Great Moments In History: When Told He Was Too Wounded To Continue Fighting, Field Marshal Troy ‘The Black Knight’ Thompson said ‘Ha, Tis But A Flesh Wound’.

The Queensland Premier, the Townsville City Council, the RSL and the Townsville community tell him to resign,  but the con man mayor Troy Thompson says he’s not going anywhere (an apt phrase, if you read it correctly.) The ‘Pie looks back on a tumultuous and indeed historic week in the annals of this city.

The Bulletin has been prominent in the slow-motion expose of moral and actual dishonesty, but don’t keep polishing that halo too vigorously, editor Cas Garvey, you won’t be winning any Walkeys.

Despite the uproar the council goes about it’s daily business unhindered, mowing lawns, pick up wheelie bins and giving the Townsville Bulletin tens of thousands of dollar in pointless advertising.

And computer illiterate like The Magpie will no longer be taking the Lord’s name in vain, with the the ultimate computer software update … the internet to get a new patron saint.

Also, a slight change to the US cartoon gallery this week: we’ve included the best of a flood of photoshopped opinion about the outcome of some old court case in New York.

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Troy Thompson is Now In Full Denial

He apologised to the ‘military’ for lying, but not one single  word of apology for lying to voters. 

After committing hari kiri on national television,  Thompson has shown absolutely zero awareness of the stark reality now facing him. But devoid of any decency or honour, he says he intends to continue the cheap soap opera of his mayoralty to the bitter end – an end which unfortunately, could take some time.

The simple timeline of the week started when he did a couple of brief interviews promising that all the questions regarding his past would be answered in ‘a three hour interview on 60 Minutes’  … he meant A Current Affair,  and if the interview did take some hours, it was clearly a professional hit job by people who knew what they were doing, especially editing video. Admissions of things already here and in the broader media were half-admitted but excused on various grounds – non-payment of worker entitlements in a failing company, but managing to pay his former wife and employee a $35,000 severance package was waffled off.

Perhaps the most telling ‘the dog ate my homework’ excuses was the recurring theme was that much of his hazy background was due to over 100 concussions he had suffered over time. He counted them?

Again, this was a lie in the classic sympathy-seeking con man mode … and was about as subtle and false as Marie the mother and mother-in-law in Everybody Loves Raymond. He seemed to be trying for some sort of subtle link to his football playing days, – school and local level –  when he claims he was a local hero to some.  But medical evidence suggests with that number of concussions, you’d have a problem dressing and feeding yourself,  let alone managing a multi-million dollar city budget. If in fact you were still alive. And it’s doubtful with that many concussions, you’d be able to keep count, but he apparently did.  Yet still couldn’t remember his Army number, or appearing in a Gold Coast court on fraud charges.

The segment of 10 or so minutes was a classic example of ‘enough rope’  interviewing. No aggressive hectoring by the interviewer, just polite unreeling a little more rope with every question. And a rare thing for ACA … they let many of the incredibly daft answers hang in the air without a sudden knife thrust follow-up question, it was all left there for their audience themselves to evaluate.

And evaluate they did, indeed, one might say they evaluated the brains out of it. So dismayed with the inane reasoning and again the avoidance of proper respectful answers,  everyone was wondering what the hell now,  the locals were asking what happens next – knowing something had to, but what?.

The answer wasn’t long in coming.  First, the morning after the interview was aired, the  Bulletin summed up Thompson’s performance  in one of it’s best and most succinct possible headlines.

Editor Cas Garvey’s clinical dissection of the Hindenburg of an interview may have been the final straw for all the 10 TCC councillors. That afternoon, an historic moment took place in the council forecourt – just the day after the interview was aired.  In an open letter to Thompson from all the councillors, read to the media by Clr Suzy Batkovic: they didn’t request, they demanded the mayor’s voluntary resignation, or they would pass a no confidence motion at they next council meeting on Wednesday and seek ministerial intervention.

(In the confusion of the afternoon, it was first thought there was one unnamed councillor standing with Thompson, but that ended up as a full majority. The caption was right at the time, not the Bulletin’s fault.)

Saturday’s paper was even more to the point than Friday’s.

But Thompson, who obviously sees himself in a different light to everyone else. displayed his utter disconnection from the impact of events with a point blank refusal to step down and that he would ‘discuss the matter’ with the councillors at the next meeting (Wednesday.)

And at the time of writing, that is where the matter stands.  There is an unreliable rumour about the place that Ticketek has tried to get sole rights to sell tickets for Wednesday’s council meeting, and were very pissed off when told it was against the law. Maybe if they spoke to the mayor, he might be able to swing a deal.

One Nest reader’s thought on the matter … disregard the photoshopper trap: wristwatches.

Brickbats And Bouquets For The Bulletin

After being caught wrong footed by the election outcome – let’s face it, we all were – the paper eventually cranked into gear and started some digging. There was good and persistent reporting, and a lot of well-reasoned editorials  from editor Cas Garvey.

But the sad truth is that she had to be goaded into it by the stunning idiocy of Thompson in telling the paper to get fucked, he wasn’t talking to them because he didn’t like their questions – and figuring the masses would be behind him about the ‘bloody medja’. Even that confrontation could’ve run its course without any explosions … but then,  the dimwit (possibly egged on or manipulated by his MyPlace mates, cookers one and all,) signed his own death warrant when he decided to attack the one single thing that News Ltd really cares about in Townsville … ad revenue. Thompson suggested he would call for a policy to stop council’s lucrative advertising schedule in the paper, and just use social media. That immediately attracted the interest of certain southern executives,  and Garvey was told to let loose on him.  Which she did.

