Instead of, I don't know, calling Barack Obama's wife his "crony"? Or calling newspaper editors drooling idiots (most are, but still)? Or writing any number of things that caused a Norfolk, Va., newspaper to drop her column because the editor got sick of her "mean-spirited rantings"?

Anyway, guess how long it took after Malkin agreed that we should all try to be "classy" when we attack our political opponents until she called a political opponent a "two-bit...hustler"? Two minutes!

And, you know, here's Malkin posting NBC's logo photoshopped with a hammer and sickle and here's Malkin printing Chris Matthews' phone number in order to encourage her deranged readers to harass him for the crime of not interviewing her (on a previous book tour) politely enough, here she is calling NBC a bunch of gay muslims or something, here she is accusing NBC of news-staging, etc. etc. etc. But hey, if they'll move some books she'll sit down on the Today show!

No, seriously, on the one hand, it is certainly commendable that NBC would allow a virulent critic of GE and their own news division to appear on their network. But on the other hand, they should legitimize critics with actual valid criticisms, and maybe not crazy morons known primarily for lifting pieces of discredited scholarship in the service of racist arguments.

As for what she said on Today, it is too stupid and full of lies to deserve a response. But here we go anyway: she says the president took a "local parochial law enforcement story" and tried to use it to "try to ensure some sort of moment of his racial authenticity," by which she means he was directly asked what he thought about the arrest of a personal friend of his and he said it was "stupid," because it was stupid. Also he is racist against white people.

Even Matt Lauer—even Matt Lauer—cannot quite believe her vileness.

[Photo: The Distant Past]

O'Reilly did a segment the other night on how the internet is full of pimple-faced lizard-people bloggers who go around saying mean things about everyone just because they hate life itself, and as an example he cited something someone said in a blog "post" about Sonia Sotomayor on Hotair.com, only that this person's words weren't in a blog "post," but in a blog "comment" instead, and then Michelle Malkin started shooting lasers through her eyes and O'Reilly's cock immediately moved due north, you can just tell by the stupid smirk on his face after Malkin's rant, so that means we all can expect him to continue to be a dumbass about the internet forever, just so he can get wood over Malkin's diatribes. Lucky us.

Also, the entire right-wing blog world is up in arms over this right now and they're even calling him out for his hypocrisy about policing comments, and it's totally awesome and HILARIOUS!

Video via Deceiver.com

Bush torture memo-crafter John Yoo thinks that Obama's pick is nothing more than race-pandering for votes:

Obama had some truly outstanding legal intellectuals and judges to choose from-Cass Sunstein, Elena Kagan, and Diane Wood come immediately to mind. The White House chose a judge distinguished from the other members of that list only by her race. Obama may say he wants to put someone on the Court with a rags-to-riches background, but locking in the political support of Hispanics must sit higher in his priorities.

Sotomayor's record on the bench, at first glance, appears undistinguished. She will not bring to the table the firepower that many liberal academics are asking for. There are no opinions that suggest she would change the direction of constitutional law as have Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, or Robert Bork and Richard Posner on the appeals courts. Liberals have missed their chance to put on the Court an intellectual leader who will bring about a progressive revolution in the law.

Matthew Yglesias likes Sotomayor's life story:

The argument is going to be out there that this isn't irrelevant, but I think to a normal person something that immediately leaps out about Sonia Sotomayor is that for someone who has all the usual qualifications to be a Supreme Court Justice, she also has an unusual life story. She's been on the Appeals Court and before that the District Court, and she went to Yale Law School. But she also grew up in a housing project in the Bronx, after her parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico.

It's the kind of story that makes you feel good about America and that still resonates as quintessentially American even though social mobility in the United States isn't quite what we like to think.

Politico's Jonathon Martin is sort of impressed at Obama's lack of risk in the Sotomayor pick:

In picking the candidate whose name surfaced within hours of first leak about Justice David Souter's retirement, Obama is also demonstrating the same profile in caution that has colored previous big decisions, such as who to name as his running mate.

George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr called her "a liberal mirror image of Samuel Alito" - a child of the meritocracy with a resume that is big on credentials and low on controversy.

It's hard to be breathtaking and boring, but Obama somehow finds a way.

TNR's legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen, one of Sotomayor's most vocal critics to date, is throwing her his tepid support while voicing displeasure over conservatives twisting his words to suit their cause:

Conservatives are already citing my initial piece on Sotomayor as a basis for opposing her. This willfully misreads both my piece and the follow-up response. My concern was that she might not make the most effective liberal voice on the Court—not that she didn't have the potential to be a fine justice. Questions of temperament are often overlooked, but history suggests that they are the most relevant in predicting judicial success. (Justice Scalia may be a brilliant bomb-thrower, but has failed in his attempts to build coalitions and bipartisan majorities.) Now is the time to think more broadly about the role Justice Sotomayor is likely to play on the Supreme Court, and I look forward to doing that in the weeks ahead.

The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb sees Sotomayor as Obama's Harriet Myers:

She will, presumably, be a reliable liberal vote — nothing more, nothing less. Conservatives could have done much worse, but we're getting a liberal Harriet Miers instead of a liberal Alito. The real danger for conservatives is that Sotomayor becomes a Hispanic icon who's seen as being unfairly maligned by Republicans. That could further alienate Hispanics from the party and do lasting damage to the conservative revolution in ways that Sotomayor herself never could.

Marc Ambinder says that Obama is sending a clear message with the pick, one that he's been secretly enthused about:

Obama is sending a few different messages to a few different audiences. To liberals, the pick sells itself — a progressive superstar with fantastic academic credentials. Obama is addressing conservatives only because he wants to get his judge confirmed by a wide margin. To the rest of the country, the Sotomayor pick will embody Obama's judicial philosophy — going beyond theory to, as the talking points say, "ensure consistent, fair, common-sense application of the law to real-world facts."

"I strive never to forget he real world consequences of my decisions," Sotomayor said today.

On Thursday, Obama was in a jaunty mood after he interviewed Sotomayor. A few groups of reporters were meeting in the West Wing with senior officials, and the President decided to stop by. He was an in expansive mood and riffed about the direction of the court. He did not tip his hand about the interview or the identity of his pick, and he asked that his musings be shared off the record. But it was clear that he was excited about how his pick would energize the court.

Rush Limbaugh predictably thinks that the Republicans need to "go to the mat" to fight the nomination, which he thinks proves once and for all that Obama is a "reverse racist":

She is the embodiment of the criticism of a judge or a justice who is all wrong for the highest court in the land. So of course the Republican Party should go to the mat on this because in the process of doing so, the American people will find out more about Barack Obama and who he really is; what he really believes in. And her choice, this choice helps to tell the real story of Barack Obama. This is a debate worth having...Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he's appointed one.

Ann Althouse, who likes the pick, thinks that Republicans can learn a lot and in turn do some good for the future of their party by acting like mature adults through the upcoming confirmation process:

If confirmation is about agreeing with the ideology, then Republicans might want to vote against Sotomayor. But confirmation should not be about ideology, and conservatives ought to want to prove that principle by their votes. Use the confirmation hearings to delineate what liberal judicial ideology is and why people ought to reject it. Then get a good presidential candidate for 2012 and make Supreme Court nominations an issue. Is that too hard? Does that take too long? Too bad! You say you want a Justice who will tell the truth about what the Constitution means. But here's something about what the Constitution means: The President has the appointment power.

Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sang the pick's praises to CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

This is a powerful message, a powerful message of hope and opportunity through this appointment, just like there's a powerful message sent when an African-American is elected president or an African-American or a Hispanic is appointed as attorney general of the United States. It's a powerful message that a president listens to. And this president obviously did.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw takes issue with Sotomayor's lack of savings:

Some people with low incomes manage to scrimp and save (I always think of my grandmother), and some people with high incomes spend most everything they earn.

Apparently, the new Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is an example of the latter. The Washington Post reports that the 54-year-old Sotomayer has a $179,500 yearly salary but

On her financial disclosure report for 2007, she said her only financial holdings were a Citibank checking and savings account, worth $50,000 to $115,000 combined. During the previous four years, the money in the accounts at some points was listed as low as $30,000.

My grandmother would have been shocked and appalled to see someone who makes so much save so little.

Nate Silver takes Greg Mankiw to his statistical woodshed for his comments about Sotomayor's spending habits:

Mankiw's critique is a bizarre on several levels. For one thing, while a $179,000-per-year income is quite a lot wherever one lives, it doesn't go as far in New York City as in almost any other place. State taxes in New York are pretty high for the upper income brackets, and New York City also charges a city tax of 3.648%. As a single filer, Sotomayor's income tax burden, counting her federal nut, is probably something like $65,000.

In addition, New York City is an expensive place to live: particularly on the Island of Manhattan, and even more particularly in the West Village neighborhood where Sotomayor has her apartment. The average price of a two-bedroom rental apartment apartment in a doorman building in Greenwich Villiage is $5,396 per month, or about $65,000 per year. (Sotomayor, from what I can gather, in fact still rents her space). So considering her tax bill and the cost of her apartment, Sotomayor is down to "only" about $50,000 in disposable income per year. A single person can certainly live very well on that sort of income — even in Manhattan — but would probably not live what we'd ordinarily consider an extravagant lifestyle. It would be quite easy to spend a good chunk of that $50,000 on utilities, transport, groceries, and extra medical care (Sotomayor is diabetic); throw in a couple of nice meals out every month, tickets to a dozen Yankees games each year, and maybe a week's worth of vacation, and you're not going to have a whole heck of a lot left over. And of course, if one is generous with one's friends, or gives money to one's extended family or to charity, the money will go even faster. Sure, it's a pretty full life. But it's not likely that Sotomayor is downing bottles of Cristal and snorting coke in the bathroom every Friday at Hotel Gansevoort, or having four-martini lunches with the Sex and the City girls at Bryant Park.

We've been waiting to hear Andrew Sullivan's and Michelle Malkin's thoughts on Sotomayor, but haven't seen any updates from either of them yet. We'll update the post when we do.

What The Sonia Sotomayor Pick Says About Barack Obama [Politico]
Sotomayor: No Threat to the Revolution [Weekly Standard]
Empathy Triumphs Over Excellence [John Yoo]
Rush Limbaugh Advises Republicans to "Take It to the Mat" [Ann Althouse]
GOP Must Go to Mat on Sotomayor to Tell Real Story of Barack Obama [Rush Limbaugh]
Alberto Gonzales: Sotomayor Pick Gives Hope [CNN]
Obama's Pick, From the Start [Marc Ambinder/Atlantic]
The Sotomayor Nomination [TNR]
The Sotomayor Story [Matthew Yglesias]
SCOTUS Appointee is a Spender [Greg Mankiw]
Grandmother of World's 23rd Best Economist Posthumously Offeneded by Sonia Sotomayor's Spending Habits; Will Obama Withdraw Nomination? [FiveThirtyEight]

Here is the boring conclusion from this Bringham Young professor, that is kind of obvious: "Blog readers still get most of their news from regular news sources, but they are concerned that they are not getting the whole side of the story there," and so they read the news, and then they read political blogs to get context and analysis. Breaking!

This is the "surprising" bit that right-wing blogs will pick up and push so hard that will eventually bleed onto Fox:

Davis also queried more than 200 journalists to learn how they use blog content in their coverage of political news. Most journalists were aware of influential blogs on both sides of the political spectrum, such as Daily Kos and Talking Points on the left and Michelle Malkin and Instapundit on the right. Despite equal awareness, journalists spend more time reading posts in the liberal blogosphere.

For example, more journalists know about Michelle Malkin than Talking Points. Yet twice as many journalists actually read Talking Points than read Michelle Malkin.

Oh no! Journalists have liberal biases and so they only read liberal blogs and so therefore all the opinions of those terrible bloggers will bleed into the mainstream media or something!

Here are some things, though: back when political blogs became a "thing," that "real journalists" had to check, they were only checking "warblogs," which all became famous and celebrated and then they killed Dan Rather. This, sadly, made a certain kind of sense: Conservatives were in power, and so you checked those blogs for the Conservative message. What liberals thought about things didn't matter. It just didn't! Guess what? Now the opposite is true, and the heavy-duty liberal policy wonk blogs are relevant, because they can be a window into what the sort of liberals who are running everything think about important issues. (Also, just a thought: are you counting Drudge as "a blog"? We would imagine all the journalists would cop to checking Drudge, still, even though he's gone off the deep end.)

But honestly that argument is sort of a cop-out: the more important difference is in the actual content. Look at this sentence again:

For example, more journalists know about Michelle Malkin than Talking Points. Yet twice as many journalists actually read Talking Points than read Michelle Malkin.

Talking Points Memo features original reporting and analysis from a liberal perspective. MichelleMalkin.com is the crazed rantings of a racist psychopath. This is like saying "twice as many journalists read The Weekly Standard as pay attention to the Black Hebrew Israelites who hang out in midtown."

Fresh from their latest round of conniptions and hissy-fits over Obama saying that "empathy" would be an ideal characteristic for his upcoming nomination to the Supreme Court, because Jesus hates empathy you see, conservatives are predictably aghast at Sykes' jokes and that Obama dared to enjoy them. Here's a sampling of commentary:

The UK Telegraph's Toby Harnden...

There's not much room for differing interpretations of what Sykes said. She called Limbaugh a terrorist and a traitor, suggested that he be tortured and wished him dead.

What was his crime? Hoping that Obama's policies - which he views as socialist - will fail.

That's way, way beyond reasoned debate or comedy and Obama's reaction to it was astonishing.

Imagine if a comedian "joked" that Obama was a terrorist who was guilty of treason and should be tortured and allowed to die. There would justifiably be an outcry.

And Obama laughing when someone wishes Limbaugh dead? Hard to take from the man who promised a new era of civility and elevated debate in Washington.

Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds...

YUKKING IT UP. "I hope his kidneys fail. As classy as we've come to expect.

Pat Buchanan on MSNBC...

I think that shot, which was really over the top... and I think it shook up some of the people in there, just said, ooh... they're talking about it, and I think it's gonna be all over the TV Monday with the radio talk shows and things like that, and it's gonna hurt the dinner, and it's gonna underscore that point that these people are all sort of laughing their heads off at the Republicans and conservatives. It's not fun for all, it's just a bunch of insiders going up to the outsiders in a crude way. I don't think the lady helped herself with that one, and I think it'll be very controversial.

And naturally the wingnuts over at the bastion of intelligentsia that is Free Republic had lots to say, this coming from "Las Vegas Ron"...

The good news is that stuff like this takes its toll, and not on the objects of attack. I don't know if Obama realizes it, but he is generating racial tension.

After reading how his pick to lead the US Forest Service had no previous USFS background, a fellow commented, "Why do I expect he's black?"

I thought it was in poor taste, but then, sure enough - the pick is a black man known for supporting fellow minorities.

Picking a trashy black lesbian to do bitter stand-up that will be replayed on TV doesn't help the President. In fact, it makes him look like what he is - a bitter racist whose chief qualification, in his mind even, seems to be "I'm Black. I'm Cool."

And having the adoring press there laughing reminds folks that the people who bring them ‘news' are firmly in Obama's hip pocket...or even further in his shorts.

I watched about half of her performance. The word I kept thinking was, "Ghetto". And I doubt I'm the only one.

A month ago, I made a joke about needing to be on the receiving end of some income redistribution. The salesman smiled and replied, "We're the wrong skin color - all we're allowed to do is give." I was shocked because I had never had a salesman say something like that in front of me. But I think a lot of folks are starting to feel like this is a BLACK Administration - no whites need apply. And that is very bad for racial harmony.

Even some liberals were offended, like Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke...

I've been to the White House Correspondents Dinner. And, if history is any judge, then comedians asked to perform there seem to do best when they joke with gentle jibes rather than go for the jugular. Someone should have reminded Wanda Sykes about that before tonight. Because not since Don Imus roughed up Bill Clinton at the annual event has a comedian been so mean-spirited.

And Matt Drudge has been running this headline and photo most of the day...

To all of this I say...IT'S A FREAKING ROAST PEOPLE! The humor is supposed to be below the belt. In my mind this isn't even nearly as bad as Colbert's evisceration of Bush in 2006. Not even close. But just wait until tomorrow when the chattering classes get back into full swing. It'll be insane! And I'll be listening to Limbaugh's show while hitting refresh on Michelle Malkin's blog every fifteen minutes or so. It'll be so grand!

Today's meme on the right is that Obama's storm troopers are deliberately painting law-abiding, peaceful tax protesters as dangerous right-wing terrorists. This fantasy is based on the confluence of two events: The scheduled "tea party" events wherein white rich people can vent their rage at having to concede power to a nonwhite rich people, and the release this week of a Department of Homeland Security bulletin warning local authorities to be on the look-out for right-wing nutjobs. When Michelle Malkin hears "violent right-wing extremism," her ears naturally start burning. She thinks DHS was talking about her, and she's outraged.

OK, so if the Tea Baggers aren't violent extremists seeking the overthrow of the federal government, what are they, then? Over to you, Matt Mackowiak, Republican operative and former press secretary to Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, writing in the Austin-American Statesman:

The coming revolution is akin to "Fight Club," the 1999 film that follows the struggles of day to day life for a regular guy who starts an underground fight club as radical and not terribly productive psychotherapy.

As Brad Pitt's character, Tyler Durden, says in the movie, "Fight Club was the beginning, now it's moved out of the basement, it's called Project Mayhem."

Tyler Durden, you may remember, was the imaginary friend a boring guy in a suit created during his descent into psychosis. And Project Mayhem, you will recall, was a plot to destroy the nation's financial system by blowing up credit card companies. Which is a fair approximation of what the Republican Party accomplished during its eight years in the White House.

So get it straight, Obamatards: Tea Baggers are not violent madmen. They just aspire to be like characters in movies who murder people and plant truck bombs in buildings in a coordinated effort to overthrow the existing power structure, with which they disagree.

There are some other ways the Republican Party is like Fight Club:

• They are both comically and deeply homoerotic.
• They are both always fighting among themselves for no reason.
• They are both fucking insane.
• They both have shitty endings.

[Via Matthew Yglasias.]

Conservative punditrix Michelle Malkin nourished her spawn.

BusinessWeek.com editor John Byrne, whose importance should be evident from his ALL-CAPS username, exposed the inner workings of the world's most boring business magazine.

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson opted for "dong."

Journalism-school dropout Reed Kavner learned there's no such thing as a cheap lunch.

Chicago Tribune reporter Wailin Wong corrected bloggers.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Associated Press managing editor Lou Ferrara reminisced.

Freelance writer Glenn Fleishman quite possibly spent more time concocting a metaphor for his work on a feature story than he did on the story itself.

Sassy conservative punditrix Michelle Malkin craved junk food, and not just the intellectual kind.

Boing Boing space-princess blogger Xeni Jardin seemed to mock her coworkers' obsession with copy protection.

Globetrotting tech-book author Sarah Lacy unleashed her gams on an unsuspecting Middle East.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Coughlin was a Catholic priest whose CBS radio show reached an estimated third of the country during the Great Depression. He initially supported the New Deal, but his admiration for Roosevelt quickly curdled into rank anti-Semitism and kill-all-the-bankers rage. He was among the first to use the emerging mass media to build up his audience into his own political constituency, a power that he used to talk up Hitler and Mussolini, uncover various Jewish conspiracies, and inveigh against Wall Street.

The current climate cries out for a similar media figure to focus and control our Bailout Rage. He or she could come from any medium—radio, television, the web—and any political stripe. From the left, an anti-capitalist ranter could rise to greatness by relentlessly attack the privileged elites who got us into this mess; from the right, a bilious Real American could stand athwart Obama and shout "lynch!"

So who will it be? Here are the candidates, and their odds of reaching Coughlin's heights :

Bill O'Reilly
He's basically been angling for the Coughlin gig for the past 15 years, but real fire-and-brimstone demagoguery is hard to pull off absent a genuine political or economic catastrophe. And prior to 2006, he was hobbled by the fact that his own party was in power, depriving him of a convenient foil to rail against. He seemed to be making a play for Coughlin-esque heights last year when he launched a campaign against price-gouging oil company executives. So it's curious that now, at the very moment when his dream is so close, he seems to be calming down a bit. When O'Reilly decides that the time is ripe to start calling for "the folks" to march on Washington, we'll know, but for now he seems content to give Steve Doocy pop quizzes. Odds: 3-4

Glenn Beck
The nightmare scenario. Beck is an emotionally unstable Mormon who believes literally everything he reads on Free Republic. He's begun announcing life-encompassing militaristic campaigns like the 912 Project, which is designed to order his audience's lives in accordance with his nine principles and 12 values, and says things like "this is your country, you are still in control. … Now you're being forced to bail those people out. There are more of us than there are of them. We surround them." Even the Fox folks are getting worried. Odds: 1-2

Lou Dobbs
A poor man's demagogue. He wanted it badly, but bet on the wrong horse with the whole Mexico thing. Now immigrants are fleeing the other way over the border to escape our catastrophe, and Dobbs is thrashing about for an issue to get people's blood boiling. Defending corporate jets for bailout recipients isn't going to do it. Odds: 1-10

Keith Olbermann
He's got the self-regard for the job, and he knows how to pick targets and keep firing. But Olbermann is at heart a pointy-headed liberal, and he's hobbled by his allegiance to Obama. He could yet turn on him the way Coughlin turned on Roosevelt and attack him from the left. Still, he obsessively collects trading cards, not exactly the type of quality we like in out cult-of-personality Great Leaders. He should take up hunting. Odds: 1-4

Rush Limbaugh
Clearly going for it. But nobody likes him, and he's hit the ceiling on his audience. It takes a fresh new face to really ignite the passions of the sidelined masses, and we've all already formed opinions on Rush. Also, radio is dead. When Coughlin reigned, it was a mass medium, now it's nothing but addled shut-ins. Odds: 1-3

Sean Hannity
Trying too hard. People want to feel like they're following someone who reluctantly takes on the burden of leadership for the good of the nation. Hannity is a demagogue's sidekick at best. Odds: 1-5

Michele Malkin
Why does it have to be a TV or radio personality? Malkin's the ideal demagogue for the web age. She's angry enough, and belligerent, and you can actually feel her hatred for gays et. al. radiating from your computer screen, which helps establish that crucial personal connection with angry, confused followers searching for meaning and order in their lives. She's already demonstrated the ability to inspire her readers to action, as when she published the home addresses and phone numbers of "seditious" UC-Santa Cruz students who opposed the war in Iraq, who later received death threats. Too bad she's not white and a man. Odds: 1-666

Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, now a Google engineer, contemplated violence. (There's some kind of thing about guns going around on Twitter! We don't get it, but we sure hope that's what Schachter's referring to!)
KNBC TV personality Shira Lazar corrupted the youth of America.
Associated Press managing editor Lou Ferrara expressed an entirely legitimate concern.
Bizarro right-wing conservatrix Michelle Malkin made it official: She is not PC.
New Yorker writer Tad Friend cried in public.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Internet gossip (we like those!) Perez Hilton sought refreshment after an exhausting twitterfight with Ashton Kutcher.

CNN's Rick Sanchez GOT SO MAD HE HIT THE CAPS LOCK KEY.

Late-night funny guy Jimmy Fallon looked forward to meeting Martha Stewart.

Fast Company's Ellen McGirt expressed her enthusiasm.

Conservative punditrix Michelle Malkin did her part to ensure the survival of the blogger species.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

The rest of the photos are available on Facebook.

Back in 2006 Michelle Malkin posted the phone numbers of some college kids planning to protest Ann Coulter. The kids—who were neither running for office nor inserted at the last minute to the great buffet table of family values on display at the nationally televised Republican National Convention—received death threats! Malkin refused to take those phone numbers down! When they complained, Malkin reposted their numbers!

Ha! Also, of course, Malkin thinks we should've kept all the Japanese-Americans in WWII locked up in internment camps forever and ever, but hey. Outrage-off! Cesspool Blog! Bastards all!!!

[Photo-illustration (c) back when people gave a shit about Michelle Malkin.]

Which is why I can't get mad at your hasty political backtracking. Something about that would be so "typical Democrat self-immolating," so "Nation of Whiners" of me. Instead I will leave you with this story: yesterday I attended a panel on income inequality at Barnes & Noble featuring my own personal Jesus, Wall Street Journal columnist Tom Frank and former Harper's editor-in-chief Lewis Lapham. Tom's new book The Wrecking Crew is a hysterically funny survey of the hysterically vast destruction Republicans and their unabashed contempt for government have unleashed upon the government. If we were more like them, we would have figured out a way to convincingly get voters to substitute out "America" for "government" in that last sentence, but no. We are just so relentlessly self-critical! I heard one spectator whine about how he would vote for Ralph Nader or Ron Paul before Obama. Asked another, a late arriving senior citizen, afterward: "But did they let the Democrats off the hook? The Democrats always let the Republicans start wars!" And while it was true, it was the sort of rhetorical question that was its own explanation. Which is to say, Janice Min, I see some dirt on your shoulder, could I brush it off for you?

First, Mead emails Malkin, repeatedly, to no response at all. Then they try her editor at the New York Post—nothing. Then Remnick tries!

Dear Michelle Malkin,

I am the editor of The New Yorker magazine, and I believe that you have received some sort of contact from our office, but I just wanted to assure you that our desire to write about you is serious and genuine. I can be reached through email above or [phone number redacted].

Best regards,
David Remnick

On 2/16/08, Michelle Malkin wrote:

Thanks.

Dear Ms. Malkin, "Thanks..." but can we talk? I am at home at [phone number redacted]. Best, David Remnick

OMG, the home number! Malkin finally responds: she has "neither the time nor inclination to sit down with your staff Jane Goodall and serve as an anthropological specimen for The New Yorker's readership."

Ok, Michelle. Whatever.

Hilariously she was more than happy to be profiled by Washington Post Media "critic" Howard Kurtz last year.

Why the Hell Would The New Yorker Want to Write a Profile of Michelle Malkin [Bloggasm]

Nothing. Searches for liberal commentators did not reveal any racy photos — in fact, they didn't display any images at all. Could Google's algorithms be expressing a political bias? Or, more likely, are conservative pundits simply more photogenic? Whatever the cause — glitch or political in-joke — other Googlers have decided that the equal-time principle applies to search-engine bikini shots. A search for "Michelle Malkin" no longer includes any images, and the Photoshopped image of Ann Coulter has also disappeared. Pity. We were so looking forward to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann in a Speedo.

UPDATE: Yes, of course it's fake! You idiots! Sure, that head looks way too tiny for the body, but then we don't want to make any assumptions about Malkin's head size. Enjoy her cyclonic indignation here.

Michelle, You Ignorant Slut ... [Wonkette]

Google News
25 Ways to Ignore Joel Stein and Support Our Troops [Michelle Malkin]

Have you read the Smoking Gun's expos of lying liar James Frey, the drug addict/alcoholic/rage-filled author of the mega-best-selling "non-fiction" memoir "A Million Little Piece?" It's devastating.

Just one more reason to despise the victim lit genre.

Lesson: When it sounds too bad to be true, Oprah, dry your eyes and check the facts.

Wait, there's a "victim lit" genre? We never saw that in our college course catalogues, but we're guessing Malkin's idea of "victim lit" revolves more around My Life and less around dudes like James Frey. And for fuck's sake, can we just leave Oprah out of this? Remember, the book was actually popular before O got all the housewives crying about it.

Oprah's Con Man [Michelle Malkin]