More of this, please.

This is how you deflate the Palin mystique.

Turns out when she wasn’t paying herself a travel stipend to live at home, she was perfecting a glow in professional tanning bed she installed in the governor’s mansion.

What’s the difference between a hockey mom and Sarah Palin? A $35,000* tanning bed.

[*TPM estimated value]

More of this, please.

Photo: Janette Beckman/Retna

Infinite Jest author and Rolling Stone contributor David Foster Wallace was found dead in his Claremont, California home Friday night. His wife called police at 9:30 p.m. to report she had discovered Wallace hanged himself. He was 46.

In 2000, Wallace covered John McCain on the campaign trail for Rolling Stone in a piece called “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub: Seven Days in the Life of the Late, Great John McCain.” He also contributed “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s” in October 2001, which describes his personal 9/11 experience in Illinois; that piece is included in the 2005 collection Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Earlier this summer, Wallace published an expanded version of his McCain piece as McCain’s Promise. (more…)

Why does Sarah Palin talk to Americans one way in Kodiak, and another way in Carson City?

Most of what we’ve learned about Sarah Palin from the insta-vetting of the past two weeks reinforces what we already knew:

She doesn’t know boo about national affairs. Her family life is colorful. She’s a fundamentalist Christian and a rabid anti-environmentalist, whose only relevant experience for the national stage is her familiarity with drilling and pipelines.

Most of these are seen as assets by her supporters who are either with her on the cultural front or see in her a telegenic spokeswoman through whom they can give voice to a neoconservative agenda that Palin seems all too happy to parrot.

There are two facts, however, that stand out as damaging:

1) She made the Alaskan tax payer “reimburse” her for more than 300 nights of travel lodging expenses — for nights she spent in her own home.

2) She asked American taxpayers to fund the study of the mating habits of crabs and of harbor seal DNA as part of an astonishing record of spending more than $700 million on pork in fewer than two years as governor.

The first dovetails perfectly with McCain losing track of his houses, and it cuts against her woman-of-the-people cred by making her seem like another pampered politician.

Image: Foreclosure signs. Voiceover: In these uncertain times, John McCain and Sarah Palin can sleep easy at night. One has so many houses he can’t keep track of them all. The other charged taxpayers hotel rates… to sleep in her own bed. Barack Obama has a plan… The attack ad writes itself.

The second works because it’s precisely the kind of “wasteful Washington spending” that John McCain has for decades preeningly crusaded against.

Voiceover: John McCain promised to make the abusers of federal earmarks “famous.” Well… He’s made the biggest pork-barrel spender in America his running mate. Followed by a list of Palin’s absurd pet projects.

The rest, near as I can tell, is just noise.

Democrat Jennifer Brunner is sadly mirroring the same partisan mischief Republican Ken Blackwell was infamous for when he was Secretary of State.

She’s disqualifying what may be thousands and thousands of McCain-campaign printed absentee ballot request forms because of a technicality in which voters failed to check off an extraneous box that affirms they’re a qualified voter.

This is plainly partisan, legalistic voter-disenfranchising bullshit and Jennifer Brunner — a onetime recipient of a Profile in Courage award for her whistleblowing against insecure electronic voting systems — ought to be ashamed of herself.

“I’m going to raise the level of political dialogue in America, and I’m going to treat my opponents with respect and demand that they treat me with respect.”

–John McCain in January 2008