The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

Today it has been more obvious than usual that watching the US election unfold while in the Wild West of Oz does have its disadvantages
It is a 12 hour time difference now ticked up to 13 thanks to pesky daylight saving over there

This morning the opening score was 235 for Biden and 213 for trump which had been quite a change from the last count
Joe slowly SNOOZED his way up to 253 before settling for the night at the ever so tantalizing 264 seats while the Teflon Don had barely crawled from 213 to 214. So it was looking increasingly clear that this was on account of the mail in ballots being added to the totals

( Out for the count )

Karma is a bitch



If Only......

(sorry for the lack of alt text - every time I add it the HTML nazis get nasty and nitpicky. It did read "Lady Liberty got laid and now she's got a terminal case of the pox")

I was glued to the radio all day on Wednesday and listened as a certain some one took the podium and made his acceptance speech.
All humility, graciousness, bridge building and bucket loads of lofty idealism.
Izzie was not convinced.

It was so amusing, actually sickening to hear a man who has spent most of his life and certainly the last 18 months striking matches and pouring petrol everywhere - the human Molotov Cocktail and now he's donning the fireman's hat and is going to save the planet. As some previous commentators said - Trump isn't running for President, he's running to be Batman.

I wonder how long it will take before the Real fear mongering rage filled hissing snarling Donald Trump will return to true form.


Such a lowlife shameless charlatan bully is now being richly rewarded for his appalling behaviour. I suspect that even he is astonished to have gotten so far. What is so worrying is that his ego is just far too enormous to ever allow him to seek out and take advice from people who are smarter than him and who might actually compensate for his total lack of competence.
To find so much rage, malice and incompetence together in some one on the cusp of so much power is truly frightening.

( One Wicked Wednesday )

And now in this time of darkness, the prophet of Doom has departed this mortal coil. We will have to walk the valley of shadows alone.

Once again another musical legend bites the dust.
When Trump's Tower of Babble has long crumbled to dust, the Tower of Song will live on.

The party is nearly over. Either the Donald will soon fade away into oblivion after endless hissy fits or reality will become uncannily like a Stephen King novel. The Dead Zone comes to mind but with the alternative ending.

( Hell's Bells )

On first appearances, the Trumpet has offended just about everyone in the country and the number are most definitely not in his favour. But the Donald's minions are so much more motivated than Hillary's and since they don't have compulsory voting in the USA, demography isn't destiny and it is hard to know which way the wind will blow.


If Mr Porkie loses Izzie will be sort of sad to see the end to the veritable feast of cartoon goodness.

Donald Trump is extremely inspiring but for all the wrong reasons.



It's going to be a fascinating day watching the numbers roll in over here on the other side of the planet.
We should know by 6pm local time tomorrow.

PS Such a pity that both candidates are such a pair of devils. It has been most entertaining for the impartial martians on the other side of the world but it's not like it's just some neverending reality television show or Game of Thrones.

Bernie Saunders or the present Pope Francis running as candidates would have made the race much more fun and maybe even more civilized. Who knows - policies might even have got a mention.

Only one more sleep to go until the Big Day

Izzie is a die hard politics junkie. This year for the first time will be able to follow all the drama all day without any 3-9pm shift at the mad house getting in the way

So if there was any genie in a bottle or fairy godmother to grant wishes for this year's election results, this serpent has a few simple wishes

1 A hung parliament (let's see how long it takes for squeaky clean Mr Rabbit to start doing dodgy deals with minor parties)

2 A Labor victory but Kevin Rudd loses his seat. That smug little git so needs to be put back in his box

3 Alannah McTiernan wins her seat and becomes our new Prime Minister. Who cares that she's photoshopped her campaign pics to look younger than her grand daughter. She not only gets stuff done on time and on budget but is big on public transport and reducing dependence on oil and fossil fuels for a whole bunch of sensible reasons of which climate change is only one

But Tony Abbott will be Pope before any of that happens so here's a second best wish list with dollops of masochistic schadenfreude


Now that the junk yard dog will be unleashed on the unsuspecting public, let's go the whole way and have his fellow rotweillers Julie Bishop, Eric Abetz and Sophie Mirabella on the front bench

