(Image: Young Liberals)

A taxonomy of takes For several hours yesterday, there was simply no way to avoid the takes billowing away from the slap Will Smith flashed across Chris Rock’s face at the Oscars like dust from a collapsed building. Muting keywords was useless; the takes simply evolved away from anything you could predict, new variants getting around any defence. I assume if you were to run to the street away from your screens you’d hear people screaming from their windows, Network style, about how the sight of two scrapping millionaires interacted with their personal circumstances.

And so we should be grateful to the Young Liberals for their attempt to stop the whole thing in its tracks by being the first political organisation to reference the event, the surest way to kill off a meme. Heroically, their job done, they deleted the tweet.

Whatever flavour of take you like — smug, bad faith, self-involved or preposterously grandiose — it’s out there. But our local favourite is The Saturday Paper that had to know what it was doing when it asked Christos Tsiolkas to write about how a slap wasn’t enough to make the event exciting.

Climate 200 As we hurtle towards election season, the Climate 200 group has taken a leaf out the book of The Juice Media, putting together a fun sweary ad to attack government talking points. The ads which cropped up online yesterday take aim at the “positive energy” ads which cost us $26,000 a week on Facebook alone, as well as the science behind them:

The Australian government’s making bullshit ads about its climate action. We use your money to pay for ads that look sciencey. Cute! …. $30m of your money went to coin the bullshit phrase ‘positive energy’. Bargain!

The ad goes on to argue that excluding “dodgy land use accounting”, real emissions “have fallen by less than 1% under our government”.

This was immediately followed today by Australian Unions’ “aimless, blameless and completely shameless” campaign, cropping up on top of the news.com.au website (and a lot of people’s fences).

Green day There’s an interesting choice of words in the messaging for Greens candidate in Macnamara Steph Hodgins-May: “People are tired of politics as usual — we need independent voices in Canberra.”

Which is an interesting selling point for a (now well-established) political party. Are the Greens trying to grab a bit of their “progressive outsider” status back from the contingent of climate action-centred independent candidates, who have so far dominated much of the discussion about who might form the crossbench after May?

Trump watch Associate justice on the US Supreme Court Clarence Thomas — whose bitter confirmation process in the early ’90s, opposed by Democrats on the grounds he was alleged to have sexually harassed attorney Anita Hill, echoed in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings — has long been considered the most conservative judge on the bench.

However, that’s apparently nothing compared with the views of his wife, Virginia. It was revealed last week that in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, she sent no less that 29 texts to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows urging him to do everything he could to overturn the result:

Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.

But this isn’t just an idle bit of tomfoolery from the spouse of a public figure — the Supreme Court has been required to rule on various cases related to the events of January 6, 2021, and Thomas has frequently gone against his colleagues (and the evidence) when it comes to Trump. Senate judiciary committee chairman Dick Durbin is calling on Thomas to recuse himself from January 6-related cases in future.