The Australian, and a cavalcade of loons promenading on the pond ...

(Above: notice the uncanny resemblance of Ned Kelly to former chairman Rudd, especially in the face).

Thursday's usually a quiet time for the pond - what with mid-week fatigue and an election campaign, there's only so much a loon can bear to do.

But when the going gets tough, the tough remember Joseph P. Kenny's phrase and Billy Ocean's song and their fondness for cliches, and get going.

Splendid serial lurker and stalker Mark Latham has now - thanks to network Nine - stalked Tony Abbott, as covered in Latin language of love for Liberal-lurker Latham, and while the main question he asked is a little more astute than the moan he delivered in a finger-pointing way to Gilllard, the chief reward is for circus lovers everywhere.

Remind me to boycott Nine for a week. What's that? I never watch Nine? True, so remind me to apply a boycott as if I watched them ... There, that'll learn 'em.

But if asking Abbott about how he done Pauline Hanson down - et tu big Tony? - is a passing frivolity, how about Niall Ferguson's latest contribution to informed debate in The Australian, by way of ALP's knight is as thief in rusty armour:

Stimulus? Yes, sure, Labor has stimulated the Australian economy, in the same way that Ned Kelly used to stimulate the economy of Victoria.

Remind me to boycott The Australian if I ever start to buy it...

No doubt the learned professor thinks this is some kind of bon mot, or witticism in the Harvard manner, matching Alexander Pope in spreading a little literary sunshine in the antipodes.

My immediate thought involved an involuntary sigh, and the sense that a gherkin strides amongst us, as it seems that the original Godwin's Law simply didn't cover all the circumstances involving ill-informed invocations of historical figures.

Yes, it's time for a very specific dinkum digger corollary to be added, and we claim it as our own:

As the probability of Godwin's Law being invoked approaches one in the antipodes, the probability that 'Ned Kelly' will replace 'Adolf Hitler' also tend towards one.

You can read more about Godwin's Law at this alternative to its wiki, and I must confess I found it vastly more entertaining than reading the rest of Ferguson's predictable tilt to the right.

Oh there's Gillard's Fraudulent Claim, and unthinking ABC interrogators and ill-informed Nobel Prize-winning economists (not to mention pandering condescension about how Joseph Stiglitz is a likeable sort of jolly good chappie when he's not being a doofus), and a little backhand to the Fairfax press, and an invocation of Lady Luck, the Howard government, China, the RBA and the mining industry, and sundry other dry thoughts capped by the Ned Kelly reference, such that I thought why doesn't this tosser just bugger off back to Harvard and stay there.

Yes NIMBY-ism is a potent force at the pond, and there was just a passing thought that perhaps the good professor might spend his time working out how to help Republicans redeem the mess into which they plunged the United States, without once attempting to blame it all on Bill Clinton (who somehow gets a guernsey in the piece as showing the dangers of bad government, if the Clinton administration had suddenly been tempted to tax dot.com companies on their market evaluations in 1998. Somehow this ends up as part of a rant about a mining tax, as if no one taxes mining, and if in the end we aren't arguing about a rate, rather than some totally arbitrary change in direction, as alleged by Ferguson).

Yes, it's just another ideological rant dressed up with a thin veneer of economic theory chipboard, and you take your pleasures as you find them. Which might or might not be Michael Stutchbury ploughing the same ideological field in BER program not 'timely' in averting slump.

But we have to mark Stutchbury down for this typical effort in The Oz. Not one mention of Ned Kelly! Talk about lacking credibility and astute historical metaphors.

No, that's left to Greg Sheridan celebrating this remarkable insight Seen from the US, Rudd is a Westminster Obama.

I do cavil a little however. How much better if the header had read Seen from the US, Ned Kelly is a Victorian Jesse James.

For an exemplary hearty dose of blather, seeking to draw parallels and significance from random speculations, you'll be able to spend a full pleasant minute or two with Sheridan, who takes all due care to celebrate the "genial" Tony Abbott, while deprecating Rudd and Gillard as antipodean Obamas. Oh and to celebrate this wonderfully effective approach to climate change:

The ETS grassroots campaign, which Abbott understood and then co-opted and led, did something similar for the Liberals and Nationals. It allowed Abbott to unify his party, fire up his base, and smash a hole in the government.

Never mind whatever hole he might have helped smash in the planet.

Meanwhile, The Australian excels itself with a splendid editorial headed Safe drinking is not a right.

To which we can only say hear, hear, and demand that unsafe drinking of water be implemented forthwith around the globe. We also believe that eating and sanitation isn't a right, and that the black helicopters are circling, filled with dangerous socialists and UN bureaucrats in search of world government, as we speak:

The right to clean water and sanitation is far less definable and depends on economic development, technology and infrastructure. Above all, if people have a right to water and sanitation, other people must provide it -- in practice, governments using public money.

So this is really a call for state intervention, at the expense of other priorities and freedoms -- and water is no more a practically enforceable human right than other essential commodities such as food, clothing or shelter.

Yes, starve you buggers, or die of thirst, and preferably naked out in the wilds without any shelter, you grasping socialist pinko commie perverts and bludgers. Unless you pay the man and pay the man handsomely for the pleasure of helping you out, you can just bloody die. Snort! As if the right to drink water is a right ...

This resolution follows naturally from activists' ideological resistance to the privatisation of water. This ignores the countless examples from Bolivia to Egypt where governments have failed to provide clean water because of corruption, cronyism (usually including massive subsidies to inefficient farmers), mismanagement and waste. It also ignores successful private models in Bolivia, Chile, Denmark and elsewhere.

Yes, yes, and governments put fluoride in the water, which is why my teeth ache, and the fluoride crust provides conductivity and connectivity to the aliens seeking to take control of my mind, and no matter what kind of aluminium hat I wear, the signals get through, and now they're coming to take me away hah hah ...

Yes, there's collective evidence and knock down proof in The Oz of dangerous radicals and activists and ideologues and western charities ...

What? You want a right to drink safe water you upstart? Only if you kneel down and pay homage to Chairman Rupert, and subscribe to his newspapers, either by way of a donation of a litre of blood a week, or perhaps a 10% tithe of your total wealth ...

If it's good enough for the chuch, it's surely good enough for a little cool, clear water ... water ...

Yep, governments are evil, and big business so caring, so let's privatise.

What's that you say? What about Coca Cola and Fanta and the Nazis? (Why Do Foreigners Like Fanta So Much). Oh no, you're not trying to tell me big business isn't entirely honest and upright and stalwart?

Now if someone could only explain to me why the Romans and the Victorians both relied on the government to help out with fixing up their water supply and their sewerage ... What's that? Because in the case of the Victorians rampant big business fucked over the cities and the environment such that there would have been even more rioting, disease and ill-health than there was, forcing the government to take steps, do things, become action Jacksons and move forwards? (Victorian era technology and engineering).

Well I never.

But you'll have to be as game as Ned Kelly to explain it to the Oz ...

(Below: and since we love to break Godwin's Law ourselves, here's a Coke trinket, and you can find out more about it here in Why historians say Coke invented Fanta to enliven Nazi soldiers).

And now here's a song for those oldies who, like my father, loved Frankie Lane. Not to mention Marty Robbins and Sons of the Pioneers, who are also up on YouTube. Me? I'm off to see the SSO do over Edwards and Scriabin ...

Miranda Devine, and a flexing of the tabloid muscles, while we wonder why the Liberal party went missing online ...

(Above: interested in finding out more about the Liberal party's forward looking theories on the full to overflowing intertubes, and their infrastructure solutions? Try. Again.)

Knock me down with a feather, preferably from a politician who's turned into a feather duster.

With the Liberal party providing a solid defensive block regarding information about the intertubes - what need of a filter when you have a service failure? - we trotted off to the Sydney Morning Herald, and there bold as brass, and conflating in the usual way, in a relentless quest for relevance, was Miranda the Devine.

