that Trump is in increasingly deep shit. When will these two realities collide, and what will happen when they do? Does Trump even have $83.3 million? (Letitia James, New York State’s attorney general, is currently seeking three hundred and seventy million dollars from Trump in a separate civil case, related to the Trump Organization’s shady business practices.) In the meantime, there’s Carroll. She may wind up being a hero in American history. Most people don’t know who she is, but she was once a pretty big deal. She got the idea to sue Trump from George Conway—the conservative lawyer who was married to the Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway—whom she spoke with at a party in the summer of 2019, a few months after her article ran in New York magazine. A few months later, Elle ended her long-running advice column, “Ask E. Jean.” She was in her mid-seventies at the time, and the President of the United States was publicly hoping that something horrible would happen to her. She now sleeps with a loaded gun next to her bed.

It's old news, but the pond has been a reader of the magazine for a long time, and could still imagine what the reaction of Harold Ross or William Shawn might have been to the deployment of "deep shit" in a story ...

Enough already, the pond has filibustered far too long and must get down to it, with another apology for doing so, but someone has to step into the sewers to see the deep shit floating there ...

A Martian stumbling on this blog might wonder why the pond is cynical, said Martian never having read Polonius before. Isn't he just deeply interested in the safety of children, your friendly uncle Martin Martian asks?

But if Polonius really cared about education, he'd be tackling one of the greatest issues creating turmoil in Sydney ...

The pond keeds, the point of this Polonial outing is to celebrate the wonders and glories of the Pellists, though it'll take another gobbet to get there ...

It's just as well Polonius doesn't do detective work regularly because inference isn't evidence, but never mind, could we have a rousing snare drum, Bolero style, to celebrate the true point of the exercise. 

A celebration of the Pellists incredible response to the depravity inside the Catholic church ... (no, it wasn't don more frocks, it was to organise a response that did little for victims and unravelled in all the wrong ways).

Yes, it's easy to focus on pedophilia in religious institutions, but surprisingly, Polonius never does it, or if he does, it's only so he can mount a manly defence of the Pellist frock-lovers (not that there's anything wrong with a love of frocks, it's more the grievous mistreatment of children that's the issue).

The pond has seen this deflection, distraction and dissembling many times before, and typically it came the same weekend when the dog botherer was moaning about being asked to conform to safety requirements for children in sport, moaning on abut being asked for a "working with children clearance". Given half the chance, the pond would forbid the exposure of children to any reptile until they were 18 years old and ready to vote  ...

And so to the next apology, and that's the pond's insistence on offering the Everest climb known as "Ned" ...

But what choice did the pond have? Look at the alternative ...

It's the old Ron DeSanctus problem, when vying with the mango Mussolini for attention. 

Why would anyone accept a dose of the oscillating fan, when they could have a serve of the old codger himself, rabbiting on endlessly in his usual way ...

Now at this point the pond decided to adopt its usual weekend strategy. 

The pond has not the slightest interest in Chicken Little "Ned" shouting at clouds and running around the chook yard in a sackcloth and ashes frenzy, frothing and foaming at the mouth ...

The reptiles have already done the tax frenzy to death, and the pond is well over it.

So the pond thought that in compensation for its errors, it would, together with "Ned", offer a cartoon-led recovery, with the infallible Pope providing the definitive word on what's to follow ...

Then people could embark on the Everest climb in good heart, and leave base camp to set off into the rarefied air. world of the well-known, and often repeated, and routinely regurgitated ..

At this point the reptiles interrupted with a snap of a fearsome Satanic beast or an ogre or that great big ugly troll, with eyes as big as saucers and a nose as long as a poker ...

This would usually scare the aged demographic shitless, in something of a New Yorker deep shit way, so to speak, and the pond thought it could help by adding to the fear ...

Terrifying, but perhaps not as terrifying as enduring "Ned", still rabbiting on ...

At this point the reptiles introduced a genuine Queensland plod of billy goat gruff kind ...

Well, come along! I've got two spears,

And I'll poke your eyeballs out at your ears;

I've got besides two curling-stones,

And I'll crush you to bits, body and bones. (the gruff goats are here)

Strangely at this point all the pond could think about was the mango Mussolini ...

It came as something of a shock that there was still much more of the undermining "Ned" to go ...

On the upside, the pond didn't have to mention climate science, genocide or domicide or whatever ...

Say what you will about "Ned", a few random shells won't distract him from his endless mission to spread as much FUD as possible ...

Speaking of leadership, for some reason the pond was reminded of Nikki Haley, adept at own goals. You could find the yarn in TNR's Nikki Haley Makes Her Bizarro Texas Secession Comment Even Worse ..

That reminded the pond of the dispute that started Nikki off on her secessionist path...

By this stage some might be feeling their rage machine cranking into overdrive at the thought that there's still two gobbets of "Ned" to go ...

But relax, they're relatively short ...

The public deserves a better debate about tax and the ned (need if you will) for tax reform?

So even "Ned" admits his blather is a complete waste of time and he's incapable of delivering a better debate because he just wants to spread FUD, preferably filling up his column to portentous lengthy by borrowing quotes from others.

The pond realised it had left its coverage of the pending US election a little late, but better late than never ...

And that's how the pond gets through a "Ned" natter these days.

Others might have different solutions, some might even want to comment on the FUD, but it works for the pond ... and at the end there's just one short shout at passing clouds to go ...

In short, if you can't get them when they're going, get them when they're coming, and in the best of all worlds, then you can get them coming and going ... and meanwhile, the chance of returning to bed for a Sunday morning nap has been exponentially improved ...

And so to a few more cartoons to wrap things up, first with a serve of TT ...

And then with an epic outing from Sutton ...