But two things we should note.  Remember this?:

The Magpie based that on information received and investigated a few days before publication and the Townsville Bulletin received the same information from the same source four days before it was partly published in the Nest. And the Bulletin’s reaction to the revelations … absolutely fucking nothing, not a single mention in the week leading up to the election. Wasn’t important, eh, Cas? Check the acreage of newsprint on the matter since then, m’dear.

So the only way anyone would know that the man they may vote for who was carrying some pretty heavy baggage, was to read about it in this modest-sized blog of a few thousand readers. Editor Garvey spent the final crucial week, along with reporter Chris Burns, virtually acting as Jenny Hill’s campaign manager. They probably figured they didn’t need to actually inform readers about anything much to do with Thompson, because he was gunna lose bigtime, right? They’re still smarting from this hubris.

That was a shameful misjudgement and a dereliction of the duty of  the community’s only newspaper. And much of the subsequent grandstanding in the editorials was as much to do with Garvey covering her misjudgement tracks as they were about the nitwit Thompson.  One particularly galling tactic by the editor was to continually suggest this only really came to light and worthy of her indignant wrath more than a month later … on Anzac Day.  Always a good tabloid heart tugger. The Magpie had forecast the medal issue days beforehand, and our gal, alerted to a possible left hand chest vacancy decided that might be worth running with. And one wonders if Thompson had been better advised and a bit smarter, could he may well have held back the strident criticism in the paper while he embedded himself in the job, making moves to remove him more difficult and divisive in the community.  And quite possibly, striking a Hill-like deal with the paper. Instead he panicked,  not intelligent enough to know that you don’t try to shut down the media with an arrogant dismissal. That simply invites what he has ended up getting.

This is not The Magpie setting himself up as some stable genius and oracle,  more deploring the absence of basic journalistic obligations and awareness in the Townsville Bulletin.

So guess what, Cas, you have maybe made a cross for you yourself to bear – by proving that when pushed and goaded, you and some of your team are capable of very good reporting,  so we now know you can do it.

So it is reasonable to expect you to treat other issues in the same manner.

We’ll be watching.

While We’re With The Bully

There is an issue that has been broached The Nest and often incomments over the past couple of years about the amount of money the council spends on advertising in the Bulletin. The question is always are we getting value for money?  Take this weekend’s paper for instance … two double page spreads, which even with good customer discounts would be well over $10,000.

Maybe worth a discussion in these striated times when money’s increasingly tight, but not as a bellicose threat or spiteful intent to anyone, just a possible belt tightening on behalf of the ratepayers. Both these examples are in fact better suited to social media and the council’s own websites.

That said, the Bulletin is a very necessary entity in a city of such potential as ours, and I will always say what I think professionally about what I perceive as its shortcomings but its necessity to a growing city will never be questioned here. That’s why The ‘Pie has repeatedly warned that the money-hungry News Ltd may turn it into a Courier insert. That would be of great detriment to us all.

Seems Harpic Has Inspired Others In The Fight Against Crime

Looks like Aaron Harper has got the backing of the Pensioners’ Party.

They Glow Up So Quickly Nowadays, Don’t They?

Ah, that Pope Frankie, what a cool guy. Perhaps having checked the papal accounts and realised funds aren’t what they used to be,  the canny Frankie has fallen back on the sure-fire miracle business for a boost but with a modern twist.  He’s gone after the millennials to swell the coffers, declaring the internet is to get a new patron saint.  The current patron of the keyboard is St. Isidore of Seville, who was tagging and doxxing folks back in 600AD, so pretty obvious the church needed to upgrade to a new IOS version saint.

And quickly found the required update.

Carlo Acutis, who died from leukemia at the age of 15 in 2006, was the perfect  figure around which to weave a miracle narrative.  A internet ‘influencer’ he was obviously the gold standard of the breed, said to be responsible for a terminally ill South American patient who was denied the desired ecstacy of meeting her Lord just yet by fully recovering. Then a while later he was at it again, this time credited with fixing an Italian girl’s mangled brain injuries suffered when she fell of her bicycle.

That was good enough for Pope Frankie,  who waved through the beatification at warp speed, the final step before sainthood, which usually takes decades and all sort of arcane carry-on (cf Mary McKillop).

All uplifting for the faithful, but kinda depressing for those who care about the human condition and dignity.  I mean, FFS, really? And of course it is infradig to ask the obvious question: if young Carlo managed to reverse those terminal cases, why couldn’t he cure his own leukemia? And if ‘God’s will’ is the answer, what was God thinking, it’s like pulling a star forward off after he scored a couple of ripper goals in a rough match.

In America, It’s A Start, But There’s A Long Way To Go

Guilty. As. Hell. On all 34 charges of fraud and election irregularities. Donald Trump, already in the history books as the greatest grifters ever to infest the Oval Office, gets another first in its pages as the first American president to become a convicted criminal.   He will be sentenced in a few weeks time, and while prison of up to four years is possible, it is highly unlikely.  But should that happen, under some of the world’s loopiest loopholes, he could run for office from jail.  If that unlikely scenario unfolds, he’ll have another reason to be unhappy … he will be the second, not the first, candidate to do so. That’s exactly what Socialist Party leader Eugene V.Debs did in 1920 (he got 3% of the vote) – was pardoned a year later and died in 1926.)

But while Trump is in full whiney voice about the verdict, he has reason to be pleased.The Republicans claim that within 10 hours of the verdicts being handed down, his campaign received $60million in donations. That’s their claim anyway, which reminds one of that old saying about fools and their money.

A change to our US gallery’s usual format. Included this week are the best of the flood of photoshopped opinions. And on the same theme. we’ve chucked in a couple from the funnymen at our own Aussie The Shovel. Enjoy.

And A Few Closing Thoughts …

And at least there are some official with a delightful sense of humour while still getting their message across. Make sure to read the fine print. Beep beep!!

……..

And that was the exhausting week that was.

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