Hiking the Appalachian Trial This evocative phrase can mean anything done instead one's official duties. It also implies that you are skipping work to cry for days with your soul mate, in Argentina.

That Whole Sparking Thing What a wonderful euphemism for sleeping with that special someone who is, as far as your romantic partner knows, "just a friend"! That moment when you give up all pretense of innocent platonic friendship and just go for it is indeed a special time in the dissolution of every man's marriage.

Crossed Lines This is a splendid example of the art of digging yourself a deeper hole. Feel free to use it if you are trying to make your background sound sexy and exciting without having to admit to anything specific, or if you just want to be vague, once again, to your partner about your romantic history!

Only Dead Fish Go With the Flow This, apparently, is Christian dogwhistling, yes, but it is also a really great way to paint your complete abdication of your responsibilities as the proactive decision of a maverick. Only a dead fish would keep governing Alaska after two years on the job! A vibrant leader of tomorrow would buck the system and randomly quit for no good reason in the middle of her term! (Also: live fish swim both up and downstream, all the time, we are pretty sure.)

A Pattern of Generosity The John Ensign sex scandal has, thus far, not presented as many idiomatic gifts as the scandals of Palin and Sanford. But there are nuggets of gold. This phrase, our humble suggestion for a new euphemism, comes from Ensign's lawyer's statement on the payments made by Ensign to the husband of the woman he slept with for a year. In the letter, the lawyer claims the payments were made by Ensign's parents, out of the kindness of their own hearts, and not by Ensign himself, out of his campaign or Senate funds, acting on orders from Tom Coburn. So go ahead and say you bought those drugs or paid that woman to keep quiet as part of your long "pattern of generosity" next time you're caught possibly misusing funds!

Honorable mention: "The biggest self of self is self."
"I know that I know that I know"
"If I die, I die."

Depending, perhaps, on her painkiller supply, Peggy Noonan veers wildly between hackish defenses of Republican doctrine and actual clear-thinking criticisms of politicians (and sometimes, when she's had a little Chardonnay, she goes to airports, or walks around the Upper East Side looking at buildings). The latter columns tend to trick people into thinking the former columns are something other than a lifelong party faithful carrying water. But we digress! As a Republican, she would like to see Republicans actually win elections, someday, and because she is already on record as hating Sarah Palin it would not damage her brand, too much, to continue the attack.

She throws a few sops to the believers: after the Palin pick "the left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children" (if we remember correctly, "the left," as represented by Barack Obama, asked that her children be declared off-limits, and "the media" merely reported, belatedly and with obvious disbelief, on her bizarre family life). And there are attacks on unnamed "intellectuals," by which she actually means "the Republican party elite," but she knows quite well that the word she uses is dogwhistle for "liberals."

But maybe we should just enjoy the actually unbridled disdain on display, here.

"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.

"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope!

From there, we go on to blaming Palin's fall on "membership in the self-esteem generation," and a repetition of Noonan's post-9/11 mantra: "the world is a dangerous place." She feels that if she repeats it often enough, the Cold War will reignite and Ronald Reagan will rise from the dead, to win it again, for the Gipper, and for the team.

We can't wait to hear what Meg Stapleton has to say about all this!

The story, as of Monday: a Facebook friend of Audra commented, "obama bin lauden is the new terrorist....muslim is on there side .....need to take this country back from all these mad coons.......and illegals." And Audra responded: "You tell em Eric! lol."

Audra unfriended some people who complained about her reaction, but not racist Eric himself. And then the internet heard about it. But Audra is still running to be chairwoman of the Young Republicans. And John Avlon at The Daily Beast has tracked down all the other examples of Audra's Facebook nuttiness.

The weird and sad thing is that everything she writes is utterly crazy and deranged, but it is so within the current bounds of acceptable political discourse that we are like "why is she worse than Jim DeMint, again?" But here you go, here is the crazy:

In October 2008, in the wake of news that an effigy of Sarah Palin was being hung outside an affluent Hollywood home as an offensive Halloween decoration, Shay replied, returning to the "LOL" style that she employed after the "coons" comment: "What no ‘Obama in a noose? Come on now, its just freedome (sic) of speech, no one in Atlanta would take that wrong! Lol."

Posting and endorsing a conspiracy theory video that attempts to prove that Obama believes he can only "ensure his own salvation" and "fate" if he helps African-Americans above whites, complete with Barnum-esque captions ("LISTEN AS HE ATTACKS WHITE PEOPLE").

And so on! And she will still probably win her campaign for chairwoman of the Young Republicans. None of these crazy comments disqualifies her from leading them, because this is already what old Republicans say, openly, on TV and on the radio, all the time. So, good luck, Audra Shay. You certainly do represent the future of the Republican party!

Or, rather, the Las Vegas Sun has it. And it is much more business-like, and much less poetic, than the emails of Governor Sanford.

So. Doug Hampton, the guy who is married to the woman Ensign was sleeping with, "spoke publicly" about the affair today. And apparently Tom Coburn "and others" urged Ensign to not only stop this affair-ing, but also to pay off the Hamptons' sub-prime mortgage, so that they could move to Colorado. That is probably a really bad suggestion from Coburn there, to tell a Senator to pay off a mistress and her husband!

Hampton and Ensign were bonded by their conservative evangelical faith. Hampton said he reached out to intermediaries involved in a Christian fellowship home in Washington, D.C., where Ensign and several other powerful Washington figures live.

The group, including Coburn, a well-known conservative, confronted Ensign and suggested that the Hamptons needed to be given financial assistance — in the millions of dollars — to pay off their $1 million-plus mortgage and move them to a new life away from Ensign.

During the confrontation, Ensign agreed to write a letter to Cynthia Hampton expressing remorse, Hampton said.

The letter, which was authenticated by Ralston's executive producer Dana Gentry, is filled with contrition: "I was completely self-centered and only thinking of myself. I used you for my own pleasure not letting thoughts of you, Doug, Brandon, Blake or Brittany come into my mind," he wrote, referring to the Hampton children.

But after sending the letter, which bears the date "Feb. 2008," Hampton said Ensign quickly disavowed it in a conversation with Cynthia Hampton and continued to pursue her.

Hampton said that on that same February weekend, Ensign told him, "I'm in love with your wife."

Christ. Why are the sex scandals this year so sad and pathetic? We can't wait to hear what Michael Wolff has to say about this though!

Yesterday, the House voted on a bill that would put "a plaque acknowledging the role of slave labor in the construction of the Capitol" in the new Capitol Visitors Center. The vote was 399-1 for. Oh, silly Ron Paul, we thought, you don't even think the Federal Government has the jurisdiction to erect plaques on its own buildings, or something, based on your generally logically consistent (with certain glaring exceptions) but entirely nutty philosophy of government.

But hey, look at this. Ron Paul voted for the plaque, honoring the slaves! Which means some other asshole didn't!

And that asshole is Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa. He is a fairly standard-issue House conservative, which means is a fucking loon. He called Joe McCarthy "a hero for America," said terrorists would "dance in the streets" when Obama was elected, claimed DC was more dangerous than Iraq, and called the abuses at Abu Ghraib "hazing." But, still, being the sole vote against a kind gesture to long-dead slaves is a little much, even for this prick!

Rove is not yet actually in jail, so we are holding off on the champagne. Though he will never actually go to jail, so maybe we should just have champagne anyway?

Karl Rove personally ordered the firings of a bunch of too-liberal US Attorneys and he was also behind the politically-motivated corruption charges against the former Democratic governor of Alabama, and everyone knows this, and frankly what Rove and co. did to the entire Department of Justice is terrifying and will broadly hurt American in many, many ways for a generation. But, you know, Rove probably just lied about it all, because why not? Is anyone going to actually fight the divine right of Presidents to do whatever the fuck they want all the time without actual consequences? No. The Constitution is basically enforced on the Honor System, you know.

And Rove might testify again, and maybe someday some of his testimony might become public, and someday and in some form John Conyers' committee might release some sort of report, and on that day, justice will have finally been served.

Pickens made a lot of money with oil, and then decided that wind farms were an even better way to make money. Because he is a capitalist Republican conservative, he thought his best bet for making a profit on wind power was to get a shitload of money from the government. And so, despite his years of partisan donations and funding of smear campaigns he suddenly played Mr. Concerned Citizen Environmentalist during the 2008 presidential campaign, earning him important meetings with Bloomberg, Obama, McCain, and Harry Reid.

But! Wind power turned out to not even be worth the effort of pretending to care about it as a front for taking lots of government money to build natural gas pipelines, so he is giving up on his "world's largest wind farm" plan. Because, hey, natural gas prices fell, and the money being handed out to people pretending to free us from foriegn oil dried up, and the gub'mint won't pay for his transmission lines until 2013.

Playboy actually first excerpted Nabokov's Ada or, Ardor back in 1969, when they were a very popular and highbrow titty mag. But the years have not been kind to Playboy, because the years invented the internet, and everyone forgot both how to read and how to masturbate to magazines.

And do you know who we don't envy? Playboy's literary editor, Amy Grace Loyd.

So. Vlad Nabokov, one of the most brilliant English-language authors ever, had not finished his last work, The Original of Laura, when he died. And he demanded that it never be published, because he was a bit of a perfectionist. Vlad's son Dmitri complied with his dad's wishes for many years, until he decided to just let it be published, because why not. So "super-agent" Andrew Wylie took over, and Amy Grave Loyd attempted to woo him with orchids, a reference to Ada.

