This is two-thirds of a short thing in Kaplan about Sarah Palin last night:

1) She’s lost a lot of weight, perhaps 15 pounds. She looked trim and firm, like she’s hoisting the barbells or maybe chopping wood. Her chair at the head table was empty; if she had the shrimp and filet mignon served to attendees, she ate in her hotel room.

2) She wore a fitted black suit, black hose and high black platform heels. She had on three opera-length strands of pearls, two white and one multi-colored. In her lapel, a small pin with two flags—for Israel and the United States.

This isn’t that Robin Givens, or whatever her name is, queer eye for politicians’ wives thing, this is from a blog that purports to be about politics.

We did hear a lot about Al Gore’s weight and beard and so on, so I can’t honestly say for sure that a man wouldn’t be scrutinized in the same way.

Kudos to Oliver Willis and Stefan Sirucek for getting on top of Handsgate. The whole thing makes me think of this:

I guess I don’t see this as all that bad, not compared to “I read all of them” or O’Biden or thinking Africa was a country, let alone resigning mid-term, misusing the office of the governor to pursue a vendetta against Todd Palin’s sister’s estranged husband, etc.

But it is amusing, though not as amusing as Andrew Sullivan’s obsession with Palin (yesterday was a banner day for that).

I started reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail today. So far, I love it (about 50 pages in).

It’s hard to imagine a book like that being written today, partly because the the Liebling/Thompson (sure I’m leaving out out others) style of magazine writing has been completely extinguished, but mostly because I can’t imagine someone like Hunter S. Thompson getting that kind of access today.

I don’t know that politics has changed for the worse the past 40 years but when you compare Halperin’s awful new book to Thompson or Timothy Crouse, it is clear that things have changed drastically in the politico-media world.

It never stops:

This new tea party bears no resemblance to the one that began a year ago as a reaction to the collapse of our financial system and the subsequent bailout. That movement of ragtag and unorganized libertarians, independents and conservatives was something new and unique. An authentic protest movement angered not just by the new President, Barack Obama, who had presided over the bailouts but the president who started the ball rolling and whose incompetence had led to the crisis in the first place, George W. Bush.

Obama hadn’t even been elected when the bank bailout occurred, let alone presided over it.

From Jaron Lanier, The Serfdom of Crowds, in the Jan/Feb issue of Harper’s Magazine:

The wave of financial calamities that took place in 2008 was cloud-based. No one in the pre–digital-cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to himself in the way we routinely are able to now. The limitations of organic human memory and calculation put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion. In finance, the rise of computer-assisted hedge funds and similar operations has turned capitalism into a search engine. You tend the engine in the computing cloud, and it searches for money. In the past, an investor had to be able to understand at least something about what an investment would actually accomplish. No longer. There are now so many layers of abstraction between the elite investor and actual events that he no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of his investments…

The Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order. In each case, human creativity and understanding, especially one’s own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the crowd, in the algorithms that remove the risks of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any mere person to understand. A hedge-fund manager might make money by using the computational power of the cloud to create fantastical financial instruments that make bets on derivatives in such a way as to invent the phony virtual collateral for stupendous risks. This is a subtle form of counterfeiting, and it is precisely the same maneuver a socially competitive teenager makes in accumulating fantastical numbers of “friends” through a service like Facebook. But let’s suppose you disagree that the idea of friendship is being reduced. Even then one must remember that the customers of social networks are not the members of those networks. The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear in any significant way. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the cloud lords to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who could someday show up.

Reading Scott Horton’s piece The Guantánamo “Suicides” finally prodded me into paying for a two-year subscription to Harper’s. I’ve been trying to cut back on the amount of paper that comes into the house, but I realized that I’ve bought at least eight of the last 12 issues over the counter. This may be a feckless leap of faith, since Harper’s has had the same troubles as all the other dead-tree media recently, but too often I just don’t “get around” to reading long, thoughtful reports online. Horton’s No Comment blog is on my short list of favorites, and he uses all the added-value online features (pics, video, links) cleverly and unobtrusively. It’s one of the blogs I would miss greatly, even if I don’t remember to click on it every day.

Not sure how many (if any) of you are watching this on Animal Planet, but I thought I would throw up a thread.

Love Newfoundlands.

If you’re snowbound and desperate for entertainment, Jezebel will be liveblogging Palin’s speech at 9pm.

Princess Sparkle Pony has a Sarah Palin Tea Party Convention Bingo card, which you could probably use for a drinking game, but only if you’re not planning on driving or possibly walking for at least 12 hours afterwards.

I’ll probably be out for dinner when the big event takes place, but with an estimated “almost a hundred” media (and only 600 paying guests), the odds are that we’ll find out pretty soon if anything significant happens.

Blazing Saddles is on AMC.

BTW- Dog Show on Animal Planet at 8.

This Dave Weigel piece is fascinating, even more interesting than the usual from Weigel. It captures Breitbart berating a WND editor for giving a birtherist speech at the teabagger convention.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Hot off the presses, some pics of Lily outside. She hates it, and I had to tamp down an area for her to go to the bathroom.