Just we we thought it was safe to go out into the water, the sharks in the pond still serenely swim about. It's official - Columnist Miranda Devine returns, boasts the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, as Devine devolves back to her tabloid roots at a cool quarter a million or more a year - but here she is still haunting the Herald six days after that announcement, with Kiesha's shrine reminds us why her name must be remembered.

From the tone and quality of sentiment in the piece, the Devine is already limbering up for a tabloid outing.

She starts out with the pollies doing their Rooty Hill routine - as a way of showing she's writing about 'now' - before moving on to Hebersham and the disappearance of a child, the subject of a police investigation - as one does when conflating - and before too long, we arrive at this:

Left to their own devices, the locals have forged a strong sense of community and purpose. Drawn to Woodstock Avenue by pictures of Kiesha in the media, they talk non-stop about a little girl they never knew as police work inside the first-floor unit, carrying carpet and doors out to forensic vans

Uh huh. A little girl they never knew, lured by the media, and so a strong sense of community and purpose. If you can make sense of that little flurry of conflation, you're a better sentimentalist than most.

But how to link the single death of a child with the area's bizarre dedication to the Labor party?

Easy, because you see these flat featureless suburbs, with straight roads and myriad roundabouts, on a vast expanse of plain, are full of ugly people and criminals and junkies and law breakers, far removed, a world away from the other glamorous Sydney by the harbour, and so designed to make a reader shudder, as helped along by a shuddering sentimental Devine.

Only the cops and tabloid journalists pay attention. As for the politicians:

They belong, of course, to one of Labor's safest federal seats, Chifley. Smack bang between the marginal seats of Lindsay and Greenway which have been lavished with attention during this election campaign, Chifley has been ignored, as usual. Held by the retiring Roger Price, longest-serving Labor member in Parliament, it has been gifted to Ed Husic, president of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union, who will likely achieve as much for his loyal voters as his predecessor. Not that the Liberal Party has treated Chifley with any more respect, selecting a candidate so woeful he had to be dumped last month.

What, no Howard battlers?

What follows is a litany of how much people care, and how people are proud to live in the suburb and how there are strong unprintable theories on the case doing the rounds, and then this:

Almost everyone has solved the case in their minds, and they discuss their theories endlessly, analysing the body language of Kiesha's mother, Kristi Abrahams, and stepfather, Robert Smith, on TV last week.

Uh huh. The tabloid heart beats strong in the Devine. What a clever nudge nudge. How to keep nudging?

Since telling police she woke up on August 1 to find Kiesha missing and fronting up to a media conference three days later in dark glasses and barely able to speak, she has scarcely been seen.

Yes that's a first class nudge. More nudging please:

The young mother and her family, including her six-week-old son, Levi, and three-year-old daughter, Brianna, have been staying in various motels. They returned briefly to pick up some clothes but missed a poignant ceremony in the park next door on Sunday, when about 200 people gathered to release balloons to guide Kiesha home.

But a tabloid write up wouldn't be complete without more caring and a little weeping and more caring:

"Isn't it a wonderful thought that so many people care? There's not a person here that wouldn't have taken that little girl home and looked after her … It's nice to think you are lighting the candles to show her the way home, but I think she's probably not coming back."

This needs to be backed up by simple-minded blather of a reinforcing tabloid kind:

The public grief of the people who lived around Kiesha in her six short years may seem curious to outsiders, but it is this community concern which is the most important protection for children in dysfunctional environments. It is rooted in instinctive notions of right and wrong, which are often clearer to those at the bottom of the heap.

Roll that sentence around on your tongue, with its instinctive stupidity, as if those at the bottom of the heap have some instinctive notion that guides them as regards what's wrong or wrong, as opposed to the middle or the upper bits of the heap:

It is rooted in instinctive notions of right and wrong, which are often clearer to those at the bottom of the heap.

We are but one step away here from the 'noble savage', though let's not pin that one on Rosseau, a routine that if applied by people to Indigenous folk or others low on the totem pole, would usually be skewered by the Devine as sentimental nonsense.

As befits a drop in, who having dropped in and written the column, will promptly drop back out, until the next column calls, and a trip into the myriad roundabouts is required, a false identification is a pre-requisite:

They might have jumbled families of their own, but they know where the ice addicts live, and they know in which families children are safe and in which they aren't.

When government bureaucracies and the rest of Sydney let them down, they have each other.

But then the mask drops, and the professional media bleat intrudes:

Of course, if police at some stage deem a crime to have been committed in relation to Kiesha, any mention of the little girl will be forbidden in the media.

Yes, and the foot in the door reporting of the commercial networks will stop, and the kind of voyeuristic exploitative guff being scribbled by the Devine will perforce have to stop as others are required to consider actual facts and circumstances, and the shock jocks will have to hold their tongues about the need to be tough on scum and crime.

And then how will the papers sold and the ratings hold up? What a sore test, what a lack of caring and sharing, what a lack of community:

Her name and photo will not be published and any sins against her will be forgotten, because of secretive laws enacted by the NSW government - aided by a negligent opposition - to evade proper scrutiny of its failed policies on child protection, under the guise of protecting privacy.

Repeat: Any sins against her will be forgotten ....

Yep, when confronted with the death of a child, the best the Devine can produce is treacly sentimental offensive innuendo laden nonsense, topped off by offensive gibberish ...

The laws will effectively extinguish the candles at Kiesha's makeshift shrine on Woodstock Avenue, just as they extinguish any outcry that should come if people hear of another child "known to DOCS" who has met a sad end.

What a pity the laws can't extinguish Miranda the Devine.

But as a quality piece of gutter trawling sensationalist claptrap, replete with innuendo of a safely legal kind - as a response to individual tragedy, however it might play out and whatever the police might conclude - the Devine has provided a perfect calling card for a return to tabloid journalism.

But then it's always been that way with the yellow press, with death always the perfect motivation for half baked speculation dressed up as sociological observation, and garnished with sentimental identification for the sake of a story.

Back in the day when I looked at the early twentieth century Australian media's love of crime and mystery, the subjects were likely to be the Gun Alley Murder, right in the heart of Melbourne, or the doings of Arnold Karl Sodeman.

But if voyeurism is your go, there's no need to rely on the Devine. The entire proceedings of the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, from 1674 to 1913, are now on line, and you can frolic through the doings of the court and criminals, and also take at look at the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts. Using 'transportation' and the appropriate search dates, you can also track the criminals who contributed to the start of Australia as a rather large prison.

Or not. You could always settle for reading the Devine's defence of the Catholic church in the matter of pedophilia, in Evildoers, not Pope, to blame.

Or not. You could always just batten down the hatches and wait for the Devine to move back to the tabloid heap.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure how to round out this piece. Perhaps a dictionary would help:

babbler, blab, blabbermouth, busybody, chatterbox, chatterer, circulator, flibbertigibbet, gossiper, gossipmonger , informer, meddler, newsmonger, parrot, prattler, rumormonger, scandalizer, scandalmonger, snoop, tabby, talebearer, taleteller, tattle, tattletale, telltale, whisperer

Take your pick.

And now since we have a portmanteau theme today:

(Below: interested in finding out more about the Liberal party, using the full to overflowing intertubes as a keen post modernist futurist with a nuanced understanding of the digital interface. Try. Again.)

Oops, that didn't work. Try. Again.

Oops, that didn't work. Try. Again.

Ah to heck with it. Just show me where to vote.

Janet Albrechtsen, death to Mahler and French clocks, and let's hear it for ugg boots ...

(Above: our favourite picture of our favourite gum chewing, chardonnay hating, ugg boot wearing, trackie loving, slipper endorsing, pj's embracing, polar fleece celebrating, elitist hating member of the media elite).

"Do I really have to do it?"

"Yes you do, you get over there and do it right away!!"

"I'll clean my teeth. And eat an apple. I'll polish my shoes."

