The Other Side of The Coin....

G'day Possums,

I decided that this week to illustrate the anecdotes emanating from this floundering excuse for a federal government with what I think are apposite Still Life images; or Nature Morte, as befitting a moribund ruling rabble. 

The other side of the coin, to lift the skirts to be exposed. It's not looking very good for for the ruling rabble.

Well, is the merde hitting the proverbial or what? And as various ruling rabble non-entities run hither and thither to avoid the stinking spattering fallout from the Royal Commission into the banks and financial services they keep tripping themselves up in the most ludicrous ways.

One side of the coin...

There was Kelly, Shadduppa-Yo-Face O' Dwyer sort of recanting on her silliness with Barrie Cassidy and admitting, sort of, that they well, might have got the political timing of the RC possibly wrong. Echoing her leader, Truffles Turnbull's lines she was then eviscerated by actor Peter Capaldi reprising his foul-mouthed bullying political advisor character from "The Thick of It"  on "The Project" calling her all sorts of deliciously nasty things and that, "...she was all over the place, like shit in a paper bag." It's interesting to note that even the conservative media are now finding it impossible not to treat this flailing rabble with the contempt it deserves.

...the other.

Following a complaint from the last failed prime miniature, Rabid-the-Hun at being called by ABC's rhyming political rapper Andrew Probyn, "...the most destructive politician of the generation." Rabid said,  "... he wasn't looking for an apology ...but should get one," Michele, The-Gutless Guthrie, MD of the ABC, promptly slapped Probyn's wrist for telling the truth and issued an apology and correction to Rabid, further genuflecting to the right-wing of the ruling rabble and further diminishing the standing of one of the last credible news sources in Australia.

Many others also amended Probyn's unusual eruption of truth, correcting his statement about Rabid to read: " The most destructive politician in Australia's history." Which is pretty accurate.

ABC

Macron of France has been here and told Truffles to find some balls re: climate change and to do more to address Global Warming also saying that Truffle's wife Lucy was "delicious."  I think Macron must be short-sighted and had confused Lucy with Julia Zemiro... who is.

 And deliciously talented to boot.

IPA policy statement

Macron must have been bemused with the news that The Pussy Grabber, Trump is sending climate-denier environment chief  Scott Pruitt to have a two hour "round-table" with "excellent people" from the IPA who, according to the IPA's Roskam, would teach the American's a thing or two.

Le Jongleur Roskam's fantastical parallel universe had him touting the panel's Jennifer Marohasy, as “Australia’s authority on temperature and climate variability”(....a person who has accused the Bureau of Meterology of corrupting the temperature record.... I kid you not, Petals), but revelling in his self-appointed king-making and anointing, Le Jongleur suggested too that Maurice, "Global-Warming-is-a-Delusion" Newman would be a kindred spirit!

It has not been announced whether all attending will be wearing costumes from the Bar scene in Star Wars.

IPA thoughts on Civil Society

Truffles lost one of his Financial Sector Advisory Council members when disgraced departing AMP chief exec Craig Mellor stepped away because he has been less than honest with the federal regulator about charging customers fees for no service.

But we've not done anything wrong, bleat the AMP board as the council assisting calls for criminal charges to be laid....and the public sees clearly that not only are the banks and financial advisers in it for themselves and not their customers but that the gene pool for Board appointees is as shallow as the talent pool for the ruling rabble.

J. Banks foot

That that pool is exceedingly shallow was evidenced by four brain farts erupting late  this week. One by (the currently unfortunately named) Julia Banks who in rejecting calls for the dole to be increased, opined that although her parliamentary salary is around $200,000.00 and owning five properties, she could live on $40.00  per day. 

Now, there's stupid, there's really stupid and there's also the mind-numbing social irrelevance and blinkered greed, common to ruling rabble types. I dare say her Victorian electoral seat has already suffered the 2% margin reversal it needs to return Labor at the next federal election if the Twitter/ Farcebook storm is anything to go by.

clear thinking in Queensland

Petals, I really have never known what's in the water in the Deep North but apart from lately having multiple councillors of the conservative ilk up on criminal and fraud charges, up popped the Lame-Brained Andy Laming to pontificate on education. Saying that teachers should work the same hours as everyone else, should only have four weeks holiday a year, not be doing any prep or marking at home Andy Lame-Brain also intimated that the new Gonski proposals were a sell out to the teacher unions. These idiocies were generally supported by ex ruling rabble senator Suzie Boyce who on "The Drum" said dismissively that people only became teachers as it was a simple job with good holidays...or some such merde.

