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:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J6S6mDyNvY[/youtube]