"None of that impresses me. You do it right now, you hear?! Enough excuses. You're supposed to be running a loon pond blog. What better loon can you find?"

"But I don't feel like it, I don't want to. I can't be bothered, I just don't care."

"Huh:

Don't care was made to care,

Don't care was hung,

Don't care was put in a pot

And boiled till she was done." (here)

"Oh okay."

Deep sigh. Here's Janet Albrechtsen scribbling Elites just don't get Howard.

Yes, yes, yes, we know. It was those damn elites that voted out the Howard government. Making some fifty per cent plus of Australians part of the damn elites. How come it's possible to be part of such a broad based elite? Shouldn't elites be say one or two per cent of the population? You know, like columnists for The Australian capable of coherent thought? .000000000001 per cent of the population ...

As for the buggers in Bennelong that voted the man down and out, look around people. Fifty per cent or more of you are damned elitists. As Antony Green, local Enmore celebrity and ABC elitist reminds us, there were on a two party preferred result, some 44,685 elitists were to hand in Bennelong in the 2007 election as part of the process of selecting the elite to hie off to Canberra (here).

Will these damn elitists now line up for an elite professional tennis star or a former elitist ABC broadcaster? Damn, it's hard for elitists to work out which elite they should pick ...

Do we have a thing about the use of the word 'elite', one of the most abused and over-worked words in the vocabulary of brain dead commentariat commentators?

Yes, we surely do. Here's an example of it in action:

This recent sniffing by Fairfax media elites about the return of "Howardism" betrays one constancy: they just don't get John Winston Howard. And it's likely they never will. The reason is simple enough. If you don't understand mainstream Australia, then Howard is equally mystifying.

Actually what's mystifying is that a dunce could scribble this in 2010, with the 2007 election now a matter of history, and Howard done and dusted, and a feather duster like many another ex-politician, and not even able to score a gig on the ICC, with a wretched Kiwi, Alan Isaac, a bloody accountant no less, scoring the gig (Zac the accountant).

What's even more astonishing is the melancholic way that commentariat commentators pine for the past, and indeed like to live in it, and cannot bring themselves to admit that Howard lost the last election. Put it another way:

They cannot bring themselves to admit that Australia is quietly, comfortably conservative by nature. Not in that overtly American way of muscular individualism, flag-waving patriotism or screaming Tea Party opposition to big government. In Australia, public displays of philosophical affection give way to private pragmatism and common sense. Howard battlers are not pining for the past. They have always sought the leader and the government that best represents their values and aspirations.

What? Like Kevin Rudd? Is that why they voted in former Chairman Kev?

It's astounding, time is fleeting
Madness takes its toll
But listen closely, not for very much longer
I've got to keep control

I remember doing the Time Warp
Drinking those moments when
The blackness would hit me and the void would be calling
Let's do the time warp again...
Let's do the time warp again!

It's just a jump to the left
And then a step to the right
With your hands on your hips
You bring your knees in tight
But it's the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane,
Let's do the Time Warp again!

Oops, don't know where that editorial intervention came from.

Back to the doleful, soulful tune of the mindless:

That reality defeats even the better minds in the media. Take Leigh Sales of ABC1's Lateline. In the first week of the election campaign, the Friday night host wondered whether we should expect to see "John Howard wheeled out during the Liberal Party's election campaign, or will he be a bit too much of a reminder of Work Choices and that era?" Howard is invariably depicted as an embarrassingly dotty, dribbling old one-trick pony forever shamed from political life by the 2007 election loss. For them, Howard represents everything they, the educated classes, despise: flexible workplaces, strong border control, moderate climate change policies, indigenous intervention. And so on.

And so on and so on and so on. Only now it's not the elite. Somehow it's a shame, a disgrace to be educated. Yep, somehow we should despise education because then you might end up in the educated classes, scribbling tripe for The Australian.

Have you ever been trapped in a party with a Whitlam-ite, still trying to maintain the rage however many decades on it might be? Listening to Albrechtsen wax lyrical about John Howard has the same soporific effect. He lost, get over it, move on ...

Oh dear, she just won't let go, will she?

They failed to comprehend the differences between Howard's 2007 election loss and Paul Keating's drubbing in 1996. Mainstream Australians stood ready with baseball bats to boot Keating, his Italian suits, antique clocks and Mahler CDs out of office in 1996. Meanwhile, the educated classes cried into their chardonnay at the rise of a balding, nerdy chap in thick glasses who espoused family values and torpedoed political correctness.

Fuck me dead. This from a poncy fancy git of a one time lawyer, paid handsomely to be an elite natterer for The Australian, married into the elite banking class, blathering on about how she's at one with the people, in much the same way that John Howard no doubt enjoyed his cellar during his time in power.

Exercise. Compare and contrast John Howard's cellar, as outlined here and featuring these four chardonnays:

Geoff Weaver 1999 chardonnay
Brokenwood 2001 chardonnay
Giant Steps 2001 chardonnay

Cape Mentelle 2001 chardonnay

with former chairman Rudd's cellar, as outlined here (with pdf here, containing grog and price list, noting that the emphasis has swung to Pike & Joyce chardonnay 04, Toolangi chardonnay 06 and 07, Petaluma charonnay 07, and Eagle Vale chardonnay 04).

What's the betting that in the privacy of her own home Albrechtsen occasionally tipples a chardonnay?

The point? That pricelessly stupid cultural and social stereotypes reveal a pricelessly stupid mind.

The day we see Janet Albrechtsen wander in to the ABC studios dressed in bogan gear, chewing on gum, and purporting to be one of the great unwashed, instead of a twee, wound way too tight member of the upper middle classes is the day she gets divorced and runs away with a plumber to Penrith. Leaving behind whatever clocks her nice house contains ...

But wait, there's even more meandering into the fields of nonsense, explaining that Howard didn't lose, or if he did lose, it was only the fault of the educated classes and not that evil fifty per cent plus that actually voted him down:

In 2007, only the educated classes had their baseball bats at the ready for Howard. Most Australians did not harbour visceral hatred towards him. While Australia's second longest serving prime minister certainly overstepped the mark on Work Choices, his bigger problem was overstaying his time in office. After 11 years as PM, Australians gave the new guy pretending to be Howard-lite a go. When they worked out Kevin Rudd was conning them, the battlers turned away long enough and swift enough for Labor to switch to a new face.

Oh bugger me dead. Enough with the Balmain boys and the baseball bats and the educated classes. Since when has being educated been some kind of visceral slur? Isn't that why we actually have a bloody school system?

He lost, get over it, move on.

No, no, no. She can't give it up. She's obsessed with John Howard. Everybody's either a John Howard or a John Howard lite or a wannabe John Howard or busy adopting John Howard's policy, except the ICC, which appointed a New Zealander, and frankly I'd rather drink a New Zealand sav blanc to an Australian chardonnay.

Call me unpatriotic, or just call me John Howard lite:

Those who lay claim to reporting, analysing and explaining Australian politics need now only ask themselves one question: if Howard is such a fossil from the past why has Julia Gillard mimicked the former Liberal PM on the critical issues in this election campaign? When Gillard shelved the emissions trading system, she signalled she is browner than Howard. Likewise, Gillard copied Howard's strong borders policy by proposing offshore processing of illegal immigrants and echoed Howard's policies on Afghanistan and the US alliance. On ABC1's Q&A on Monday night, Gillard -- the architect of waste and mismanagement within the $42 billion schools building program -- continued the me-too caper she started early on in the campaign, lining herself as the natural heir to Howard's record of sound economic management.

Bugger me dead. So what's her problem, since a vote for Tony Abbott is a vote for John Howard and a vote for Julia Gillard is a vote for John Howard and a vote for former chairman Rudd is a vote for John Howard and a vote for Bob Brown is a vote for ...

Hang on, hang on, is Albrechtsen suggesting that the only way not to vote for John Howard is to vote Green?