It should be noted that neither of these has taught in a classroom and one surmises that their contempt for the profession at least in one case, would come from a private education and ability to rort entitlements!

Rather than look to country's like Finland as exemplars these ruling rabble types prefer the divisiveness of a fractured system, as it suits their political agenda.

A construct ( Sanchez Cotain)

Fourth and last fart off the rank was Tony Shepherd, railing against the Business Council of Australia being effectively questioned in Senate Committee; accusing questioners of a "witch-hunt" and that they were driven by political self interest in wanting to know what the BCA members would do with 65 billions of taxpayer money they may be given.

Now, self-interest... I think Tones knows a bit about that.... social responsibility... not as much.

A movable Feast.

The BCA btw, are wanting to put together a "donation" fund of $25,000,000.00 to "educate" the  taxpayer whom they say will be well served by giving them $65,000,000,000.00 and which, they assure us, will trickle down .... eventually... perhaps...sometime.  It's a pity that many of those donating cannot afford to pay tax in the first place and BCA's  Westacott expresses surprise that anyone could possibly question the motives and intentions in such a fulsome propaganda fest.

Hoo-roo Possums,

Shane

Darkness we are heading toward.

The Orthodox Stench of Corruption

Shane in Ferns

G'day Possums,

Mrs Wombat and I had a little sojourn in "Warby" recently and it reminded us somewhat of the town of Glastonbury in England.

All the pics that follow are from its surrounds.

The Ruling Rabble, fellow-traveller apparatchiks and other assorted entitled had a memoriam, a get-together some weeks ago to eulogise their hero and Liberal Party founder, "Ming Menzies" and his "Forgotten People" speech. That in their orthodoxy they had their dates wrong and their "memoriam" was a historical confection was of no import to them;  particularly "Mings" adulation of Hitler prior to the war and who as PM was selling iron to the Japanese just before WW2, hence his sobriquet, "Pig-Iron Bob:" and also the fact that he "went missing" in London for months, leaving Australia completely unprepared for the coming Pacific conflict was of no relevance to them in their re-enactment.

What matters most to the Ruling Rabble is the public facade of respectability, the pretence of fiscal rectitude and the impression of solidity.

This fractured orthodoxy was well demonstrated recently when the monies paid to the ineligible and now sacked right-wing Senator, Bob Day (apparently $130,000.00) have been "forgiven," but the data matching program informed private debt collectors are still chasing down citizen's welfare debts as miniscule as $20.00 with pensioners being hunted, too.

Don't do as I do, do as I say. 

Double standards = Orthodoxy.

 

Warburton

Enter, stage right: Trade Minister Andrew, Reboxetine Robb. 

Paid $100,000.00 by a Chinese businessman for his election funding. The day before the Federal election, he signed up to a $880,000.00 pa job with the same Chinese firms who months before were awarded a 99 year lease on the Port of Darwin. Subsequently, one month after being elected Reboxetine leaves parliament!

As this little piece of chicanery was a trifle more news and noteworthy than Silly Sam Dastyari's $5500.00 worth of Chinese "donations," prime miniature Truffles, worried that the stench of their orthodoxy was becoming more apparent:  Asbestos Bishop also had her "seat" warmed to the tune of $800,000.00 of Chinese electoral munificence too,  found some 5 minutes of solace in a desperate "Look-Over-There" moment by blaming Tardis State premier Dan-the-Man Andrews for the Victorian parole board's decision to parole an ice-addled criminal nutter who, claiming allegiance to both Islamic State and Al Queada,(?) murders an innocent man, takes a woman hostage and wounds three policemen before himself being shot and killed.

What a saviour of probity is "terrorism," eh?

 

Warburton

It's a Ballarat tradition... there's a Prime Minister's walk in the botanic gardens on Lake Wendouree with portrait busts of all the country's PM's.

It may be unfortunate for the nation that Rabid-the Hun, Abbott ever existed but now he too is there in effigy, stiffly fouling the rural environment. 

Sometimes we need to be reminded of our electoral and educational failings.

