I need to comment quickly on the Letterman vs. Palin stuff that’s blown up recently around the interwebs, even though I feel that by doing it, I may actually be legitimizing it in a way I shouldn’t. That said, in case you missed it, Letterman made a fairly standard late-night joke about Alex Rodriguez impregnating Bristol Palin when Sarah and daughter recently attended a Yankees game with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Here’s the video:

Anyhow, the problem with this joke was that Palin actually attended the baseball game with Giuliani and 14 year-old daughter Willow (yes, that is her name) Palin, not the 18 year-old and previously knocked up Bristol. Whoops, not a good mistake to make. But, intentional on Dave’s part? Me and everyone else with a brain are betting not, given that the joke only makes sense in the context of Bristol, the daughter made famous when her mother decided to make her and her unborn child and her unborn child’s father a part of a national Presidential campaign.

In light of that fact, you can see why the elder Palin wouldn’t want to use this unfortunate incident to turn her innocent 14 year-old daughter into a sex-fueled media event, and so, in response, Sarah promptly went on the Today Show to rant about how David Letterman was obviously intentionally commenting on raping her innocent little 14 year-old daughter, how it was just a convenient excuse that her older and of-age daughter happened to have been impregnated, which, again, we only know because she made Bristol a centerpiece of a national campaign, and went on and on about how horrible Dave is and people these days, etc. etc. Meanwhile, the right-wing values attack dogs, lead by feminist crusader John Ziegler, have answered the call of, uh, duty? and have organized petitions and boycotts and demonstrations against the stately TV host. Needless to say, the good conservative folk are outraged, OUTRAGED and the net boards are full of commenters using horrible spelling and worse grammar to trash that evil child molesting supporter Mr. Lette–Wait a minute. Feminist crusader John Ziegler? This John Ziegler? (Money: right around the 3:30 mark)

Right. So the card-carrying feminist shock jock brigade has taken charge and has now started a campaign to get Letterman fired, and wait a minute, not only are the failed-radio-host-turned-documentary-filmmakers involved, but now Republican New York State Assemblyman Brian Kolb, the Minority Leader representing a district approximately 223 miles from the Ed Sullivan Theater (Mr. Kolb has a lovely website, by the way), has deemed the event important enough to his constituents that he has taken up the call to have Letterman fired and has set up a website along with Ziegler.

Which raises the question: why, exactly is this an important issue to a New York State Assemblyman? Is there some agreement between the states of New York and Alaska that requires this kind of action that I’m unaware of? Perhaps more likely, could it be that the Republican party is in such a shambles that what passes for leadership in the GOP these days sees this as a national issue that could somehow save the party? And what’s more disgusting here, the fact that they’d dare demand that David Letterman, my favorite talk show host, be fired, or that they’d drag an innocent 14 year-old girl into a national debate on the false pretense that she was being used to make a rape joke to try to drum up controversy to get her mother back on the national political landscape, and moreover, use fake feminist outrage as a mantle to hide behind while they do it?

I’m just a humble blogger, I’ll let you decide.

Take a look at Obama’s new Open for Questions website. In case you’re not familiar with the story, President Obama will be holding an online town hall tomorrow, and will take a series of questions from users on the WhiteHouse.gov website. The difference between this concept and past online-generated Q&A events is that the Open for Questions site lets users vote for their favorite questions, which are then listed by popularity à la Reddit or Digg.

During the event tomorrow, Obama will answer selected questions from among the most popular. I have no pretense that the questions won’t be screened, but even so, the top ten questions at the time of writing are all about, surprise surprise, the economy, and they already seem to have come straight from an outline of Obama’s economic stump speech, save one notable exception.

But here’s another interesting fact that many might overlook: half of the questions come from classic swing states Indiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Florida and Missouri. Two more are from the semi-swing states Oregon and Wisconsin. Moreover, the questions are nearly perfectly geographically distributed: there’s one from the West coast, one from the mountain West, one from the Midwest, two from so-called Appalachian states, two from the South, two from the Southeast, and one from New England. The notable missing states and regions, essentially population-rich New York and California, both heavily favored Obama in the 2008 election.

I’m not accusing the White House of anything nefarious, but it’s not like there’s no precedent for Obama deliberately picking swing states for high-profile online documents. Plus, near as I can tell there’s nothing on the site that mentions moderation of the questions or how the voting process works (aside from flagging), so it seems likely that Obama’s staff is free to manipulate the question lists as much as they want. Again, this is fine, but if the site is moderated, the White House might want to clarify how the site works so that people understand that it isn’t Digg or Reddit, and that more than just voting factors into how questions are ranked.

As a side observation, it’s interesting to note what types of questions come from where. The question from Pennsylvania is about manufacturing, the question from Houston is about the high tech industry, the question from Connecticut about 401Ks, etc. It all fits with areas of the economy that are suffering in those states.

The notable question I mentioned earlier is the one from Oregon, which asks why Obama hasn’t set up his promised online bill discussion site yet. I attribute this to the simple fact that internet-savvy voters are more likely visit the site and find that question interesting enough to vote it into the top ten over other more Obama friendly and economy-focused questions. Plus, if he chooses to answer the question, it will give Obama a chance to pimp the website, talk about the uniqueness of the town hall event itself, and highlight all the technology he’s worked with so far.

And on that note, one more, final observation: Google was chosen to run the Open for Questions service. Is that any surprise? The web company was among Obama’s largest donors during the campaign.

So Congress released the second half of the bailout the other day, and as I was pouring myself a bowl of cereal, it occurred to me: bailout? A bailout for the banks? Really? There are so many other things that need a bailout. Looking down at my bowl of cereal, the box now empty, I began to contemplate how many other, more worthy institutions lie broken and crumbled at the bottom of porcelain kitchenware; not because they engaged in years of faulty lending practices, but simply because we’ve been ignoring them for too long.

I mean, $700 billion is a lot of money, and we’re just spending it to fix the banks. The banks! And there I was, staring down at a crushed and soggy bowl of cereal from the bottom of the box, thinking about how much more pleasant it would have been had the cereal been fully in tact, and over in Washington they’re giving a bailout to the banks!? Do you see what I’m getting at here?

I mean, take China for an example. While we’re bailing out the banks, they’re using the recession as a time to invest in their infrastructure, to make sure they don’t repeat some of the product scandals of the past few years. When China comes out of this thing, they’re going to have a re-built infrastructure and a bunch of companies who don’t make products that fall apart towards the bottom, leaving a completely useless lower third of the box. And we’re investing in the banks?!

The banks!

Here’s the original. I did my own thinking on the issue.

What if:
The situation in Gaza and the rest of the world was exactly the same as it is today. Then, suddenly, alien ships arrived at Earth and demanded that all humans be their slaves, or else. The whole of Earth banded together, and the conflict in the Middle East was abandoned. Instead, the Israelis and the Palestinians had to work together to defeat these aliens, with the Palestinians conducting suicide missions against alien strongholds and even the civilian population sent to occupy Earth, and the Israelis quarantining the invasion force to the moon and conducting a brutal blockade of all resupply and even humanitarian shipments from the alien home world and alien allies in the quadrant.

How would the US react?

Here’s another question: How would the world change once the aliens were defeated? Would the Israelis and Palestinians finally be able to settle their differences and achieve peace? What do you think about this hypothetical scenario?