Ms. Loyd was disappointed, figuring the honor of first serial was more likely to go to a place like The New Yorker, which had its own long history with Nabokov, and had in fact just last summer published one of his newly translated short stories. Ms. Loyd's worry was not unfounded: Mr. Wylie had indeed sent Laura to the The New Yorker months earlier. But as it happened, according to a source at the magazine, the fiction department was not interested. (Fiction editor Deborah Treisman had no comment.)

On the first of June, Mr. Wylie changed his tune and wrote to Ms. Loyd asking her what, hypothetically, Playboy would be willing to pay for an exclusive.

They were willing to pay more than they have ever paid for a book excerpt before, and they were willing to pay this much without even reading a word of it. And it kinda turns out that the book might not be very good! "There are parts of it that are much more cohesive than others. But I found it fascinating in that way," Loyd says.

But 5,000 words of The Original of Laura will run in the December Playboy, presumably next to reviews of the latest in hi-fi gear, Canadian whiskey ads, Gahan Wilson cartoons, a lengthy Q&A with Mort Sahl, and nude pictures of Barbara Carrera. Pick it up at your local newsagent!

Roll Call reports that Reid told Max Baucus to stop "chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill," because bipartisanship is not in and of itself a goal, because Republicans and Democrats have fundamentally incompatible philosophies of government, and because their policy aims are completely at odds. And the thing is, the Democrats are actually in charge!

According to Democratic sources, Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus that several in the Conference had serious concerns and that it wasn't worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.

But, you know, he is still dealing with all these "moderate" Democrats, who are like three guys, and the votes of those three guys are so important, even though they have no coherent agenda beyond "taking something liberal and making it less liberal." And if Reid actually had balls, instead of just the illusion of balls that this anonymously sourced story suggests, he would just demand that his entire caucus vote for cloture and then allow Senators to "vote their conscience" on the HELP bill as it currently stands.

(Meanwhile Rahm Emanuel either went off message or remained on message and either way the White House is still following their philosophy of just letting Congress do things by themselves so that at the very least something gets passed.)

Life, and the news, can't be all car chases, legislative gridlock, affairs by prominent Republicans, unrest overseas, war, and Sarah Palin. It seems eminently understandable that the circus surrounding the early death of a terribly famous man would continue to be considered newsworthy. But no! It is all the liberals' fault, or something.

First, Albany Republicans refused the man his moment of silence last week. Then, New York congressman Pete King called him a pervert. Now, T-Paw, the outgoing Minnesota governor who figures a national career awaits him if he just hangs in there and doesn't attack Letterman or go to Argentina, weighs in:

"[It's] time to move on." He opened his portion of the show talking, unprompted, about the Jackson coverage. "You can't get away from it. ... I've had enough of it.

"It's time to pay our respects and move on."

Are we alone in not being bothered, really at all, by the Jackson coverage, which has already tapered off, and which will be much more muted after the funeral, at least until the toxicology report comes back? We are liberal media elites, though, and so our sympathies, as always, lie with perverts.

(This is not even counting the various hundreds of dumb conservative bloggers who took Jackson's death to be some sort of MSM/Obama plot against them, or something. And here we thought it helped Mark Sanford!)

Mickey Kaus offered 14 theories for Palin's resignation, many of which are now kinda redundant and a bit stale. They can be whittled down to six.

Crime! This is the "theory" that Sarah Palin will sue us for mentioning, so we'll just say that there is no evidence at all that she embezzled anything, from anyone. Or, at least, there is no evidence that she is under federal investigation for embezzlement. So maybe not this one! But...

Some other terrible political thing Like maybe some new and more exciting ethics issue is coming down the pipeline? Maybe something is rotten with the Alaska state finances? But why would one more small-potatoes scandal end her heroic governing adventure?

Sex! Maybe Todd let Greta Van Susteren "handle" him, at the WHCD? Maybe Bristol got knocked up by A-Rod? Maybe Sarah slept with Greta Van Susteren? There are, as far as we know, no new rumors along these lines. Just idle fantasies.

Money Now we enter the realm of "likely but boring." Sarah Palin can make a lot more money writing books and giving speeches and maybe even hosting a TV show of some kind (can you imagine?) as a private citizen than she can as the Governor of Alaska. She did mention legal bills in her rambly speech, though the woman raises a million bucks from crazies every time she stutters, so how bad could things be?

She Just Hates Governing Yeah, has she ever demonstrated any aptitude for the actual business of governing? We realize that's a lot to ask of any leading light of the Republican party these days, but still. Alaska's running out of money, the legislature hates her, and none of that shit is as much fun as appearing on TV to complain about how everyone on TV is unfair to you all the time.

She Is Crazy Maybe the incoherent reasons she gave for quitting—to win the game, for the team—represent her actual thought process? Maybe she decided not to run for reelection, in order to position herself for 2012, and then she was like "you know what, if not running for reelection is how I get ready to be President, quitting altogether right now will have to make me even more ready."

