Like The Hills, and unlike Sarah's vice-presidential bid, Pallin' Around With The Palins is prepared in advance.


We open with the Palins enjoying some traditional Alaskan cuisine — perhaps "sandwiches" made of a slice of bread between two slices of moose meat. Because everything is crazy up there, right?


But all is not well in Palintopia. Sarah's not happy, because she's getting lambasted by critics.


Including Levi Johnston, who's telling the media she quit her job to write a book (can we maybe get him to take off his shirt again?). But Only Dead Fish Go With The Flow was supposed to be a secret! At this point we'd like to get a special guest star on . . .


Like Pat Buchanan. Maybe he could personally carry out his advice to "hold Levi's head underwater until the thrashing stops."


Now Sarah consoles Bristol, and attempts to find her a more loyal partner (this part of the show is like The Bachelorette).


Some candidates are rejected early.


Sarah suggests a candidate of her own — that nice Jay Newton-Small of Time, who called her an "exotic creature"...


But is surprised to find out that despite her first name, Newton-Small is a woman.


In this portion of the show, Sarah prays for forgiveness. She also asks the Lord for tips on her 2012 presidential campaign, and the date of the next fish run. Could include more guest stars here (Pat Robertson? Rick Warren? To really stir things up, Jeremiah Wright?)


Time for a fishin' break.


But the Palins are attacked by a shark (think Palin vs. Wild)! Pat Buchanan's "drowning" technique is no match for the massive creature.


Luckily, Sarah winks the beast to death.


The Palins say their goodbyes. In the next episode, they skin a bear, and give hip waders to the homeless.

• Wow: there are apparently conservatives suggesting that Judge Sonia Sotomayor's enjoyment of traditional Puerto Rican food will impact her ability to be a mouth-breathing, lock-step conservative justice in the grand school of Clarence "Oral Arguments Are Nap Times" Thomas. [TalkingPointsMemo]

• And a bunch of racist Republicans, including Newt "Who Needs Latino Voters" Gingrich and Tom "I See Brown People" Tancredo, swear they know one when they see one... and that Sotomayor fits the bill. [Politico, ThinkProgress]
• Pat "The Nazis Weren't That Bad" Buchanan thinks Sotomayor got the nomination because of Affirmative Action, because all white men are obviously more qualified than a Princeton-and-Yale educated appeals court judge! [ThinkProgress]
• Mark Krikorian thinks Sotomayor's a racist for insisting people pronounce her name correctly, and feels discriminated against because he's not allowed to Anglicize it. As someone who refuses to completely Anglicize her name for the likes of anyone — particularly with a name like Krikorian — Mark Corker can go fuck himself. [ThinkProgress]
• Unrelated to fucking: Barack Obama stayed in a really nice luxury suite in Vegas. [People]
• In actually important news, we weren't just torturing prisoners in Iraq, our soldiers were raping them. [Newser]
• Oh, and we're on high alert in South Korea because the North Koreans have threatened to re-start hostilities in the decades-old war. [Washington Post]
• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned Israel to stop building new settlements, and Israel really doesn't care. [NY Times]
• But, hey, Roland Burris is crazy! [LA Times]
• And, Michelle Bachmann's starring in her own comic book, so that's way more important. [TalkingPointsMemo]

• This week's New York Times Magazine cover story on Obama's first hundred days doesn't look exceptionally celebratory. It looks more like, "This is what 100 days as President will do to you." [NY Times]

• Washington continues to buzz about Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter's party-switch, which even the White House didn't learn about until yesterday morning despite Joe Biden's efforts to get him to do it. [Washington Post]
• But in 2001, Specter blasted then-Senator Jim Jeffords for his party-switching; he even tried to make it illegal. [LA Times]
• Michael Steele's pissed off about the Specter switch because he was going to back Specter in the primary...which is probably partly what Specter was worried about. [Politico]
• Rush Limbuagh wants John and Meghan McCain to switch parties now, too. [Huffington Post]
• Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine thinks assholes like Limbaugh are part of why the party is losing voters in droves and Senators in dribs and drabs. [NY Times]
• Specter's desertion means that Norm Coleman shall never surrender his fight to have the courts declare him the winner of the Minnesota Senate Race. [Politico]
• Speaking of Minnesota, Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann thinks that the outbreak of swine flu is either a Democratic conspiracy, the result of God hating Democratic Presidents or poor management by Democrats. [ThinkProgress]
• Less insanity regarding American health: The Senate finally approved the nomination of Kathleen Sebelius to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, despite Republican opposition to the fact that a pro-choice President picked a pro-choice nominee for the gig. [Reuters]
• Keith Olbermann, like much of America, would really, really like to see Sean Hannity waterboarded. [USA Today]
• However, no one wants to see former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich take Moonlight Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof's offer of an apprenticeship. [PR Newswire]
• And, apparently, Pat Buchanan likened a Nazi war criminal to Jesus; in Pat's world, killing 29,000 of his fellow Jews is What Jesus Would Do. [Huffington Post]

ANA MARIE: Good morning!

MEGAN: Hey there! How are you?

ANA MARIE: A little tie-tie and already tired of the fucking shoe story.

MEGAN: I am actually really impressed with Bush's reflexes. Like, for all those politicians that took cream pies to the faces, Bush was like, nuh-uh. In slow-mo, it's very Matrix-y.

ANA MARIE: I think this should put to rest the rumors that he's drinking again. You know what's really going to suck about this, right?

MEGAN: Other than everything?

ANA MARIE: Journalists no longer be allowed to wear shoes. We're living in a post 12/14 world. And in that world, shoes just aren't worth the risk.

MEGAN: Dude, no one is taking my shoes. I stop with the pedicures in, like, November. I can't afford otherwise.

ANA MARIE: I doubt if you're alone. Lynn Sweet does not seem like a regular pedicure girl.

MEGAN: Plus, not to be mean to the White House press corps, but I'm betting some of those dudes have some gnarly, smelly feet. I really think a room full of unshod reporters' stank feet is probably more of a risk to the President than a shoe.

ANA MARIE: (And I just want to note that I had to cycle through a few names before I got to a WH correspondent that might not get regular pedicures. But I suspect Jake Tapper does!) Yeah, see that is where we disagree! I think many WH correspondents take VERY good care of their tootsies. It's not like they're out there pounding the pavement. Very little reporting involved in covering the White House.

MEGAN: I don't know, it's not like Maureen Dowd is there and can go all Elvira, Mistress of the Dark on him. [Ed: For those with better taste in movies than me, Elvira dispatches the villain at the end with a stiletto to the forehead, killing him. ]

ANA MARIE: I had forgotten that Elvira had her own movie. Thanks. You will not be shocked to know that right now on Morning Joe Pat Buchanan is showing a rather... uhm... exhaustive knowledge of Nazi history. Seriously, though: Pat Buchanan showing up to out-Nazi-trivia Bryan Singer about his own Nazi movie.

MEGAN: Yeah, completely NOT surprised. At least I can blame my Hitler trivia knowledge on the fact that I was a German history minor.

ANA MARIE: FWIW, I sense that Pat, like the heroes of Valkyrie, thinks that Hitler totally ruined Nazism.

MEGAN: Is is strange that I'm surprised that Bryan Singer is kind of hot?

ANA MARIE: I'm a little surprised at how young he seems, but not that he's hot. Usual Suspects was, fuck, over a decade ago?

MEGAN: Directors are so rarely attractive, though.

ANA MARIE: I have not made enough of a study of that. But speaking of studying: Trying to make sense of this Kristol op-ed. Have you read?

MEGAN: I find it hard to read while his grinning pumpkin head stares at me. It's already hard enough to decipher.

ANA MARIE: He and Jim Webb should hire themselves out for Halloween.

MEGAN: Is there enough orange paint in the world for that?

ANA MARIE: I think he wants a bail out? Or he's knocking the GOP for something?

MEGAN: Actually, I am a little horrified that I'm agreeing with some of the things he's saying about Republicans. He's still a reflexive idiot about liberals.

ANA MARIE: He has been kind of an idiot about Republicans!