Well surely that's her only explanation for blathering on about the Howard battlers, since as far as I know Howard isn't running in this election, and so Howard battlers will have a battle to find a Howard to battle for ... Unless everyone is John Howard, in one hue or shade or another ....

In other words, Gillard knows this election will be decided in the homes of Howard battlers. Issues that concern Australians in the sun-belt seats of Queensland and western Sydney are very different to the left-of-centre agendas pursued by those in inner-city seats where our media elites work, live and practise pilates.

Fuck me dead. There it is again with the elites and the crap about pilates.

But how does Albrechtsen know about such things? Is it because she's just another bloody member of the media elite, former member of the ABC board, one time lawyer and academic, and for all we know a lover of yoga?

Or perhaps instead of wandering through art galleries to be shocked by what she finds, she's a regular at the footie, lovers a meat pie with dead horse, and her house is full of furniture she salvaged from the local Vinnies?

But of course all this is a mere prelude to the sounding of victory drums:

Those who misread Howard and history misread Abbott.

And so on and on and on, in which Albrechtsen explains that Tony Abbott will win the election because he's really John Howard, never mind that John Howard lost the election because he was John Howard, because Kevin Rudd won that election because he was John Howard. And how if he doesn't win, it'll all be the fault of the media for failing to realise that Julia Gillard was actually just pretending to be John Howard, whereas Tony Abbott does a much better job:

For much of the media, the prospect of Abbott becoming prime minister on August 21 is as repugnant as Howard winning in 1996. Mesmerised by Labor's latest messiah, they speak about the "sparkle" in Gillard's eyes. For them, a secular Gillard who pretends to be a conservative is far more preferable to a Catholic Abbott who is the real thing.

And now for the obligatory call to arms:

The rest of Australia may beg to differ.

Or they may not. Who knows, but it brings us back to the lamentable state of the nation's wine cellars which prompted this powerful editorial in The Australian. We're not wine snobs, but ...

Just to be clear, we're not advocating an obscure wine list favoured by inner-city topers: we're not impressed by the elites who diss anyone ordering a merlot. But an educated approach to ensuring the national cellars reflect the diversity of our wines - as well as recognising international offerings - is surely in the national interest.

Oh dear, so now the inner city elites love chardonnay but hate merlot?

Who exactly are these fuckwits that write this kind of nonsense? As if an editorialist for The Australian is anything but a git and a ponce and an elitist snob ...

Yes, that scribble was all part of News Ltd's excitement over the state of the nation's wine cellar under Howard and Rudd, as you can read here in Sneak peek at Kirribilli, Lodge wine cellars and Howard left win to rot, PM's cellar boring as hell.

Well here's a thought for Janet Albrechtsen. You're no longer going to be on your own writing this kind of drivel. There's a new scribbler in Murdoch-land, and she's from the Fairfax media elite, and she's called Miranda the Devine, and she's as mad as hell, and ready to propose way more far-fetched nonsense, and a love of Penrith in ways not dreamt of in your comfortable, handsomely educated, elitist, spiffingly toffy middle class lifestyle ...

Yes, it's going to be a race to the bottom, as two pompous preening members of the middle class media elite establish once and for all how much they truly hate Mahler, chardonnay and French clocks, and pretend that they're not part of a media elite but are at one in body, soul and mind with the great uneducated unwashed ...

Who will emerge triumphant in this cat fight as they race to the bottom of the gutter?

Why surely the gutter, as logic and reason leave the field for a nice refreshing glass of sav blanc ...

"Finished. I've finished. Can I go out and play now?"

"Of course you can dear. Feeling better?"

"Way better. You were right. It's great to read media elites wanking on about media elites."

"Good girl. I know it's hard work, but you always feel better afterwards."

"Yes, when I grow up I'm going to like Mahler and French clocks and chardonnay, and not worry what other people might think. I think they're such an awful, dreary, mind deadening bunch of tossers."

"That's nice dear. At least it's better than ruining your life with screen culture. Now why don't you put on a song? Dance a little. You know you like to dance. Life is short. Have some fun ..."

Abbott, Conroy, and not so much a vision thingie as Steve Jobs' sneaker shoelace ...

(Above: planning a better futurist broadband digital future).

What better way to start the day than to join in the celebrations surrounding the "I'm as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" flight attendant who found a novel way to depart the plane, beer in hand.

It ended badly, as these moments of glory tend to do, and if you haven't caught up with it, The New York Times has the story under the header Fed-Up Flight Attendant Makes Sliding Exit.

Sure the Herald and other local rags have the story, but thanks to a barely adequate speed on the intertubes, you can go directly to an American source (what an amazing world, and imagine what you might be able to do with faster connectivity...)

The pond is more cheerful just thinking about the whole damn thing ...

And then ... Yes, there is an 'and then' ... what more dismal way to start the day than contemplating the coalition's broadband proposal, which is as dog eared, moth eaten and backward looking as had been expected.

As usual, various pundits have been dragged out from the woodwork to explain that fast broadband is only suitable for the delivery of television - where does the ABC manage to find these luddites?

No doubt they stood around in the old days as Qantas began its regional services, saying sure aeroplanes might be good for delivering a few letters, but as for passengers, it'll never take off. No one will want to abandon the service and luxury to be found on air ships.

Next thing you know flight attendants run screaming from planes, a beer in hand, as the great unwashed take to the air ...

It's the form of these pundits to talk about killer apps. Where's the killer app, they blather, as if mentioning a killer app gives them immediate street cred with which to diss talk of the benefits of speed. You can imagine these drones in the hall of Apple asking Steve Jobs, yes, yes, it looks good, you're good at design, but where's the killer app? The iPad will never fly, it's only good for playing music and movies ...

If Jobs hadn't had liver problems, what's the bet he'd be grabbing a beer and exiting by the nearest chute?

Yep, the only thing more pathetic than Abbott's vision was the ABC's coverage, and their attempts to dig up a supporter of it, which somehow reminded me of the blackly comic grave scene in Death in Brunswick.

So what's been the reaction to Abbott's 'vision' thingie? Well even The Australian realises that it's a dud, running with Abbott battles to defend 'grab bag' broadband plan. Here's the key issues in a couple of Powerpoint slides:

Internet Industry Association chief executive Peter Coroneos said the opposition's plan fell "significantly short" of the NBN.

"The private sector has had all this time to deliver broadband and they've only made the decision to do that where it makes commercial sense," he said.

"Wireless is never going to be a substitute for fibre."

Except of course what Coroneos should have said is that it falls pathetically short, and that the current state of broadband in Australia is scandalous, with a heavy premium for access and onerous caps for usage, and woeful technological shortfalls and substitutes for the real thing, and all the result of the elephant Telstra seeking to keep rivals out of the zoo, while remaining wedded for way too long to its land line cash cows.

As for the delusionary notion that wireless is a viable alternative ... Whenever someone mentions this, I know (a) they know nothing and (b) they like to reveal their technical ignorance by blathering through their hat.

Meanwhile, even in the relatively backward United States, there's talk of the benefits of 100 Mbps in 100 million American homes within 10 years. Sure it's just a catchy vision thingie, a National Broadband Plan that's the child of the wretched FCC, but at least there's a hint of a vision ...

The plan presented by Abbott's team suggests Abbott is more at home splashing the cash on middle class welfarism, leading pundits such as Elizabeth Knight to scribble Abbott's alternative is no real alternative at all. If you can stand it, there's plenty more of it going around, as in Industry slams Coalition plans, but frankly I got too depressed reading the news to find more links. But how about 'I'm no Bill Gates': Abbott stumbles on broadband plan?

Scrub that. Here's what the header should have said: "I'm not even a shoelace in Steve Jobs' runners" ...

At a time when Australia is digging up and shipping offshore, as a one off delivery to China and such like places, its mineral wealth, you'd think politicians might want to box clever and devise ways we can make the most of a digital future. Not under Abbott.

