Except for when she lapses into hilarious self-parody...

So I guess we'll be seeing her a lot.

Just a few weeks, before the Palin/Joe the Plumber "Left Behind Tour" begins anew in Iowa for 2012.

But in the mean time, please enjoy and be completely and utterly horrified at this video which shows just how violent irony can be (seriously). A moment clearly inspired by the video to the left.

Stay tuned for when Palin recreates the Odessa Steps scene from the Battleship Potemkin, which she'll tell you her great grandmother virtually saw from Juneau -- after you tell her where Odessa is.

The Derek Trucks Band - Key To The Highway.

What's on your mind tonight?

They closed early. That the entertainment business is notoriously resistant to macro-economic trends is a truism stemming from how well cheap entertainment managed to do during the Great Depression. It hasn't really be true-- or cheap-- since then. And this time around the Biz is being crushed by its own Bush-era greed and excesses. Despite boosterism from free-market admirerers, the entertainment business, especially the sectors involved in overpriced tickets, has been hemorrhaging red ink for a couple years; it's getting worse now.

Nobody in the Biz wants to talk about it-- or admit that ticket sales are in the toilet... or already flushed down it. I'm on the Board of a business 100% dependent on concert ticket prices. We spent virtually our entire last Board meeting discussing how to cut back... on everything, and to prepare for the worst case scenario. I could be wrong about this but I think most music biz types shudder if they hear they or one of their projects has been mentioned in Bob Lefsetz's newsletters. His latest starts with a definitive attack on one of rock's last remaining heroes: "Neil Young is a jerk." I like Neil-- and his music-- a lot and I wouldn't categorize him in the same terms as Lefsetz. But Leftsetz isn't altogether wrong about one thing-- something that goes way beyond Neil. Concert tickets are way too high-- part of a bloated system as unrelated to delivering good music as HMOs are to delivering quality health.

With even the Wall Street guys unable to pay the ridiculous prices for great seats, the business is learning a big lesson. It is not recession-proof. As for the bands who've toured the same markets, year after year, with no new hit material? How many times do you need to see the Stones? They don't sell out anymore.

Some artists still do, usually one with cult audiences like Madonna. With tickets to her shows selling between $350 and $55 a pop, every single one of her recent concerts sold out including 4 nights at Madison Square Garden, 2 nights in Chicago, 2 nights in Oakland, 2 nights in Boston and a night in East Rutherford, NJ. Lucky for her all those shows were before the gays decided to put all their boundless energy into fighting for equality and against Mormons. And if you're not Madonna... ticket sales are looking dismal, even beyond dreck like Charlie Daniels, Five For Fighting or the must-see nostalgia combination of Great White, Asia, Dokken and Sweet. Last week a panic-stricken Ticketmaster started experimenting with a new concept: easing off on brutally ripping off their customers.

Ticketmaster is famous for fees that concert goers love to hate. Now the ticketing giant is experimenting with dropping those fees in an attempt to gain customers in an increasingly tough economic environment. Tickets for the Eagles' upcoming concert will be available without any Ticketmaster convenience fees, and if you print your tickets at home, no delivery or handling fees.

The predatory monopolists have worked out a deal with The Eagles to bring down the cost of the tickets so that they band wouldn't suffer the fate of so many older artists and have to cancel their tour.

High prices are turning off concert goers, even though promoters have actually persuaded musicians to stop gouging their fans and have actually started lowering ticket prices slightly after two dismal years. As the reality of the Bush Economic Miracle and what appears to be a full-fledged economic collapse, it may be too late. And even if fans are willing to scrape up the money for overpriced tickets, there is widespread fear in the music biz that they will be spending far less on merchandise and at the concession stands, a major source of income.

The sports teams also having a tough time, having similarly priced themselves into a precarious situation in hard times. In Friday's NY Post Phil Mushnick reported an ugly scene in Memphis where the Knicks played the Grizzlies. Watching on TV he writes that "nearly every shot showed rows and rows of empty seats. The most expensive seats, from courtside and roughly 25 rows up, were almost all vacant. And expensive seats for Grizzlies games are on the NBA's low side, $100-$200 per. And this was just the Grizzlies' third home game of the season. The box score claimed that attendance was 10,129, eight more than the club's previous game in the 19,000-seat FedEx Forum. But if that were the case, most patrons were seated directly behind the TV cameras." An eyewitness claims there were 4,000 people there. And it gets worse.

In Sacramento, where the Kings would regularly sell out the 17,300-seat Arco Arena, the home opener was played to at least 5,000 empty seats - and attendance has fallen since. Indiana, Philly and Charlotte are way down, too. By late spring, you'll likely hear and read that a couple of NBA and NHL teams are close to suspending operations, unable to make rent and payroll, that corporations that bought arena naming rights and businesses that bought big-ticket advertising are behind in payments. There will be more layoffs than layups, more undertakers and no underwriters. There will be no new vanity-purchase buyers, no consortiums with which to consort. Even the new reliable among team investors and sponsors-- casino owners and operators-- are bleeding millions.

