Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ben Smith gets an email from Joe McGinniss Junior, the son of the non-fiction author. Why does this not surprise me?:

[McGinniss Jr. writes that] "A woman was renting her house and sought out the author because the Palins had crossed her (owed her money for renovations she had done at their request and never paid her for). So she knew McGinniss was writing the book and found him and offered him the house."

The neighbor "turned down more lucrative offers from the National Enquirer who wanted the house so they could 'stalk' and take pictures, etc… She said no," he wrote.

Sargent's reading of the situation:

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Sarah Palin is not genuinely all that upset about journalist Joe McGinniss moving in next door to "stalk" her. I'd say it's likely she sees a clear upside: It gives her grist for exactly the narrative she's trying to spin.

Reader responses to Ralph keep getting better.  One writes:

I grew up in San Marcos and in high school took a summer job at Aquarena where one of my job requirements was to dress up in a giant Ralph costume. I had to walk around and hug children (or, make them weep in fear at the sight of a large pig). Trust me, dressing in a Swimming Pig costume, in the summer, in Texas, is not a pleasant experience.

Another:

I remember Rufus the Sadistic Swan well. My twin baby sisters had their birthday party at Aquarena Springs in about 1978 or '79. Rufus invited himself, and at some point attacked Margaret and ate her birthday present – a cheap wristwatch from our grandmother. Some park attendants later found my emotionally scared sisters and told them that Rufus had vomited up the watch, and Maggot could have it back. She declined – wisely I think.

Another:

Oh my, GLURPO!  I am not normally afraid of clowns, but this early photo of Glurpo really freaks me out.  According to the caption, "Glurpo was apparently quite the tourist attraction at the San Marcos Texas 'Aquarena,' where … he would swim out of an underwater cave and horrify small children by mutely laughing and sucking his insane rictus up against the glass like a parasitic eel."

Another:

Aquarena has since become an educational area that is part of the Texas State University system, renamed the Aquarena Springs Center. I took my SCUBA diving certification dive there. All of the old stuff from the park show now lies at the bottom of about 10 meters of water, accumulating algae and providing a home for the fish. The faux-submarine (somehow involved in the mermaid show) has been scuttled, and makes a lovely underwater tour.

A Flickr user says of the above photo, "Let's just say I'm glad the woman, not the man, is feeding the pig in this manner."

Timothy Egan has a devastating column on the former half-term governor's record in picking candidates to campaign for:

A week ago, Palin backed a candidate for Senate in Washington state, Clint Didier, a former professional football player who also owns a farm and has railed against excessive government spending.

But at the same time Palin was calling Didier “a commonsense constitutional conservative [who] will help put our country on the right track,” it was revealed that he took at least $140,000 in federal farm subsidies.

But there's no real inconsistency here. Didier's approach is what you call Alaskan Palin conservatism: big government socialism, masked by pioneer bullshit.

The Big Picture focuses its lens on the gulf. For "top kill" news, the Houston Chronicle is consistently updating their page on the spill.

A reader writes:

I don't blame Palin for being creeped out by Joe McGinniss moving next door. I don't think she is handling it very well, and is upping the "creepy quotient" with her own behavior. Still, there is a stalker element to this.

What could possibly be the reason that McGinniss felt that he would serve his readers by parachuting into the subject's backyard? I'm sorry, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but Palin is right.  It's downright weird. Do we want a society where people – celebrities, politicians, or anyone for that matter – have to worry that they can never have a moment of privacy again?

Another writes:

Moving to Palin's town for research is one thing, but moving next door is clearly meant to provoke and mock. It's childish and unbecoming and makes me extremely unlikely to ever read the book. The proper approach to someone like Palin is the kind of reasoned, thorough criticism your blog takes. Petty stunts, on the other hand, are counter-productive and only give Palin legitimate fodder in her otherwise baseless anti-media crusade.

Obviously electrifying:

A reader points me to the precedent of the Ixtoc oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 1979. The rate of discharge was 10 – 30,000 barrels a day, compared with 12 – 19,000 now estimated for the BP spill. And the oil kept gushing for ten months before it was plugged. 3 million barrels of oil hit the coastline. It could be worse.

Max Fisher rounds up reaction to the escalating tension between Pyongyang and Seoul sparked by the North's sinking of a Southern ship in March. Fred Kaplan surveys the not-so-cold war between the two countries, which have clashed at least ten times since 1999. Hitch vents:

The dirty secret here is that no neighboring power really wants the North Korean population released from its awful misery. Here are millions of stunted and unemployable people, traumatized and deformed by decades of pointless labor on the plantations of a mad despot. The South Koreans do not really want these hopeless cases on the soil of their flourishing consumer society. The Chinese, who have a Korean-speaking province that borders North Korea, are likewise unwilling to suffer the influx of desperate people that is in our future. I can't see the United States accepting them in its present mood. Kim Jong-il's junta knows this, as it knows that we are not prepared to fight him. So the deliberate mass starvation and the nuclear blackmail are two aspects of the same depraved system. (Incidentally, if that system doesn't deserve to be called evil, I don't know what does.)

Drezner proposes banning North Korea's soccer team, which is participating in its first World Cup finals in 44 years. The lameness of that sanction, and the fact that it would hurt mainly those poor souls playing footie at the pleasure of their deranged dictator, merely adds to the poignancy.

At the same time, here is an example of an unfathomable evil that the US simply cannot end, but can merely contain as best we can.

Adam Ellick posts an unembeddable video on the Pakistani press's infatuation with conspiracy theories. The attempted Times Square bombing was the latest instance of mass denial:

Eight years ago Pakistan had one television news channel. Now there are 26 news channels, half of which broadcast 24 hours a day. But most of what is on offer hardly qualifies as rigorous, fact-based news. Rather, shows follow a familiar formula of a roundtable discussion by middle-aged men hashing out political conspiracies.

If that problem sounds familiar to an American audience, consider that in Pakistan it has taken on daunting proportions.