Clearly Joan Walsh has some sort of celebrity obsession with Palin. For weeks after Palin was no longer front-page material elsewhere, she was still front-page material at Salon. The letters at the time regularly pointed that out and begged it to stop.

Now we have two consecutive columns by Joan taking pity on Palin and blaming McCain for Palin's numerous problems on the campaign.

Get over your "girl crush", Joan. (As your broadsheet columnists would say.) Palin doesn't swing that way, and you're embarrassing yourself with your public swooning.

Now it's clear you're trolling or living in a fantasy world....

Since when has Sarah Palin given interviews? If that's your basis for your fantasies about her, you have very limited material to work with.

"the charm was lost on me"

Stephanie can just use this sentence from this review as the entirety of every review she has ever written and we'd all be better off for it.

Will Obama's new puppy survive Carpetgate 2012?

Will the US automakers survive the transition to helium-powered cars in 2034?

Will the human race survive the great zombie war of 2155?

I expect full coverage of all of these issues very soon! Nothing could be more important! Thanks Salon!

Citing popular vote totals for Bush and Obama is not a very useful measure since the population of the country keeps increasing. There is no context to evaluate that number. It's sort of like comparing the cost of a movie in 1920 with the cost of a movie now without taking inflation into account.

It would be much more informative to know the percentage of Obama's popular vote total compared to the total population of the country, or total number of registered voters. But since that's probably not a record, it wouldn't warrant a mention.

Thanks for misunderstanding me in such a hostile fashion, dhadbawnik. My point isn't that Obama sucks. (I voted for him and support him, in fact.) My point is that the information that both Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008 set records for the TOTAL popular vote is essentially useless, unless you also consider that there are now more people in our country and therefore there are more people than ever who could vote for him.

Further investigation finds that 538 did cover this:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/population-and-popular-vote.html

And Obama is second to Ronald Reagan (in 1984) in terms of the total votes received relative to the population of the US. That is a much more impressive accomplishment than the one sited by Madden's blog entry, and Bush's 2004 victory trails down to number 8 on the list.

You know, if you're going to have the word "nude" in the headline, you should post something related to that....

Just sayin'

Well, it appears that bebop-o's Thorazine has worn off again and he's back to dumping incoherent text into the chat forums. Editors, an ignore feature would be delightful....

"12 more balls"? I don't get it.

A little help?

Don't be so harsh, mcsnee. Stephanie Zacharek likes some movies. She liked "Don't Mess With the Zohan" and the Eddie Murphy stinker "Meet Dave".

Of course she hated Wall-E, the Dark Knight, and Titanic, all of which were almost universally praised by critics, the public, and the people who give out movie awards. Perhaps she just hates GOOD movies.

I am blind and I'm so glad that you included Comics for the Blind this week! It was so helpful!

If the reviewer is Stephanie Zacharek, I'm betting the answer is a resounding NO.

(checks article)

Woohoo! Thanks for introducing some much needed consistency to our otherwise crazy world, Steph!

Heh, just kidding. I didn't really think that. Nobody really thought that she would like a movie.

Based on the 98% rating currently on rottentomatoes.com, it seems that Ms. Zacharek is once again out of touch with the qualities that most people look for in a movie. Ms. Zacharek is the Bill Kristol of movie criticism.

So why does this overwhelmingly well-reviewed movie feel so cold? Perhaps it is you, Stephanie.

I get it finally!

You already have commissioned your caricature artist to do an illustration of Camille Paglia. The guy (or gal) must cost a fortune! Now that you have a caricature of Camille, you can't possibly justify the cost of letting her go and replacing her with someone whose column is grounded in reality, but whom you don't have a caricature of!

If only caricature artists didn't cost so darn much, we wouldn't have to put up with this crap column!

http://lileks.com/misc/33quiz/2.html

Thanks for spreading the gospel, Keef! I thought I was the only one who swore by that technique.

I'm not sure which is worse. Parents who share too much detail about parenting, or a blog which shares stories about parents who share too much detail about parenting.

I mean, if I just read any given parent's musing, it's likely that many or most of the postings will be interesting, cute, or whatever (along with the gross or offensive ones). But if I read that blog, it's a guarantee that all of the parenting stories will be inappropriate.

In other words, let's say that I am offended by people who think they have been abducted by aliens. Why in the world would I then scour the internet and consolidate all alien abduction stories that I could get my hands on? Seems like ignoring it is the better option.

Why is the video version of this article censored? Isn't this the internet? Isn't this 2009?

That's right. I clicked on the Tom the Dancing Bug link so that half of the resulting page can be taken up by the News and other top stories that I JUST SAW on the home page. That's why it's worth it for me to have to click again to see the thing that I already indicated I wanted to see.

Nice work!