If you follow hockey, you probably already know what a disaster that's been. Pat Hickey reporting for the Montreal Gazette paints a bleak picture that is bound to get much, much bleaker.

In Atlanta, they have experienced the three smallest crowds of the past four seasons. Attendance has dropped 15.7 per cent to 13,384. The Islanders are on life support as owner Charles Wang tries to get a new arena to replace the Nassau Mausoleum, which is the oldest and smallest building in the NHL. The latest rumbling is that a frustrated Wang would be willing to sell to the right bidder or, if he gets desperate, to Jim Balsillie. The Lightning and Devils are down, and Columbus, which sold out every game in the 2001-02 season, had only 10,424 fans attend a Monday night game against Anaheim. That was the smallest crowd for the Blue Jackets in the history of Nationwide Arena. Cheaper seats have helped Dallas turn things around, but attendance has dropped considerably in Colorado, where the Avalanche once sold out 487 consecutive games. That streak is a memory. Attendance is down 6 per cent in Los Angeles, where the Staples Centre is filled to 83.4 per cent of capacity. But my spies there tell me that - as is the case in many other arenas - the nightly attendance figures are inflated.

Economic reality isn't going to be denied and vast empires based on unrestrained greed are crumbling before our eyes. Lucky so many of us get by so well with virtual entertainment these days.

Two excellent articles came out today on the climate Sarah Palin finds herself in as her administration prepares the FY 2009 budget, and she has to settle down to doing her real job again, for a change. Palin has never gotten along with big oil, which has always been fine with me in many respects.

Even before she was selected as John McCain's running mate, however, Palin often claimed more credit for both the higher extraction rate now charged oil companies for removing Alaska's minerals, and for the AGIA deal. On the campaign stump this fall, she constantly claimed all the credit for these events. Every single bit of it.

From several angles now, the AGIA deal with TransCanada is beginning to look more than a little dicey. Their financing package is nowhere near complete, and the environment for getting money now, both in small and large sums, let alone mammoth sums, is changing daily hourly.

Tony Hopfinger, at Alaska Dispatch, has written an informative article about Palin's appearance Wednesday morning before the Resource Development Council. Here's a revealing extract:

When Palin was introduced at the Resource Development Council's meeting at the new Anchorage convention center, she was met with modest applause. Nobody stood up and the claps lasted less than 10 seconds.

She opened her remarks with what has become her post-presidential election stump speech in recent weeks: “The last few months have been an amazing experience.... The time went so quickly... I got to briefly expand my wardrobe. I got to meet a few VIPs, you know, those that really impact society, like Tina Fey.”

No laughs for this laugh line from these hard-headed poker players, though.

Ex-Alaska legislator Andrew Halcro has begun today what I think will be a series of articles on the prospects of both AGIA and Denali. He opens with this:

"Even in my own energy producing state, we have hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of clean green natural gas, and we're building the nearly forty billion dollar natural gas pipeline, which is North America's largest and most expensive infrastructure project." --- Governor Sarah Palin - Vice Presidential Debate - 10/2/08

In the 1996 blockbuster "Top Gun", there is a scene where a young hot shot pilot gets called out by his commanding officer after a risky stunt; "Maverick, your body is writing checks your butt can't cash."

It seems history is repeating itself for at least one self proclaimed maverick. After spending nine weeks travelling from one end of the country to another, promising the people of America that her leadership is building the largest and most expensive natural gas pipeline in the history of the United States, Governor Sarah Palin returns home to face the music; her leadership is building no such pipeline.

Maybe she thought she'd get elected and could leave the truth behind for others to handle. Maybe she thought Joe the plumber and the press had short term memories and would forget about her pipeline lies if she ran for national office again in the future. Or maybe, just maybe, Palin didn't see anything wrong with being extremely liberal with the truth when talking to the so called elite liberal media.

But whatever the reason for her being less than honest with Americans about her actual success in trying to manage the development of Alaska's economic future, this "Top Gun" looks more like the movies character Goose than the movies character Maverick.

Halcro goes on to describe a working relationship between the major producers and TransCanada that has deteriorated since the time AGIA went through the legislature and was signed by Gov. Palin:

And given all of her tough talk on the campaign trail about how she "took on big oil" and "broke up their monopoly" while jump starting this project, Palin now finds herself boxed in by her tough talk. Yes, it will be big oil who will decide the fate of this project, not Sheriff Palin.