MEGAN:

But despite the fact that the government is partly responsible for the Big Three’s problems, the right hasn’t really been stirred to enthusiastically promote a deregulatory agenda to help the auto companies. What excites it is mobilizing to oppose bailouts for unionized workers.

Last week, Senate Republicans picked a fight with the U.A.W. on union pay scales — despite the fact that it’s the legacy benefits for retirees, not pay for current workers, that’s really hurting Detroit, and despite the additional fact that, in any case, labor amounts to only about 10 percent of the cost of a car. But the Republicans were fighting Big Labor! They were standing firm against bailouts!

ANA MARIE: I'm not convinced he's always writing this column himself. Not that he's farming it out, but just engaging in automatic writing or something. Letting the spirits speak through him. And this spirit happens to be different than the "I HEART SARAH" one.

MEGAN: It's definitely written through his "all liberals are hypocritical" filter, though.

ANA MARIE: I think he's saying that they should do MORE to deregulate unions besides take on labor. Like, the problems of regulation go beyond unions. By saying that GOP shouldn't have gone after labor, he's NOT saying unions are good. And even though he likes the idea of the "car czar," isn't the car czar idea inherently anti-anti-regulation? My head hurts now. Let's move on

MEGAN: Well, I think he main point actually comes through at the end.

The bill would have allowed President Bush to name a car czar, who could have begun to force concessions from all sides. It also would have averted for now a collapse of the auto industry, and shifted difficult decisions to the Obama administration.

It's all about trying to make his Republican compatriots understand their role is to make Obama look bad.

ANA MARIE: AH! Ain't unity grand?

MEGAN: But let's talk cute: an Obama daughter-Chris Rock daughter playdate. That's a unity of cuteness.

ANA MARIE: But not BIDEN PUPPY CUTE!

MEGAN: Okay, the puppy is very cute, but: he used a breeder. Pound puppies, people, the nation is crying out for change.

ANA MARIE: And, seriously, who DOESN'T want a play date with Sasha and Malia. I mean, I want a playdate with them. I know, I would feel better about a rescue pup. BUT LOOK AT HIS EYES. The puppy's, not Biden's. Though I think that the national had a similar reaction when Obama picked Biden: "We would have preferred HRC BUT LOOK AT HIS EYES."

MEGAN: It is an extremely cute puppy, and the Biden granddaughters will, naturally, get to name him.

Originally, Brown said she was to bring two puppies to Biden, but Biden called and said he wanted to see all the dogs.

"He was very gracious," Brown said. "He hugged and kissed all of the shepherds."

There are also totally women in the world today wishing they were puppies.

ANA MARIE: I LOVE that detail.

MEGAN: Well, how do you not let puppies lick your face?

ANA MARIE: "He hugged and kissed all of the shepherds." Of course he did. That's the only part of the Vice President's job that Biden's not planning on eliminating.

MEGAN: I'm sure that's in the Constitution.

ANA MARIE: I am so glad I'm not in Chicago, btw. You can hear the chattering of teeth in the voices of reporters covering Blago/PEBO (PEBO = "President-Elect Barack Obama" I learned that very recently! Like, journo slang.)

MEGAN: I sort of love how more and more people are like, dude was craaaazzeee when he's obviously just sort of always been an asshole.

ANA MARIE: But you can't "plead asshole" in court.

MEGAN: Actually, I think that should be a legitimate defense. "But, Your Honor, I'm an asshole." I want to hear defendants say that, give 'em 30 days off their sentence or something.

ANA MARIE: I think that was Scooter Libby's first try.

MEGAN: Scooter left out the "stupid" part. Everyone already knows lawyers are assholes. That's the real meaning of "Esquire." Speaking of, I found Shep Smith's interview in Esquire kind of endearing but difficult to read in the absence of questions. Even writing that made me feel like I'd bought into something very bougie about writing.

ANA MARIE: Well it was like hearing one side of a phone conversation. A fascinating conversation! But still, a little disjointed. Maybe they're saving money by not printing the reporter's questions! Something that maybe places like the Tribune Co. and Newsweek should look into!

MEGAN: Less ink, less layoffs? Maybe they should look into this Internet thingie, where there's no ink and no layo... Oh, wait, never mind.

ANA MARIE: I was thinking more, like, how they don't have to pay extras in movies if they don't have lines. If you don't print the reporters' questions, you don't have to pay them.

MEGAN: Maybe we could just let all the people in the news write in the first person about what they're doing and just call it a day. The press is just like this unnecessary middleman in this day and age.

ANA MARIE: EXCEPT THEY'RE NOT, right? I was a conference last week and this guy from Google was all, "we hate it that the MSM is going under, because without them we're not going have quality information to index for people to search." So I was like, "You'll need to start hiring journalists then."

MEGAN: Oh, God, stop. I'm laughing so hard I'm crying. Or crying so hard I'm laughing, I can't really tell.

ANA MARIE: Ok I'm here, and caffeinated. Please turn on Morning Joe so that we can mock in tandem. If it were later in the day, I would recommend drinking every time they say "team of rivals."

MEGAN: Yay caffeine! And, um, boo for Pat Buchanan. who just suggested that our move from a manufacturing economy to a tertiary economy is the reason the American Empire is failing.

ANA MARIE: Because after a few pops maybe "team of rivals" would make sense... As it is, the only "rival" in sight for Team O is Hillary... and I am far from convinced that she's really gonna get offered the job much less take it.

MEGAN: Well, do you have stuff for mimosas and Bloody Marys? Because those are perfectly acceptable alternatives to morning whiskey.

ANA MARIE: If Hillary gets SecState, i will break out the morning whiskey

MEGAN: I only have morning tequila. By the way, when did Mika start wearing Palin's hair?

ANA MARIE: Ugh. Mika. Do you think it's weird that they cycle every editor in NYC through as a "guest host" but NO OTHER WOMEN? Is Mika so insecure that the only other lady she'll share a desk with is Andrea Mitchell and her giant floating head? And I think this is basically the same question: do you want Hillary to be the most powerful woman in the Obama White House? I mean, on the one hand — as it's been pointed out — not a lot of other women's names are out there. On the other hand: Hillary. Bill.

MEGAN: We should probably comment on the fact that the freezing cold Erin Burnett just said that 80% of Russians would have voted for Obama, in part because they're hoping Obama will fix the chilly relations between us that Putin —who has his hand firmly up Medvedev's butt — is making worse over missile defense and South Ossetia... even though Putin, the cause of the chilly relations, is still damn popular himself . Well, she didn't say that part about Putin having his hand up Medvedev's butt but mostly because the KGB starting filming her there at the end.

ANA MARIE: Perhaps the KGB just wanted a look at Erin's delicious ass.

MEGAN: On Hillary, I mean, am I in love with John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, Sam friggin' Nunn or Bill McGrabbyhands Richardson? No. But it's not going to be Sam Powers or Susan Rice.

ANA MARIE: Hagel would be a disaster. I love the rumor that the Hillary thing got leaked basically just fuck with Senor McGrabby.

MEGAN: You thought watching Bush paw Merkel's shoulders that time was embarrassing, wait 'til Richardson gets his paws on her ass, even if she is a little old for his taste.

ANA MARIE: Hagel would just go around hitting people rather than caressing them.

MEGAN: Honestly, in that group, having Bill Clinton paw my ass would likely be my best option, not that he supposedly does that any more.

ANA MARIE: Right. And his complete reform of c) is another reason Hillary will not be SecState.

MEGAN: Please, please, please tell me you just heard that on MSNBC?

ANA MARIE: No. I am projecting.

MEGAN: Their slightly fey entertainment reporter just said, "Justin Timberlake in heels and tights? Yes, Pat Buchanan, there is a Santa Claus."

ANA MARIE: Justin Timberlake for SecState!

MEGAN: I'd smack his ass for him!

ANA MARIE: I'm working really hard to get from "Timberlake in tights" to reminding everyone that Rahm is a ballet dancer... but I guess i don't really have to work that hard. Lindsey Graham totally wishing they all could wear tights to the transition meeting.

