1.) Best essay by a washed-up celebrity: Dick Cavett of “The Dick Cavett Show” writes an occasional online column at the New York Times, and his take on Sarah Palin’s post-election stardom and her butchering of the English language is really, really great:

Now something has gone wrong with all three television sets. They will get only Sarah Palin.

I can play a kind of Alaskan roulette. Any random channel clicked on by the remote brings up that eager face, with its continuing assaults on the English Lang.

There she is with Larry and Matt and just about everyone else but Dr. Phil (so far). If she is not yet on “Judge Judy,” I suspect it can’t be for lack of trying. …

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

2.) Most astute analysis of the potential auto bailout: Many times in past months, I’ve directed your gaze to the wise words of Pat Buchanan, former Nixon speechwriter, Reagan adviser and fringe presidential candidate. There are plenty of places I part ways with him, but the man’s political instincts are usually keen — this post about “conservatives” and their strange opposition to a meager $25 million to bail out our auto industry is worthwhile reading, even if (like me) you aren’t sure you agree with it:

Understandably, Republicans are seething.

When Hank Paulson demanded $700 billion to haul away the trash in the dumpsters of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs — assuring us we could hold a garage sale of the junk — they rebelled. They acted as the nation, by 100 to one, demanded. They killed the Wall Street bailout.

The Dow quickly sank another 1,000 points, and, charged with criminal irresponsibility by the elites, the GOP buckled, reversed itself, rescued the bailout — and was wiped out on Nov. 4.

Now we hear from Paulson that the $700 billion Congress voted will not, after all, be used to buy up all that rotten paper on the books of the big banks. Some banks are using the cash to buy other banks.

So Republicans are right to be enraged. They are victims of the biggest bait-and-switch in political history. But they are now about to do something terminally stupid. With GM, Ford, and Chrysler teetering on the brink, they are turning a cold stone face to Detroit …

And to let the auto industry die is to write America out of much of the economic future of the planet. [Bolds mine-R]

Go read the whole thing. You’ll be a little smarter afterward.

3.) Funniest totally lame YouTube thing I just found: Thanks, Nick, for pointing me to this:

Oh, how I wish I had been fortunate enough to have a presidential candidate walk into my front yard. And have it taped by the media. And have my named mentioned 20 times during a debate. If it had been me, maybe I could have “secured my dream.”

As it stands, it’s not me — it’s Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber. I’d already heard he’d secured an agent in Nashville for a country music career; turns out, that’s not the half of it. Over at SecureOurDream.com, Joe’s not only blogging, but shilling a book that he won’t be writing a word of hasn’t written yet, AND a $14.95 subscription to the Joe the Plumber fan club.

The design is awful (though it’s noted that “SECUREOURDREAM.COM VERSION-2 [why the hyphen?] COMING SOON”), and the blog post too innocuous to really get rabid pro-plumber conservatives on their feet:

Congratulations to Barack Obama. The American electorate has decided that he will be our next president. As I have stated, I will honor and support my president, but there will be no free ride. When President-Elect Obama takes office in January, his term of service to the American people begins. We wish our new president blessings of wisdom and good judgment, and we pray he hearkens to our voice if ever we feel our American Dream is being threatened. It will be a loud voice, so good luck trying to ignore it.

None of the links go anywhere, really, except to “coming soon” or more ads for the book. My friend Adam notes that this is probably about a month too late… who really cares about Joe the Plumber at this point? I do think, however, that he might make a good sitcom star — the straight-laced, hard-luck husband whose wife is always getting into shenanigans and whose friends are always looking to him for advice. He’d definitely be as good as Jeff Foxworthy, right?

Interesting blog thread over at The American Conservative, which has become my unlikely first click when I open my computer and start to surf. Blogger Sean Scallon writes:

(Modern “conservatives”) tried to assert the government’s authority over education with No Child Left Behind and in a private medical case in the Schiavo affair. When the nation’s financial institutions crumbled and buckled under the weight of bad investments, the Federal Government stepped in to prop them up as any socialist government would. And of course, in order to defend the state that does all these things, the right-socialists established police powers that are common in nearly all socialist countries that limit the right to dissent and allows the government to spy on potential enemies, real or not.

