‘Going Rouge’ Rounds Up the Usual Suspects to Demolish America’s Sweetheart Sarah Palin
Ready, aim, fire! Imagine 47 liberals toting guns — a truly frightening thought — with Caribou Barbie, Hockey Mom Sarah Palin tied to a stake, blindfolded, wearing designer clothes or a Carhartt ranch coat, her $350 designer glasses perched jauntily on her perfectly coiffed hair, bravely facing her firing squad.
That’s what I took away from Going Rouge: Sarah Palin — An American Nightmare (Health Communications, 336 pages, $15.95) edited by two senior editors at The Nation magazine, Richard Kim and Betsy Reed.
Among the mildest contributions in this compilation of mostly previously published material is that of Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation. It’s titled “The Sarah Palin Smoke Screen.” You’ll have to rely on the table of contents to find it because — like Palin’s own best-selling Going Rogue — this paperback lacks an index. What is it with publishers these days failing to provide something as essential as an index in nonfiction books?
At the other extreme, foaming-at-the-mouth Matt Taibbi of The Rolling Stone drops the F-bomb on Sarah to the point where even I — far from being a fan of the faux populist from Wasilla — began to feel sorry for her, something I didn’t when I read her ghost-written memoir. Mad Dog Palin is Taibbi at his rug-chewing best, to change the metaphor.
The editors literally rounded up the usual liberal suspects from AlterNet, Slate, the Daily Beast, Salon and, of course The Nation for inclusion in Going Rouge, writers like Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine), Katha Pollitt, Gloria Steinem, Hanna Rosin, Rebecca Traister, Robert Reich, Christopher Hayes, Joe Conason, Frank Rich and Jim Hightower, who derided — in Sarah Palin’s Faux Populism — Palin’s alleged populism by comparing and contrasting her to real populists like Mary Ellen Lease, Ida Tarbell, Mother Jones, Molly Ivins, Barbara Jordan and Granny D. Hightower is always a perceptive commentator and he’s worth reading here.
Juan Cole compares the Devine Sarah to the current president of Iran in Sarah Palin, Meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Cole says both are former governors of northwest frontier states; “both are known for saying things that produce a classic Scooby-Doo double take in their audiences,” Cole writes, adding: “Both appeal to a sort of wounded nationalism…identifying themselves with the common soldier.”
The editors included contributions by Alaskans who rip off the Phantom of the Opera mask they accuse Palin of wearing, but lacking are essays or articles by conservatives who were on record as being opposed to Palin from the start, people like Kathleen Parker and David Frum. Other contributors note the opposition of conservatives to the selection of Palin, but they also comment on those — like William Kristol — who fawned so fulsomely over Palin.
The essays cover in eye-crossing detail Palin’s fundamentalist Christian beliefs, the Troopergate affair, her lack of geographic knowledge and, her husband Todd’s membership in the Alaska Independence Party, her quitting in the middle of her term as governor and — in the case of the women contributors — how lacking she is in talent and experience compared with Hillary Clinton or even possible GOP veep candidates like Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe or Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. There’s a lot of repetition in the contributions, genuine overkill in the manner of Maureen Dowd in her 2004 book about George W. Bush, Bushworld.
While many of the contributors to Going Rouge dismiss Sarah Palin, others bring up the specter of Richard Nixon and even George W. Bush, saying we should never underestimate — or is it “misunderestimate” — the ignorance of the American voter.
Going Rouge preaches to the liberal choir, but independents and conservatives may benefit from reading this book of essays by the nation’s liberal chattering classes. Like it or not, Sarah Palin matters to many Americans and the thought of her running for President in 2012 either delights or frightens, depending on your political views.
Book Review: Decoding The Lost Symbol By Simon Cox
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Navigation tools these days can be pretty advanced and accurate and the amount of data available should be enough for anyone, even in the more remote locations. Yet good old fashioned ‘asking for directions’ is still usually the best way to find a place and navigate in an unknown area, the digital solutions, while accurate, fail to convey the data in a way that makes more sense to us humans. Google realized this and made extensive studies trying to improve the experience by making directions in Google Maps read out more like the ones one of your friends give you, with plenty of landmarks and other visual cues to help guide you. 

Wikipedia is in the midst of its sixth annual fund raiser to keep the site going. Run by the Wikimedia foundation, a non-profit organization, and with no revenue source of any kind, Wikipedia relies solely on donations to finance its operations and pay its 35 employees. The 2009 fund raiser has been running for more than a month now and a recent plea from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has managed to shatter all previous record for the amount donated in a single day.
It looks like Google is trying to recoup on the past year going on an acquisition spree after staying quite on that front for a while. It has done some pretty big deals, AdMob, On2 and some smaller ones and is now said to be in talks with local business directory and review site Yelp and is apparently willing to shell out $500 million for it.



Twitter doesn’t have the best record when it comes to stability or security and it looks like all the recent hires haven’t done much good. Twitter’s famed Fail Whale doesn’t show up as often as it once did, but the site still goes down more than other similar services its size. This time, things are more serious though, the site has been hacked and defaced by Iranian activists. Twitter is now back up and it has responded officially, though there aren’t that many details at the moment other than it was a DNS attack and that users were redirected from twitter.com and several subdomains to a site set up by the attackers. 



