The Today Show Interview with Joe McGinnis, author of "The Rogue" (VIDEO)

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"Losing will only build her strength" (VIDEO)

Chris has an interesting point here:

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Tom Toles reveals your secret Liberal Fantasy (GRAPHIC)

Deep down, this is what you really want, right?

Please, dear God, don't let Sarah Palin anywhere near the button.

She might attack the wrong people.

Honest.

CO-HOST: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? [...]

PALIN: But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies. We’re bound to by treaty –

CO-HOST: South Korean.

PALIN: Eh, Yeah. And we’re also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes.

The audio can be found here.

Unlike Think Progress, I can't quite dismiss this as a simple case of mis-speaking.

I can understand not knowing the name of the Prime Minister of Paraguay, or not being intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the Middle East Peace Process. Those are places where even a Presidential Candidate one can mis-speak with a clear conscience.

But North Korea is a place that Sarah Palin, and folks like her, saber-rattle against...a lot. There are people out there, right now, calling on the President to attack North Korea, right now.  (Never mind what happens to Seoul).  North Korea is a charter member of the Axis of Evil. It's like forgetting the name of Iraq or Iran.

I'm not exactly known (if I'm known at all) for cutting Sarah Palin any kind of slack, but if she's going to constantly demagogue against Terrorists and evil regimes, as if attacking these places, I think we should be able to hold her to a certain standard...and that includes getting the damn names right.

The Conservatives newest "cat-toy": NPR

At the end of the day, I could live with Juan Williams' firing by NPR. If everyone else is getting fired for saying racist stuff (Rick Sanchez, Dr. Laura, Don Imus...somehow not Brian Kilmeade), then why shouldn't Juan Williams?

Oh, that's right. Bashing Muslims is okay in this country. How silly of me.

Anyway, we have this little nugget from Josh Silver of FreePress.net:

The reactionaries of the far-right are clawing and scratching at their latest red meat: National Public Radio's decision to fire Juan Williams for comments he made about Muslims on Fox News Channel.

It's hard to work up too much sympathy for Williams -- a once esteemed journalist who has repeatedly embarrassed himself in recent years as a soloist in Bill O'Reilly's amen chorus. He was warned multiple times by NPR about providing commentary on Fox News that violated his employment contract. And his reward for the noxious comments that cost him one job was a new $2 million contract from Fox, announced Thursday.

But that hasn't stopped Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Malkin, Andrew Breitbart and, of course, O'Reilly from seizing on this contretemps to resuscitate a long-standing right-wing pipe dream: to gut NPR's federal funding altogether. And like clockwork, after a day of increasingly frenzied rhetoric from the usual suspects, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint announced he will introduce legislation on Friday to do just that.

Adam Serwer (posting at Greg Sargent's Plumline) had this:

For his part, Thinkprogress editor Faiz Shakir told me this morning that he wouldn't have fired Williams, and that the purpose of the original post was to "highlight a comment that was incorrect for a larger audience so that we all can better understand why that comment doesn't help us move in the direction of the kind of society we want to live in."

Since Williams was let go, conservatives have been calling for NPR to be "defunded" over the incident, with Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner suggesting a "left wing radio network" shouldn't be receiving public funds. Sarah Palin has returned to her bizarre understanding of the First Amendment, which is that people who share her views have a right to be paid for them. I suspect part of the reason conservatives are upset is that they're not used to seeing a news organization react with such outright panic to transient public outrage from the left the way the media usually reacts to heat from the right. Few on the right thought CNN's hasty decision to let go of Octavia Nasr was a threat to freedom. Williams himself seems to think his own firing is the kind of thing that leads to Soviet-style forced labor camps, which is the kind of reasoning that really is more at home on Fox News.

However poorly NPR handled the Williams incident, the notion that NPR is "left wing" is ridiculous. Williams' presence on the network is emblematic of the network's milquetoast approach to political analysis. The reason Williams was let go wasn't because of the all powerful left, but because NPR is so concerned with the perception of bias that it didn't want one of its analysts associated with a network that works as a staging ground for Republican presidential hopefuls. NPR's commitment to a contrived form of journalistic objectivity may be counterproductive from the point of view of informing its audience, but there's no question that even prior to this incident Williams' appearances on FOX went against NPR's code of ethics, which advises employees to "not express views they would not air in their role as an NPR journalist."

Levi Johnston: Not necessarily bright, but honest and direct (VIDEO)

The fact that Levi Johnston thinks Climate Change isn't man-made doesn't speak well of the young man, but he was better in his answers than the former half-Governor of Alaska.

How do we know? Lawrence O'Donnell cribbed his questions to Levi right from Katie Couric's interview(s) with the half-Governor from 2008.

Black Republicans

From the Daily Beast:

Timothy Johnson, who as chairman of the Frederick Douglass Foundation works to get African-American Republican officials elected and grow the ranks of black members of the party, says that Sarah Palin needs to clarify her defense of Dr. Laura Schlessinger. He also says Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele needs to speak out against Palin.