The best explanation comes from Hal Kvisle, CEO of TransCanada, an independent pipeline company. "Eventually, it's come down to the big producers. ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and BP are the ones most likely to hold the shipping commitments, so whatever kind of project is put together has to be one that works for the producers," Kvisle said.

In fact, three days after the Alaska State Legislature approved Palin's pipeline plan to nowhere, where they granted Kvisle's company up to $500 million in taxpayer money and exclusive rights, Kvisle was quoted in the Toronto media as saying, "Nothing goes ahead unless Exxon is happy with it." And my friends, Exxon ain't very happy.

Go read Andrew's article. It is informative, to say the least. You might skip Wesley Loy's blog entry at the Anchorage Daily News political blog niche. Unless you're looking for more evidence of how much better our Alaska blogs are managing to cover the new ground upon which celebrity Sarah is going to tread this coming legislative session. The ADN clearly doesn't get this yet. Loy manages to pimp pump up Palin, while dissing Senator-elect Begich at least twice.

Dpt of Justice file photo

The Wall Street Journal reports Attorney General Mukasey collapsed tonight:

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed while giving a speech on national security to a prominent conservative lawyers' organization.

Mr. Mukasey, 67 years old, appeared to slur his words about 20 minutes into his speech at the Federalist Society's annual dinner, held in the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington. Mr. Mukasey was defending the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies in front of an audience of about 400.

FBI agents, who provide security for the attorney general, rushed to his aid before he fell to the floor of the podium.

Mr. Mukasey appeared to be somewhat alert as he was carried on a stretcher by District of Columbia fire department medics. He was heard to say he thought he had fainted. A medic could be heard to tell the attorney general "just relax."

He was taken to George Washington University Medical Center and appeared to be alert and in good condition, according to the D.C. Fire Department.

Mr. Mukasey became attorney general in 2007 and took over a department demoralized by the controversial tenure of Alberto Gonzales.

h/t Boo Radley

Israel is also refusing to let any reporters enter the area. Reporters without Borders has appealed to Defense Minister Ehud Barak to provide access and the Tel Aviv-based Foreign Press Association has

“condemned the ban, stressing that the closing of the Gaza Strip to the foreign press ‘not only prevents international public opinion from being informed about the humanitarian crisis unfolding there, but also draws attention to the coercive measures taken by Israel and engenders the suspicion that this is a deliberate attempt to cover up what is happening.’

Some news is filtering out from humanitarian workers and it's not good:

Mohammed Musalam, 39 years old, sits outside his home in the dark. A father of nine, he has been unemployed since the Israeli blockade started nearly 18 months ago. He is totally dependent on charity and assistance from aid agencies.

“I wait day-by-day to get food supplies from the UN. These supplies mean life itself for me and my family. The latest Israeli closure is tightening our lives even more. I am sitting outside my dark home because I feel like I am suffocating from the way we are living.

“The blockade does not only target Hamas, but it also targets my children’s food, water, ability to study and now even the food aid we rely on from relief agencies,” Mohammed said.

“I have not been cooking with gas since the start of the blockade because of shortages, and I bought a small electric water heater. We have been using it for cooking. Now that we don’t have electricity, I have been burning wood to cook for my children. In other words, the Israeli blockade is taking us back to a primitive age.”

Since shipments of cash are also blocked, the 98,000 Gazans who receive welfare are without funds and even Gazans with an income are now facing a lack of food. Abdelnasser al-Ajrami head of the Bakers Association detailed the situation today:

"Out of a total of 47 bakeries, 27 are already closed, while another 20 are only working part-time because of power cuts and a shortage of fuel."

The blockade also prevents medical supplies from entering Gaza. A report from Oxfam on the Al Shifa hospital which is operating on generators (which are also threated by the blockage of all forms of fuel) details the conditions residents are facing:

Another vital department in the same hospital is the premature baby department, which cares for more than 28 babies a week. The department depends on electrical incubators for the newborns. In the hospital there are currently 27 babies in 26 incubators. The other three incubators the hospital has, as well as a ventilator, are out of order. This is due to a lack of spare parts, denied entry to Gaza because of the blockade.

The UN has issued appeals to Israel to lift the blockade as has King Abdullah of Jordan in a secret meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense minister Ehud Barak.

The Israeli reaction has been quite clear, as the LA Times reports. Government officials are “claiming that the shortages are being exaggerated to stir international sympathy for Gaza.”

The Israeli human rights group Gisha responded, noting that “Both sides must refrain from harming civilians, instead of deliberately targeting them,” and pointing out that Israel is violating it’s own promise to the Israeli Supreme Court to allow necessary supplies of fuel to Gaza. Gisha’s attorney Yadin Elam sent a letter to the Israeli Department of Defense demanding “the immediate reversal of all restrictions on the transfer of fuel, cooking gas and humanitarian products into the Gaza Strip" and insisting:

that the military live up to the dictates of international law, which prohibits act of collective punishment - and avoid deliberately depriving civilians of vitally needed basic supplies.

