In a positively gem-filled interview with National Review Online, Santorum said,

Sarah has jumped onto the scene and has been hammered by the mainstream media. This is an opportunity for her to show a more thoughtful side. She has a gift for prose. Hopefully that comes across.

He also cautions that, "the media loves to take a small part of a book only to twist and turn it around." This "twisting" language is familiar — last week an Alaska insider said Sarah Palin had turned to Facebook because, "There was so much difficulty in her getting her message out without it being deliberately, in my opinion, twisted by members of the media." It's a little disingenuous for someone who turned end-of-life counseling into "death panels" to complain about media misrepresentation, and also plain inaccurate. It's not like Sarah Palin is secretly a liberal and the media is just making her look like an oil-loving moose-slayer. She doesn't really seem to have any interest in being seen as a moderate, and neither does Santorum, who is now heading to Iowa to "address President Obama's power grab." He has a point: it does suck how Obama and his vice president are getting secret legal orders to spy on citizens, and then invoking executive privilege to cover up said spying. Oh, wait ...

Of course, probably what Palin really hates is the media "twisting" her words to make her look stupid, so she may not be too thrilled with a lecture circuit expert who told Page Six,

The big lecture buyers in the US are paralyzed with fear about booking her, basically because they think she is a blithering idiot.

The expert says that Palin is a bad choice of speaker not just for left-leaning universities, but for lecture series that work on the subscription model and want to avoid pissing off subscribers. He adds that Palin is not only "polarizing," but that she "is so uninteresting to so many groups — unless they are interested in moose hunting. What does she have to say? She can't even describe what she reads."

Of course, maybe Palin's book will be the kind of thoughtful, honest story that proves all the critics wrong. Her collaborator Lynn Vincent — no doubt hired to tone down Palin's natural "gift for prose" so she didn't blind anyone with her wit — isn't revealing any details, as per her nondisclosure agreement. We do know that Vincent's most famous book, Same Kind of Different as Me, about a millionaire art dealer whose life is changed by his friendship with a homeless man, is being made into a movie by Mark Clayman, executive producer of The Pursuit of Happyness. Ralph Winter, producer of X-Men, is also attached. This leads me to imagine a pretty fun crossover film version of Going Rogue, in which Rogue (played not by Anna Paquin but by Sarah Palin herself, or maybe Bristol) travels to Alaska to battle an evil liberal warlord who wants to stop all oil drilling. Ralph, call me!

Update: Whatever's in it, Going Rogue is already third on Amazon's bestseller list.

Santorum Heads To Iowa, Looks Forward To Palin Memoir [National Review Online]
Sarah's Lectures A Tough Sell [New York Post]
S.D. Ghostwriter Mum On Sarah Palin Memoir [San Diego Union-Tribune]
Palin Already A Bestseller [Politico]

• Dick Cheney thinks: The Gays should be happy with whatever states choose not to discriminate against them; Americans should be glad George Tenet didn't have worse intel about the link between Saddam and Osama; and the Guantanamo detainees should be happy we didn't summarily execute them. [Time, CNN, MSNBC]

• David Duke is mad at Rush Limbaugh for comparing him to that Latina Sonia Sotomayor. But he's not a racist! [ThinkProgress]
• Dick Cheney wouldn't have nominated Judge Sotomayor, but even Dick Cheney is smart enough not to call her a racistwhile he's trying to rehab his image. [Politico]
• Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, however, is not as smart as Dick Cheney. [Politico]
• Sotomayor begins the obligatory meetings-with-Senators today; let's hope she wore some comfortable shoes. [Politico]
• The Obama Administration denies that any of the images of American detainees subject to the ACLU release lawsuit depict sexual abuse, as was reported last week. Please note the careful wording. [Salon]
• The Administration also says that it decided not to release the photos because Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Malik objected and threatened to force us to withdraw even earlier than he planned, which is not nearly as dirty as it sounds. [McClatchy]
• Tom Tancredo staffer Marcus Epstein is a crazy-ass racist who assaulted a woman on the street last year because she was black, and he won't be going to law school now because of it. [DCeiver]
• Kim Jong Il's son, Kim Jong Un, who is 7 years younger than I am, will be taking over the nuclear-armed country of North Korea. This is gonna go well! [BBC]
• Eliot Spitzer has spent a lot of money on sex workers. [NY Times]
• Norm Coleman has spent a lot of money masturbating to his electoral fantasies in Minnesota courts. [NY Times]
• Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has finally learned how to relax and submit peacefully to our new Chinese overlords. [NY Times]
• You are correct: I have sex on the brain.

Abercrombie & Fitch
This probably won't shock you: Abercrombie & Fitch is torn between mindless apathy and pure evil. In the past six election cycles only one candidate has managed to crack a thousand in campaign contributions collected from Abercrombie employees' studiously frayed pockets, and that politician would be — you guessed it! — George W. Bush. The Skull & Bones candidate has raised $5,000 in racist classist Abercrombie dollars over the past few cycles, largely thanks to spokesman Tom Lennox. It is the only retailer whose employees have contributed to the Worst Presidency Ever.

Urban Outfitters
Urban Outfitters founder and CEO Dick Hayne is notorious for his support of that weird Pennsylvania senator who brought home his dead baby and became the first politician to become synonymous with butt sex. But the single largest recipient of Urban Outfitters campaign contributions has been Barack Obama, whose $7,400 collected from various executives — perhaps subliminally influenced by those clever T-shirts? — just tops the $7,100 of Dick's dollars that have lined the coffers of Rick Santorum.

J. Crew
J.Crew is your store if you are into uneasy family reunions! CEO Mickey Drexler has donated nearly a hundred grand to Democratic committees alone, while octogenarian founder Arthur Cinader likes lining the coffers of any fucking batshit Republican who bats an eyelash his away. Cinader has donated to Alan Keyes, Sam Brownback and Malcolm Forbes, but his fave is Phil Gramm, who has received $8,000 from him over the years.

Barney's
Barney's is the place to shop if you like avant-garde design and hate Hillary. Employees have donated thousands of dollars to New York politicians over the past few years — $1000 to Charlie Rangel, $4,000 to Chuck Schumer, $3,000 to Rudy — and a mere five Benjamins to Hills. (Though $250 did come from creative director Julie Gilhart, who is like the Karl Rove of fashion trends. Perhaps she likes pantsuits?)

Forever 21
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the store for your blue-collar budget is the biggest supporter of the Hillary Clinton campaign, clocking in at $11,500. Interestingly, two executives also donated a total of $4,000 to Rudy Giuliani's campaign and another $2,300 to Obama. Everyone knows variety = the spice of Forever 21!

• Alpha Girl Next Door Holly Madison to make the octogenarispawn of Hef. [Rush & Molloy]
  
• This one time, George Clooney made a weird joke on Leno about visiting Stonehenge and it was actually an inside joke with the Vegas stripper he was fucking. (Aw?) Also: "He has perfect feet for a man." [Daily Mirror]
  
• My suspicion is that real famous people do not call up People to tell comment on how they got arrested but who knows, Kristy Swanson was on some show called Skating With Celebrities. [People]
  
• Candy Spelling uses her columnist perch at TMZ to tell Britney Spears to stop being fodder for TMZ. [TMZ]
  
• "The past is the past. It was amazing, it was magical." Bet you knew before I even said anything that this is a quote about the Spice Girls. [MSNBC]
  
• Out-of-work Senator Rick Santorum overheard talking about his plans to make a movie. God help us. [Page Six]
  
• Emosogynist-in-chief Zach Braff never defies expectations, does he? [Page Six]

• Tom Cruise is so high up in the Church of Scientology they're letting him perform the wedding of billionaire James Packer. [Page Six]
• Have you been to Starbucks lately? There are pictures of Paul McCartney everywhere, and he looks like a total tool, even for Starbucks. Anyway he's officially a senior citizen and richer than the Vatican, so, I guess, whatever. [Page Six]
• Rod Stewart marries someone roughly his daughter's age. [MSNBC]
• Boy band mogul Lou Perelman charged in Guam with running a Ponzi scheme bigger than he is. I predict this will become one of those fascinating, detail-rich Rolling Stone stories we will never have time to actually read. [MSNBC]