Jonathan Alter on Countdown last night Tuesday night (via Steve Benen, who also criticizes Alter):

“I think [Republicans are] in a place now where they just want to hurt Obama.

“And what they don’t get—I wish they would look into their souls a little bit—is that if they convey over and over again that the president of the United States is weak, what does that do? It emboldens the terrorists, and I don’t say that lightly.

I understand that Senate obstructionism may get in the way of Obama’s ability to conduct foreign policy. But emboldening terrorists? Osama bin Laden wakes up one morning, sees Richard Shelby has put a hold on 70 nominees and says “now is the day that we strike”? There’s absolutely no evidence that Al Qaeda thinks in these terms at all.

It’s not just that “shut up, the terrorists are listening” is essentially anti-free speech and anti-democratic, it’s that it doesn’t make any sense as a strategy.

It was dumb when Congressional Democrats were attacked in this way and it’s dumb when Congressional Republicans are attacked this way.

Even if we can’t use the word “retarded” anymore, at least we’re still allowed to torture and execute mentally disabled people.

(A little dark for a Saturday morning, I realize. But it’s true.)

This story is not getting as much attention as one would think in the American media, but Greece, Spain and Portugal are facing major financial crises that may end with the countries defaulting on their debt. If this happens, you can be pretty sure that the deficit scolds will use this as cautionary tale, e.g. “don’t let us be like Spain, enact `entitlement reform’ now”, etc.

Krugman points out that Spain’s budgetary practices have not been particularly irresponsible, that in fact they were running a surplus when the economy was good:

As Europe is roiled by sovereign debt fears, it’s important to realize that the crisis in the largest of the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain) has nothing to do with fiscal irresponsibility. On the eve of the crisis, Spain was running a budget surplus; its debts, as you can see in the figure above, were low relative to GDP.

So what happened? Spain is an object lesson in the problems of having monetary union without fiscal and labor market integration. First, there was a huge boom in Spain, largely driven by a housing bubble — and financed by capital outflows from Germany. This boom pulled up Spanish wages. Then the bubble burst, leaving Spanish labor overpriced relative to Germany and France, and precipitating a surge in unemployment. It also led to large Spanish budget deficits, mainly because of collapsing revenue but also due to efforts to limit the rise in unemployment.

There is a little bit of snow outside.

John Cook at Gawker has a point-by-point teardown of Fox News’ “fair and balanced” editing of the underwhelming-on-the-air “faceoff” between Jon Stewart and Lord Falafel. “I’m Not Saying Your Mother’s A Whore: How Fox News Censored Jon Stewart vs. Bill O’Reilly” :

Fox News has generously placed the full, unedited conversation between Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart online, so we can see precisely how unfairly and deviously Fox edited the interview in order to weaken Stewart’s case: A lot!

Last night on his show—Part Two of a ludicrously overhyped “faceoff” between O’Reilly and Stewart in which Stewart attempted, among other things, to present a critique of Fox as a fear-mongering GOP messaging operation—O’Reilly boasted that his edit of their 42-minute interview for broadcast was “a fair cut” and invited viewers to have a look at the unedited version online to judge for themselves: “Some of these idiots in the press who hate us, ‘O’Reilly cut the interview to make Stewart look’—OK, all of that is bull. It’s a fair cut. And then when you watch the cut and watch the whole interview you’ll see it.”

So we took him up on the offer, and guess what? If by “fair cut” O’Reilly means “cut in a manner that left some of Stewart’s best lines, most effective arguments, and most convincing evidence out of the interview and hidden from the broadcast audience,” then he’s absolutely right…

And to watch the Fox News cut of this exchange, you’d think O’Reilly scored a minor point by mocking Stewart’s repeated use of the word “cyclonic”

O’REILLY: Cavuto sane?
STEWART: Being the thinnest kid at fat camp. So let’s just get that straight. Here is what Fox has done through their cyclonic, perpetual…
O’REILLY: We’re back to the cyclonic.
STEWART: Their cyclonic perpetual emotion machine that is a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week. They’ve taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao. Explain to me why that is the narrative of your network?

Here’s what Stewart really said about Neil Cavuto’s practice of raising “Is Obama a Stalinist?”-style questions:

I know what this is. I come from Jersey—it’s the same thing: “I’m not saying your mother’s a whore. I’m just saying she has sex for money. With people.” [F]ox News used to be all about, you don’t criticize a president during wartime. It’s unacceptable, it’s treasonous, it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. All of a sudden, for some reason you can run out there and say, “Barack Obama is destroying the fabric of this country.”

Ah yes—the Cavuto Mark in all its glory!

Read the whole thing. The Gawker staff deserves great credit for, as the saying goes, watching these idiots so we don’t have to, and for exploring Fox’s bad-faith chop job at length. Comments are well worth reading, too—including, I suppose, the Fox apologist who whines “The rife condescension in this thread is exactly why more people watch Fox than the Big Three. Obviously, the bulk of Fox’s viewers don’t really sweat the fact it’s a right-leaning outlet, just like the Big Three viewers don’t sweat the left-of-center bias. Fox’s viewers watch Fox because it’s the one place in the MSM they don’t get called stupid all day long.”