Will the 2010s be the Sarah Palin Decade?

According to Pew, the Alaska governor's popularity among Republicans, as measured by her net approval-minus-disapproval ratings, is +56, with former Gov. Mitt Romney and former Speaker Newt Gingrich a bit further back, at +39 and +33 respectively, and Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele trailing far behind that trio with a +14 and 58 percent of Republicans having no opinion or unable to identify him.

This dynamic has been predicted before.

Wednesday 3.

* First Read considers the curse of the 2012 GOP candidate, noting that only Mitt Romney has avoided total credibility implosion. But stay tuned: it's a long way to Iowa, and I believe in the Mittpocalypse.

Of course, it's also worth noting that Obama's political opponents tend to be cursed in this way: consider that his main opponents for Illinois State Senate were pulled from the ballot for insufficient signatures, that his original run for Senate was facilitated by the scandal surrounding the divorce of Jack and Jeri "Seven of Nine" Ryan, and that his opponent for the presidency actually thought Sarah Palin was a credible vice presidential candidate.

* More on Kay Hagan and health care from Triangulator. Contact information for Hagan's Senate office is here.

* The MTA is trying to sell name rights for subway stations. Can't we get a court to bar this kind of silliness? "Atlantic Avenue" is a useful and informative name for a subway station; the name of a bank in London is not remotely. UPDATE: I'm 99% less outraged upon realizing that Barclay's is building a basketball stadium near that subway station.

* Michael Bérubé on the futility on the humanities. Said futility is not a bad thing.

* Žižek on Iran (at least allegedly).

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

* Soccer in South Africa, at the Big Picture.

Naturally, there is one person to blame for everything that is happening in Iran right now, and that is Barack Obama. Except whatever good comes out it. That was all Bush.

UPDATE: Exactly.

More!

* Summer book reviews from both me and Jaimee in the Independent.

* As ubiquitous as pollution has become in the industrialized West, it remains largely invisible. That is not the case elsewhere in the world.

* Mitt Romney is a tool. A huge tool.

* "ICE does not keep records on cases in which detainees claim to be US citizens." Via MeFi.

* Everyone is reading Infinite Jest this summer. Are you? I really didn't like it the first time through, but DFW died and made me sad, so maybe I'll give it another shot.

* And, as always, morality is impossible without God.

Again, four more.

* My working assumption has been that the GOP's biggest names—Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney, god-help-us Sarah Palin—would sit out 2012 to take on the winner of the open Democratic field in 2016. (I've actually thought for a while that 2012's Bob Dole would be Newt Gingrich; someone who'll lose handily but won't get creamed.) But that assumption may have been wrong; Bobby Jindal's bizarre grandstanding over federally funded unemployment benefits in a time of deep economic crisis suggests he may try for 2012 after all. Like Steve, though, I don't quite grok the strategy; prolonging misery and screwing up the economic recovery of his home state helps him how, exactly?

* Climate questions for Barack Obama.

Q. You favor a strong push to develop the technology needed to capture and sequester carbon from coal-fired power plants. Many argue that the surest way to bring this technology to market is to impose a nationwide moratorium on the construction of new coal-fired plants that don’t capture and store their carbon emissions. Would you support such a moratorium?

* Wil Wheaton has seen Watchmen.

* Unless DVR usage is significant, I would not get too used to Dollhouse.

'Whatever happened to Sarah Palin?' Look for stories with that headline over the next few years—with polling like this Sarah Palin will likely never be a serious candidate for national office ever again. And that's good news for all of us, in Real and Fake America alike.

The New Yorker has an interesting first-crack in the "Whatever happened to Sarah Palin?" genre this week, actually, with a post-mortem on how McCain ever came to make such a damaging choice.

