For those of you who have not seen Palin’s presser, here it is via Paddy via Taylor Marsh at the Political Carnival:

That was rambling and disjointed even by Palin’s low standards. When I was watching it, it reminded me of a COPS episode, when they are are talking to a guy accused of stealing aerosol paint from a hardware store, and the guy swears he didn’t steal any paint, and yes it is all just a big coincidence that he has a circle of silver paint around his mouth and nose, and yes, it is an even bigger coincidence that there is a paper bag with silver paint in it and no he has no idea why there are empty silver cans of paint in the bag seat of his car and oh, hey, by the way, do you have a light, buddy, and better yet do you gotta smoke?

It was manic. I have no idea what is going on, but this was just bizarre. And what makes me even more convinced she is just done, we have this:

If Palin wants to run in 2012, why not do exactly what she announced today? It’s an enormous gamble – but it could be a shrewd one.

After all, she’s freeing herself from the duties of the governorship. Now she can do her book, give speeches, travel the country and the world, campaign for others, meet people, get more educated on the issues – and without being criticized for neglecting her duties in Alaska. I suppose she’ll take a hit for leaving the governorship early – but how much of one? She’s probably accomplished most of what she was going to get done as governor, and is leaving a sympatico lieutenant governor in charge.

And haven’t conservatives been lamenting the lack of a national leader? Well, now she’ll try to be that. She may not succeed. Everything rests on her talents, and on her performance. She’ll be under intense and hostile scrutiny, and she’ll have to perform well.

All in all, it’s going to be a high-wire act. The odds are against her pulling it off. But I wouldn’t bet against it.

That was Bill Kristol, and that is as good as a kiss of death.

All sorts of speculation going on, but who knows? I’ve never understood her to begin with, I won’t begin to try now.

I knew he’d eventually get the blame but K-Lo got to it quicker than I expected:

If she is stepping down because of what politics has done to her family, because of something in her family life she doesn’t want to see as David Letterman fodder, because it’s impossible to be governor, a star, and a mom to an infant … this is good. It demonstrates good judgment and priorities.

Look, I sincerely hope that this resignation has not been brought about by some personal, health, or family problem.

But if it was, is David Letterman really the culprit?

Any minute now, Lady Starburst will be making an announcement of some kind...probably that she won’t seek re-election as governor of Alaska.

This may be the first time I’ve ever said this, but Mark Halperin’s run-down of reasons she won’t run is pretty good, and I sort of like his Mona Lisa/Palin graphic. Not many people know that da Vinci originally intended to have Mona Lisa winking, rather than half-smiling, in the picture.

Update. From the comments:

Rick Sanchez confirms on CNN that Mooseburger will announce shortly that she’s not seeking re-election in Alaska.

Update update. She’s actually resigning in a few weeks. King David never would have done this.

Update update update. This probably isn’t connected at all, but Palin canned the state health director earlier this week. Let’s hope no one we know uses this likely coincidence as a pretext for more Trig truth-squadding.

Update update update update. Josh quotes her:

“You are naive if you don’t see a full-court press on the national level, picking apart a good point guard.”

His take is that this indicates it is the mother of all sulks. My take is that some form of national media is about to break news of a damaging scandal.

Jonah Goldberg has “a letter to Sarah Palin” column that I find interesting because it touts the importance of policy knowledge, but only for getting elected:

Second, peddling a few platitudes and truisms about free markets and limited government is no substitute for really knowing what you’re talking about. Yes, you can talk well about the stuff you know — oil drilling, energy, etc. — but beyond your comfort zone, you fall back on bumper-sticker language that sounds fine to the people who already agree with you but is useless in winning over skeptics.

President Bush had the same problem you do, which is why there’s a hunger for Republicans who can effectively articulate and sell our policies and philosophy. That’s why the wonks have the upper hand. Mitt Romney, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, and other hands-on types are what the party wants and, frankly, needs.

Note that the emphasis is on articulating and selling, not on understanding and implementing. But even if Jonah still doesn’t believe that the reality of policy is important, at least he now accepts that the electorate does and thinks that Republicans should put forward candidates who at least give the appearance of understanding this reality.

I think that represents some kind of progress.

Via Memeorandum:

Manhattan apartment sales plunged more than 50 percent and the average price dropped 21.4 to 24 percent from a year ago, as the U.S. recession forced many who own a piece of the Big Apple to eat humble pie, several reports said.

The average price of Manhattan apartment in the second quarter slid to $1,312,920 down from $1,669,729 a year earlier, according to a Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate report released Thursday.

Those numbers give me chest pains.

This is kind of amazing:

This is complicated stuff (for people with no financial background, like me, it’s nightmarish) and I have a longer thing about this coming out later. But the essence of this story is that Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge has, for months, been complaining that Goldman has been manipulating the NYSE, in particular manipulating program trading in somewhat the same way (although perhaps not to the same extent) that they manipulated the commodities markets. In order to make his case — and his theory has gained a lot of acceptance, to the point where Goldman had to respond to the allegations publicly — he has been analyzing data the NYSE releases on program trading every week.

So what happened this week? The NYSE announced that it will no longer be releasing its weekly program trading data. This is quite obviously a move designed to make it even more impossible to track what’s going on in the NYSE and shield, in particular, Goldman Sachs. Let’s hope there’s a public uproar about this; Zero Hedge posted contact info for NYSE officials, and has urged readers to petition the exchange to restore the old rules in the name of transparency.

Go USA!

BTW- my favorite thing about the Dennis Kneale meltdown I talked about the other day is that when his producers were trying to get Zero Hedge on the air, their producers were apparently completely unaware that Tyler Durden and Marla Singer are characters from Fight Club (read the accompanying email exchange). Apparently the Goldman boys were confused, as well.

I wonder the same thing when I read some of the right-wing blogs:

All of this is par for the course; the WSJ editorial page has been like this for 35 years. Nonetheless, it got me wondering: what do these people really believe?

I mean, they’re not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth — one that is, in effect, told only to Inner Party members, while the Outer Party makes do with prolefeed.

The question is, what is that higher truth? What do these people really believe in?

I’m gonna roll with tax cuts, invisible jeebus, and “shut up, that’s why!” But even that isn’t accurate, because we know that most of the right-wing elites don’t even believe in the invisible jeebus stuff (remember when all the folks at the NRO and other right-wing joints were asked about whether they believed in evolution, and they all did- I can’t find the link), they just pretend to be godbotherers and flat-earthers to keep the rubes busy. So what do they actually believe in?

This story at CNN, about a woman who survived a plane crash, falling 2 miles to the jungle canopy, is so amazing I’m kind of shocked it has not been turned into a movie.

This was good news yet still depressing:

As the United States takes its first steps toward mandating that power companies generate more electricity from renewable sources, China already has a similar requirement and is investing billions to remake itself into a green energy superpower.

Through a combination of carrots and sticks, Beijing is starting to change how this country generates energy. Although coal remains the biggest energy source and is almost certain to stay that way, the rise of renewable energy, especially wind power, is helping to slow China’s steep growth in emissions of global warming gases.

While the House of Representatives approved a requirement last week that American utilities generate more of their power from renewable sources of energy, and the Senate will consider similar proposals over the summer, China imposed such a requirement almost two years ago.

This year China is on track to pass the United States as the world’s largest market for wind turbines — after doubling wind power capacity in each of the last four years. State-owned power companies are competing to see which can build solar plants fastest, though these projects are much smaller than the wind projects. And other green energy projects, like burning farm waste to generate electricity, are sprouting up.

I just can’t tell you how depressing it is to know that while we fight to get this sort of thing going in the US, one of the two major political parties does everything they can to oppose green energy while chanting “Drill, baby, drill!” Maybe once the Chinese show how profitable and valuable green energy is, the Republicans will notice.

And, it goes without saying, that a portion of the stimulus bill that every Republican voted against for purely political reasons went to green technology.

You know, with the newest employment numbers, I have no doubt Krugman is right:

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?

Let’s do the math.

Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.

And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?

Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.

The problem is that while Krugman is probably right, he was also right last week when he said that climate change is a serious issue and that we need to spend a lot of money to address it. And he was also right the week before that when he said that we need to do something about the health care system. And on and on.

Add to that, the opposition, which stood by and did nothing when Bush exploded the deficit in peactetime, and then write things like this (and this really is a wingnut tour de force- almost every sentence contains multiple falsehoods, distortions, and outright gibberish):

Porkulus has utterly failed, as has the Obama administration’s fiscal policies. Businesses have conserved capital in the face of massive new taxes and costs associated with Obama’s stated fiscal policies, such as cap-and-trade, foreign-income taxation, and the higher interest rates that will spring from the massive deficits Obama plans to create. The capital necessary for growth won’t appear in the market under these conditions, as we have clearly seen. When will the media begin to hold this administration responsible for Obama’s economy-killing agenda?

Now some of you might disagree, but I happen to know that Ed Morrisey is not that god damned stupid. I read him before he signed on with the Malkin empire, so I know he is just playing along because he knows what pays his bills. But he doesn’t have to believe this stuff, nor does Michele Bachmann really need to believe that the Census workers will- actually, I’m not really sure what she thinks the census workers are going to do. They are just playing a game to convince the people dumber that them, and believe it or not, there are a lot of those people out there.

So Krugman is right. Again. But there isn’t anything that anyone can do about it.

Here’s a pic from my parents house, with my uncles dogs, my sisters dog, and Ginny and Guesly all paying a great deal of attention to my sister:

The paps are my aunt’s show dogs, the border collie is my uncle’s puppy, and the bigger dog is Huck, my sister’s pup. You all know who G & G are and who they belong to.

Lending more evidence to DougJ’s theory, I just heard Roger Simon on Hardball state that “Sara Palin held her own in the debate.”

If, by holding your own, you mean refusing to answer any questions you didn’t like, talking about random things that had nothing to do with the question, babbling about a grade school and winking at the camera, and then spent the rest of the time just lying about things, well, sure, she “held her own.”

Also, Biden mopped the floor with her in the post-debate polling, but, you know, those are facts that might conflict with Simon’s narrative.

Tom Levenson, friend of the blog and MIT Professor of Science Writing, has a new book that fits neatly in a growing but still unnamed literary niche, one that transplants already perfectly famous historical figures into a hyperbolic action-thriller setting. One of my favorites in the genre pits Mark Twain, Nichola Tesla and Bertha von Suttner (you may need to look that last one up) against JP Morgan, Guglielmo Marconi and others trying to open a demonic gateway to hell.

My own entry would go something like this.

The setting: America. While World War II rages across the oceans, another war quietly builds at home. Fueled by prohibition, modern technology and detective work that still has one foot in the nineteenth century, organized crime has exploded from a nuisance to a mortal threat. FDR cannot admit the extent to which mobsters have penetrated his government or the antediluvian state of forensic science. Al Capone has hatched a bold but credible plot to install his own agents at the top of the FBI. Desperate and nearly overwhelmed, the United States turns to the only man who can bring hoods and hooligans back under control: Albert Einstein.

Eager for a break from academia, Einstein maps the American underworld in unprecedented detail. The new sherriff catches less careful gangsters totally by surprise. Gradually the prisons swell with small-time sharks and potential informants. However, major problems remain. For one, the march of technology has provided criminals with tools that law enforcement agencies have not even started to grasp. For another, big fish like Capone understand the danger well enough. Nonetheless, Capone’s ambitions launch him into an epic contest of wits against Einstein himself. To win Einstein must modernize forensic science and bring down history’s greatest mobster. His reputation and the future the United States hang in the balance.

Normally I could admit that no publisher in his right mind would consider a turgid precis like that. But now that I’ve read Tom’s book, I won’t do that. That crazy stuff actually happened. Even the superlatives.

Levenson plays with a series of story elements that each would make a fine topic for one of those OCD books that belabor a single topic (salt, cod, Pi, zero, the low-top beige Converse All-Star). Some of you might know that Isaac Newton (yes, that Isaac Newton) managed the English mint for a while in the late seventeenth century. Some might also know that England faced a currency crisis at the time; something to do with the lopsided value of silver on either side of the Channel. Also relevant: the Bank of England was founded around that time, to support a war, and issued what we now know as the first government-backed paper money. That and the crude medieval coins that still circulated created an epic market for counterfeiters and a number of other currency scams.

When you add these things together with new information about Newton’s detective life that Levenson uncovered with original reporting, you have a bizarre, gripping crime story that is completely true. Counterfeiting and terrible currency management almost brought down the British empire. Isaac Newton in fact crafted what might be the first recognizably modern monetary policy, he modernized the mint and in his spare time he personally jailed much of the English counterfeiting community. A gifted counterfeiter named William Chaloner did make a play for control of the mint itself, and if not for the mint’s Warden he appeared more likely than not to win. In a position like that, with England mired in a war that already wrecked the economy and saddled with terrible monetary policy, Chaloner could have condemned the Empire and made himself almost unimaginably wealthy.

Levenson’s deft writing style makes me feel a little guilty for indirectly linking it with the dross that I wrote above. His chapters, which alternate between top-down perspectives on the initially separate lives of Newton and Chaloner, transition with a verbal and conceptual wit that recalls the spectacular conclusion to Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club. The book is a one-handable read (this is important for people like me who stand on the bus a lot); the pace moves briskly and compacts necessary historical digressions into paragraphs that keep the narrative going far better than footnotes or Melvillian soliloquies would do.

Those who enjoy science biography, crime drama, narrative history, monetary policy or comics where Jack Kerouac and James Watson go back in time and punch robo-Hitler should definitely check out this book.

***

As with all things in life, a greater sense of satisfaction can be had if you buy it through the Amazon link at top right.

***Update***

Several commenters have asked about Neal Stephenson’s Baroque cycle, which apparently also covers Newton’s tenure at the Mint. Tom mentions in his book that he scrupulously avoided Stephenson’s work to make sure that Stephenson’s characterizations did not influence his own.

Is there anyone in public life with a mustache who isn’t a buffoon?

Kurtz (hey, he’s quick with these things as much as I hate him) has the response from the WaPo newsroom:

The Washington Post’s executive editor said today he is “appalled” by a plan to charge lobbyists as much as $250,000 for off-the-record gatherings at the home of the paper’s publisher—with Obama administration officials, members of Congress and the paper’s reporters and editors—and insisted that the newsroom will not participate.

“It suggests that access to Washington Post journalists was available for purchase,” Brauchli said in an interview. The proposal “promises we would suspend our usual skeptical questioning because it appears to offer, in exchange for sponsorships, the good name of The Washington Post.”

Brauchli was responding to fliers, circulated by the paper’s parent company, offering an “intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth.” The fliers, which said participants would be charged $25,000 to sponsor a single salon and $250,000 to underwrite an annual series of 11 sessions, were reported this morning by Politico.

“We do not offer access to the newsroom for money,” Brauchli said. “We just are not in that business.”

What bothers me most about this is that they’re calling these things “salons”. At least call them “massage parlors”.

Update. Commenter clone12 suggests the euphemism “message parlor”.