NICE TRY bored irony thrill-seekers in all major U.S. cities, Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue book tour is characteristically going rogue and will be avoiding the large urban areas of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and others like them. According to this extremely patronizing CNN story—in which Jacksonville, FL. and Rochester, NY are essentially characterized as nothing more than some dirt paths strewn with human bones, maybe six trailer homes and a Starbucks—the GR Tour will instead be hitting mid-size cities in more traditionally conservative parts of the country. Oh but despair not, cosmopolites! Very decent chance that the Nation and Slate all-stars of Going Rouge will be incidentally touring Whole Foods or some party in Park Slope or whatever. [CNN]

So the question is, was she being sarcastic in that parenthetical aside about “variety”? MORE »

Things are NOT LOOKING GOOD for the Going Rogue: An American Life book tour! Part of the whole deal with these things, the book things, is that you get to sound out the words from the books, like into a microphone, and then you get $100,000. This is exactly what Sarah Palin was promised. Except no one is paying Sarah Palin $100,000 to sound out the garbage that she Scotch-taped to an index card and mailed to HarperCollins the other day. “An industry expert tells Page Six: ‘The big lecture buyers in the US are paralyzed with fear about booking her, basically because they think she is a blithering idiot.’” MORE »