Joel Meares, Sarah Palin, Stephen Colbert, and The Punch arrives at the octogon late ...

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Come on guys, keep up.

It's Monday February 22nd, the month almost over, and there's Joel Meares scribbling The R-word, Sarah Palin's war on "retarded".

Is is another disturbing sign that Chairman Rupert's minions are finding that the blogo chatosphere handosphere is a tough slog, and that the intertubes are - gasp - global?

Spoiler alert - watch the Colbert clip above, if you haven't seen it already - before reading on.

As well as being way out of date - Palin was doing a double dealing defence of Rush Limbaugh for his retarded comments way back when - Meares also misses out on mentioning in his piece Stephen Colbert's great putdown, in which he used Sarah Palin's defence of Rush Limbaugh as satire as an excuse to announce that 'Sarah Palin is a f**king retard'.

Colbert added that her reasoning also explained the note on her other hand. "Retard=sometimes funny". And Colbert went to air on February 8th!

Well we loved the cheekiness of Colbert at the time, so it gives us a chance to feature the clip above, but watching it again reminds how sharp he is, and how tired and tiring The Punch's conversation is sounding.

Even reading the Goanna in the Herald today saw the clawless reptile manage a tried and true comparison between Sarah Palin and Pauline Hanson, in Hanson in the USA.

While The Punch offers up Tory Maguire doing Belinda Neal: a one-woman political phenomenon.

Follow that up with Scott Morrison doing a little trading off with the claim that Dame Mary Gilmore as his great great aunty, and that deep down he just loves unions - except the naughty unions around at the moment, because after all, The unions were complicit in Garrett's insulation failure - and it's time to spend lunch time roaming through the Comedy Channel where funny people are funny.

There's free, and then there's 'don't bother, it's free', as Morrison on The Punch sees Australia descending into William Lane's nineteenth century Paraguayan adventure. Sheesh. David Burchell thinking we're in the middle of world war one, and Morrison thinking we've landed in Paraguay.

Well at least that gives me a chance to put in a plug for the University of Sydney's neat online presentation of the New Australia journal, here for any passing stray historian with an interest in antipodean follies.

There's plenty more online about Lane (wiki him and the experiment here for some more links), but what is such a splendid irony is that Lane ended up in New Zealand as an ultra-conservative, pro-Empire, German hating scribbler.

You know, I could swear that's the real family connection. Why Morrison and Lane even have the same taste in spectacles. Could I humbly suggest Morrison now think about a hat and a moustache?