What a dismal failure of imagination, a failure all the more dismal because there were ways to take what was good from Labor and promote alternative scenarios. If the man knew how to box clever. Instead of making noises like a cardboard box ...

The truth in all this is that the Liberals are still wedded to the notion that a behemoth Telstra, like an ageing government monopoly, is still the way to go, revealing themselves as a kind of prototypical bunch of agrarian socialists.

Yet over in the other corner, what have we got? Conroy labelling opponents of his useless filter as supports of child pornography, little better than pedophiles in action, and a Labor government which on its record is likely to botch the NBN roll out (having already started badly with jobs for the boys).

Well Conroy lost my vote a long time ago, and now Abbott can join the queue.

Okay, okay, I have a professional interest in decent broadband. But even self-interest can't explain away such a pathetic failure, and the kicking of such an own goal. It's enough to make a loon ponder grab a beer and head for the nearest window exit.

But wait, there's one further delight with which to greet the day. Gillard's $2b Sydney transport fix.

Yep, the Parramatta-Epping line is back on again, having been on and off for well over a decade. Is it any wonder that hardened Sydney-siders are cynical about politics.

Sure it's a good idea, but the western and north western suburbs have been delivered so many coathangers so many times they have a stiffer neck than a rugby league thuggee. Or Tony Abbott conjuring up his 'vision thingie'.

What next? A second airport for Sydney, since even Melbourne has a second airport, wretched and remote though it might be ... Ah Avalon, gateway to Melbourne and Geelong ...

Well we can but dream the invincible dream, but ain't it grand how Sydney infrastructure projects come out of the toy box at election time, and then stuffed back inside the box so that they can be pulled out again, still in their plastic wrapping, the next time an election comes around. All hail Bob Carr, the first master of doing nothing, while sounding terribly earnest and terribly busy doing it ...

Meanwhile, Channel Nine is lathering up its 'print the controversy' routine, in preparation for its Sunday night tic tic tic Latham report, as Oakes hits out in round two of Latham stoush:

Veteran Nine Network reporter Laurie Oakes has again come out swinging against Mark Latham, saying the former Labor leader has a bile duct "the size of Sydney Harbour".

Yes, but Laurie, while you're having a go at Latham, and carrying on like a pork chop, Nine's still going to run the story on Sunday. You're just another clown in the same circus, delivering the same amount of bile, and no doubt the hope is that the bile exchange will deliver a box office advertising bonanza come Sunday night.

If Nine cared, they'd can the damn thing. But they don't and they won't. So how does it feel spending your last years in the circus working alongside your colleague Mark Latham?

Lordy, gonna grab that beer and hit that chute hard ...

(Below: and since this is an equal opportunity site for boofheads, an image found here).

Gerard Henderson, Mark Latham, Malcolm Fraser, and farewell Miranda the Devine ...

(Above: found here, in a piece scribbled in the days before Annabel Crabb fled the granny Herald for aunty ABC. Now it seems a big, large, obnoxious rat is fleeing the granny ship).

Excellent news. Unsurpassing joy. A bit like listening to Beethoven's Ninth a couple of times in a row.

Well not really, but the news that Miranda the Devine is leaving the Herald to work in Murdoch-land means that one more serial pest has found a natural home in the fortress of weevils.

The good news is told in Crikey's What was David Gyngell thinking? ... Devine goes national for a song.

And it's worth contemplating what's the song in question. According to Crikey, the News tabloids involved in the scooping of the fetid Herald pool are likely to have stumped up over $240,000 a year for the benefit of Ms Devine's opinions - which must give the gherkins who offer up their thoughts to The Punch, Australia's most cheap skate conversation at least a nano second's pause for thought.

If ever there was a clear demonstration that the free market for ideas in Australia is stuffed, the Devine grandly reveals that the shift isn't for mere sordid money, but for the braveheart idea of leaving the small Fairfax pond to work for those purveyors of quality journalism, the Murdoch tabloids, such as the HUN and the Daily Terror, in the guise of a "national correspondent".

Yep, in the rough equivalent of the grand global financial meltdown, the marketplace for ideas counts for nothing up against the marketplace for shit stirring. Which in turn makes me wonder why people pay for the pleasure of being outraged by the Devine, firing off indignant messages about what has always been a fire free zone when it comes to coherent thinking or useful insights.

Happily it means we'll be thinking much less about the Devine, because we never, for example, visit the HUN, because it's the home of dolts ... and Melbourne's welcome to it.

Not to worry, there are plenty more loons on the pond, which naturally brings us to our resident prattling Polonius, Gerard Henderson, and his offering Latham and Fraser can afford to intervene in the news.

Henderson spends the first half of his column slagging off Mark Latham, for living off his parliamentary pension, and turning himself into a grub on grub street, and for his approach to Gillard in the street, with its implicit and explicit aggression - and who could argue with any of that?

Latham's anger, which stemmed from a paranoid belief Gillard and Labor had complained to Channel Nine about his 60 Minutes appointment, may have been counterproductive in that it could increase sympathy for his target. But the intention was clear. Latham, a product of the NSW Labor Right, has now turned on virtually all his former political friends - from Gough Whitlam to Gillard.

But what's amusing is the way Henderson then proceeds to a kind of moral equivalence which sees our favourite old squatter, incited by too many dull rural board games like Squatter, given the same kind of dusting up.

But what's Malcolm Fraser's crime? Has he been caught in the streets waving his finger at Tony Abbott, aggressively shaking his hand, towering over him, and giving him a good paranoid going over?

No, he's simply expressed a point of view:

Then there is Malcolm Fraser. Interviewed by Fran Kelly on Radio National on Friday, he replied "no" when asked whether the Coalition was ready for government. This comment created considerable media interest. Yet it was not really news at all. In fact, Kelly asked virtually the same question before the 2007 election and received much the same answer.

What a shocking crime. Here at the pond we're still reeling at the thought of it.

But hang on a second. Does Henderson even pause for a moment to think that he himself is being a kind of verbal thuggee by equating Latham and Fraser?

No, because he needs to get in his own bit of paranoid indignant finger waving:

In Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, which is co-authored by Fraser and Margaret Simons, it is recorded that "Fraser refuses to say how he voted in [the] 2001, 2004 and 2007 federal elections". The message is clear. These days Fraser prefers Labor governments. It is made clear Fraser "said many times that the Howard government did not deserve to be re-elected". In other words, Fraser's position with reference to Tony Abbott is identical to his attitude to John Howard.

Dear me, how shocking. Why surely that makes him worse than Latham, a quisling, a traitor, a lickspittle fellow traveller with the left. A man who by all accounts might have voted according to his conscience and his inclination. For the wrong side! Batting and bowling and fielding for the wrong team!

The man is in such moral and theological error that he makes the street stalking Latham a model of piety. Such a litany of errors:

I have done a detailed critique of Fraser's memoirs in the coming issue of The Sydney Institute Quarterly. The book is littered with errors of commission and omission. Some of the historical howlers are just that. But others seemed designed to present Fraser as how he wants to be regarded today - a small "l" liberal in the tradition of Robert Menzies.

By golly, this man must be taken down a peg or three:

There are two problems with Fraser's self-image. First, he was a small "l" liberal on some issues - such as apartheid, refugees and indigenous affairs. But he was a hard-line conservative on foreign policy and national security matters when prime minister.

Yes folks, there's the astonishing sight of a hard-line conservative abusing a hard-line conservative for being a hard-line conservative. Monty Python does't get any better than this. so what's his chief hard line conservative crime. Defence minister during the war in Vietnam say? No, no, no:

Fraser even put about 2000 armed members of the Australian Defence Force on the route between Sydney and Bowral following the Hilton Hotel bombing in Sydney in 1978, enlisted to protect visiting heads of government attending a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. No other Australian leader has so deployed the ADF during peacetime.

Yes, and after an explosion which only killed three people and only wounded seven. Why at the time I remember urging Fraser to deploy a squadron of easter bunnies, mingled with a squadron of Santa Claus's and position them along the streets in a way that would spread calm, perhaps even a little joy amongst the populace.

Fraser chose to ignore my advice, preferring to act out his brutalist Soviet leader fantasies by deploying the army. The streets ran red with blood, but who can forget that poignant moment when a young student thrust a flower down the barrel of a gun as the tank lurched towards her?

The contrast to the security deployed during the APEC summit by John Howard couldn't be clearer. Howard understood the benefits of tension-relieving comedy, and so arranged for the Chaser lads to crash the barriers, making Australian security a laughing stock around the world. Spirits were immediately lifted, laughter reigned supreme ... There, that's genuine honourable hard-line conservatism.

But now we return to the indignant, outraged Henderson for a bit more of his spray. Because you see, suddenly it's okay to be a hard-line conservative again, even a Ming the merciless:

Second, Menzies was no small "l" liberal himself on foreign policy and national security issues. His memoirs tell us much about how he regards himself but little about Australian politics or the history of the Liberal Party.

Oh dear, talk about complete confusion. Fraser claims he isn't a hard line conservative but he is, or was, and says he's like Menzies, whom he thinks wasn't a hard line conservative but he was, and so he's just like Menzies because they're both hard line conservatives.

I give up. Can we just try to work out the ins and outs of hard line conservative Stalinism?

Still there's a point, and here it is:

Fraser's comments attacking Howard, Abbott and the contemporary Liberal Party are no more inherently newsworthy than Latham's continuing diatribes against Kevin Rudd, Gillard and modern Labor.

Actually if Fraser stalked Abbott in the street, can I dare to think that it might be newsworthy.

But as for the rest Henderson of course is right.

Henderson's comments attacking Fraser, Latham, Gillard and the contemporary Labour party are no more inherently newsworthy than Miranda the Devine's continuing diatribes against greens, feminists, bicyclists and public servants.

Never mind. It seems they're worth a pretty penny.

Time for one last bout of sour grapes and jaundiced rhetoric? Sure thing:

Latham and Fraser are both big names. And both have time to devote to keeping themselves in the news on account of the fact they are in receipt of taxpayer-financed allowances, made possible by once having led their respective parties.

The media do themselves no credit when they encourage the personally embittered to castigate the parties they once led. Manifestations of retirement syndrome are not a pretty look.

So Latham and Fraser are one and the same, a street stalker the moral equivalent of a man expressing his views.

Meanwhile, in other news today, Malcolm Fraser went on Sky News, and savaged Laurie Oakes, while also delivering a vitriolic spray at Tony Abbott and jolly Joe Hockey. Oops, we seem to have got that wrong. It's Mark Latham comes out swinging at veteran journalist Laurie Oakes.

One senior Nine insider conceded the aggressive presence of Latham in Brisbane on Saturday had inflamed the controversy: "I don't think he sets out to intimidate: it's the style of the bloke.
"He's a big f..king boofhead.
"He'd been standing back, then he went forward. ... he's 11 foot tall and weighs 20-stone - he's just naturally an intimidating presence."

Why that sounds just like Malcolm Fraser.

You see, the media do themselves no credit when they encourage the personally embittered to castigate parties and personalities on the basis of cheerleading, fear mongering views. Manifestations of commentariat columnist syndrome are not a pretty look.

But at least the Devine's 'not a pretty look' is no longer in the Herald, leaving Henderson looking more and more like a shag on the rock. Not a pretty look ...

Not that we intend any disrespect to shags or rocks. We love 'em, close kissing cousins to loons as they are ...

(Below: a couple of red eyed shags on a Falklands rock).

Cardinal Pell, Wendy Francis, and onward Christian soldiers, lovers of watermelon and prejudice ...

(Above: eek, it's a photoshopped fake of Steve Fielding with a watermelon. What does it mean Cardinal Pell?)

(Above: eek, Wendy Francis. Here on the pond one day, gone forever on the next).

So is there any upside to my sudden awareness that Wendy Francis is standing for Family First in Queensland?

Well yes, I like to think there are a number of benefits.

For a start, it's not just good old Pellist heretic Cardinal George Pelll who's a silly old chook.

Pell, you might recall, tottered out into the world, or more particularly, into the bizarro world of News Ltd, to announce that the Greens were thoroughly anti-Christian. Keep that up as a selling point, and the Greens suddenly look tempting.

Anything but the Pellist heresy thank you very much ...

Showing that his grasp of metaphors is as feeble as his grasp of politics, Pell penned the following:

In his article, Cardinal Pell wrote the Greens' once claimed that humans are simply another smarter animal - an ethic designed to replace Judeo-Christianity.

He said some Greens are "like watermelons, green outside and red inside".

"A number were Stalinists, supporting Soviet oppression," he wrote. (Greens' policies more Christian than Cardinal George Pell, says Bob Brown).

In his usual inimitable way, it seems Pell has been reading Gerard Henderson smear of all Greens by association with Lee Rhiannon, a matter we dealt with here.

Well he would say that, wouldn't he, seeing as how he has such an intimate association with Tony Abbott, but is a green watermelon the best he's got as a metaphor? What a pathetic, tragic, out of date, out of touch, past his use by date goose.

As for calling the Greens in generality Stalinists and Stalin lovers, is he aware of the variant to Godwin's Law?

As time has passed I've noticed a tendency for 'Commie' to replace 'Fascist' as an ad hominem particularly on usenet. This could be a direct result of Godwin's law or a result of the increasing numbers the American public using the net. This suggests yet another Godwin corollary.
- As the probability of Godwin's Law being invoked approaches one the probability that 'Commie' will replace 'Nazi' also tend towards one.
Martin Spamer

Indeed. A dollar in the swear jar please Cardinal Pell. Or perhaps a dollar in the collection plate. Oh heck, why not just auction off your ritzy collection of fancy pants red robes, and send the money to the poor. You know, do a Jesus routine, instead of a watermelon Stalinist routine. After all, if you're red on the outside, chances are you're red on the inside.

But where were we with Wendy Francis, and her outing in Family First candidate Wendy Francis stands by gay slur on Twitter? (Beware, it's another of those damned forced video stories the Herald specialises in so if you're caught napping you have to watch another of their damned ads. Curse you Herald, curse you).

Ms Francis, Family First's lead Senate candidate in Queensland, said in a Twitter message yesterday: "Children in homosexual relationships are subject to emotional abuse. Legitimising gay marriage is like legalising child abuse."

Which makes me wonder. Is sending a child to a Catholic church like legalising child abuse, as the priests fiddle about with the altar boys back behind the vestry, like Uncle Ernie in that Who rock opera? Or is that illegal child abuse? And is Ms Francis as fired up about the Catholic church as she is about gays, since there's a heck of a lot more evidence of the church at fault than there is for her preposterous views about gays ...

Ain't it strange, nay weirdly wonderful, how stupid some Christians are ...

Ain't it grand to learn that Australia - well hopefully only the dark north, which is to say Queensland - has people as off as any the Americans can offer up ...

Of course Francis has followed the standard course of a minor politician suddenly dumped in the spotlight, caught saying silly things like a 'roo entranced by the glare. It was only going to be a dogwhistle, and then the media were all over it like a rash, because they love the loons as much as we love them here on the pond. Google her name, and you'll see what we mean.

But back to the fatal error of inexperienced candidates.

So you twitter away like a right royal twit, sending tweets into the ether like a goose:

Oops, then it's out in the ether, and someone grabs them, and then it's on.

What to do? Well delete the tweets, as any rabbit caught in the glare would do. But curse it, damn it, such is the full to overflowing nature of the intertubes that they just keep on caching and saving this kind of stuff.

So then explain that there's only a small number of people helping and it's all a bit overwhelming, and then explain how there are only 140 characters in a tweet, and this was just a headline, never mind that it's a profoundly offensive, in error headline, and then offer up the immortal phrase, the watermelon thinking in this case:

The gay slur thing; I am not homophobic.