Interestingly, Julia Gillard's portrait in this line-up was once the most attacked and defiled but as Rabid's has already had a crown of onions adorn it, I dare say petals, that attention to his visage might well soon overtake that of his bete' noire's.

 

Warburton

Watching The Drum (ABC) recently I was again struck how the orthodoxy of opinion has become the mere rote of the narrow, neo-conservative.

Discussing Corbyn's almost victory in the British elections all of the panel, left and right (what was that faecal matter from Quadrant, Cater, doing there btw?) were happily repeating their truisms of how unelectable Corbyn was seemingly oblivious to the fact  that their opinions did not in any way, accord with the reality of the vote!

This is what I had noted during our last federal election:

"Early in the evening during the election broadcast I was looking at the performances of Sales, Uhlmann and Crabb and also noting the growing number of seats that were falling to Labor and sensed that "something is up here" but this panel kept blithely brown-nosing Scummo and often interrupting and ignoring Wong until : Bang: 1,2,3, Tassie seats had gone, then suddenly they were all at sea having to deal with a reality that was way out of their comfort zones. They never recovered and their bias' took a battering for the rest of the night."

http://shanewombat.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/not-with-bang-but-whimper.html

Warburton

The smug, self satisfied repetition of ruling rabble assertions as question, the mindless repetition of neo-liberal theory as substitute for discussion, the banality of the current orthodoxy is deadening debate and dumbing further down a nation not generally noted for the liveliness of its thinking.

 When you see Fictions Frydenberg allowed to blather on nonsensically about energy costs and the failures of a privatized market being the fault of the alternative energy producers and then his opposition being question-cajoled into agreeing to the same you know you're witnessing the proliferation of propaganda by a player not a journalist.

When you hear constant commentary that there is partisan agreement to Finkel's energy review before it is even released you know that you are listening to the softening-up propaganda of what-you-must-believe. Personal opinion and analysis is being corrupted from the start.

When you have to suffer through Andrew Probyn's (ABC 7.30) sing-song "opinion" homily's attempting to rhapsodise right-wing cant ..Oi!

But for once you can only agree... he can't!

Better that Probyn, be given time off to study a talent; a real wordsmith of popular culture like Clive James and discover that James knew not just his word's worth but that with them he drew from reality succinct images of value and meaning.

Warburton

It has been said that The Ugly American, Murdoch stormed out in high dudgeon from The Daily Mail's London election room as the exit polls began suggesting that his vituperative campaign against Corbyn had failed miserably..... I hope that is true. 

I wonder too, if Lynton Crosby is feeling aggrieved again?

Two elections old boy, two flops....times up?

 

Warburton

"There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile.

He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.

He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,

And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

 

Warburton

Hoo-roo possums

Shane

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It's Down the Slippery Slope We Go ....

 

Reversing positions

G'day Possums,

In the British Museum in London there are casts of antiquities, things like Trajan's Column, Assyrian Reliefs, Renaissance sculptures: all copies made 100-150 years ago which are now important as models for degraded or destroyed monuments as they retain more detail than many of the existing originals. So copying can be useful .

Remember when, under Little Johnny Howard the concept of ministerial integrity and honesty began to be devalued? This is where it has led: the most corrupt, self-serving and incompetent ruling rabble ever to afflict this land has Dodo Dutton lying about the fracas on Manus and who says anything? Who in government holds him to account, who in the MSM takes any notice?   No-one.

Our slippery slope just added a few degrees of decline.

 

AFP in action.

The Australian Federal Police Force (the militia of the ruling rabble) has been given $320,000,000.00 extra to tackle terrorism.  On the same day the AFP announced that they will not be investigating The Minister for Inhuman Services, Alan Shylock Tudge for leaking to the media, private and personal details of a welfare recipient who wrote an opinion piece for Fairfax Media claiming Centrelink had "terrorised" her over a debt she claimed she did not owe.  Some weeks later, her personal details were supplied to a journalist who wrote a comment piece from the Government's perspective, raising the prospect that Centrelink had been "unfairly castigated". Nice bloke is Shylock.....

AFP is yet to confirm that a few Schekels of its new $320Mill will go toward assisting in banging up alleged fraudster and for Rabid-the-Hun, doyen of the Union movement, Kathy Fingers Jackson whose $1.5 million wealth and spending sprees were seemingly funded by union donations without their approval. Odd that Fingers ratted on fellow unionist Thompson over similar but smaller matters and that case was treated with alacrity .... there's that slippery slope again.