Smirking smug Sophie has mannerisms and a condescending tone of voice uncannily like the Queen of Goblin Toads from the mad house that used to be the Izzie day job

Malcolm Turnbull can get the new portfolio of Minister of Porn while the maddest baddest attack dog of all and Tony's best mate Rupert Murdoch can be our new front bench Minister of Media and Communications

Eric Abetz of course is itching to get his hands on the soon to be resurrected Work Choices and Cardinal George Pell can be the number one adviser on Direct Action on Climate Change and Minister for Marriage Equality. He can run the Department of Child Protection while he is at it and why not add CSIRO as well?

And who else but the sexy Fiona Scott would be more suitable for Minister for Transport, Immigration and Foreign affairs?

It's going to be a very interesting 3 years

So it’s now official. On Saturday 7th September there is going to be an invasion of Vote People in Australia. This serpent is excited already. Had already complained that it’s not possible to put them all last. Well at least nearly all of them. It used to be possible but those days are long over.

Two weeks ago Radio National ran an interview with a guy by the unlikely name of Arthur Dent who until the recent adventures of a certain Julian Assange had laid claim to being Australia’s first political prisoner

He wasn’t always called Arthur and had in fact changed his name by deed poll. His muggle name is Albert Langer and he was notorious for having issues with the Electoral Office.

The crime that earned him time in the slammer was the promotion and possible invention of a devious and wonderful scheme for filling in the boxes of election voting slips

Here in Oz for federal elections the lower house is elected using some form of preferential voting. You rank the candidates in order of preference. If your number one candidate does not get the numbers, they take your second choice into account and so on down the line until one of them eventually has sufficient numbers to get across the line. Sometimes that could mean your vote going to the last or second last name on your list

Albert Langer proposed a simple but ingenious solution to keep the two big bastard parties from stealing your vote in such a devious manner. You simply numbered the ballot as far as you wanted to go and then gave all the rest the very same number. So if there were only two candidates you could bring yourself to vote for out of a batch of six you would number the ticket 1 then 2 and then put a 3 in every single other box.

This pissed off the two major parties big time so they pulled strings and pushed buttons and sent the Electoral Commission on the rampage to give poor Albert a hard time. They sent nasty ‘cease and desist’ letters which he politely ignored. He continued his sneaky rebel rousing anarchist activities and got tossed in the slammer for his trouble

He was talking about the whole drama on the radio last week. They had changed the law so that any vote cast in such a manner would no longer be considered valid. But apparently they did not bother doing that for the Senate.
The interviewer asked him if it was worth all the hassle since so few people had actually voted using his neat little trick - somewhere in the low thousands at each election. Arthur had never expected such a ridiculous reaction from the authorities but still had no regrets.
Izzie had been one of those few thousand and had been most peeved indeed when they got rid of that useful loop hole. It would come in so so handy in September.

For Tweedledum and Tweedledee or as others call them - the Pepsi party and the Coca Cola party are particularly obnoxious this time. Both parties are now led by egomaniacal control freaks with blue ties, with almost identical policies when they actually bother to have policies and each in a race to the bottom of the barrel in their desperation to get elected

( Votes and Boats )

The witching hour is fast approaching. Five weeks is a long time in politics
Knew that the serpent was slinking in a marginal seat but only found out today that the last time the present occupant scraped in by only 174 votes.
That will give us great schadenfreude in doing our bit to get him tossed out tomorrow. But Julia and her local minion will not be pocketing $2.40 for the serpent's first preference either. They've got to work for it because they don't deserve it.