The closure of the crossings into the Gaza Strip is not undertaken to prevent a concrete threat against a specific crossing but is done with the illegal intention of inflicting pressure on the civilian population in an attempt to affect the behavior of militants and political elements. The closure of the crossings is therefore in violation of the absolute prohibition in International Law against collective punishment.”

Rather than protest the blockade, President Bush will meet with Olmert on Monday "to review Middle East peace efforts that the U.S. leader had once hoped would produce an agreement before he left office."

Don't hold your breath.

I said most of what I'm going to say about the Waxman-Dingell fight in this post (though I will reiterate my concern that Waxman--who will now be in charge of shepherding healthcare through the House--has said almost nothing about it thus far).

Except that, now that Waxman has won, I think it crucially important that we find someone very effective to replace Waxman at Oversight. Waxman leaves some important unfinished business at oversight, including his investigation into the White House emails, the Bush Administration's lackadaisical policy towards leakers (including Scooter Libby), and recent oversight into the financial crash. Furthermore, Darrell Issa is by most accounts set to take over as Ranking Member on Oversight.

Oversight is one committee where the Ranking Member has the means to be a real pain in the arse, and Issa is a bigger pain in the arse--and more effective--than most Republicans. Finally, I don't want to make the mistake the Republicans made; I want someone to exercise real oversight over the Obama Administration. For all these reasons, we need a real leader replacing Waxman at Oversight.

I recommend either Dennis Kucinich or Elijah Cummings.

The senior member on Oversight, after Waxman, is Edolphous Towns. I don't know all that much about Towns--though I find it telling that, as someone who watches a great deal of Oversight's hearings, I've almost never seen him contribute substantively (for that matter, I rarely see him, at all, at full committee hearings). That, plus he's the recipient of some big love from the Pharma/Health Care and Finance industries--two industies that must remain targets of oversight.

Kucinich and Cummings are both relatively senior members of the Committee. And both have proven to be the kinds of effective 

Kucinich currently serves (opposite Issa) as Chair of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee (and many of the most critical oversight issues in the next Congress will be domestic ones). And his work on impeachment shows that his staffers have the ability to do great work and Kucinich has the ability to deliver them. Plus, he's the perfect kind of gadfly to keep our new President honest. I suspect that Kucinich would have a tough time getting the votes in a straight fight, but if there are multiple candidates, he'd have a shot.

Cummings would probably fare better than Kucinich in a head to head fight (and having one African American take this seat from another African American would limit the sensitivity on the CBC, which worries that the Dingell loss represents a challenge to seniority and therefore to the chairmanships of other CBC members). And he is relentless in hearings at insisting on Congressional oversight--as his attack on chumps above makes clear.

I'm trying to suss out who is bidding for this position. But in the meantime, I think that both Kucinich and Cummings would make excellent choices for the job.

Strong stuff. Nice to see FDL up on the screen at MSNBC.

Take a look:

It’s about 1,836 confirmed dead, 705 missing, and the ten of thousands still displaced years after Hurricane Katrina.

It's about the ethnic cleansing of one of America's oldest cities, the purging by gross negligence of one of our cultural treasures.

That's why I'm still angry at Sen. Joe Lieberman for his dismal record under the 109th and 110th Congresses, and why I am still fuming that he retained his chairmanship of the Governmental Affairs Committee under the next session of Congress.

There are critics who say that Lieberman is a problem with which the people of Connecticut will deal in the future when his seat is up for re-election.

Not so, or at least Lieberman's seat in the Senate is a different issue, and one I do truly hope that Connecticut's citizens will get right this time.

But the chairmanship of the Governmental Affairs committee is a matter for the entire nation to address, on behalf of the 1,836 dead and 705 missing and many more disenfranchised in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The dead and missing have lost their voice, and we owe it to them to replace him with an effective chair who will not only investigate why the levees failed, why the federal government responded in advance, during and after the storm so poorly.

And we, the living, owe it to ourselves that a Senate committee chair not fail to do their job ever again.

It’s not about revenge or retribution, as others have labeled the anger many progressives feel about Lieberman. It’s about doing the job one’s agreed to do, or getting replaced for failing it. It’s about getting to the bottom of unnecessary loss of American lives, and making sure that the miseries that felled them do not happen again.

And I'm not going to forget as time goes by that Lieberman has failed those 1,836 and 705 every day he does not conduct a hearing on their behalf. Nor am I going to forget that he fails every damned day he does not conduct a hearing on our behalf to prevent such losses from happening again.