• Andrea Mitchell’s sources say Sarah Palin is not running for anything, ever, and that she’s “out of politics for good.” But who will fill the other half of the Santelli 2012 ticket?
• Sarah Palin (or somebody!) is pregnant again! CNN’s Rick Sanchez suggested this “why not?” reason.
• Palin’s nutball spokeswoman, “Meg,” denies Andrea Mitchell’s account, and says that Palin will actually be going “outside government,” which, uhm, is not actually a denial at all, right? DailyKos commenter bluedonkey08 says in response, “You know, sometimes I think it’s not worth trying to understand what she says. Your sanity will appreciate it.” Noted.
• Palin’s brother called the cable news to give his own theory, based on some conversation with Sister Sarah at a ski resort somewhere, two months ago. According to this relative, Palin has been spending “80% of her time defending herself” from the Media. You know, because it’s super important to yell at David Letterman for weeks at a time, for being a teevee comic who makes jokes about politicians. (Sarah Palin apparently spends the remaining 20% of her time at ski resorts.)
• Mean old Washington Post beltway neocon Charles Krauthammer said the other day on Fox News that Palin is “not a serious candidate” for Republicans. Did Krauthammer make emo Sarah cry and quit?
• She’s just plain crazy and you’re just wasting your time trying to make sense of her erratic behavior. This is the theory suggested by CBS News, which described her speech as “rambling and sometimes confusing.”

The New York Observer reports:

As promised, the folks at Sentinel, the conservative imprint of Penguin, have come to a decision about South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s book on fiscal conservatism. According to a statement sent out just now by associate publisher Will Weisser, Sentinel has “agreed to release” Governor Sanford from his contract in light of the scandal that brought his promising political career in the Republican party to an end last week. The brief statement called it a “mutual decision.”

Okay, so exactly nine (9) people would’ve bought Mark Sanford’s boring-ass book about “fiscal conservatism,” because Mark who? But the rumors were that Sanford would “rejigger” the manuscript into a sexy adulterous family-hating Argentine-fucking line-crossing literary tour de force, the Southern Gothic Emo-Yacht Club-Preppie Le Scaphandre et le Papillon of our time.

The conservative publisher wanted no part of this Latin Sexytime. Mark Sanford will have to fall in love with an 11-year-old urchin boy if he wants to sell his sex memoirs to Republicans.

When our beloved Labor Department reported a 9.4 percent unemployment rate in May, people high-fived each other in the streets because it seemed we had reached the true pinnacle of unemployment success. Who would have thought we’d be able to do ourselves one smidge better? And yet!

The American economy shed 467,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent from 9.4 percent, the Labor Department reported on Thursday. Job losses were widespread among the construction, manufacturing and business and professional services sectors.

The losses were sharply higher than economists’ expectations of 365,000 lost jobs.

Two things to note. Number one, economists all agree that jobs are a lagging indicator, which is to say, employers tend to wait until the economy’s been better for a while before they start hiring again.

We may expect employment statistics [to] look poor well past the trough of consumer spending that may occur in late 2009 and 2010. As always, savvy economic observers and investors should disregard this lagging indicator in forecasting economic direction.

Number two, Barack Obama has been in office for five whole months of this 20-month recession, so clearly the dismal job numbers are all his fault.

Job Losses Rise in June as Unemployment Reaches 9.5% [New York Times]

Now, you are probably saying to yourself, “Duh, this is the same story every year, because Americans are just gargantuan, repulsive blobs.”

While the last part of your statement is medically correct, the first part is COMPLETELY WRONG. Last year, “only” 37 states got more obese, while the fat rate was steady in the other 13 states.

Once again, the relatively healthy folk of Colorado have the nation’s lowest rate of obesity, with “only” 18.9% of its residents meeting the medical definition of Obesity — the rate was 16.9% just three years ago and was probably 1% in the 1930s, the last time we had a Depression.

Tell me about a memorable run during the campaign that really stands out.
Oh, my gosh, the one that really stands out I’m embarrassed to death to repeat. I went for a run at John McCain’s ranch a couple of days before the debate with Joe Biden. [...] I fell coming down a hill and was so stinkin’ embarrassed that a golf cart full of Secret Service guys had to pull up beside me. My hands just got torn up and I was dripping blood. …

I don’t remember news reports about it?
Heck no! I made those guys swear to secrecy. [...]

So the Secret Service guys kept silent?
They did! And I have this great respect for them that they’ve kept silent all these months later.

Wow. See that right there is a pretty explosive secret! Wouldn’t want that kind of information to fall into the wrong hands!