 

Audience

Many don't, but I quite like QandA, even though its even handedness is the 50's suburban Sunday lunch with the rellies sort of soiree,  where you-can talk about anything except religion, politics, sex and money; but within its managerial limitations it  does provide the ruling rabble guest an hour to display not only their incompetence but also their sheer lack of imagination. As did Digger Tehan recently, breaking into a sweat trying to justify the waste of $100,000,000.00 for the Sir John Monash museum at Villers-Brettoneaux and then his complete inability (or bloody-mindedness) to contextualize Gonski Mk#2, HECS payments, Uni fees and housing prices… even panellist Danni Addison quipped to him something apropos “… you’ve lost this audience…” and Dave Hughes …well just watch him…in one succinctly accurate analysis of Truffle's body language in meeting with Frump45, Hughes likened Truffles to  a 13 yo girl on a date with Justin Beiber. The program has its moments of truth.

When in NY Truffles had a meeting with his boss, The Ugly American Murdoch. It transpires that media rules will be changed to suit Murdoch's insatiable greed and need for world domination, so we can look forward to his total control over 95% of print, radio and television in the near future. Mitch, Useless Fifield, paper delivery boy to the IPA fatuously opined that this was a great step forward in journalistic and media diversity and agreed that donating $30,000,000.00 to Foxtel to cover women's sport was sound policy ...besides what would the ABC do with it?

Then came, THE BUDGET!

In an admission of failure, Scummo Morrison and Truffles slightly reversed tack from the hard right free market position of the last four years and presented measures they say are "fair," and "balanced."  Apart from filching half baked versions of Labor's policy's, and which given the ruling rabble's complete lack of talent, they will stuff up, does this signal a rejection of all that Rabid-the-Hun and Eleventy once promulgated and, as a corollary, the ideological hard line of the IPA?  The punitive Centrelink regime will stay. Sewers will be searched to track down welfare recipients doing drugs. Pensioners will still be hit, penalty rates are about to go and even though a small tax was levied on the banks to fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme the banks still  have a big tax break around the corner  if The Senate Shysters, Xenephon , Noe Notion, Loopy Leyonhjelm, Bestiality Bernardi and FlappyMouth Hinch vote it in. Education is still being underfunded, Hecs will be taken earlier and TAFE has been cut again.

Fair, balanced?  I think not . It's more smoke and mirrors to try and get over the electoral line again when if they win, surprise, surprise, all the IPA zombie cuts will be back with a vengeance. Trusting this mongrel rabble is not an option in any circumstance.

Needless to say the press, in the main did the obvious and gloated how the rug had been pulled from under Labor's feet and how the ruling rabble were now "governing".

Hissy-Fit Sales did one of her more asinine and disdainful "interviews" with Short-stuff after his budget reply speech where she was solely interested in the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife "gotcha" moments and in her inimitably crass fashion, interrupted Short-Stuff every time he seemed to make an answer of substance....and therein  lies the tactic being employed wholesale against Labor, belittle, interrupt, disagree, push the ruling rabble line: Alberici wandering off into fantasy land about Short-stuff getting "rolled " because his colleagues disagreed about his poor taste dog-whistle ad, and let's not say any more about Jack-in-the-Box Probyn, other than that his delivery would be better suited to the Ch 7 Weather report!

And this Petals is the fair and balanced ABC, not the Murdoch run commercials! But then again, Guthrie an ex Murdoch employee is in charge, now!

Which was ironic,  for all those mentioned were also giving glowing testimonials to their late colleague Mark Colvin, eulogising his incisive and intelligent interviewing, sense of history and honest reporting.

Now, where's that slippery slope again ?

The glum faces of the ruling rabble during Short-stuff's budget reply speech put to rest the notion that anything announced in the budget was a social democratic exercise and "Labor-lite."  All the ruling rabble have done is expose their abject mismanagement, the wounded and fully wasted four years of being policy bereft since 2013: nothing has developed except inequality, fear, debt  and the corruption now rife in their ranks.

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It's Down the slippery slope we go ....but I've said this all before.

Hoo-roo Possums,

Shane