Janet Albrechtsen, sorry must dash off to shop for shoes, and sundry other cries of loons ...

(Above: the freshly relevant award for cartooning goes to this 2009 effort).

It's the unapologetic nakedness of the cheerleading that gets me.

Here's Roger Ailes sounding conciliatory:

... Ailes did say that he had issued a warning to Fox News staff.

"I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually," Ailes said. You don't have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that."(here).

Other side? How could there be another side in a news channel dedicated to fair and balanced reporting?

That's the sort of slip of the tongue that lets the cats out of the bag, and the rats run away with the cheese, to mix a few metaphors as a way of evoking the contemptible world view Ailes' promotes with vigour. But at least now Ailes has acknowledged he and his minions are on the other side to the other side ...

Meanwhile, shameless distortions are all the go. Here's David Brooks scribbling The Politicized Mind:

In short, the evidence before us suggests that Loughner was locked in a world far removed from politics as we normally understand it.

Yet the early coverage and commentary of the Tucson massacre suppressed this evidence.

Which is simply not true. Suppressed the evidence? Only a paranoid or an idiot would use such a word.

The same day as the shooting, the Huffington Post and any number of online outlets provided to Loughner's MySpace page details, as here, and the videos he'd placed on YouTube (placed on the site so that YouTube couldn't take them down), and the details are much the same as those used by Brooks to announce that as an expert psychiatrist in full possession of the facts, it's Brooks considered opinion that Loughner may be suffering from a mental illness like schizophrenia. While at the same time preaching about how others jumped the gun ... before ruminating thus:

If the evidence continues as it has, the obvious questions are these: How can we more aggressively treat mentally ill people who are becoming increasingly disruptive? How can we prevent them from getting guns? Do we need to make involuntary treatment easier for authorities to invoke?

What, in some kind of government health scheme of a dire socialistic kind that will bring about the ruination of America, as organised by an illegal Kenyan Muslim who has seized control of the country in an illegal coup?

Torrey’s book describes a nation that has been unable to come up with a humane mental health policy — one that protects the ill from their own demons and society from their rare but deadly outbursts.

Actually the United States hasn't been able to come up with a humane health policy of any kind, with the well to do perfectly content with their health insurance, and let the devil take the hindmost (never go there without travel insurance, or expect to die if an accident happens).

The other problem is this: contemporary punditry lives in the world of superficial tactics and interests. It is unprepared when an event opens the door to a deeper realm of disorder, cruelty and horror.

Which surely must be an even more glib and facile attempt at deflection than that mounted by Ailes, since the American media (from the true crime channels to the movies to the tabloids) is primed to salivate at the merest hint of disorder, cruelty and horror.

And New York Times columnists are supposed to be in a league of their own when it comes to clear thinking, as opposed to defensive posturing ...

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck strikes again, emailing Sarah Palin thus:

I want you to know you have my support. But please look into protection for your family. An attempt on you could bring the republic down. (here)

I wonder what psychiatrist Brooks would make of that level of delusional thinking? Of course in the antipodes it revives fond memories of Pauline Hanson, who back in 1997 prepared a delusional video with messianic overtones:

Fellow Australians, if you are seeing me now, it means I have been murdered. Do not let my passing distract you for even a moment ...
... For the sake of our children and our children's children, you must fight on. Do not let my passing distract you for one moment. We must go forward together as Australians. Our country is at stake ...

Over a decade later and she's still hanging around like a bad smell in a fish shop, but that's what you expect of messianic delusionists with a taste for the theatrical and the melodramatic.

Well surely thus primed it's time to take a look at The Australian, and before we run out of words, let's also celebrate Janet Albrechtsen's It's virtually vive le globalisation ... since we're speaking of personalising issues, and standard stereotypical abuse of the kind that causes many to open windows and shout they're not going to take it anymore, and once again Dame Slap is in splendid form.

Firstly how about an idle minded bout of stupidity and simplification and a reductionist black and white approach, trotted out to get the pulse started:

Sooner or later this was always going to happen. Eventually, those wedded to a simplistic "big is bad" mindset would be forced to choose between the good big guys and the bad big ones.

In the recent war for retail popularity, the cheaper big guys won out even though they are foreign, use the internet, dodge Australian taxes and no doubt employ non-union (maybe even the dreaded "sweatshop") labour rather than the expensive, unionised Australian kind.

Yep, the United States is the home of online retailing. You know, those "foreign devils" who are bad, evil, sweatshop orientated and possibly satanist ... unless of course we're talking about the likes of Natalie Massanet who runs her sweat shop out of London.

And let's not pause for a moment in the bid to get that pulse racing:

And herein lies a rather lovely lesson about the benefits of globalisation. Indeed, those untidy, nay, feral-looking anti-globalisation protesters who travel on Contiki for Communists tours to coincide with G20 meetings, and before that G7 gatherings, ought to be raising hell over internet retailing.

What, not one mention of inner suburban chattering chardonnay swilling elites? Oh here we go, only this time it's tea:

In between sips of chai tea and swapping news on the best websites to buy stuff, they might even add (just quietly, you understand) that the free market is a damn fine thing. Where else can you buy a Che Guevera T-shirt for less than 15 bucks (or $20 if you want one officially licensed by some socialist). With one mouse click, even the most leery left-winger will discover the marvels of the free market now operating in cyberspace, where every two-bit entrepreneur can get a business started without so much as the smell of an oily rag.