Sarah Palin is INSANE.

I’M A RUNNER: SARAH PALIN [Runner's World]

Cashill cleared his schedule for the whole last year to play e-mail detective with “serious people” from most other countries, whom he has labeled with clown names, because of Joe the Plumber.

Since then, I have received helpful contributions from serious people in at least five countries and any number of states and have integrated many of their observations into my ongoing narrative, summarized here. If you are unfamiliar with this research, please read this before going forward.

About a week ago, however, I heard from a new contributor. I will refer to him as “Mr. West.” Like most contributors, he prefers to remain anonymous. The media punishment that Joe the Plumber received has much to do with this nearly universal reticence.

A week before that, I heard from another excellent contributor, Mr. Midwest. Their collective contribution should dispel the doubts of all but the willfully blind that Ayers played a substantial role, likely the primary role, in the writing of Dreams.

What was unnecessary in this investigation was Science.

As a reminder, there is no reliable computer science for determining authorship. In assessing the value of the existing science, think polygraph, not DNA. Polygraph-level scholarship may suffice for harmless speculation about the authorship of Midsummer’s Night Dream, but not for Dreams From My Father. Too much is at stake for the latter.

First, it was necessary to set up Parameters. If each instance of Ayers’ ghostwriting was a boobie, what size bra would it need?

What Mr. Midwest noticed recently is that both Ayers in Parent and Obama in Dreams make reference to the poet Carl Sandburg. In itself, this is not a grand revelation. Let us call it a C-level match. Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library in any case. Both talk of reading the books of Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois and Frantz Fanon among others. In fact, each misspells “Frantz” as “Franz.”

Ayers and Obama, however, go beyond citing Sandburg. Each quotes the opening line of his poem “Chicago.” From Dreams:

He poured himself more hot water. “What do you know about Chicago anyway?”

I thought a moment. “Hog butcher to the world,” I said finally.

From Parent:

“At the turn of the century, Chicago had a population of a million people and was a young and muscular city - hub of commerce and industry, the first skyscraper city, home of the famous world exposition, “hog butcher to the world” - bursting with energy.”

This I would call a B-level match. What raises it up a notch to an A-level match is the fact that both misquote “Chicago,” and they do so in exactly the same way. The poem actually opens, “Hog butcher for the world.”

SOMEONE DIDN’T COVER HIS TRACKS, DID HE?

Serious Person “Mr. West” had much, much more, but if only he could trick the damnable Obama-controlled e-mail machine into transmitting his codes!

Last week, the first email I received from Mr. West had in the message box “759 striking similarities between Dreams and Ayers’ works.” This claim seemed so outsized I did not take it seriously. When I was unable to open the documents, I emailed Mr. West back, asked him to reformat, and then forgot about the email. He resent his documents a few days later.

“The 759″ are all basically direct instances of plagiarism and ghostwriting, a sort of literary “bombing the Pentagon storage room” exercise. What are all of these words that Bill Ayers uses in his two books, and how could Cashill not know them?

Returning to the exotic, in his Indonesian backyard Obama discovered two “birds of paradise” running wild as well as chickens, ducks, and a “yellow dog with a baleful howl.”

In Fugitive Days, there is even more “howling” than there is in Dreams. Ayers places his “birds of paradise” in Guatemala. He places his ducks and dogs together in a Vietnamese village being swept by merciless Americans. In Parent, he talks specifically about a “yellow dog.” And he uses the word “baleful” to describe an “eye” in Fugitive Days. For the record, “baleful” means “threatening harm.” I had to look it up.

Ayers is fixated with faces, especially eyes. He writes of “sparkling” eyes, “shining” eyes, “laughing” eyes, “twinkling” eyes, eyes “like ice,” and people who are “wide-eyed” and “dark-eyed.”

Now Cashill *never* claimed that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s second book, he never SAID THAT, he is not crazy. The Audacity Of Hope was written by, let’s see… ah, that little queer kid who writes all the stuff these days.

A likely suspect for these imitative passages, perhaps the whole of Audacity, is Obama’s young speechwriter, Jon Favreau. Favreau joined the Obama team in 2005, time enough to play that role. The London Guardian reports that Favreau carries Dreams wherever he goes and can “conjure up his master’s voice as if an accomplished impersonator.” If so, in Audacity he played the classic role of the ghostwriter — one who absorbs his client’s thoughts and relates them in a refined version of his client’s voice.

WHY ARE YOU NOT OUTRAGED ENOUGH?

Breakthrough on the Authorship of Obama’s ‘Dreams’ [American Thinker via Salon]