MEGAN: Lindsay Graham wishes he could pick the colors, and you know he'd have one of them in fishnets. Hard to decide whether it would be Rahm or Barry. And do you think Rahm still counts time in 8's (that's a joke for everyone who ever took dance lessons)?

ANA MARIE: Perhaps that's why losing part of a finger didn't phase him. Oh, and McCain trivia: When he hosted SNL, Mark Salter left him for a bit to go smoke and when he returned, the senator was in the middle of putting on fishnets for his Barbara Streisand skit... a costuming decision, safe to say, that had not been pre approved. Disaster was avoided, the nations' eyes were spared and McCain held onto his dignity for a whole nuther 8 years. and then Palin happened... Salter was unable to stop that.

MEGAN: And, I have to say, the inside of my brain needs a good acid-wash now, as I was unable to avoid the mental image of seated McCain in a wife-beater and a thong, slowly unrolling a pair of fishnet stockings up one if his legs held high in the air with a pointed toe (because of the ballet conversation).

ANA MARIE: See if you can sub in Rahm.

MEGAN: The thong doesn't fit Rahm as well.

ANA MARIE: How do you think that meeting goes today, btw?

MEGAN: I'm assuming it will be about as productive as the G-20, which is to say that it will be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

ANA MARIE: Hm. I respectfully disagree.

MEGAN: About the G-20, or the Obama-McCain confab?

ANA MARIE: McCain Obama confab. All Obama needs to do is to tell McCain he wants to put him in charge of a new immigration bill. And then Lindsey will clap his hands together like a little girl.

MEGAN: And thereby shred whatever credibility McCain still has within the Republican party? Awesome. I'm guessing lobbying reform, since that's reportedly where their relationship went sour.

ANA MARIE: I don't think McCain gives a fuck about the GOP. At this point, he is truly free.

MEGAN: True, although McCain did nearly completely reverse himself on immigration since the start of the campaign.

ANA MARIE: Actually, the problem Rs had with him was that he didn't reverse himself enough. He changed his rhetoric but he favors comprehensive reform.

MEGAN: How exceedingly practical of him! That's so unlike a Republican. But pushing an Obama immigration bill would make him the Lieberman of the Republican party, at a minimum.

ANA MARIE: Lieberman is the Lieberman of the Republican party. And, like we're saying, McCain is not a very good Republican. Oh, and another point! Lots of chatter among pundits about whether or not the meeting will be "uncomfortable" because of the "harsh campaigning." I think that's pundits wanting drama where there doesn't have to be any. These are big boys.

MEGAN: Do people think they're going to go at it at 20 paces or something? Bitch-slap fest? If they were going to be dicks, they wouldn't do it.

ANA MARIE: And yet we're going to get HOURS AND HOURS of speculation about it. That's what today is looking like, "news"-wise

MEGAN: I mean, when the biggest bold-faced names out of the Obama camp are Greg Craig, Phil Schiliro, and Valerie Jarrett, imagining a pants-off, dance-off between Rahm Emanuel and Lindsay Graham is way more fun.

ANA MARIE: I think we can imagine the "vetting" of Bill Clinton as a pants-off dance off as well.

MEGAN: [shudders] The other big story is that Obama might have to give up his blackberry, and he's not even going to go into rehab.

ANA MARIE: I have to say this makes me a little sad.

MEGAN: The end of his Blackberry, or Bill Clinton dancing in his underoos?

ANA MARIE: Barry berry-less. As much as I thought the whole "McCain can't email" thing was a pointless crit, the idea of Obama being theoretically available via email was really humanizing, as weird as it may be to think of email as humanizing I mean, surely, there's a way for him to keep emailing. If we can put a man on the moon, etc.

MEGAN: I mean, I also hate and think it's a shit thing that the reason they're doing it is so that less of his stuff will be accessibly under open records laws.

ANA MARIE: Exactly. Sort of voids the point of records laws...

MEGAN: That, and I sort of feel like: if you're not going to be DOING ANYTHING WRONG why does it matter?

ANA MARIE: Because it's not as though those discussions won't happen... or as though Obama won't ever do anything shady.

MEGAN: It'll just be Change if he does fewer shady things.

ANA MARIE: What if he does just as many but because he's so fucking disciplined we just never find out? I consider this a real possibility.

MEGAN: The problem is not whether he remains disciplined, its whether every single person that works with him remains so, and history says that they won't. Four years, let alone 8, is a long time to keep one's yap shut when there are reporters around stroking your ego and lots and lots of alcohol. Plus, as advisers start rolling over around the 2 year mark — and they have at least some time to kill given his lobbying restrictions — people are going to be looking to talk. That's how it works. He'd be better off keeping the Blackberry to remind him not to say or do stupid sketchy shit and turning over his emails to conservative interest groups than pretending like his sketchy shit isn't going to get found out.

ANA MARIE: Megan Carpentier for Deputy Chief of Staff!

MEGAN: It's Friday, and I am sooooo looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow.

LATOYA: You know, I must say, it is really nice to have a four day workweek. There's always a three day weekend. But don't worry — my spot is a non profit, and we're advocating for everyone to have a 4 hour work week! We should succeed in a few years, faster if the economy implodes and we convince businesses that happy, productive employees need Friday off and full benefits.

MEGAN: I like your ideas, but somehow I have this chorus running through my head.

LATOYA: Blows kisses. But I still love you Megan!

MEGAN: I am too grumpy in the morning to love almost anyone. I'll love you, too, at about 11:30.

LATOYA: Whatever — we need to spread some love around. Did you see the news? East Asia is looking to set up a funding block to protect themselves from financial crisis.

MEGAN: Ahh, the sweet siren song of capital controls! Nicolas Sarkozy will probably point to that as a reason to re-think Bretton Woods.

LATOYA:

East Asian nations have pledged to set up an $80bn (£51.2bn; 63.6bn euros) swap scheme by mid-2009 to help protect the region from financial turmoil. The move by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) is backed by South Korea, China and Japan. Countries could borrow directly from the fund in times of emergency, to boost liquidity. The meeting comes as 43 European and Asian leaders meet in China to discuss how to tackle the financial crisis.

See, this is why we need friends. Rugged individualism isn't going to put 80bn in a pot for us to share. Where the hell is the coalition of the willing? Can we get some help?

MEGAN: Isn't it starting to seem like rather than try to prevent the inevitable from happening — and rather ineffectively — we should start planning for how to get out of it? Like, put some of our money toward that?

LATOYA: It's like Dubya read How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, thinking it was Carnegie's book.

MEGAN: The coalition of the willing told us to go fuck ourselves about the time that McCain declared diplomatic war on Spain (if not far earlier).

LATOYA: One would think it's time to reevalaute how we — as a government and as a nation — view money, investments, solvency, humans and capital.

MEGAN: Workers are a fundamental of the American economy, and they are strong. Strong enough, one hopes, to survive unemployment and a recession, but since they'll still be strong we can totes not call it that. It's a mental recession, for a nation of whiners that are nonetheless fundamental and strong.

LATOYA: That's a lot of strength there. But, umm, can we drop the bullshit for a second.

MEGAN: Is that allowed? It's a Presidential campaign.

LATOYA: See, unlike a maverick (which I learned from my friend Alyssa Quart is an unbranded calf), I am a patriot. I shocked the hell out of my friends by admitting this — they wanted to put me in rehab.

MEGAN: You only love the Fake America, though.

LATOYA: But I really do love my country. And I do believe that America is destined for greatness, if we can stop letting asswipes who fear every little thing stay in charge.

MEGAN: Well, then this might make you happy: the GOP is expecting to lose between 11 and 23 House seats, including Bachmann.

LATOYA: Courtney (of Feministing) has this cool interview on Alternet with Deborah Stone who wrote The Samaritan's Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor?. I think this interview gets at part of the reason why the GOP is imploding. Basically put, this mess isn't working. I know no one wants to pay more taxes. I sure don't, and Joe the Plumber isn't gonna no matter what. But seriously — an educated workforce with basic needs taken care of benefits everyone.

MEGAN: It's an interesting argument, actually. Adam Smith argued that the market and competition fostered trust and interdependence, and that's the basis of a lot of capitalist/democratic theory. But the way this has played out, you sorta gotta wonder about whether that's true. Even economists recognize the value of social goods, though conservatives like to forget it and whine about eliminating the Department of Education.

LATOYA: And with as much money America has, it's shameful that so many of us working (fake or real) American citizens have to hustle and scratch for the basics — and for what? Yeah, Adam Smith's work gets so perverted sometimes. They just pick the parts they like (endless consumption!) and jettison the parts they don't (accountability!) The interview gets really good here:

CEM: You argue that conservative leaders — especially Reagan — have convinced American voters that interdependence is weak and shameful and that rugged individualism is realistic. You also show the ways in which joyful interdependence plays out around us constantly in our personal lives. Why, given our everyday experiences of altruism, did we take to the notion that it was weak writ large?

DS: Partly, I think, the conservative notion of freedom (not having to do anything you don't choose to do) taps into the painful truth of human development. Each of us grows from a helpless, dependent and powerless creature to a reasonably competent and independent adult with a high degree of autonomy. From our teen years on, we savor that freedom from adult control, even as we watch our elders sometimes become frail and revert to childlike dependence. Perhaps that's why it's easy for leaders to evoke terror and shame in us by speaking of dependence.

Partly, too, our culture celebrates individual achievement. Even team sports hype their MVP awards. From the time we're born, when our parents get our Apgar scores of infant health, we are constantly subjected to measures of our individual merits — athletic abilities, intellectual abilities, job performance and financial accumulations. Schools emphasize individual accomplishment, and teachers punish collaboration as "cheating." When parents, schools, employers and others reward people for individual achievement, this way of thinking pushes interdependence into the background of everyone's consciousness. We begin to believe that individuals can do it all on their own if they try hard enough, and we lose sight of all the ways people get help all the time.

MEGAN: Yeah, I haven't lived at home or been financially supported by my parents since I was 18, and even then I had to buy my own shit with the money I could make off of umpiring and temping.

LATOYA: Right — so I don't want to hear that try hard shit. I did. And I do well for myself. But goddamn it, we need more.

MEGAN: Plenty of people try hard and still don't get much of anywhere. And some people don't try at all and get to go places you and I will never be.

LATOYA: Exactly. Like the Real Housewives of ATL.

MEGAN: I was having this conversation over the weekend about my grad school, which was chock full of people from money, many of whom had never gotten a paycheck. And I was working 2 internships — one paid and one unpaid — to make enough money to pay rent and have stuff on my resume that wasn't "Assistant Systems Administrator," so I was always going to class in business clothes (from Marshalls, mostly) because I was going to or coming from work. And I found out later that everyone just thought I was fancy — it didn't occur to people that I was working.

LATOYA: Yeah, some people really don't understand that you can't just ask your parents for money to cover things sometimes because your folks don't have it.

MEGAN: Many of those people have way more money than I can imagine, and it's not because they had bootstraps.

LATOYA: And a lot of people in power willfully shut their eyes to this. We're not saying "take money from the ungrateful rich and redistribute it to the deserving poor." That's a load of fucking bullshit. We're saying, if people with means chip in a bit more and help out those with less, we will all be far better off.

MEGAN: Also, it's a progressive tax system, motherfuckers, it actually exactly means that if you make more money, you're supposed to pay more taxes. (Sorry, I finally saw the "I'm Joe the Plumber" commercial last night and nearly threw my beer at the TV when that came up)

LATOYA: The fate of a nation falls to all of us — not just those with means. And so if we only consider the needs of those with means, while blindly hoping that one day we will have more means and be rich, we have put ourselves in a precarious position. I'm so over this fake class war though.

MEGAN: I'm over wars in general.

LATOYA: Not the stratification of wealth — that's real — but the manufactured Joe the Plumber bullshit. Luckily for us, it appears that the modern conservative movement is cannibalizing itself so maybe we can have a real conversation about these issues once the election is over with.

MEGAN: Also, it's a little ironic that a conservative talk radio station collected money from listeners to pay his back taxes. Apparently, it IS patriotic to pay more in taxes to help others, as long as it's a white dude who makes $250,000 a year.

LATOYA: See, look at that — a classic example of tribalism, right there. Where's Pat Buchanan's outrage over that? Oh wait, I forgot — it's only tribalism when someone else is doing it. I do hope the GOP implodes and recreates though. You can't have a debate with the willfully stupid and all the smart conservatives are kind of just drifting right now.

MEGAN: Pat Buchanan's outrage is reserved for Colin Powell.

LATOYA: It's like they can't believe what's happening either. (Oh, and like Colin Powell gives a shit what Pat Buchanan thinks. That mofo needs to sit down. The only reason I tolerate him is because he is wealth of comedy for Rachel Maddow.)

MEGAN: It's the fundamental problem with the coalition they built, and with the voters they've encouraged this year. They are the know Know-Nothing party.

LATOYA: Yeah - look at this Jonah Goldberg douchnozzle.

MEGAN: Fucking Jonah Goldberg needs to stop wearing too-tight lace thongs, because they are obviously riding up and cutting off the blood to his brain.

LATOYA: Let's revisit the obvious here. People who aren't affected by racism don't need to comment on when it is or isn't happening? How the fuck would you know?

MEGAN: Well, it's unfair to say that Jonah is unaffected by racism, since he's a racist. It affects him daily.

LATOYA: No, he affects other people with his abject ignorance.

MEGAN: Oh, but dontcha know, racism is just a "false memory."

Instead, Obama has set off a case of full-blown race dementia among precisely the crowd that swears Obama is leading us out of the racial wilderness. Rather than shrink, the tumor of racial paranoia is metastasizing, pressing down on the medulla oblongata or whatever part of the brain that, when poked, causes one to hallucinate, conjure false memories and write astoundingly insipid things.

We're all just paranoics, and we should sit down, shut up, smile and pretend that everything in America is hunky-dory. This, however, is the most blindingly stupid and offensive line of the piece: "[Barack Obama] explicitly chose to have a racial identity when he didn’t have to..."

LATOYA: I've been searching my site for that story where the dude burned a cross on someone's lawn and his mom tried to argue that it wasn't racially motivated or that time when we had to post about racial code words since blacks were getting called "reggins" at work (that's nigger, backwards, for those of y'all still sleeping) but it's all there. All our stuff on identity is there, it is obvious that racism isn't a problem that goes away by people not talking about it.

MEGAN: All not talking about it does is allow people like Jonah Goldberg to not get called out for being racist.

LATOYA: When has that ever worked? Can I ignore my fucked up credit and tell a creditor that my BoA bill was in the past and we all need to move on? No — we have to deal with that shit. And the sooner people like Jonah Goldberg shut the fuck up and get out of our way, the better.

10:00 ET: That's it! If you've got something to say, email "them" or stick around in the comments.

9:59 ET: She goes out on footage of the White House T-ball game and how Bush made all the Joint Chiefs participate. Kent says, "It might have been less humiliating if he let them pitch!" Bonus rogering reference about Bush and the Joint Chiefs right after Rachel mentions that Bush took neocon think tank advice over theirs per Woodward's book? Kent redeems himself. He can be the most annoying bastard, but if he can work in the buttsecks references under the radar, he's my boy.

9:58 ET: Lance Armstrong might come out of retirement in 2009. Kent is a little annoying.

9:57 ET: "Just Enough" with Kent Jone on pop culture? Ok, whatevs. MTV Video Music Awards: Rihanna, P!nk, Jonas Brothers, and then Britney Speaks won three awards including video of the year? Man, the things you miss.

9:54 ET: "It's a little unfair to accuse me of trashing her religion and then trash [Jeremiah Wright], Pat. But it was a pleasure to have you." She needs to have a fucking hook for him. Or a slave hood she could zip shut like The Gimp from Pulp Fiction.

9:54 ET: "I would love to ask her that, but I'm afraid the campaign would think me not appropriately deferential." ZING.

9:52 ET: It's also unfair to criticize her church, according to Pat. She's a Pentacostal, by the way, not an evangelical. He accuses Rachel of "trashing" that religion.

9:51 ET: "It was the scruvy lies and slanders on the DailyKos... They didn't do this to John Edwards." Rachel points out that all blogs did cover it while the MSM didn't, and the MSM wouldn't if Palin hadn't put the statement out.

9:50 ET: It's Pat! His combover is way less obvious on TV than in person. Also, he's pissed that the Washington Post put Bristol Palin's pregnancy above the fold... and that's, like, totally unobjective of the,

9:48 ET: Keeping Sarah away from the media. Rick Davis calls coverage of her "unobjective." On Fox News. No irony.

9:48 ET: FedEx lemming commercial! Love this commercial!

9:47 ET: Alli commercial! I like my fat ass, thanks. Sometimes. I like it better than shitting weird, anyway.

9:44 ET: "We are Day 9 into Sarah Palin's Media Avoidance Tour." Also, she calls Pat Buchanan her fake uncle and shows Michelle Obama dancing and Michelle looks fucking awesome dancing and is better than Barack. Michelle and I need to go dancing. Michelle, call me!

9:43 ET: She says Obama's message is that, "Did you like the last 8 years? Great, go vote for John McCain??" Umm, the fuck? Yeah, not so much.

9:41 ET: Rosa doesn't have a good answer: we're really divided, national polls don't matter, polls don't capture new voters, Sarah Palin's too divisive and Obama has more of a can-do attitude than Palin. Yeah, seriously, remain not impressed with Rosa. And not because I'm a whiny, trying-to-lose hang-wringer.

9:40 ET: Rachel asks a good question: if Obama's so totally going to win, why are they tied.

9:39 ET: LA Times columnist Rosa Brooks. "Democrats seize every opportunity to wring their hands." I already find her a little annoying.

9:38 ET: Ooh, they just show Barack being sarcastic: "With the exception of [every policy issue under the sun, John McCain] is totally going to shake things up in Washington."

9:35 ET: Back to Olbermann's Obama interview! Obama likes the John McSame meme. Rachel doesn't seem to be buying that he is better off sticking to his current tactics.

9:32 ET: Congress won't take up SCHIP again despite the fact that Republicans don't want to have to vote against it before an election because they're scared of the veto pen. Wahhhh.

9:30 ET: Federal government took over Fannie Mae and Federal Mac. McCain twice was all about not bailing them out: now, naturally, he's all for it. Palin said today that they've become too big and expensive for taxpayers... only they weren't until the federal government took them over.

9:29 ET: Underreported stories! Yay! First up: the GSA wants the government to repeal post 9/11 safety codes because developers won't make enough money if they have to put up glow tape in stairwells. Man, when will the Bushies be evac'd from D.C. again?

9:26 ET: eHarmony commercial. They don't allow Teh Gayz to participate, but apparently enough lonely straights watch Rachel anyway. Then AT&T and Crestor for the Oldz.

9:26 ET: Awww, Rachel hits on one of my bugaboos — Congress should fucking pass some legislation Bush has threatened to veto. Fuck his veto! Fuck it!

9:25 ET: McCain is now saying they won't let Palin give an interview until they're sure the media would be "appropriately deferential." The media is supposed to be deferential? Where the fuck did that get this country after 9/11?

9:24 ET: He's never endorsed a candidate since he's been a pastor? Is that even allowed anymore?

9:22 ET: Rachel wants to know if its appropriate to ask Palin about why she sat in church and listened to that crap, and T.D. says we should ask her if she believes it but it isn't fair to judge her for not being rude to a guest speaker. Man, he's so even-tempered. I guess Rachel's leaving the fire-breathing for Olbermann. I'm kind of cool with that.

9:21 ET: He says politicians prolly shouldn't speak for God as it related to war. Amen.

9:20 ET: Bishop T.D. Jakes is here!

9:19 ET: Jews for Jesus founder preached of her church, and God uses terrorism to express His displeasure with Jews. Can we officially say Jews for Jesus people are as creepy as Scientologists.

9:18 ET: God has a plan for Iraq (according to Sarah Palin? Hmmmm, could that be... Barack Obama?

9:16 ET: Cialis commercial. I guess it's not just women that think Rachel Maddow is fucking hot.

9:15 ET: Sarah Palin's pastor thinks that Alaska will be a refuge during the apocalypse... Man, evangelicals make Catholic orthodoxy look completely rational.

9:14 ET: Pro-drilling commercial? WTF?

9:13 ET: "Unlike chocolate and peanut butter, church and state are not two great tastes that go great together," says Rachel.

9:12 ET: Rick Davis said that this campaign isn't about the issues? WTF?

9:11 ET: "If anyone is the ideological heir to George W. Bush, it's Sarah Palin." No, Rachel didn't say it, but it was a great line.

9:06 ET: Breaking down how Sarah P

Megan: I don't know if you read Jezebel...

Rachel: Sure.

Megan: ... but everyone is a really big fan of yours, so the opportunity to speak to you is really exciting!

Rachel: That's so nice. I don't think of myself as existing in the world in a way that people can see me. But I can see Jezebel and you can see me, apparently. It's a strange dynamic.

Megan: It is! So what has it been like, this furor since it was announced that you'd gotten your own show? Obviously, seeing the crowd reaction here every time you open your mouth, it seems pretty positive.

Rachel: It is positive. I haven't been able to see any of our coverage, I've only been on it. So the thing that I'm worried about is that I don't know how much our voices carry over the sound of the crowd, and if we ought to be yelling in order to be heard and if we should stop talking when the crowd is yelling. So just as a physical matter I'm not sure what to do. And I also don't want to be rude to my colleagues here. I'm not running this show — I'm part of a four-person panel that is a tertiary thing. I am a very small cog in this machine, so I don't want to be a distraction. But, that said, I can't say that it's not nice that people are being so nice to me. It's very flattering. I don't know what to say but "Thank you," I just keep saying, "Thank you."

Megan: Do you read your own press?

Rachel: I read some of it. I actually haven't read really anything recently. I read a little bit of the response to finding out I was getting my own show. There was a strange thing that happened with The New Republic, they ran that piece and then Glen Greenwald at Salon having written that long rebuttal to it but I just thought that was like, whoa. That was a discussion of me as an issue rather than of me as an individual. And I found that fascinating academically. But I try not to read too much. It warps your sense of importance and your sense of self. I need to focus on what I think, so that I can stay original. Does that make sense?

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. Do you have some idea what you might do with your new show that's going to premiere in about a week to be original?

Rachel: [laughs] Week and a half! Week and a half! Two weeks from yesterday! I mean, the mission of the show is that at 8 pm there is "Countdown." And at 10 pm, there is "Countdown." At 9 pm, there is something in the middle that needs to hold that audience as much as it can. That's what the corporate mission is, and that's what the program I deal with was created, that's why they asked me to do it because they think that I'm the best person to do that. So, that's the mission. What's the strategy to get there? The consistent advice that I have received, and I've received it from — and I've received it from people in my personal life from whom I regularly take advice, I've received it from people who I don't know but who I respect in terms of what they've accomplished in media — across the board, the advice from everybody has been "Figure out a way to be yourself." And there's a big difference between TV and radio in the way that they are produced. Radio, it's me and one other person. The maximum size of me and my team is three people and two of them are part-time. I mean, it's a very solitary enterprise. And my reading, and my writing — my radio show is scripted — it's cone of silence, big time. A television show has a cast of thousands that are involved in producing it and therefore it is much more of a process. It is much easier to start off as me and end up losing it. It is much easier to start off as my show and end up with another approach. And so I want to find a way so it can be show.

I don't really think that I can compete on the level of "TV Bot," you know, the normal, generic TV host. I'm not that pretty. I'm not that accessible, I'm not that... all of these other things. I'm on specific things, they like what I've got already, so we need to find a way to reproduce that on a show every day. And that's been my entire purpose, figuring out a way to make it to most me as possible. And that's the strategy.

Spencer: As someone in whom the netroots and the blogosphere is very invested, someone that speaks our language, someone who tries specifically to bring our perspective out, do you think it will be hard? Do you think you'll be getting more scrutiny from MSNBC, from the corporate side, than a right-wing addition to the line-up would?

Rachel: I feel like I could answer that in theory and academically, but my experience thus far is that MSNBC has not nudged me. At all. The only experience I've had is to say, "I'm not interested in talking about this topic and if you guys are going booking me for a long time to talk about that topic, I've gotta say I don't have much to say about blank topic, so, you might not want to book me." And they've been like, "Oh, c'mon, you want to talk about it," and I've said, "Nope, I don't want to talk about it," and that's it. That's been the extent of my editorial back-and-forth as a guest on MSNBC. They've never gone there with me, ever.

And I have asked management, upon them offering me the show — and I have no idea how I would've responded if they answered the other way— but what I asked was two things. I asked "Are you looking for me to be different than I am? Talk about different things, or seem different that you've already seen?" Second question, "Do you want me to change the way I look?" I asked the questions because I was curious, but I literally have no idea what I would have said had the answer been anything other than "No, you're fine, we picked you because we like you." But the answer was, "No, you're fine, we picked you because we like you."

Megan: Did you think they would ask you to grow your hair out, dye it blonde and get Botox or something?

Rachel: I guess I was curious as to whether they secretly wanted that but felt they couldn't bring it up because I'd get mad. And who knows what it will eventually be like, and who knows from here on out. They're launching the show, and working on a very short time frame, but it's not been my experience so far.

Megan: Something I wanted to ask, that you brought up a little earlier, is this idea of being seen as An Issue as opposed to a person. Obviously your personal life has come into play in some of the coverage, in terms of being the first lesbian to have a news show. How does it feel to have your personal life out there in a way that it wouldn't be if you were heterosexual or divorced or whatever.

Rachel: Yeah, you know, there is definitely a fascination with the personal lives of people that are on television. I get that, it's a visual medium, that's how we connect to people. I have never been closeted, like, never — I came out when I was 17. I couldn't be closeted even if I wanted to. So I'm out, that's not an issue for me, it's not a decision for me, it's not something I've ever thought about my whole adult life. More than half my life, I've been out. I think it is something that of more interest to people that are thinking about me for the first time than it is for me in talking about it. I don't, this is going to sound crazy, I don't like talking about my personal life. I don't like talking about the media. These aren't my topics. I'm really interested in Afghanistan. That's what I want talk about. My radio show today — you know, I was here and then I ran across town to the Gates Center and was like "Okay, okay, okay, finally I get to talk about Iraq now! Ok!" I geek out on the news.

Earlier: Rachel Maddow For President (Of Cable News, That Is)

By the end of a season spent viewing the most thought-provoking and revelatory and turnout-generating political showdown in recent history transpire between a black man and a woman, few but the likes of Pat Buchanan, one of Nixonland's most heinously cynical architects, and Schlafly surrogates like Charlotte Allen seemed willing to cling without reservations to the scraps of angry white male ideology that has so laid waste to this once greatness-aspiring society. More people changed or were encouraged to entertain changing their minds during this marathon primary than in any political campaign my generation has seen, so for that, thanks Hillary. Who knows, the country may even be ready to vote for the both of you now.

cMOE: Dude I don't want to forget this so I'm just showing you now. From Dick Morris's column on how McCain can beat Obama:

If the GOP nominee were Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, independents and Democrats might not vote Republican even if they became convinced that Obama is some kind of sleeper agent sent to charm and conquer our democracy.

MOE: um no kidding!
MEGAN: Why doesn't Dick Morris go back to sucking prostitutes' toes and leave the rest of us alone. Have you seen his teeth? He ain't stopped sucking stanky feet yet.

MOE: So there is too much to write about today but anyway Iran is still building a nuclear program, treaties be damned and we can't do anything about it, Burma is still letting its people die and Asian governments won't do anything about it, Hugo Chavez is supporting FARC and by any standard probably now qualifies for our state sponsors of terror list but we probably shouldn't give him the satisfaction, and now they're saying it's the end of American Superpower. For realz?!
MEGAN: Wait, wait! The NY Times is reporting this morning that Myanmar/Burma is going to let ASEAN help. I'm skeptical but maybe they actually will?

MOE: Ah, so their "soft approach" did work!

In a clear departure from the usually secretive style of the military junta, state television in Myanmar on Sunday showed video of the leader, Senior General Than Shwe, touring a refugee camp, checking supplies, patting the heads of babies and shaking hands with survivors. Some of the cyclone victims, surrounded by neat rows of blue tents, clasped their hands and bowed as the general and other senior military officials walked by.

MOE:

"Are we going to continue to cover the earthquake?" the Guangzhou-based reporter asked in an instant message to his editor, a day after China's deadliest earthquake in three decades struck Sichuan province."Of course," replied the editor, surnamed Yang. "Why not?"
Then, the reporter said, he forwarded to his boss the text of the latest edict from the propaganda department of the Communist Party Central Committee, ordering domestic news media not to send any more journalists to Sichuan.
Yang wrote back, "If everyone pays no attention to this, then it won't really be a ban."

MEGAN: Oh, she's probably still under house arrest. Like the regime wants to allow her ot be showed doing good work?
MOE: 40 years of mind control, propaganda, a string of incomprehensible, and incomprehensibly destructive political campaigns combined with severe rationing and poverty followed by 15 years of steady marginal increases in living standards and the appearance of openness will...do that to a citizenry!

MOE: I guess we should talk about how the crowd that showed up for Obama was like 1/8 the population of Portland? And maybe we should talk about how tiny his advance for Dreams From My Father was?
MOE: Oh and how a place as shit poor as Yemen manages to hide a guy with a $5 million price on his head. And also we should talk about oil prices. And McCain's continued purge of his aides who love lobbyists, which is getting like New York politicos with whores. And Anthony Shahid's fucking depressing story on Lebanon.

MEGAN: Ok, well, I can speak to the continued purge of lobbyists. Because there's one guy who isn't getting out. He's McCain's Mark Penn only potentially slightly less stupid. He's practically consolidating power in the campaign by getting rid of the other guys with lobbying ties, so that in November-January when clients are looking for someone with a good relationship to McCain that hasn't been accused of fucking him, he's the only one left. It's all very wonderfully Machiavellian.

MEGAN: Also, I think it's fair to say that Republican lobbyists understand the least about why people think they're shills out to destroy America and don't love McCain that much anyway, so it probably never occurred to anyone that it might be a teeny tiny problem to the electorate that the guy writing McCain's energy policy was an active lobbyist for energy companies. Because, hey, that's how this Administration has run things for 8 years anyway.
9:15 AM
MEGAN: As for the Yemen thing, it's actually a little funny because here, more and more people are tipping off their neighbors to pay their electric bills and shit and the economy goes into the toilet. So either the Yemenis are more loyal, or we're just that more desperate? Either way, my position has always been that I would totally turn in criminals for money, which is probably why my friends are all nerdy-upstanding types. One year at college there was a $1200 reward for a serial fire alarm puller and I was dying to know who it was because that was like, half of the money I'd make all semester otherwise.

MOE: Which reminds me of a point that I hope that Obama can make fairly. Re the "eight more years" thing. I think anyone who goes out of his way to say that a McCain administration would be "another eight years of the same" is doing a disservice to history. I think it's safe to say it would be historically impossible for another Administration to match this administration's singleminded dedication to the pursuit the interests of such a tiny group of corrupt people in all blatant disregard of democracy. I think we would be ill-advised to cheapen George W. Bush's "Worst President Ever" stain that way. No matter what happens in the general election January 20 will be a relatively good day for this country.
MOE: And regarding Yemen, I think it's safe to say we are less desperate.

MOE: And don't let me forget to bring up this fucking depressing story on the end of the era of cooperation between First and Third World countries that SOMEHOW begat the Green Revolution on the basis of a basic shared interest in the end of human suffering and not ADM profit margins.
MEGAN: Um, I don't thing McCain will be bad in the same way, but I think he's spent the last 8 years selling his soul to the Rovian devils in order to secure the nomination, and that doesn't make me particularly happy. There won't be a ton of turnover in terms of the kinds of people in middle management and shit because they're all working on his campaign and will be "owed"
MOE: This is pretty stark.

Adjusted for inflation, the World Bank cut its agricultural lending to $2 billion in 2004 from $7.7 billion in 1980.

MOE: Well, but what does McCain need with the Rovian devils now? Karl Rove is dispensing him free advice via his various punditry positions now.
MOE: There is just something that chills me about the "eight more years" refrain.

MEGAN: Well, and let's not forget that part of the problem with the IRRI's budget and people not working there is the fact that they were a proponent of biotechnology to get certain properties out of rice (salinity resistance, vitamins) that simply could not be bred in by convention means, and they were shit on by the world and the environmental movement, targeted for eco-terrorism and a lot of their developed-world money dried up over it, even though the Gold Rice project could've had serious benefits for the malnourished people of the world. I kept waiting for the article to mention that and it didn't.
MOE: Fuckin ecoterrorists. Anyway here we see shades of the pharmaceutical industry.

The insect is not a new problem. In the 1960s, the rice institute, nestled between jungle and the bustling town of Los Ba os, pioneered ways to help farmers grow two and even three crops a season, instead of one.

MOE: You talk to guys who develop drugs at pharmaceutical companies and they think it's absolutely shameful that if they want a drug to come to market these days they have to go to work on the next generation of lipitor or abilify or the drug that finally cures metabolic syndrome when there are still so many infectious diseases to be cured. At one point there was a Nature article suggesting the industry establish a non-profit pharmaceutical company to address diseases whose cures would not be money makers. The same should go for agriculture, you'd think. I don't really understand why all the philanthropy targeted at making life-improving technology more available to the third world seems to focus on hand-cranked laptops and stuff like that.

MEGAN: I think it's because a lot of philanthropy is corporate, it's designed to make companies look good to their consumers and stock holders, but those decisions are made by people within the company. So, of course that's the kind of corporate philanthropy they would engage in. And the pharmaceutical companies will pay tons of money to run those Prescription Partnership for America commercials and send out the buses and take a hit on giving medicines to a small subset of people who can't afford it rather than risk price controls, and they'll give away some AIDS medications in developing countries to keep patent rights.
9:35 AM
MEGAN: And Monsanto will spend millions of dollars spraying RoundUp on farmers fields to see if they're cheating on licensing rather than donating to the IRRI or developing drought-resistant wheat or something.
MEGAN: And everyone will give Bill Gates $1 million to research a cure for malaria or AIDS or whatever and claim that they're doing great shit and then go back to making money.
MEGAN: Anyway, if we're going to take today to be depressed about injustice, how about if you're taking medical marijuana while waiting for a transplant, you're pretty much not eligible for the transplant anymore?
MOE: Well I actually have a better answer to my own question that is not QUITE as cynical. The culture of Silicon Valley and the rapidness of the wealth creation that's happened there, the "open source-ness" of ideals, the existence of Microsoft monopolistic practices as a sort of anti-standard...the newness...the fact that the scientists in the case of the technology industry WERE the business founders and ARE the wealth holders...this swirl of factors makes electrical engineers and software engineers more idealistic and philanthropic I think. Whereas in pharmaceuticals and agriculture a lot of the scientific talent is still being managed by corporate shareholder-driven assholes because the barriers to entry are so much higher.
MEGAN: So, geeks think computers really can save the world, and everyone else is just faking it like I said? I'd buy that in moderation.
MOE: The thing is that: there are certain classes of people you might to run their businesses more ethically, less greedily...more thoughtfully...Hasidic-founded Kosher agriprocessing plants are no longer among them. (Did you read this story?) (Holy shit.)

MEGAN: I would be more surprised and outraged that this Administration is targeting illegal immigrants for arrest and deportation and doing virtually nothing to the management that hires them if I hadn't been living in this country for 30 years, probably.
MEGAN: And/or hadn't read that series in the WaPo last week about how unethically and illegally we treat supposedly-illegal immigrants while in custody.
MOE: And on that note I'll leave you with this from George Packer's New Yorker piece on conservatism:

MOE:

Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—"A little raw for today," he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading "Dividing the Democrats." Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in "the Old Roosevelt Coalition," it recommended that the White House "exacerbate the ideological division" between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon's policies; highlight "the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party"; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare.

Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. "Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country," Buchanan wrote. "We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention." Such gambits, he added, could "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."

MOE: This story is almost too wonderful.

MOE: Gene Weingarten reads blogs and listens to talk radio and watches five television sets for 24 hours and it gives him a brief appreciation for Rush Limbaugh.

MEGAN: The WaPo site has been trying to get me to read that story for 2 full days but I have been resisting its lure because I don't want to know my future.

MOE: Okay, I'll send you some excerpts. First

". . . the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." — Umberto Eco.

MEGAN: I read The Name of the Rose in high school. I was mad, upon seeing the movie, that there was not more of Christian Slater's bare ass. I think this would not be an opinion I would hold today were the movie to be made today, with today's Christian Slater.

MOE: And speaking of ...the down there zone, remember when Jane Fonda said "cunt" on TV?

Fortunately, the gaffe is all over the Web in streaming video, and, yes indeed, here she is, Hanoi Jane herself, the bete noire of right wing radio, flagrantly uttering the unutterable. Clearly, Rush and Bill are courageously willing to address this shocking and distasteful subject even at the risk of driving their audiences into multi-orgasmic rapture.
Limbaugh joyfully eviscerates Fonda and moves quickly on to other things, but O'Reilly is in high dudgeon and is all over this reprehensible event. He's morally outraged, and seems to want to wring all he can get out of it, as though it were, say, a luffa sponge.
As someone in the broadcasting business, he says, he doesn't want to become "the scold police," but he wonders just the same if someone ought to call the FCC and demand punishment.

(Later at night, on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor," he will devote an entire segment to the issue, practically sputtering in exasperation when he can't persuade his guest, lawyer Anita Kay, to agree with him that heads must roll. Kay will point out, reasonably, that Fonda wasn't using the word in a hostile manner; she was simply stating the actual title of one of the monologues from the play "The Vagina Monologues," which is, ironically, about how the word should be destigmatized.) B-b-but "this is the most vile word in the lexicon of obscenity!" O'Reilly protests. Laughing, Kay basically tells him to calm down and grow up, that the average 12-year-old girl has heard this word, and it's no big deal. It's my favorite moment of the day. (Anita Kay, the cure for the common scold.) The peril of listening to Limbaugh and O'Reilly at the same time is that you tend to compare them, and these are dangerous waters for an unapologetic, unreconstructed New Deal liberal like me. The comparison makes you actually like Rush. He's funny; O'Reilly is not. Limbaugh teases and baits his political adversaries; O'Reilly sneers and snarls at them. Limbaugh is mock-heroic; O'Reilly is self-righteous. So, when Limbaugh speculates that the Democrats in the House committee went after Roger Clemens because liberals hate cherished American institutions such as churches, the Boy Scouts and baseball, you know he's sorta kidding. When O'Reilly says liberals who oppose torture of prisoners just don't care how many people will die in a terrorist attack, you know he's as serious as an aneurysm.

MOE: I can only listen to Fox News, on account of my mysterious muting problem. Although I was thinking of switching to CNBC this morning. Here we go. The Dow is possibly up because JP Morgan might be raising its bid for Bear Stearns. Wait, the market is not open yet, that is just what the futures betters are betting. They are talking about something called fractionalization creating a lot of possibilities for arbitrage in these securities. I am not really sure what this means. Do regular CNBC viewers really engage in "arbitrage"? Whatever. Ooooh, someone called Wisdomtree.com is pushing an exchange traded fund that tracks India's economy. Good idea. All right, back to the meme of the day. What is it? A lot of things happened this weekend, including the publication of the Peggy Noonan column that finally pushed me over the edge into the realm of begging Peggy Noonan for an interview.

MEGAN: Also, as of this morning, 4,000 soldiers have officially died in Iraq. Cheney would like us to know that the White House mourns every single death but it is, after all, a "volunteer army."
MEGAN: Because there's nothing nauseating about saying that.
MEGAN: They volunteered to die, so it's not as big a deal apparently. Perhaps to commemorate, we can each take a moment of silence today to think about the 4,000 soldiers and then yell "Cheney, go fuck yourself"

MOE: Aiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee. Puppies! Polar Bears! Peggy! Peggy heard the speech and thought "Go America Go." She just thought it was kind of a downer. The first comment goes:

I think Peggy needs to recycle Reagan101 again, and while she's at it perhaps she can read what a real journalist thought of the speech.....Washinton Post writer Charles Krauthammer's article "The Speech, A Brilliant Fraud".

MEGAN: I mean, that sort of a little bit puts the lie to the "all volunteer" army idea. Because definitely some people join despite having tons of other options because it's the family business or they have heroic ideals or just want the extra money or whatever, but some people do it because they don't have good grades, or money for college or career prospects or even job prospects where they grew up. So, yeah, they volunteered to not be even more grindingly poor, to not try to get on welfare, to do something to achieve that American dream thing everyone's been telling them about their whole lives and instead some number of them end up on food stamps anyway and are eking out on existence trying to stay alive in some country where they don't really want us.

MOE: Also, everything that Peggy Noonan said Obama was overly gloomy about can be summed up in this, Maria Bartiromo's response to Tim Russert's query as to what America's biggest economic challenge is.

Well, our biggest challenge economically right now is the tight credit environment.  From an individual standpoint, it is very tough to get a mortgage, it is very tough to borrow money anymore.  From a business standpoint, the same thing.  I would say one of the key representations of what's happening right now is what happened at Carlyle Capital.  Very simple stuff, Tim.  They had $600 million in assets, they borrowed $22 billion. Doesn't work out.  The math just doesn't work.  And that's exactly what's happening.  People have overextended themselves, businesses as well as consumers, and now we're paying the price

MEGAN: Duh, Moe, the $600 million wasn't the only collateral. It was also secured by the fact that 90% of every person involved was an older white man who went to a small number of the right schools and participated in the dinner clubs or fraternities or whatever deemed appropriate by their set and who belongs to a small number of socially appropriate country clubs or whatever. That's the real
collateral.

MOE: DAMMIT YOU AND YOUR FINE PRINT MEGAN

MEGAN: I am a cunt like that.

MOE: Okay does rehashing that conversation I'm pretty sure we already had but for the constant cache-clearing of the 24-hour pundit cycle that we'll come back to a moment because I'm going to tell you about my mom, and also, ask what you did to commemorate Christ's resurrection, about how McCain wanted to switch parties after 2001 just delay the inevitable awesome conversation about the Nixon-tattoed Republican huckster who tipped off the government to Eliot Spitzer's whore habit (because he went to the same whores, duh) and also, printed up those clever Citizens United Not Timid T-shirts that sunk the Hillary campaign?
8:50 AM
MOE: Cunts are such a theme today!

MEGAN: To commemorate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ (no H., thanks), I had brunch that included bagels with lox, champagne and coffee. Then I took a nap. I worked, then I went to dinner with a friend who is having relationship issues, and I came home and worked some more.

MEGAN: And I talked to my parents.

MOE: I got high with a very good friend whose name I am gonna leave off the blog even though he seems to have posted pictures commemorating that on his Facebook profile. It was the first time I have ever 1. bought weed by myself, which I did successfully, along with the first time I have 2. attempted to roll a joint, an endeavor at which I failed miserably.The best part of the evening was buying junk food in anticipation of the muchies. The next morning we walked a mile and a half to Chipotle but it was closed. I got on the wrong subway home and ended up getting out in Williamsburg and walking home over the bridge. I smiled unilaterally at a lot of Hasids and realized it was Easter only when some dudes sitting at the front of the bridge said, "Hey sexy, happy Easter."

MEGAN: It was really good weather, wasn't it?

MOE: And my mother said that she always forgets until she visits my sister in Charlottesville how marginalized and disenfranchised black people are. And the throwing his grandma under the bus line went over well with her. She was like "when he said that I was like, oh my god that is like a universal experience, to cringe over how old white people talk about black people." We have a lot of typical white people in my family as you can probably tell.

MEGAN: Wow, your mom is cool. I think I might owe her some wine some time.

MOE: But it made me think, you know, the same thought Gene Weingarten had over the extent to which regular voters are completely oblivious to the meme of the moment and thank god for that.
MOE: Now G-d can you do something about William Kristol? And Pat Buchanan?

MEGAN: Word. The whole Gene Weingarten piece reminded me of the conversation I had with my parents about how I do this in the morning and I was like, well, I get up at 7, read 15+ sites and then start typing and they were like, wow, you're the most well-informed person we know and then I realized I was probably fucked and this is why I'm a political misanthrope.
MEGAN: I think Bill Kristol, who, seriously, if you put that man in some fucking clown make up IS THE JOKER FROM BATMAN will take care of his own demise. But someone get Rachel Maddow a spit shield for when she has to sit next to him on MSNBC.
MEGAN: and by "him" I mean Pat Buchanan

MOE: Apparently Michael Smerconish has been defending the speech. He's a much-beloved Pennsylvania conservative radio talker. Ugh, but before I feel click over on one more thing only to rue that here we are, balls deep in the memes again, let me call out this sentiment from Pat Buchanan's most recent blog utterance.

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

MOE: He actually asked, "Where is the gratitude?

MEGAN: So, why the FUCK is he still a commentator on MSNBC? Oh, right, they're trying to out-Fox Fox or something, because that's why they're 3rd in the ratings.

MOE: I'm not sure. I don't know. I think I have heard sentiments from my grandfather who was a typical white person of the first generation immigrant vein that would echo these sentiments. I think William F. Buckley might have echoed these statements. Enough of these statements might give you the notion that racism is endemic in white America, you know? Because implicit in statements like this, I don't have to point it out to you but I will anyway, was that buying and selling and pricing people as commodities is not a grave injustice if they are black. What is interesting is that Judeo Chrisitian rooted humanism is supposed to be the basis for the notion that a person is a person, uniquely different from other objects and organisms, and yet here he seems to be subverting that notion, rendering it backward according to some logic I can barely fathom, except to echo Obama via William Faulkner.
MOE: Via Peggy Noonan.
MOE: The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past.

MEGAN: Like, it's obviously not the motherfucking past if people like Pat Buchanan think that

MEGAN: Seriously? The means (slavery) are justified by the ends (acceptance of Jesus Christ as their savior, forced or not)? Seriously? This is what people think? What country do I live in? No wonder Michelle Obama isn't proud of it all the time.

MOE: Pat Buchanan went to my brother's high school, a Jesuit boy's school in Northeast DC. That is what is scariest but most fascinating about that statement. It is not coming from the progeny of anyone who actually owned slaves. Who actually knows, at all, what he is talking about. Perhaps he ought to listen to Mike Huckabee.

MEGAN: Perhaps Pat Buchanan, too, ought to just go fuck himself.
MEGAN: The list of people who can go fuck themselves seems to be growing.

MOE: You had a little piece of recent civil rights history you wanted to share with the class, didn't you Megan?

MEGAN: I did, in the vein of people that can go fuck themselves. The New York Times reminded its readers (some of whom heard it for the first time because they were too young at the time) that Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi with a nod to the unreconstructed racists of the world.

"In 1980, Ronald Reagan, campaigning on a platform that included "states' rights," opened his general election campaign in Philadelphia, Miss. — a decision criticized because it was where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964.

MEGAN: It was in a story on race in campaigns. Also, the incident was actually chronicled by no less than American chintzy painter Norman Rockwell in an enormous and moving painting that you will find in absolutely no book of his work anywhere (because I've tried) but you can see a bad internet print of it here. It's actually really moving in person.

MEGAN: Also, Lt. Governor Michael Steele? Former Senator JC Watts of Oklahoma? Condoleeza Rice? This is what the Republican Party thought was acceptable when you were joining up. Pat Buchanan's remarks? Still acceptable in the Republican party. If Obama has to explain his allegiance to his pastor and friend of 20 years and should have left him by the wayside to "prove" his love of America, I would like some explanations from you about that shit. Thank you. And go fuck yourselves.

MOE: No, go fuck whores!
MOE: Gay whores!
MOE: Kthanxbai.