Sarah Palin's rogue book tour made a pre-taped stop in Chicago today for the former Alaska governor's much-hyped appearance on "Oprah."
Palin dropped some doggone fascinating tidbits during the interview. She said she has no plans to run for president in 2012. Well, actually she said it's "not on my radar," which is Politician for "It might be over the horizon."
That might ease the worries of conspiracy theorists convinced that the adorable political celebrity could ring in the 2012 apocalypse. On second thought, no, it won't convince the "anti-" crowd of anything.
Oprah Winfrey, who supported her hometown senator, Barack Obama, in the election, questioned Palin about her unintentionally hilarious interviews with Katie Couric. Palin refused to refer to Couric by name, instead calling her "the perky one." Gosh!
Don't worry, plenty more to come after the book's official release tomorrow. There's a five-part Barbara Walters chat on ABC and a long radio conversation with Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.
As entertaining as the Oprah chat was, we also like to watch the comments from fans and haters. Did Oprah go too easy on Palin? Some said, You betcha. But others admitted that Palin is starting to grow on them.
We grabbed some of the best we found on Twitter. Here they are (unedited):
Chicago politics, where voting is such a revered civic duty that people do it even after they're dead, cold, stiff, stuffed, boxed and buried beneath the permafrost for years, has now come to D.C. with the Obama administration.
This afternoon comes the most encouraging economic news, courtesy of our keen-eyed buddy Rick Klein over at ABC, that the Obama administration's $787-billion economic stimulus has, for example, thankfully created 30 new jobs in a little-known rural corner of Arizona at a cost to American taxpayers of only $761,420.
That works out to only $25,380.67 spent to create each individual job.
Seems like a lot per slot, but those 30 folks must be happy to be employed again and paying taxes.
This will be a real feather in the cap of Vice President Joe Biden, who's been left behind and assigned by the ever-campaigning president to monitor the stimulus plan, its spending and effectiveness moving into the crucial midterm elections of 2010. Might the Democrats snatch that House seat?
So the people of that 15th Congressional District in staunchly Republican Arizona should be pretty happy about this.
Trouble is, there is no 15th Congressional District in Arizona. None. Nada. Zip. Zero. Doesn't exist. Not in Arizona. Not even on paper at the Democratic National Committee. There are only eight. Period.
But the administration's much-vaunted recovery.gov website reported these jobs as being created there.
Could well be a computer glitch. Lord knows humans would never make such a dumb, misleading mistake, even in politics.
Well, it looks like these ladies got the memo about Blue Monday.
This is Barbara Walters of ABC, shown here on the right, posing with the latest celebrity she's interviewed in her very long, diligent career of interviewing famous people about things we didn't know we wanted to know about them. Like their favorite tree, for example.
Walters is very good at it. Such conversations powered by public curiosity have proved addictive to Americans in a long tradition of popular American journalism since Dolley Madison captured the public's fascination as first lady for not one, but two, presidents -- her actual husband, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson, a widower who in those days couldn't really bring his black mistress in as White House hostess.
Anyway, about the latest, biggest political celebrity ever, Walters might happen to mention some of her favorite moments with Palin every few minutes on "The View" this week, which also happens to be on ABC.
It's a match made in PR heaven: A politician whose supporters can't wait to see....
(New UPDATE: Monday 5:02 p.m. OK, it's not funny if you work at the White House. But for everybody else a new video at the bottom of this post will provide some chuckles about how the rest of the world chooses to greet the Japanese Emperor. Hint: It's different than President Obama.)
(UPDATES: 12:22 p.m. Saturday. A brief news video has been added below, showing the greeting in this photograph. Contrary to some claims, the video shows no reciprocal bow by the emperor, who traditionally bows to no one. And we've added a file photo from 2007 of Vice President Dick Cheney greeting the Japanese Emperor at the same residence in a different fashion.)
How low will the new American president go for the world's royalty?
This photo will get Democrat President Obama a lot of approving nods in Japan this weekend, especially among the older generation of Japanese who still pay attention to the royal family living in its downtown castle. Very low bows like this are a sign of great respect and deference to a superior.
To some in the United States, however, an upright handshake might have looked better. (See Cheney-Akihito photo, right).
