Author: Andrew Sullivan

Michael Moynihan claims I was inconsistent in calling out Limbaugh and lauding Reagan:

As Reagan biographer Richard Reeves wrote, "Reagan and [Vice President George H.W.] Bush had had lunch most weeks, eating Mexican food, telling dirty jokes, and talking sports most of the time." In his anti-Reagan book Sleepwalking Through History, former Washington Post columnist Haynes Johnson writes that among "his vast repertoire of stories were innumerable raunchy ones that he told with pleasure and at great length." In Dutch, Edward Morris relates that Reagan used to tell rude jokes—"gross stuff"—in front of women.

But, as Michael concedes, there is a big difference between private jokes and public broadcasts. Show me a broadcast or public statement where Reagan even approached the Limbaugh style.

An internet campaign for the banker who was caught NSFW surfing on live TV has been launched. Sign the petition. Money quote:

The operators of the website, who are based at Shepherd's Bush in west London, have given their list of reasons for saving Kiely: He seems like a nice bloke; the pictures weren't hardcore; he has suffered enough and finally, there's just too much political correctness in this world anyway.

This whole kerfuffle is retarded. Even the model he was gawking at (see above) has signed the petition.

(Photo: Miranda Kerr by Astrid Stawlarz/Getty.)

This snow catastrophe – ending civilization as we know it – is because of El Nino.

If you missed my post on this last night and still believe everything the US government tells you about the Gitmo detention and torture camp, check it out.

I told you more was coming:

Nearly 3,000 pages of e-mails that Todd Palin exchanged with state officials, which were released to msnbc.com and NBC News by the state of Alaska under its public records law, draw a picture of a Palin administration where the governor’s husband got involved in a judicial appointment, monitored contract negotiations with public employee unions, received background checks on a corporate CEO, added his approval or disapproval to state board appointments and passed financial information marked “confidential” from his oil company employer to a state attorney. While 1,200 separate e-mails were released this week, 243 others were withheld by the state under a claim that executive privilege extends to Todd Palin as an unpaid adviser to the government.

There’s more truly disturbing stuff about his enmeshment with state and business:

The still-secret e-mails between Todd Palin and senior officials reach into countless areas of state government and politics:

potential board appointees, constituent complaints, use of the state jet, oil and gas production,  marine regulation, gas pipeline bids, postsecondary education, wildfires, native Alaskan issues, the state effort to save the Matanuska Maid dairy, budget planning, potential budget vetoes, oil shale leasing, “strategy for responding to media allegations,” staffing at the mansion, pier diem payments to the governor for travel, “strategy for responding to questions about pregnancy,” potential cuts to the governor’s staff, “confidentiality issues,” Bureau of Land Management land transfers and trespass issues and requests to the U.S. transportation secretary.

Also withheld: a discussion of how to reply to “media questions about Todd Palin’s work and potential conflict of interests.”

And people wonder why so many Alaskans were afraid of them.

On live television, a reporter is caught looking at naughty pictures on his monitor at work.

Mystery solved. Palin did make a call.

Here's a sobering chart from Calculated Risk. Krugman's take. And Leonhardt's.

Chait hands out some Xanax. Full context here.

"She's got some problems, and I don't think she realizes the problems. It's a shame, because I don't think she knows what she's gotten herself into," – Tea Party organizer Robin Stublen, on Palin's role at the convention this weekend.