With just days to go before the Convention, the choices were slim. Karl Rove favored McCain’s former rival Mitt Romney, but enough animus lingered from the primaries that McCain rejected the pairing. “I told Romney not to wait by the phone, because ‘he doesn’t like you,’ ” Keene, who favored the choice, said. “With John McCain, all politics is personal.” Other possible choices—such as former Representative Rob Portman, of Ohio, or Governor Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota—seemed too conventional. They did not transmit McCain’s core message that he was a “maverick.” Finally, McCain’s top aides, including Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, converged on Palin. Ed Rogers, the chairman of B.G.R., a well-connected, largely Republican lobbying firm, said, “Her criteria kept popping out. She was a governor—that’s good. The shorter the Washington résumé the better. A female is better still. And then there was her story.” He admitted, “There was concern that she was a novice.” In addition to Schmidt and Davis, Charles R. Black, Jr., the lobbyist and political operative who is McCain’s chief campaign adviser, reportedly favored Palin. Keene said, “I’m told that Charlie Black told McCain, ‘If you pick anyone else, you’re going to lose. But if you pick Palin you may win.’ ” (Black did not return calls for comment.) Meanwhile, McCain’s longtime friend said, “Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms.”

McCain had met Palin once, but their conversation—at a reception during a meeting of the National Governors Association, six months earlier—had lasted only fifteen minutes. “It wasn’t a real conversation,” said the longtime friend, who called the choice of Palin “the fucking most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Aides arranged a phone call between McCain and Palin, and scrutinized her answers to some seventy items on a questionnaire that she had filled out. But McCain didn’t talk with Palin in person again until the morning of Thursday, August 28th. Palin was flown down to his retreat in Sedona, Arizona, and they spoke for an hour or two. By the time he announced her as his choice, the next day, he had spent less than three hours in her company.

Meanwhile, Palin is back in the news today with a revealing flub demonstrating that she either (still) has no idea what the vice president does or has a vision of expanded powers for the VP that rivals even Cheney's.

Afternoon news.

* The Rick Davis lobbying revelation is the big campaign story today as the McCain camp struggles to find some way to respond. The indispensable Steve Benen dissects their first attempt here, with this succinct summary of why this matters:

Remember, the McCain campaign walked right into this one, insisting that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were largely responsible for the Wall Street crisis, and any associations between a candidate and officials at the lending companies are necessarily scandalous.

Talk about leading with one's chin....

More at HuffPo and TPM, which notes that Davis "quietly canceled" a scheduled lunch with reporters today.

* A report from the Pew Center says that cell-phone-only voters are not being properly counted in the polls. And Marist's poll of swing states has Obama sweeping the map: IA, NH, OH, PA, and MI, where he has (according to this one poll with a high margin of error) a nine-point lead.

* Kos says the Palin pick is already paying unexpected dividends, as if McCain had been more responsible he probably would have picked Romney.

But think, what if McCain had picked Mitt Romney as his veep choice, like so many of us were fervently hoping?

Sure, the rollout wouldn't have give McCain a fraction of the attention and excitement that Palin generated. The GOP ticket's (now evaporated) post-convention bump would've been smaller, and maybe Romney would've been less effective at revving up the fundy base.

But right now? Romney would be kicking ass. The media would treat him with deference as an economic expert, and let's be honest, he does looks straight out of central casting for the role of "serious businessman who we should defer to on the economy". McCain wouldn't have to hide him. Romney could make the media rounds, being taken seriously no matter what GOP gibberish he spouted. Rather than flail and cower, a McCain/Romney ticket would look sure-footed and confident, projecting gravitas in a time of uncertainty.

What's more, McCain would no longer look like a political opportunist in his VP choice. He'd be lauded for being such a "maverick", picking his greatest primary rival. The GOP and its apologists could say, with a straight face, that McCain put "country first", and actually get away with it since it's obvious McCain personally loathes Romney.

Good thing Mittens was snubbed.

* Also at Kos, Meteor Blades argues that the Congressional Democrats' myriad failures on energy this seession are not as bad as all that.

Hurrah! What a relief. This summer’s rush to remedy 27 years of bad energy policy in just a few weeks had generated a mish-mash of contradictory proposals that couldn’t possibly be fully discussed or vetted. Better to wait, as I've said from the get-go.

The Stump time travels to a scene from the 2012 Republican primary:

Gov. Palin: We are going to change America, change it from higher taxes, higher crime, and a quagmire in Afghanistan.

Fmr. Gov. Romney: I know how to make change. I'm running on 20 years of a record of change of commitment to America and conservatism, Gov. Palin is running on the strength of a speech from four years ago. Are we going to have change with results, or change with a teleprompter? We know what that has gotten us.