Or I'm not hurling abuse at homosexuals. It's just being around them is a kind of emotional abuse.

Yes you are duckie, everything you said in the tweet and subsequently to the media in defence of the indefensible is precisely that. What else to make of this?

"What I'd say to [people opposing the view] is that the headline that has been generated probably really lost sight of what I was saying," she said.

"I was talking about emotional child abuse...

... Ms Francis went further, comparing the "parentless" generation with the "stolen generations".

"We had a stolen generation and we saw that that social experiment left children confused, they were without the right to have their mother and father and for me I think the right of the child is to have a mother and a father," she said.

Well that's a relief. It seems Ms. Francis actually believes there was a stolen generation.

So that's an upside.

As for the rest, I immediately rushed off to Enmore celebrity Antony Green's The Green Guide, and invoked his Senate Calculator for Queensland, and there were six candidates getting the nod, including three for the ALP, and three for the Liberal Nationals, including good old Barners. And there was Wendy Francis getting 2.33% votes, and carrying that albatross word "excluded".

"Excluded". Such a nice word.

Talk about an upside. There for fifteen minutes of fame, a veritable media celebrity, and then gone the next ...

Now if only Steve Fielding gets himself "excluded" ...

Yes, yes, Enmore celebrity Antony Green's Senator calculator suggests 2.56% and "excluded". No more brown bottles wandering around parliament.

This is surely the moment that Pooh talked about, the sweet moment before voting, or eating honey:

"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best -- " and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.

And what a happy world it would be if somehow Cardinal Pell could find himself "excluded" too.

Or at least made to eat a watermelon a day, so he could find out what it's like to jaundiced on the inside, as well as prejudiced on the outside.

Oh if only Christ could return, that long absent fickle lord, and see the inheritors of his mantle at work ...

(Below: a man who loves his frocks, and nothing wrong with that, unless of course you take a dim view of men who love their frocks, and think other men shouldn't love their frocks, while loving your own, and worse than that, that it's better to be red on the outside, and bilious on the inside).

UPDATE: a larger image, in which it is clearly revealed that the long absent god has returned so that just in this moment of time of the snap being taken, a ghostly image of a dunce's hat is superimposed on Cardinal Pell's head. Having delivered this visual supernatural judgement, the photographer and the police and Pellists everywhere are now in search of the long absent god ...

Paul Sheehan, the usual cheerleading blather, and somewhere there's a better place ...

(Above: now there's a logo-enhanced plaque).

While some choose to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a survival technique, a way of getting through the current election campaign, here we naturally dream of ponds.

Loon ponds.

There are more loon ponds in the world than you might think, and today we feature Loon Pound, Newfoundland, Canada. Greetings Canuckian loons, situated near the pleasant town of Placentia, aka Pleasure or Plaisance. This handy guide will give you ways of finding out more than you ever dreamed of about the pond and its environs and plucky Placentians, unless of course as a Canadian you already know.

It is of course much better to dream of foreign climes and times than contemplate the squawkings on the local loon pond, and it's with bitter regret that we think of the circumstances that prevented us from heading off shore for the entire election campaign.

We wanted to avoid writing about the election, but of course the commentariat are furiously scribbling and taking sides, and who better to show how it's done than Paul Sheehan, in An unhealthy blend of evasion, half-truths and spin, featuring as usual an unhealthy blend of evasion, half-truths, spin and rampant cheer-leading.

Whenever it comes down to cheerleading, a column would be so much shorter and to the point if the columnist simply said "I can't stand Labor/Gillard/Rudd, or the whole damn thing, and/or I love Tony Abbott/jolly Joe/Truss and the whole damn thing, and I'm going to vote accordingly and urge you to do the same".

There, done and dusted, they go about their lives, we go about ours, and the raucous shouting on the pond dies away on milliseconds, and there's not even a distant echo swallowed up by the morning's gentle mist.

It's when a one sided analysis is attempted that it comes unstuck.

Sheehan leads off his show of disdain for Gillard by quoting Gillard being evasive on the 7.30 Report. If he'd been in the other camp, he would have any number of notorious exchanges featuring Tony Abbott being similarly evasive or lead footed.

Quote examples of both? What are you, a communist?

The Gillard exchange is of high moment, crucial importance and of breath-taking concern, full of deep and dire implications for the national economy and national security.

Why didn't she call former Chairman Rudd after his gall bladder operation?

Yep, that's what you get as policy analysis on loon pond. How much simpler and more honest to simply scribble "I don't like the cut of Gillard's jib", or her accent, or her red hair. Since trivia is the go for Sheehan, let him be the earnest, open, trivia hunting twat that he is.

But of course leading with trivia about Gillard might lead a humbug tweaker to lead with trivia about Abbott. How to deal with this?

Yes, the alternative, Tony Abbott, has a proclivity for foot-in-mouth disease.

Ah you see, this is an attempt to sound fair and balanced. For a nano second. Then it's on with the cheerleading:

Having challenged Gillard to three formal debates, he declined her belated reciprocal challenge to a second. But Abbott has remained authentic, sometimes painfully so. He is a veteran of the government which stormproofed the Australian economy, and offers real choices to the electorate in this campaign.

And of course at this point on the pond, it's natural to feel a surge of irritation, since Abbott is notoriously lead footed on economic matters, and being an authentic gherkin doesn't in any way affect the intrinsic quality of gherkin-ness, and you don't need to see a Labor party attack ad to remember Peter Costello's view of Abbott's economic skills.

Here he is in March before it became necessary to unite and stand together during the election campaign, in Coalition brushes off Costello's criticism:

Mr Costello accuses Mr Abbott of taking a "Crocodile Dundee" approach to policy making, by attempting to outflank Labor with an even bigger proposal.

"[Mr Abbott] keeps being told he needs to appeal more to female voters. So he adopts the Crocodile Dundee approach," he writes.

"In the movie a New York mugger pulls a switchblade on Mick Dundee. Our hero laughs at the blade. 'That's not a knife, this is a knife'. The terrified mugger disappears into the night.

"The point of Abbott's proposal is to tell the public that Rudd does not have a maternity leave scheme. 'This is a maternity leave scheme', he declares.

"Your opponent has a mildly bad idea, so you come up with a more extreme one and have a race to the bottom."

You won't read any of that in Sheehan's blather because Sheehan is really only interested in cheerleading, and not recalling the time when possible future treasurer Joe Hockey professed a disdain for the dismal art of economics, never mind his liking of Delta Goodrem.

But it's when Sheehan gets on to hospitals that the fix becomes truly clear:

Many policies differentiate the major parties, from border control to paid parental leave, but on the most basic policy issue, healthcare, where structural inefficiencies can kill people, the difference between Labor and the Coalition is stark.

It might be stark to Sheehan, but that requires some structural erasure and re-formatting of the hard drive, so that it's possible to forget Abbott's time as Health Minister, and the splendid sight of Abbott and Howard standing outside a hospital in Tasmania announcing that the federal government would splash cash in marginal hospital electorates and then take over the whole damn thing from the states.

Sheehan's tactic is to forget that the push for federal intervention and control came from his mates, and instead rushes off to get a quote from John Graham, who has had a steady career as serial whinger from back in the day when he was arguing that Sydney Hospital should be upgraded to cope with a terrorist attack (Plea for federal help refused, says doctor) and who has a bee in his bonnet about bureaucrats who refuse to help out Sydney Hospital (Back to better hospitals).

But quoting Graham allows Sheehan this little flourish:

I can't vouch for his estimate, but it sits plausibly with the pattern of Whitlamesque excesses that have been the hallmark of the Rudd-Gillard government.

Uh huh. Whitlamesque excess. Simple minded abuse, suggesting Sheehan didn't live through the actual years of Whitlamesque excess. But he did, and it's just a simple minded smear.

As usual, you need to look elsewhere for an intelligent conversation about health, and especially the upcoming impact of baby boomers on the hospital system as they start letting go, and ways to manage it, but for that you should trot off to The New Yorker, which has Atul Gawande's Letting Go, What should medicine do when it can't save your life? currently sitting outside the paywall. It's a tough read, but a caring and thoughtful one, and it doesn't deliver kneejerk blather about excesses ...

The Sheehan agenda becomes a little clearer when we get to the penultimate paragraph, when it becomes clear it's more of the same:

When the Howard government introduced a tax rebate on private health insurance, it took pressure off the public hospitals as people moved to private care. The government was able to move $1 billion, earmarked for public hospitals, to tax relief for health insurance payments. It was a shift of spending, not a reduction.

Strange then that one of the biggest gripes during the Howard years was just how fucked the public hospital system became, and how peeved people were to learn that a billion had been shifted out of the system to provide tax relief for ponces scribbling from their eastern suburbs eerie about excesses ....

And then we come to the final par:

So great is the growing gap between rhetoric and reality that Gillard not answering simple questions is a symptom of something much deeper: an abdication of public honesty in the pursuit of power.

And then I wondered, remembering how much of a gherkin Sheehan has been about climate change, how that might read if we contemplated other areas of policy making:

So great is the growing gap between rhetoric and reality that Abbott not answering simple questions is a symptom of something much deeper: an abdication of public honesty in the pursuit of power.

Why I don't even have to mention climate change. It's just a simple minded slur that you could apply freely to anyone you don't like, provided you don't want any meaning attached to the words. Humbug fries with the fatty humbug burger sir?

And then I thought a pox on both their houses, but especially a pox on the simple minded cheerleading of Sheehan and Miranda the Devine and their kind ...

Perhaps it's the proudly independent genes of Tamworth - yes, Tony Windsor's the man up there, as featured on this morning's ABC's AM - but this kind of simple minded cheerleading should not be allowed to stand ...

In the meantime, since perhaps a trip to loon pond in Newfoundland is a tad ambitious, perhaps it's time to get out the Buffy discs, or maybe start re-watching the entire, complete in its entirety, copy of The Wire lurking under the coffee table ...

A couple more weeks and it'll all be only, and then all we'll left with is the eternal, restless, ongoing squawking of the loons on the pond ...

Oh dear, I feel a sentimental song coming on. Perhaps I can dress it up as a tribute to Larry David's episode in Curb Your Enthusiasm which was a tribute to Officer Krupke ...

There's a loon pond for us,
Somewhere a pond for us.
Peace and quiet and open air
Wait for us
Somewhere.

There's a time for us,
Some day a time for us,
Time together with time spare,
Time to learn, time to care,
Some day!

Somewhere.
We'll find a new way of living,
We'll find a way of forgiving
Somewhere . . .

There's a pond for us,
A time and place for us.
Hold my hand and we're halfway there.
Hold my hand and I'll take you there
Somehow,
Some day,
Somewhere!

And now for Officer Krupke complete with subtitles.

And then it's off to the analyst to understand why I keep thinking of Sheehan as that dumbbell Krupke ...

Mark Latham, the Nine network, and a hearty dose of Sondheim's Send in the Clowns ...

(Above: a fairy story for youngsters).

In the three ring circus that's politics, you always need more than one clown.

What's interesting is the media's response to said clowns.

In The Australian, Sid Maher tries to get on the back foot and present a solid defensive bat (I'm told John Howard would approved of that metaphor), with Mark Latham confront Julia Gillard over 'complaint' about his role as a TV reporter.

Inverted commas are always controversial, but in this case we can assume the 'complaint' was Latham's complaint about the alleged ALP complaint about his right to act as a goose, or as a 'reporter' for the Nine network.

Questioned by journalists, Mr Latham lamented modern politicians not answering questions.

He said “it was almost surreal” and showed no respect for the viewers of current affairs television programs.

“If they ask me about Rudd, I don't talk about the price of bread, I'll tell you about Rudd,” Mr Latham said.

He also asked journalists: “So has the campaign got any more real in the past five days?”

Mr Latham then encouraged journalists to “blow the house down” in a looming press conference over the government's limitation of access to today's key meeting between Ms Gillard and Mr Rudd.

Latham defending the role of the media?

Why am I reminded of the good old days, when John Howard described Latham as dishonest, devious and slimy? (which you can read about here).

Or perhaps the many times that Latham took shots at the press, like this:

MARK LATHAM, OPPOSITION LEADER: Recently a party elder said to me that the history of the 2004 election would be written in books rather than in newspaper articles.

He said the history wouldn't be written in newspaper articles, it would be written by authors and recorded in a great number of books.

Well, thank goodness for that.

You can imagine my relief to learn that future historians and political science students will be able to study something more substantial than a long series of anonymous quotes. (here)

Oh dear, such a cheap shot at his new colleague Laurie Oakes.

Meanwhile, over at The Punch, Australia's most awkward conversation, Tory Maguire finds the circus metaphor irresistible, but the search for clowns resistible, though in Gillard's campaign debacle she does give a clue:

The confrontation has capped a day of chaos for the ALP, and also gave a reminder of the same macho approach Latham took as Labor Leader when he almost crushed John Howard’s hand with an aggressive handshake at a radio studio on the eve of the 2004 poll. Latham today leant into Gillard and waved his finger at her demanding she answer his unproven allegations of a complaint.

So wouldn't a better header have been Latham's campaign debacle?

In recent weeks, the mainstream commentariat commentators have taken to quoting Latham fondly, and praising him for his incisive brilliance in analysing the internal feuds, ructions and factions of the Labor party. Yes come on down Janet Albrechtsen, you're the leader of the pack.

Labor has never been able to manage Latham. His invective-laden insights had enough merit to hurt Labor, whether it was exposing the Left's vacuous claims to social justice or exposing the Right's obsession with personal aggrandisement at the price of sound policy development.

Now it seems like Nine has never been able to manage Latham. Set a dog loose and you really need to know it's going to round up the sheep rather than turn on them and savage them.

But boofhead is as boofhead does, and as boofhead has been for many a long year, and the real question is why the media has empowered, encouraged and incited so many boofheads?

What were the Nine network thinking by appointing Latham to some kind of job as roving reporter for a 60 Minutes segment?

I know, I know, 60 minutes has been an unwatched, irrelevant joke for years, so the idea of employing clowns to ginger up the circus is just another way of showing up the irrelevance.

But it suddenly seems to have dawned on Nine that even clowns have their limits, and that some in the audience might take a view, as shown in Nine apologises to PM over Latham act:

The Nine Network has apologised to Prime Minister Julia Gillard over her treatment by former Labor leader-turned-journalist Mark Latham on assignment for its flagship current affairs program.

Nine Network CEO David Gyngell said in a statement issued to AAP on Saturday he had personally apologised to Ms Gillard for the approach by Mr Latham while she was campaigning in Brisbane.

Mr Gyngell said the approach lacked proper respect.

Actually Gillard - in the footage to hand - acted quite well, and it was Latham doing his legendary firm hand shake bovver boy routine who came off second best, along with all the commentariat commentators who've invited him in to their tents in recent weeks.

But the real loser is Nine. Oh yes, that's right, thanks for reminding me, as already total dropkick losers, what have they got to lose?

Still it seems that the special report Latham was preparing might be in limbo:

A Nine spokesman said a decision about the footage, including if and when it will go to air, had not yet been made.

Actually I'd love to see the report. Perhaps they should put it to air next Sunday - it seems that this week they'll re re-enacting Bligh's journey across the Pacific. The Sunday after that it'll be too late to influence the election, and reveal Latham's shattering insights on all the many and varied ways politicians manage to lose elections. It could be quite autobiographical ...

Laurie Oakes and Mark Latham. What a team. Why do I feel a little Sunday music coming on?

Oh okay, here's a legitimate version of the Sondheim classic, with synched lyrics as the picture: