THIS MODERN WORLD

It’s important for the government to bail out GM, so that GM can continue as one of the main sponsors of talk radio diatribes against government (and government bailouts).

… reminds me of a small irony from last summer that I never got around to blogging: at the same time all the radio talkers were mocking Obama for suggesting that we keep our tires inflated, one of the carmakers was pushing a brand new innovation — self-monitoring tires which inform you when they need inflating. So you’d go directly from a rant about the idiocy of thinking you can improve mileage by keeping your tires properly inflated to a commercial about how you can definitely improve mileage by keeping your tires properly inflated. In one absolutely classic moment I caught on my car radio late one night, Laura Ingraham was the ranter — and was also the person who read the immediately subsequent commercial copy.

Sorry, gang. It turns out Sarah Palin isn’t THAT dumb. On the plus side, she refuses to go away, so at least we’ll have that trainwreck to enjoy for a little while longer. It’s amazing to think that Palin has been in the national spotlight for less than three months and she’s already gone from serious vice-presidential contender to the sort of “why won’t she go away?” level of fame that’s usually reserved for former reality show contestants.

UPDATE : My bad. It turns out I misread the article regarding the Plain hoax. She really is THAT dumb. Sorry folks. Blogging and NyQuil don’t mix.

… just described one of his sponsors, Stamps.com, as an example of “an individual who thought, hey, I can do this better than the federal government.”

And that’s got to be conservativism/libertarianism in a nutshell. Figuring out how to profit off systems and infrastructure set up by the federal government is defined as “doing things better than the federal government.”

It’s that special brand of rugged individualism conservatives talk so much about, the kind which mostly turns out to be neither rugged nor individual.

Heck, maybe we ought to eliminate the USPS entirely, and see if Stamps.com is willing to carry a letter from one end of the country to the other and deliver it to the recipient’s door for less than fifty cents.

Olbermann had Thomas Friedman as a guest tonight, and treated him as a respected commentator … and now I’m watching Rachel Maddow interview Ana Marie Cox.

Sigh.

Tony Ortega explains the three fads which gripped the American imagination in the early nineteenth century, and how a young grifter named Joseph Smith wove them all together into a new religion. It’s completely fascinating, and well worth five minutes of your time. Go, read.