Despite such socialism, these right-socialists persisted in calling themselves “conservatives” and lied to themselves while lying to the nation about how they supposedly supported “free markets” and “freedom” in general for political reasons.  However, the voters got tired of and saw right through their lies. The present economic crisis has caused the right-socialists to be replaced by the more honest left-socialists … [bold mine-R]

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Doing things in reverse today, first the punchline: The always pointed Daniel Larison (of The American Conservative) explains Palinonics — the method of decoding the governor’s record-breaking run-on sentences.

I have concluded that the problem that so many people have in understand what Palin is saying is that we make the mistake of assuming that all of the words have some reason for being there. What we have to do instead is decrypt her message by filtering out all of the confusing chatter that keeps her statements encoded and difficult to follow. Let’s take the first sentence, and identify the essential elements in bold:

“Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.”

See? If you just cut out about 60% of what she says, it hangs together nicely … Once reporters and voters acquire sufficient training in Palinonics, there should be no more misunderstandings.

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Another trip to Louisville, another visit with my sister-in-law. She’s really awesome, and of some importance in the GOP of that quite large metropolitan city. She has no problem talking about the faults and flaws of her GOP colleagues locally, and even on a statewide level. However, she’s still under the illusion that Sarah Palin was unfairly “railroaded” by the media. So, as a member (albeit a lowly one) of “the media,” I feel compelled to explain that while “media bias” exists, it’s not really equivalent to what Republican propaganda has long made it out to be.

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It may be hoity-toity, and it may be one of those magazines that graces more coffee tables than actual readers. But it’s got great longform journalism (a dying breed, indeed), and two of this month’s pieces on Obama are worth noting:

1.) “The Joshua Generation”: This in-depth piece from reporter David Remnick looks at how Obama used race to his advantage — and downplayed it as well — en route to the White House, and looks at what the victory ultimately means for black Americans in the 21st century. It’s not an altogether shiny, happy tale, but it’s informative for anyone interested in the racial, social and political divides in this country.

2.) “Battle Plans”: Ryan Lizza gives us an overarching view of how Obama’s advisers used an adept understanding of the nation’s political tide, as well as a cool-headed approach to usually white-hot presidential politics, to help Obama to victory.

All this from the same magazine that gave us the unforgettable cover above, in the name of satire.

This weekend was the fifth anniversary of my marriage to the most all-around awesome woman I’ve ever met. To celebrate, we left the kids with her parents and headed to Cincinnati for a trip to the Gap Clearance Center (jeans for as little as $5?!), Ikea, the Apple Store (where I walked out with a brand new computer — at no cost — as a replacement for mine, which didn’t make it through drowning, as I thought it had and mentioned in the previous post) and more. Before we headed to Ohio, though, I got into a telling conversation with her dad.

I was never sure if he’d seen my Obama bumper sticker, which I’d placed on my car a couple months ago after deciding he was such a better choice for president that I couldn’t leave well enough alone. Anyway, out of the blue he asked me how much Obama’s tax plans would hurt my business (I own a coffeeshop, for those of you who don’t know). I told him it wouldn’t affect me at all, and he looked at me in some disbelief. 

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My wife woke me about 45 minutes ago in a panic: Our foyer, where I have my desk and computer station set up, has a slight dripping leak about 1 in 5 times it rains. Today, however, our foyer was soaked — and along with it, my brand new aluminum Macbook, purchased just days ago.

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First off, apologies for the delay in writing about the election. When it was all said and done, I found myself at first paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the moment, and since then so full of thoughts that it was impossible to make much sense of them. I still feel a bit like that, but I’m going to attempt a cohesive thread.

The Obamas: Putting the "first" into the First Family

That Barack Obama won so handily came as no surprise to me (though the electoral numbers ended up even a bit bigger than the most positive polling suggested), given his message and the real wants and needs of mainstream America — not to mention the audacious atrocity that was the McCain campaign. For months, however, the actual narrative of Obama’s journey has been lost in the details (of attack ads and policy pronouncements, gotchas and gaffes, pitbulls and plumbers). It reared its head again on Tuesday as soon as the first results starting coming in, and it is this: Americans have elected a black man as president, and (in modern terms, at least) by a landslide. But a sad truth is that the epochal nature of this moment hasn’t hit everyone — in fact, I’ve talked to a number of people here in southcentral Kentucky who either don’t recognize what a moment this is or who cynically dismiss it as being of little real importance.

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Everyone else called it. President-elect Barack Hussein Obama. The deal is done. More thoughts in an hour or two, as I’m still blogging at the Daily News’ election central.

From Rupert “Fox News” Murdoch’s New York Post, with full story, at 9:50 p.m.: