Author: Andrew Sullivan

Today on the Dish we continued to keep tabs on Haiti. More heartbreaking images here, here, and here. A stirring firsthand account here. Brad Plumer explained why the all buildings collapsed and Tyler Cowen dreaded the looming anarchy. You can easily help out.

At last, Sarah Palin sat down with Glenn Beck. Andrew drilled into the interview's deeper and darker meaning here and here. Readers backed him up here and here, another tried to calm him down, and another called out Beck's ignorance. Frum saw it all as therapy and we got a glimpse of the show down the road.

On Prop 8, we collected tweets from the trial, Andrew homed in on a core issue, and DiA conveyed the importance of the courtroom. Up in Massachusetts, Blumenthal assessed the Senate race and Ambinder sensed some moderation from the tea-partiers. Andrew wrung his hands over Israel. More on Iran's ideological split here and the dangers of terrorists and traffic accidents here.

In meth coverage, we aired another visceral account of addiction, Andrew discussed its ties to religious fundamentalism, and a reader dialed him back a bit. We also recognized the role of magazines this decade and noticed the spread of the underblogger model.

— C.B.

A seriously injured boy waits for medical assistance outside the hospital in Port-au-Prince on January 14, 2010, following the devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti on January 12. Desperate Haitians awaited a global effort to find and treat survivors from the quake that left streets strewn with corpses and a death toll that may top 100,000. Hundreds of thousands of homeless, injured and traumatized victims spent a second night on the streets and sidewalks, transforming Port-au-Prince into a gigantic and under-equipped refugee camp. By Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty.

As the right continues its secession from the middle and cocooning in its own media, we see the following press release:

Tea Party Nation has received hundreds of requests for press credentials to cover this convention. Everyone from a small town newspaper in Iowa to Fox News has asked for press credentials. We have had requests from Canada, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Norway, Croatia and Japan. We have been hard pressed to accommodate all of these requests and do not have the space or resources to support the entirety of the press corp. Indeed, we have asked the hotel if they would be willing to provide a press room during the convention. However, given these practical limitations, we have approved the following press organizations:

Fox News

Breitbart.com

Townhall.com

The Wall Street Journal

World Net Daily

Murdoch, Breitbart, and Farah. It gets creepier and creepier.

Felix Salmon weighs in on the financial story of the day:

Overall, any harm done by this tax will be minimal, while the benefit is likely to reach a good $100 billion or so. I call that a no-brainer.

Chait sizes up the politics:

As policy, the tax helps to level the playing field between large and small financial institutions, reducing the benefit of being "too big to fail." (It doesn't go nearly far enough, but it does advance the cause.) As politics, it puts the administration back on the opposite side of the Wall Street bad guys. And it exposes the Republicans, who have indulged in a lot of anti-Wall Street rhetoric that they've had no intention of backing up with any policy substance.

Catherine Rampell rounds up more reactions.

"I remember thinking that Jeff is a different species than I am. That species could easily rip my throat open," – Conan O'Brien, about Jeff Zucker and their relationship at Harvard.

Conan ran the Lampoon; Zucker ran the Crimson. I knew neither. I just remember that everyone hated Zucker and thought Conan was some sort of comic deity.

A reader writes:

I'm glad you're sounding the alarm re the Fox/Palin fusion. Most conservative intellectuals, perhaps fearful of backlash, have chosen to remain silent or else to dismiss Palin as a sort of pop-culture phenomenon. Others–I'm thinking of the bunch at NRO–shamelessly endorse and shill for this madness.

It is only sensible to be concerned about–yes, even to fear–what may come of the alliance between this shrewd, driven, narcissistic woman and the massive propaganda apparatus that has embraced her. We have an obligation to remember what can happen when charismatic leaders seize the imaginations of frightened people and feed them a steady diet of rage and self-pity, embellished by creepy visions of the divine and of national destiny. Here where I live, in rural Ohio, you can feel the impact of Palinism, now so scarily amplified by Fox.

The combination of white racial resentment, high unemployment, and the transformation of the culture, plus simple, grinding fear (of the Other; of the unknown; of blacks and Jews and gays and migrant workers; of anything you care to name) has coalesced into something potentially quite dangerous. Ordinary people are just a pulse away from becoming a mob.

I'm not talking about rednecks and meth-heads, either–you hear the vilest expressions of grievance and rage coming from pleasant-looking, neatly-dressed people in the aisles of the supermarket or under the dryers at the local salon. Many of these people worship Palin. You actually hear them say things like, "Thank God for Fox! Thank God for Sarah!"

A moving segment from the last actual journalist at FNC, Shep Smith. It has more power the longer you watch. A mother who lost five children is driven literally to madness by this insane amount of human suffering:

Jennifer Love Hewitt Bedazzled Her Privates (VIDEO).

Bradford Plumer points to reporting on the sub-par materials and design used in Haitian houses.