Like that'll happen. Mr. Johnson (absolutely, positively ZERO relation) also said:

If she chooses to run for President in 2012, she is going to have to answer to black Republicans.

Again, yeah right.

If a majority of African-Americans were convinced that your organization wasn't going to cave at the first opportunity in the face of the former Half Governor, there might be more than three Black Republicans in the country.

You want to prove something to me? Tell Palin and tell America that Black Republicans have a zero tolerance policy towards racism. Tell Palin that if she runs, even Black Republicans won't support her. But we both know that's not going to happen, thus we come to the inescapable conclusion that Black Republicans tolerate racism.

This from the supposed Party of Lincoln.

The Racist Sisterhood...Part 2

Shocking headline of the day from the Daily Beast, following up on the Dr. Laura racist crapfest:

Black Republican: Sarah Palin Doesn't Speak For Us

Loved Josh's crackback:

Wow, pro-'N-Word' advocacy not helping with black voters. Always hard to figure how these things will play.

The Racist Sisterhood...

As I was under the weather yesterday, I did not get a chance to comment (celebrate) the ending of Dr. Laura's radio crapfest.  So let me state my position clearly for the record: Hooray!

But equally interesting is former Half-Governor Sarah Palin's tweeting in support of Dr. Laura.  There's more here in the Washington Post.

Keith tweeted a very good question in response. Does this mean that the former Half-Governor agrees with Dr. Laura's conduct??

Okay, so maybe Mitt Romney won't be the GOP Nominee in 2012...Part 2

Why? Because Sarah Palin just endorsed Terry Branstad.

And who, might you ask, is Terry Branstad, and why could it have major consequences for 2012? Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic has the answer.

He liveth again (George Wallace edition)...

Jonathan Rauch, a Libertarian/Conservative makes the argument that Sarah Palin isn't the political reincarnation of Barry Goldwater (as numbnuts George Will suggested), but actually the political reincarnation of George Wallace...

...and when you read their quotes side by side, it makes sense.

"The Consulting Paradox..."

Ahh, Nate Silver:

There's something which, if you've ever been in the business of trying to sell consulting services, you've probably grown accustomed to. It's what I call the "consulting paradox". Namely, it's the idea that the people who are most in need of help are often the least aware of it. Indeed, the range of potential clients who (i) aren't smart enough to solve all their own problems and (ii) are smart enough to know it ... is generally very narrow.

Sarah Palin needs help. So does almost every politician -- but Palin needs it more than most. She is young. She is inexperienced. She's not especially well connected. She's strong-willed and a little impulsive. And call me a hater, but the woman just ain't that bright.

Is it a big deal that Palin wrote some notes on her hand? No, not really. Lots of politicians carry notes with them (if not, as in Palin's case, literally on them). If this were Mitt Romney, it wouldn't have been a particularly big story. Nevertheless, politics is inherently contextual, and this was something that was bound to play into every negative caricature of Mrs. Palin. Somebody needed to take Palin aside and tell her: Honey, this is going to make you look ridiculous. Can't you write on a notecard instead?

Somebody needed to tell Palin that, you know what, it's OK to criticize Rush Limbaugh once in a while. Voters like moments that make candidates look big, mature, above the fray -- Palin took what could have been such a moment and instead backtracked and made herself look petty and hypocritical.

Somebody needed to tell Palin that, if she were hellbent on quitting as Alaska's governor, she at least needed to take the time to develop a competent exit strategy and a coherent farewell speech.

Somebody needed to tell Palin that it wasn't going to do any good to get into a he-said, she-said with an attention-starved 19-year-old who was getting ready to pose nude for Playgirl.

Somebody needed to sit down with Palin and consider whether, for a candidate who gets significant leverage out of the sense that she's been persecuted by the mainstream media, becoming a correspondent for one of the mainstream media networks was going to be helpful to her in the long run.

Somebody needed to make sure that Sarah Palin was ready for the Katie Couric interview, or needed to find some excuse to cancel it.

Somebody needed to tell Palin that using the term "death panels" was probably not going to help her personally at a time when she was trying to demonstrate to her critics that she could be credible about policy.

For those of you wondering about the oncoming Palin-Limbaugh feud (VIDEO)...

Worry not, Palin did hit back at Limbaugh for his own "retard" comments...

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Of course, she did it through a spokesperson.

And she didn't call for his resignation, like she called for Rahmbo's.

UPDATE: 2:25pm Pacific: Uh-oh. Rick Perry steps into this mess...and not in the way he probably intended.

Ambinder: Already giving up on 2012?

Republicans already signaling that if the Titantic's going to sink, Sarah Palin should go ahead and be the Captain.

Fallout from Sarah Palin's Two Minutes Hate...

Apparently, Sarah Palin wanted to be (Vice) President so bad that she was willing to endanger Barack Obama's life to do it.

I said it before, I'll said it again. Once you unleash that kind of hatred, it's impossible to control it. Sarah Palin wasn't thinking (she never does). She wanted what she wanted, and that's all that mattered