That's pretty much right, except my gut tells me it may be 2016.

I guess today's the day for the final, final, actually final veepstakes prediction. On a long-term strategic level I still favor the Virginia strategy, and so when I was throwing down my predictions in the Edge of the American West thread last night that's what I went with: Warner / Romney, second choice Kaine / Romney.

But the longer this goes on and is dragged out the more it seems to me they need a huge name, and there's really just a handful people on that list: Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, maybe a wildcard like Colin Powell or Chuck Hagel. Expectations are at a fever pitch; the fact that's it's the Friday before the convention and I expected a Kaine announcement Tuesday or Wednesday (if not weeks ago) makes me think it may actually be Hillary.

If that's the way Obama's behind-the-scenes geniuses think it has to be, I guess that I'm at peace with it, but good lord if it going to be a crazy famous superstar I hope that it's Al Gore.

Is it Mitt? Mark Halprin says so, which can't be making the McCain camp happy in light of yesterday's potentially game-ending gaffe.

But it sure makes john happy.

As predicted, Romney's out.

... "If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

Stay classy, Mitt.

While I frantically reload my usual Web sites for any scrap of information about the Democratic caucus, let's give a big congratulations to darling of the netroots Mitt Romney for winning the Nevada primary. It looks like Ron Paul came in second. Here they are together, basking in victory. In the meantime, I'm gratified by this post at Open Left that notes the polls for Nevada were wildly off the mark—though there's always the possibility that they're off the mark in the other direction...

* This whole "Democrats for Mitt" idea is probably kos's single stupidest self-inflicted wound since the whole mercenaries debacle. Given that his plan won't work, it's irrelevant—and even if it somehow does work, how does this idiotic game benefit any Democrat anywhere? That's assuming it doesn't completely blow up in the Left's face by accidentally propelling Guy Smiley to the White House. In any event, this sort of nonsense invites, legitimately I think, cries of "dirty tricks" from the right, which is something we have no reason to invite. Kos should either promote the "Vote Uncommitted" movement on the grounds that Clinton should not be rewarded by her failure to remove her name from the Michigan ballot, or else do nothing at all.

* Arizona governor Janet Napolitano has endorsed Obama, a significant endorsement not only regionally but also because of the way it plays into the gender dynamics that are now characterizing the Democratic race.

Meanwhile, bestsellers Anne Rice and Michael Chabon have each chosen a favorite, Clinton and Obama respectively. Call me when Lethem weighs in.

* And of course there's Kucinich's decision to pursue a recount in New Hampshire. For what it's worth, as someone who believes that both the 2000 and 2004 elections were influenced and perhaps stolen outright through manipulation of the apparatus of voting—cleansing of the voter rolls, selective closing of precincts, suspicious last-minute swings always redounding to Republican benefit, see RFK Jr. for more—I can perhaps regain some of my "sensible centrist" cred by saying I'm not at all impressed by the claims New Hampshire was stolen. For one, the exit polls I saw bandied about before the results began being reported already indicated that a blowout was not in progress; obviously the telephone polling missed a late surge in Clinton support probably generated in equal parts by sympathy for the beating she was getting in the press and by a belief that Obama couldn't lose. Likewise, the difference in results between hand-counted precincts and machine-counted precincts, despite the many shouts of Diebold!, is almost certainly a function of the demographics of those areas, not prima facie proof of malfeasance. In short, there's almost no comparison to 2004, where the exit polls were consistently wrong well outside the margin of error, and the irregularities were both more local and more pronounced.

The assertion of fraud whenever the results don't go our way only serves to discredit valid claims about electoral fraud and suspicious results.

Still, if I'm wrong and it turns out Kucinich is somehow onto something, I'll be the first one to admit it.

Inappropriate laugh tracks, via MeFi. Here's Mitt Romney and Star Trek (stay until 3:10 for the real punchline), and embedded below is the NSFW crown jewel, The Wire.

Desperate for the vaunted Canavan "Muppet Week" bump, Stephen Colbert makes a pretty excellent Guy Smiley joke early in this segment on the Iowa Straw Poll.