Special bonus non-reason:

She Is Quitting Politics to Focus On Being a Private Citizen and Raising Her Children in Peace Yeah this one is the K-Lo fantasy, in which she's not a relentless ambitious career pol who uses her kids as props when that's convenient and decries their exploitation when anyone else mentions them.

Frankly? It is a pretty non-shocking example of the GOP's ability to find humor in the craziest and most racist of places. But here is the magical tale of Audra Shay, Young Republican leader:

Shay posted something dumb about health care, on her Facebook, and one of her friends responded, as anyone would, with an angry string of slurs.

Two minutes later, Piker posted again saying "Obama Bin Lauden [sic] is the new terrorist… Muslim is on there side [sic]… need to take this country back from all of these mad coons… and illegals."

Eight minutes after that, at 2:02, Shay weighed in on Piker's comments: "You tell em Eric! lol."

Yes. You tell em, Eric! Tell em something insane! And, hah, it got better! Shay only de-friended the people who complained.

Cassie Wallender, a national committeewoman from the Washington Young Republican Federation, then wrote: "Someone please help a naïve Seattle girl out, is Eric's comment a racist slur?" She answered her own question one minute later: "Okay, why is this okay? I just looked it up. ‘It comes from a term baracoons (a cage) where they used to place Africans who were waiting to be sent to America to be slaves.' THIS IS NOT OKAY AND IT'S NOT FUNNY."

This was followed soon after by the chairman of the D.C. Young Republicans, Sean L. Conner, who wrote "I'm really saddened that you would support this type of racial language. ..wow! Thanks Cassie for standing up…"

Shay was silent on this exchange, but soon word started spreading throughout the Young Republican circuit, open to GOP members under 40. Significantly, Shay then "de-friended" Wallender and Conner-in the world of Facebook, that means cutting off relations-after calling her out, but kept Piker as a "friend" (subsequently, it appears their profiles are no longer linked).

The election for chairman of the Young Republicans is next Saturday, guys. Let's see how many embarrassing and permanently archived examples of electronic racism the candidates can rack up in the coming days.

Sergey Aleynikov began working for Goldman in May of 2007 as "vice president for equity strategy." And then he left to go to some firm in Chicago and then the FBI arrested him for "theft of trade secrets" because, they claim, he uploaded all the fancy magical automated trading codes and files to some German website.

According to the affidavit:

"certain features of the [code], such as speed and efficiency by which it obtains and processes market data, gives the Financial Institution a competitive advantage among other firms that also engage in high-volume automated trading.The Financial Institution further believes that, if competing firms were to obtain the [code] and use its features, the Financial Institution's ability to profit from the [code]'s speed and efficiency would be significantly diminished."

Now anyone might have their hands on the Process! It's been sitting on some Germany-based website owned by some Londoner for a month. Meanwhile, "program trading accounted for 49% of all NYSE trading last week, and Goldman as recently as one week ago represented about 60% of all principal program trading". And the NYSE suddenly saw fit to "alter its methodology for reporting program stock trading," leaving Goldman off the list entirely.

Not that we understand any of this but it seems like basically America is even more doomed, now.

During the "pretending to be reasonable" bit of the column, he acknowledges that Palin's political career is over and that her performance on Friday was a "bizarre, rambling resignation speech." (Bill Kristol meanwhile declares it a brilliant and shrewd political gamble.)

But then we get into the bit about how we coastal liberal elites don't get that Palin's appeal is that she represents, once again, the Nixonian silent majority. Her populism is more real and important and honorable than Obama's because he went to Harvard and she didn't. That is, in Douthat's formulation, "the democratic ideal" rather than "the meritocratic ideal," which really just goes to show that you can't win with Conservatives, even when you do pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make a name for yourself without handouts, or whatever the fuck they claim they want the nation's massive underclass to do. Nice job achieving all that fancy-pants shit, Obama, but your story would be so much more inspiring and democratic if you'd stumbled through getting a communications degree.

Behold, Sarah Palin as embodiment of the American dream:

Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true."

See, all this time, we didn't realize that old aphorism meant that even complete idiots could be president. (They still can, of course! But only if one of their parents was president first, as the Founders intended.)

At least this summer of Celebrity Death is taking out the McNamaras along with the Maldens.

JFK brought McNamara to Washington from Ford, because in the '60s (as today, probably) it made sense that a man who was quite good at managing a car company would best be able to manage the Pentagon, a corporation that produces war. And McNamera's dispassionate, analytical approach helpfully separated the messy details of death from the business of war, allowing everyone in Washington to accept burned villages, dead children, and wholesale destruction as a series of encouraging charts and graphs, showing progress in terms of thousands of dead enemies.

McNamara knew the war was unwinnable by the middle of 1965. And millions of tons of bombs and missiles indiscriminately rained down on North and South Vietnam and it became an open-ended commitment to a war of attrition between that realization and his resignation in 1967. After his resignation he refused to say a word about what he knew, and the war continued, for no good reason, until 1975.

His eventual, late-in-life apology was both too broad and too narrow. He was sorry that the entire ideology of the ruling class was wrong. He was sorry that no one listened to his limited objections. He was sorry Curtis LeMay was such an evil scumbag.

He was a narrow-minded number-crunching company man, exactly the sort of amoral little functionary we should never, ever allow to make decisions of life and death. A better man, perhaps, than a cold-blooded Machiavellian like Kissinger, but just as destructive.

At least until someone at Sony figures it out, you can watch the entirety of The Fog of War at YouTube.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

[Photo: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images]

• Bernie Madoff will be in jail for 150 years, but Ruth's only prison will be the prison of the mind, and the prison of whatever marginally less lavish home she ends up living in. The victims are still not very happy! But on the whole they have been pretty whiny about this whole thing.
• A woman with a vomiting pug claimed she was mistreated by a member of the NYPD. She did not end up dead, and she is not black, so surely there was more to this story. There was! She maybe called the cop various mean names, regarding his being a Jew. (She called him "Bernie Madoff.") Ray Kelly issued his standard there is no evidence that a cop did anything wrong response. Because this story involves both an entitled pug-owning Brooklyn blogger lady and a member of the NYPD we are guessing they both acted in ways well outside the bounds of socially acceptable behavior.
• Also being unreasonable and annoying, this week: authors! Specifically, Alice Hoffman, who used Twitter for evil
• And: Joe Jackson remains one of the world's worst living human beings, and he should probably be sent to jail for at least 150 years, for murder, basically. Slow murder. Of course if we were Geraldo, we would just call on him to be killed by an angry mob, or something! This is the same guy, this one calling for a child molester to be killed, who was very excited to replay his exclusive interview with his good friend Michael Jackson last week. Maybe America really should be nuked from orbit, by terrorists! It's the only way to to be sure.
• Oh, Vibe died this week. No one will ever pay anyone to write about music again, btw. So, hope you didn't want to do any of that.
• Look, more premium cable shows that we won't watch. (But Richard will!) And also there is this thing, about the children. It is enough to make you want to flee to Agentina, or Park Slope!
• Ok, but, if we nuke America, these people would survive. So we are reconsidering!
• Steve Jobs is alive! Moneyball is dead! Sarah Palin cannot stop lying!
• We agree: let's ban links. Especially links to Newser, and the HuffPo.
• Someone live-press released their date with John Ratzenberger. It was amazing.
• America is about to have a birthday!

Here in America, presidents do very occasionally read picture books to children, but a Mr. Bush kind of ruined that practice, for everyone, and so really only first ladies get those elementary school photo-ops, now.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.But here is Mr. Guttenberg reading the classic fairy tale "Hans in Luck" to some children. "Hans in Luck" is the story of a boy, Hans, who has a big piece of gold, and then he trades it for a horse, and then he trades the horse for a cow, and then he trades the cow for a pig, and he continues on in this fashion until he has a spinning wheel, which he loses, but his mom loves him anyway. The fairy tale is about the gold standard and it was told to the Brothers Grimm by Ron Paul, many years ago.

Meanwhile in France, their "Culture Minister" read a book about Venice by a gay 19th century poet named Alfred de Musset. Like, out loud! In public! Can you imagine if we had a "Culture Minister"? It would probably be Larry the Cable Guy. Or we'd call it a "Culture Czar" and it would be Bill Bennett.

[Top pics: Sean Gallup/Getty Images. Bottom: PHILIPPE MERLE/AFP/Getty Images]

We are going to wait for someone smarter than us about cybersecurity and the intelligence community to explain it to us, before we try to explain it to you. But here is what the Post says.

Under a classified pilot program approved during the Bush administration, NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the pilot called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian government agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block malicious computer codes.

AT&T, the world's largest telecommunications firm, was the Bush administration's choice to participate in the test, which has been delayed for months as the Obama administration determines what elements of the Bush plan to preserve, former government officials said. The pilot was to have been launched in February.

And it is basically another "the NSA promises not to break any laws despite having the ability, if not explicitly the authority, to do whatever the fuck they want" thing, we think.

Sanctions have failed, Iran will nuke us all within days, and we (sorry, they! Only Israel has the balls to do what that commie fag Obama won't, because he loves the terrorists) will be greeted as liberators. No, seriously, John Bolton thinks the people of Iran would welcome a military invasion by Israel.

Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people. This was always true, but it has become even more important to make this case emphatically, when the gulf between the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the citizens of Iran has never been clearer or wider. Military action against Iran's nuclear program and the ultimate goal of regime change can be worked together consistently.

Hah. Ha ha ha.

Elsewhere, Dana Milbank reports on dumb messages on Obama's Facebook wall, David Broder wonders if there is maybe still racism anywhere (conclusion: probably!), and David Ignatius reports that those wacky Russians have loved strongmen for many years.

But how are these guys all doing traffic-wise? (Maybe we should stop linking to them!)

In the end, Schmidt, architect of the McCain campaign's wildly shifting meta-narratives and stunts, was smart enough to realize that his hail-mary VP stunt had backfired, terribly. And so his relationship with Palin, a paranoid narcissist, suffered. CBS's Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe are writing a book about Palin, and they are releasing some of its wonderful anecdotes to us, the public, in advance.

So. Remember when it was revealed that Todd Palin was a member of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party? The publication of that actual fact annoyed Sarah Palin greatly!

Palin blasted out an e-mail with the subject line "Todd" to Schmidt, campaign manager Rick Davis and senior advisor Nicolle Wallace, copying her husband on the message (all of the e-mails are reprinted below as written).

"Pls get in front of that ridiculous issue that's cropped up all day today - two reporters, a protestor's sign, and many shout-outs all claiming Todd's involvement in an anti-American political party," Palin wrote. "It's bull, and I don't want to have to keep reacting to it ... Pls have statement given on this so it's put to bed."

Her reference to a single protestor's sign and "many shout-outs" was indicative of Palin's occasional tendency to take anecdotal evidence of a minor problem and extrapolate it into something far more menacing.
[...]
Schmidt hit "reply to all" less than five minutes after Palin's e-mail was sent. "Ignore it," he wrote. "He was a member of the aip? My understanding is yes. That is part of their platform. Do not engage the protestors. If a reporter asks say it is ridiculous. Todd loves america."

That simple and smart response did not work for Sarah, who responded by "adding five more names to the 'cc' box, all of whom traveled on her campaign plane."

"That's not part of their platform and he was only a 'member' bc independent alaskans too often check that 'Alaska Independent' box on voter registrations thinking it just means non partisan," Palin wrote. "He caught his error when changing our address and checked the right box. I still want it fixed."

Haha that is just a straight-up complete fucking lie. This woman! She is pathological! She is not even responding to a question from a reporter, she is straight-up lying to her own campaign strategist, in a really obvious and stupid way. This is not the way normal people behave. This is the way bad children behave when they are caught being bad.

So Schmidt replied-all, again:

"Secession," he wrote. "It is their entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be innaccurate. The innaccuracy would bring greater media attention to this matter and be a distraction. According to your staff there have been no media inquiries into this and you received no questions about it during your interviews. If you are asked about it you should smile and say many alaskans who love their country join the party because it speeks to a tradition of political independence. Todd loves his country

We will not put out a statement and inflame this and create a situation where john has to adress this."

So yeah, one can see how working with Sarah Palin might be difficult. Neither that nor the admirable straighforwardness of these emails absolves Schmidt of his responsibility for the campaign's miserable failure, though.

Oh but that is just one of the eye-shuttening comments from the famous shouty internet guy and former important talker-about-powerful-people in this wonderful WWD profile of Wolff.

Wolff used to be a beloved and serious New York magazine writer and book author. (This amazing portrait of Wolff as a young porn star dates to the 1979 publication of his serious novel about disaffected '70s youth.) And now he runs a website, and is sometimes on Page Six because he had an affair with an intern. No matter, though! He was right, back in the day, that newspapers and magazines were in trouble. But nowadays he tends to be wrong about things much more often than he is right, and in fact he does not really seem to care about being "right" so much as he cares about GRABBING SOME EYEBALLS. The internet has destroyed him again!

For him, grabbing eyeballs in an accelerated, competitive news cycle has meant the cheap high of a provocative headline and choosing a hot-button subject based on its momentary buzz, not on whether he has an argument about it. And if he lacks the command he had when opining on New York power players, well, the old days of cocktail party chatter as feedback are mostly gone. The noisy post on David Carr got 1,000 pageviews, but "Is Barack Obama a Bore?" got 80,000. That few care as much about the media as it cares about itself is now measurable.

He would've gotten 800,000 views if he'd written "Is Barack Obama a Muslim Bore." Does he know?

Critics point out that even as Wolff is dancing on newspapers' graves, Newser relies on their content. He responds the site is increasingly relying on native online sources like Politico, though it overwhelmingly features newspaper content summarized by paid writers.

And, hey, what is Politico again? It is a money-losing website attached to a possibly profitable little local newspaper. Not that you would know this if you read his Vanity Fair piece about how revolutionary Politico is. The one that ran months after Wolff said no one cared about Politico and it would never make money. We guess over the course of a couple months he came to see how good they were at grabbing eyeballs with provocative headlines and such!

These days, Wolff lives in the East Village, and he doesn't have a doorman anymore, and he is rude to waitstaff, which is actually pretty much unforgivably assholish, we don't care what you wrote.

Bennett is identified only as a "conservative talk radio host and CNN contributor," which makes him sound like David Brody or something. He is a former Secretary of Education and Drug Czar! Also he is a known high-stakes gambler who lost literally millions in Vegas! This from a man who wrote The Book of Virtures and who moralizes nonstop about self-discipline and "the Moral Collapse of the American Family." It was a little bit embarrassing, for Bill!

But CNN does not bring any of this up. They just report that Bill thinks South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford should "ditch politics and focus solely on getting his life back in order." Maybe he should become a CNN contributor! Then no one would have to hear about his various moral failings ever again. Except that he would probably just bring them up himself all the time, because he's a weirdo who can't stop digging.

Of course, he isn't writing for free. But he has, in the past!

And I don't think it is that terrible a thing if most journalists start earning less money. I wrote this blog daily for years for nothing because I love what I do. I've been really, really lucky to have landed at the Atlantic but the dirty secret is that I'd do this because I want to know more about the world and bring that information to as many people as possible, to advance those causes I believe are just and expose those lies that I think need exposing.

Hah. Andrew Sullivan had edited The New Republic for five years and had released two books by the time he started his little hobby blog, which he now does indeed get paid money to write. It is actually a lot easier to write for free or for not enough money to live on when you are already pretty comfortable! And for some crazy reason it is always those people who are already pretty comfortable who are just baffled by the idea of paying someone to produce content that someone else profits from!

Isn't that funny, how that works?

Sez the former writer:

"One of my frustrations about the place," Cloud continued, "I'm used to covering those things straight, by straight I didn't mean they were pressuring me to inject some point of view into a story. It's all done through the lens, ‘what does this mean for Obama?' It's an important lens to view things through, but it's not the only lens I wanted to view those events through."

It was also a problem that they wanted—needed!—him to file constantly, because he was their only person covering, you know, "foreign policy, defense, Obama's position in the world," and lots of other things that aren't easy to find a quick and convenient Matt Drudge-baiting "hook" for.

And this is what Mr. Wolff said about the Politico last fall:

"It's the highest form of naiveté to think there's a sea change in our interest in politics. There's a hardcore interest among a relatively small group who are interested in politics. Those people will always be there, but they are not a business. Just because this has been an exciting election with some novel figures in it, it's absurd to assume that represents a sea change in our interest in politics… By that logic, you could have made a media business out of a news event like hurricane Katrina. That's exactly what this is: people are not interested in politics."

Hah. We would be interested in "Hurricane Katrina Monthly," though!

Because the leader of the Democrats is still Mr. Harry Reid, a useless, spineless Democrat who does not actually care about passing liberal legislation, at all. And the most powerful Democrats in the Senate are, of course, the "centrists" who refuse to support any bill until whatever the Republicans want done to it is done to it (that is centrism!). And two Senators are near-death and hence not able to vote for anything.

Here is Harry Reid's press secretary:

"While this is, of course, good news to the people of Minnesota, President Obama, and the Senate Democratic, Franken's mere presence alone will not mean that the Democrats will be able to jam through our agenda, or make it any less critical for Democrats and Republicans to work together."

Well, it is not actually critical, anymore, to get Republicans to "work together" with Democrats. It is actually only critical for Majority Leader Harry Reid to get Democrats to actually vote with Democrats.

But Bernie Sanders has a crazy idea: a straight up-and-down majority rules vote on health care legislation! Achieving this, of course, requires a 60-vote supermajority for cloture, which would be a de facto vote for the health care legislation. Also that would be socialism.

It might happen! Still, it is not actually worth it, getting too excited about Al Franken in the Senate. Unless you are Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who are just pissing themselves with joy, because they have a new and exciting boogeyman they can hate with great intensity for six years.

[Photo: Getty]

And god, it is terrible! It is about how right-wing dinosaur book author Michael Crichton once said newspapers would die, because newspapers are dumb, and now, look: they are dead! Except for Politico, which is a little tiny Washington DC newspaper with a money-losing website. It is revolutionary! How is it revolutionary? Because it is a bunch of loser DC wonks talking to each other about loser DC wonk stuff, and many of its reporters appear on TV all the time. Breaking!

Oh, good, another opportunity for John Harris to say some of this crap:

News organizations, in the Harris-VandeHei-Allen formulation, are deadweight. Institutional authority, which once defined journalists-"The most important words were what came after your name: ‘I'm John Harris of The Washington Post'"-has increasingly become an indication of mediocrity. "In 2006 we didn't yet know that newspapers were dead," Harris continued, in my conversation with him one afternoon in Politico's Virginia offices. "I think we thought they'd drag on, but the institutional age of newspapers was clearly over. What mattered was the individual talents and reputations of journalists. The best journalists had broken free. The best have their own names. They were carrying the business."

Yes, ok, well—try calling up the White House as "John Harris from Boner Party" and see if anyone will talk to you, John!

Still: revolution! Because Mike Allen links to a lot of stuff, every morning, and everyone who matters reads those links. Just like The Note, back in 1910 or whenever that was a thing people read. Or like Drudge! Or like I.F. Stone!

But Politico is not making money, for anyone—just like... a newspaper? How is this revolutionary, again? It is a couple of blogs—some of them very good!—and Drudge-bait articles offering "attention-grabbing" takes on non-events.

This has worked-sort of. Politico puts its current traffic at 6.7 million unique visitors per month (down from a high of more than 11 million during the campaign), yet it still can't support its staff of about 100 on the Internet's low advertising rates (although, with its agenda-moving audience and its preponderance of advocacy advertisers, it manages to get a higher rate than most sites).

And, weirdly, it makes its money with its little Roll Call-style tabloid physical newspaper! Revolutionary! (If that newspaper is actually making money, yet?)

It is perhaps useless to argue whether this is good or bad. Rather, the world is as it is.

It is perhaps useless to argue whether this article has made a single point, about anything! It is what it is. A stupid article that is full of bullshit about a stupid website that is full of bullshit from a man who should definitely sit down and write that affair story before we lose interest.

Urban Outfitters founder and chairman Richard Hayne is, of course, an ultra-conservative billionaire who hates the gays and funnels millions to Republicans. But his money is probably less valuable to the party than his passion for "outfitting" America's worst young people in terrible shirts that make everyone hate liberal youths.

I was in the Class of 1958, two years behind Bernie, but in the same class as his wife, Ruth. She was my friend, or so our yearbook strongly suggests, although my memory of our friendship no longer speaks to me. I remember her only as really cute, an object of desire across a classroom or another. But in the yearbook she wrote a long inscription. It seems I teased her. It seems I kidded her. She forgave me all that and ended by writing that I would "meet Bernie at the prom — and I guarantee he will say hello."

Gross. Oh, but hey, can you get even worse, somehow, Richard? Yes, you can. He feels much pity for "the very rich."

My friend Ted has his New York City teacher's pension, while the very rich, who put all their retirement funds with Bernie, have been utterly wiped out. I feel sorry for them. I identify with them. They were not, as is sometimes written, greedy. The stock market was a mystery. It seemed to defy logic. They let Bernie deal with it. I would have done the same.

And, hah, this is the last line: "It turned out I knew Ruth. It turned out she never knew Bernie."

You are a fucking idiot for writing that, Richard Cohen. And look, you still have a column at The Washington Post, and Dan Froomkin doesn't! What a country!

(Dear Time Traveling Terrorists: your target is Far Rockaway High School. Please blow it up after Richard Feynman graduates.)

The Democrats and Republicans keep convening separately, having moments of silence, and then gaveling out because they don't have a quorum. But! Hey! Victory for Governor Paterson!

State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Teresi handed Gov. David Paterson a significant victory this afternoon, ruling that each and every member of the deadlocked state Senate - all 62 of them - must convene at the same time in the chamber when the governor calls an extraordinary session.

Teresi ordered the entire Senate to convene at 10 a.m. tomorrow, and called the separate, gavel-in/gavel-out sessions the warring factions have been holding since last week "a fiction" and "an illusion."

But! The attorney for Senate Republicans will appeal tomorrow, and that apparently means the Republicans do not have to show up tomorrow for work.

Meanwhile, hah, Mayor Bloomberg's control over the schools will end tomorrow, and New York City will not be able to balance its budget because the sales tax increase is not even included on the list of legislation that the Democrats can't even pass anyway.

But population growth downstate and population decline upstate means that the Democrats will have a healthy majority in 2013. Hah, if there is a "fair" redistricting process, which, good fucking luck.

We are guessing it was maybe Antonin Scalia's phone. Unless the duck was yet another Obama plant?

So, today, we went live to the Dallas area, for exciting off-ramp jumping and an eventual horrific affident. And here is a full ten minutes of kick-ass car chase coverage by Shep Smith.

On the one hand, Alex Jones is a (terribly entertaining) unhinged conspiracy theorist who rants about the New World Order and FEMA Concentration Camps and produces crazy movies about how 9/11 was an inside job and how Barack Obama is basically Hitler. All of this is well and good for a late-night radio talk show host! But for an elected member of the House of Representatives to appear on his show might strike some people as a sort of implicit endorsement of his more outre beliefs.

But on the other hand, by publicizing this and pointing out that it's a terrible idea, there is a chance that the appearance won't happen, and that would be a tragedy, as it is sure to be hugely entertaining. Can you imagine the new and exciting crazy things Bachmann will just state as self-evident fact, on cable TV, after a couple minutes with Alex Jones?

So you didn't hear about this from us!