It was a glorious sunny day on Thursday. Very like a certain Thursday in late June when Izzie did the sensible thing and lurked in the Lair sitting in the sun for most of the day listening to the gossip going on in Canberra
Had only been two weeks previously to a "Community Cabinet' meeting. This was a bit of public relations spin brought in by the present government where the whole cabinet goes touring the country and holding public forum meetings in school and town halls and such

The traveling circus came to town on Wednesday 9th June. Several things stood out as being significant. Kevin Rudd the then prime minister was as boring as bat shit with not much of a presence at all and a bad habit of inserting the annoying phrase "Working Families" into every sentence.
There were two characters who stood out amongst the crowd. Peter Garrett - the minister for environment who basically spent the whole time goofing around looking like an idiot, grinning and squiggling on bits of paper and appearing to be paying no attention at all to what anyone else was saying. He was like the bad kid lurking at the back of the class room mucking around and the only bit of fooling he wasn't doing was making paper planes and throwing them
Even when it was his turn in Question Time, he shuffled around and had to get some one else to do his homework for him
And then there was Julia. She oozeed calm coolness and just would not be rattled. The Rudd would not utter a word without consulting her and she seriously seemed to be the power behind the throne.
She answered every question asked of her without squirming or evasiveness and seriously looked on top of her job - all three of them. But none the one she really wanted

Looks like she got tired of covering up for witless idiots and control freaks and decided to finally grab the limelight for herself

No sooner had she polished off the knife and got herself promoted to prime minister, she was appearing at Question Time and being her usual cool sharp and pointy self and ripping the Mad monk and the other Julia to shreds.
In response to a question about her treachery but that it was still the same old labor government with the same old ministers and same old spin, she retorted along the lines that she thanked the same old deputy leader of the opposition for her question and wished her luck as she served her third leader
In other words - "I've got the top job and you haven't, you wimpish gutless grovelling bitch!"

But within a matter of weeks, this cool Julia had turned into a boring moron endlessly moving forward. She started spouting 'me too' boat people policies just to score political points and acted like she had the morals of an alley cat
Then like her predecessor, she once again put environmental issues on the long finger with the suggestion of yet another talk fest

In the meanwhile, her nemesis The Mad Monk and leader of the opposition party who also came to power by challenging the leader (but winning by only one vote instead of unchallenged) was marketing himself as the essence of stability. The Iron man thing he obviously decided to put on hold. No more budgie smugglers for five weeks or maybe forever

These are the pair that used to call each other snivelling worms across the floor of the lower house. They were being all nice and boring and respectable

They seem to have unanimously decided that this election campaign would be a policy free zone and mainly spent bitching and sniping at each other. But the problem is that they are playing nice when they used to be fast, furious and very vicious

At first they played the strange game of each one promising to spend less and cut more than the other but in the last week or so they have returned to the normal course of any proper election campaign. Only itsie bitsie teenie weenie bribes but it's pork barreling just the same

So with the home stretch in sight, the mad monk has decided to run a sleepless marathon. He's doing 36 hours on the run and still has managed to keep his foot out of his mouth. A major miracle. One could see it as desperation or determination
Maybe he's just manic.
But Julia is getting desperate. While her party had been distinguishing itself by having some positive policies instead of only swiping at the opposition, now she is resorting to resurrecting the dead, buried and cremated ghost of Workchoices. Seriously sad indeed as that should have been Tony's job.

Either way, whoever wins - the mask will soon slip. Izzie is desperate to see a return to the real Julia oozing the old coolness and cleverness. Because if the Mad monk gets the top job and finally unzips that monster mouth and slips on those budgie smugglers again, it's going to be seriously scary indeed. The motormouth will be back in action long before the brain is in gear and the inner beast will be let loose once more
Not everyone has forgotten Bernie Banton the asbestos man and the nasty things the mad monk said about him during the 2007 election campaign

The liberals really have a thing about asbestos. And Tobacco. Guess it must be all the party donations and jobs at James Hardie for their heartless bitch lawyers

Izzie's been so busy watching creepy adverts and neglected to do a proper post about the upcoming event on Saturday

Firstly the juiciest Julia of all. It takes 40 seconds to get there but is worth the wait ;)




It's nice to see that even the Taliban are watching the antics in Oz





Oh the joys of Jerkchoices!

One sad serpent

The election advert embargo started at midnight.
At least there's Cyberia and Youtube to keep getting our fix

Driver's Seat




The Liberal Lunatics have taken over the asylum

So so enjoying the dirty and disgusting depths that this year's election campaign have descended to. Only ten more days of depravity

The Time Warp - snatched from Ozfille