Remember Michelle Obama casually patting Britain's Queen Elizabeth on the back during their Buckingham Palace visit? America's royalty tends to make movies and get bad reviews and lots of money as a sign of respect.
Obama could receive some frowns back home as he did for his not-quite-this-low-or-maybe-about-the-same-bow to the Saudi king not so long ago. (See photo here)
How times change under Democratic presidents.
Back in 1994 when President Bill Clinton appeared to maybe perhaps almost start to bow to Akihito at a White House encounter, U.S. officials rushed to deny it was any such a thing. And the N.Y. Times chronicled the comedic drama here.
Akihito, who turns 76 next month, is the eldest son and fifth child of Emperor Showa, the name given to an emperor and his reign after his death.
Emperor Showa is better known abroad by the life name of Hirohito. He became emperor in 1925 and died in 1989, the longest historically-known rule of the nation's 125 emperors.
Hirohito presided over his nation's growth from an undeveloped agrarian economy into the expansionist military power and ally of Nazi Germany of the 1930's.
And, later, Japan became a global economic giant. Hirohito, along with Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who authorized the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, were much reviled abroad during World War II.
Historically, debate has simmered over how much of a political puppet Hirohito was to the country's military before and during the war.
Even after Democratic President Harry Truman ordered the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945, there were strong forces within Japan that wanted to continue to fight the Americans in the spirit of kamikaze suicide pilots.
But Akihito's father went on national radio, the first time his subjects had ever heard Hirohito's voice, and without using the inflammatory word "surrender," pronounced that the country must "accept the unacceptable." It did.
As the conquering Allied general and then presiding officer of the U.S. occupation, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, decided to allow Japan to keep its emperor as a ceremonial unifying institution within a nascent democracy.
Tojo, on the other hand, was hanged.
MacArthur treated Emperor Hirohito respectfully but, as his body language in this black and white postwar photo demonstrates, was not particularly deferential.
(But then MacArthur was not known as a particularly deferential person, as Truman discovered just before firing him later. But that's another war.)
Akihito was born during Japan's conquering of China and was evacuated during the devastating American fire-bombing of Tokyo, which was built largely of wood in those days.
The future emperor learned English during the U.S. occupation, but, inexplicably, his father ordered that his oldest boy not receive an Army commission as previous imperial heirs always had.
Akihito assumed the throne on Jan. 7, 1989. Within weeks he began a series of formal expressions of remorse to Asian countries for Japan's actions during his....
...father's reign. In 2003, he underwent surgery for prostate cancer.
In 1959, Akihito married Michiko Shoda, the first commoner allowed to enter the Japanese royal family. That was two years before the birth of Akihito's future presidential guest, Barack Obama.
Joe Biden was already 17 by then. But he wasn't a senator.
(UPDATE: Here's a new video assembled by some clever College Republicans at the University of Connecticut. It's even got music and requires no explanation.
Photo: Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty; David Bohrer / White House (Vice President Dick Cheney is received by Emperor Akihito somewhat differently in 2007); Reuters (Obama bows to the king of Saudi Arabia earlier this year); U.S. Army Archives (Gen. Douglas MacArthur not bowing to Emperor Hirohito after World War II).
With a memoir called "Going Rogue," Palin returns to the place where she earned that title, parting company with the decision by Republican John McCain's presidential campaign to write off Michigan, conceding the economically depressed state to Democrat Barack Obama.
Like any good presidential campaign, Palin's book tour will be conducted from a bus painted with the cover of the book and will be making two to three stops a day.
The rest of the book tour mimics an announcement schedule for a presidential candidate, taking Palin to places she is likely to attract friendly book buyers -- and voters. The highlight reel: Roanoke, Va.; Sioux Falls, S.D.; Sioux City, Iowa; Noblesville, Ind.; Washington, Pa. and Ft. Bragg, N.C.
Big city voters? Forgetaboutit. No L.A., no N.Y., no Chicago, no D.C.
CNN's outspoken and controversial anchor/commentator Lou Dobbs suddenly announced his retirement during his program today, effective immediately.
See the video below.
Dobbs, who's been particularly outspoken on the issue of illegal immigration, said the country's current problems require rigorous discussion based less on partisanship than empirical evidence. He said he'd been under pressure to take a new direction in his life (politics) and he was going to do so in an effort to help save what he called the country's beleaguered system of capitalism.