Yep, it's the standard crap about socialism and leery left wingers. But aren't we supposed to be like happy chooks in one giant cosmic digitised shopping mall?

And isn't it strange how conservatives are all the go when it comes to celebrating the entrepreneur, but shift on line and you become a two-bit entrepreneur (unless you happen to be Rupert Murdoch and run Myspace up against Facebook and lay off 47% of your workforce as a way to start the new year. Now there's a two bit online entrepreneur).

But then Dame Slap dealing with the way online selling actually works is truly wonderful to behold:

In fact, shopping online is the ultimate form of free choice. If you don't want to visit a store, and thus pay for the rent, and you don't want service, and thus pay for wages, then the internet is for you. Internet retailers don't have to deal with greedy landlords and thuggish unions.

Behind all this is the spectre of the Asian horde, driving us into poverty. Yet many Australians will do their first online shopping via Amazon. And the notion that Amazon doesn't have buildings (currently an 11 building campus is in development), or software development centres or fulfillment and warehousing locations, is simply quaint, while the notion that Amazon's anti-union and anti-copyright and anti-what else have you got (Amazon.con controversies) is somehow separate from the general ratbaggery of American commerce is most peculiar indeed ... Walmart, anyone, or the two dollar store?

But I guess that's because Dame Slap is practising her own variant on a cargo cult mentality:

And if we online shoppers are really honest about what drives us to click and buy, then let's admit there is something special about that knock at the door. Try taking delivery from a savvy e-tailer like Net-a-Porter. Your purchase comes in a big, beautiful, black box with a white ribbon. It's like Christmas in July or January or September.

Yep, you put in your credit card number - just like any leftist ordering a Che Guevera T-shirt, and a big beautiful black box with a white ribbon arrives on your doorstep ...

After salivating at that experience and after learning how to order shoes online (ah the shoes, the shoes, come on down soul sister Imelda Marcos, let's thump a few ferals wearing Che Guevera T-shirts), Dame Slap manages to turn herself into something of a convert, especially now that the likes of Net-a-Porter offers such a splendid eastern suburbs shopping experience:

To be sure, the globalised online free market revolution will produce losers just as the invention of the typewriter put hundreds of civil servants with goose quill pens out of work. Those unwilling to re-train, recalibrate their thinking to a new world, will be left behind. And it is hard not to mourn for some of them, such as the charming and helpful chap who used to develop my photos before I discovered the wonders of Apple's magnificent iPhoto picture book service. Now, holiday snaps turn up a week later in a glossy, hardback book to rival a coffee-table collection of Ansel Adams. Now that's innovation.

Why, she's nothing but a leet nerd with a Sontagian fixation on happy snaps, contentedly global in her re-calibrated thinking, romping through a zillion sites, grazing cheerfully on all she sees ...

Meanwhile, consumers are the winners. And they will remain the winners, even if the government introduces some tax equity for local retailers. In fact, any economically literate government ought to level the playing field.

Actually any economically literate columnist would know that instituting a GST on small items sent through the mail or by courier would be more expensive to maintain and operate than the tax collected, and would likely leak like a sieve.

Which might lead any economically literate government to contemplate why it should bother ... unless of course you happened to fall into line with the high taxing ways of conservative columnists and squillionaire bricks and mortar retail spokespeople ...

Even Dame Slap begins to get it, right at the end, and who wouldn't when there are bright shiny shoes and big beautiful black boxes to collect:

Alas, none of that will change the free choice of consumers in the new online age. Fixing the GST glitch is fair but may not make a jot of difference. Long live globalisation.

How about long live the NBN instead?

Oops, sorry Chairman Rupert.

Long live The Times' paywall I say, and the sooner the paywall hits Dame Slap's columns, the better ...

Meanwhile, let's wrap it all up by returning to Janet Albrechtsen's stablemate, Glenn Beck. The pond could in fact become just a one note songbird tracking all the bizarre, fatuous, grandiose, megalomaniac and sinister thoughts of Beck, but thankfully Media Matters already does the job, as it did this day when Beck talked of a coup:

BECK: If I could just -- if we could just be like Cuba. Let me give you the last piece of evidence that there is a revolution going on, and it is coming. It is -- there is a revolution, and they think they can get away with it quietly.

They think they -- and they -- they -- you know what? At this point, gang, I'm not sure, they may be able to because they are so far ahead of us. They know what they're dealing against; most of America does not yet. Most of America doesn't have a clue as to what's going on. There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America, and the way it is done, it has been done through the -- the guise of an election, but they lied to us the entire time.

Some of us knew! Some of us we're shouting out, you were: "this guy's a Marxist!" "No, no, no, no, no, no." And they're gonna say, "we did it democratically," and they are going to grab power every way they can. And God help us in an emergency. (here).

Thanks be unto Rupert Murdoch for such riches. Glenn Beck babbling and Janet Albrechtsen garbling online retailing into her standard rant against the left ...

Say what you will about the new digital world, but the phrase garbage in, garbage out keeps coming to mind ...

(Below: and here's a cartoon that suits the pond. Yes, yes, all around is the cry of the loon).