Over the past six months, it’s become increasingly clear that strong winds of change have begun buffeting this country and affecting all of us.
And some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond my role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving, as well as to contribute positively to a better understanding of the great issues of our day. And to continue to do so in the most direct and honest language possible.
CNN, which isn't doing all that well in recent ratings anyway, has also been under pressure to....
(UPDATE: An updated paragraph has been added below.)
Not that anybody even cares or clicked here on purpose or will gobble up every word because Sarah Palin isn't even Alaska's Republican governor anymore and her GOP presidential ticket lost last year big-time and critics made a lot of fun of her habits and family and her clothing and the way she talks and didn't get an abortion and then quit as Alaska's governor.
And she's got no chance of succeeding in national politics because she's a dim conservative and no one cares anything about her to the point that her book publisher, HarperCollins, only printed 1.5 million advance copies of "Going Rogue," coming out next week.
But first Monday comes an appearance on TV with Oprah, who became a media billionairess by simply boring her audience with what they didn't want to see. (BTW, that interview was taped in Chicago today and Palin reportedly did not say no when asked if she wanted to do a TV show.)
(UPDATE: 7:18 p.m. On her Facebook page tonight Palin reported that Oprah was "hospitable and gracious," the audience "warm, energized and (no doubt) curious"" and the two women enjoyed the "great conversation" so much they went over time; the extra chatter will go on Oprah.com.)
However, just in case there are one or two people out there who remain interested in the ...
First, Van Jones resigned as the Obama administration's green jobs czar after taking a pounding from Fox News' Glenn Beck. The charge: Jones signed a petition seeking an inquiry into whether the Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Now comes word that Anita Dunn, under fire from Beck for saying in a speech to high schoolers that Mao Tse-tung and Mother Teresa were two of her favorite political philosophers, is leaving her post as communications director.
Dunn, handing over the reins to her assistant, Dan Pfeiffer, has led the White House charge against Fox, saying the network is not a news organization but essentially part of the Republican Party. She also said her remarks to the high school students were meant as irony.
Insiders insist Dunn is not a casualty of the Beck offensive, noting that she had never planned to stay in the role permanently, and will remain at the White House as a consultant.
With the H1N1 swine flu continuing to spread faster than the government's creaky distribution system can get out the vaccine, Americans' confidence in the Obama administration's ability to prevent a nationwide pandemic of the deadly illness is crumbling.
A new CNN/Opinion Research Poll of 1,018 adult Americans finds that a shrinking number are very or somewhat confident about the Democratic administration's plans, while those lacking confidence are increasing.
Although much of the popular media's attention has been devoted to the congressional struggle and vote over costly healthcare reform legislation — and then last week's Ft. Hood shooting that killed 13 and wounded dozens — the threat of a massive pandemic claiming hundreds of lives looms as the kind of public disaster for Obama that the Bush administration's poor preparedness was after Hurricane Katrina.
But steady delays in manufacturing the vaccine and the federal government's distribution have continued. Deliveries of millions of doses have gone way beyond the original schedule. So late are deliveries that some medical experts say an epidemic will be well underway or over before all the doses become available in late December.
Now, the new CNN Poll, taken Oct. 30-Nov. 1 with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 points, finds that the proportion of Americans who are very confident that the Obama White House can prevent a pandemic has fallen from a meager 15% around Labor Day to a worse 11% now. The proportion of those feeling "somewhat confident" has dropped from 44% to 40%.
Meanwhile, the proportion of those lacking any confidence has jumped from 40% to 49%.
Carrie Prejean, some might remember, is the California beauty queen who gained instant ignominy in some circles by agreeing with President Obama's ridiculous notion that marriage is a union between one man and one woman.
This was said to make Prejean outrageously conservative although Obama, who is a male and said the same thing throughout the endless presidential campaign, was ranked as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate a year ago now. That must be what passes for progress nowadays.
Both liberals and conservatives have been bickering and chuckling and pointing fingers of hypocrisy ever since. Also, Prejean had breast augmentation, some keen-eyed critics noted, which is certainly unimaginable for any American female let alone ones successfully participating in the beauty business.
Anyway, Prejean lost her Miss California USA sash when she allegedly failed to fulfill ...
