From Sarah Palin’s tome on the fugi­tive lifestyle, a chap­ter epi­gram attrib­uted to John Wooden:

Our land is every­thing to us… I will tell you one of the things we remem­ber on our land. We remem­ber our grand­fa­thers paid for it–with their lives.

Con­fused why the leg­endary UCLA bas­ket­ball coach would be writ­ing about his ances­tors sac­ri­fic­ing their lives for land?

From the arti­cle “Back on the War Ponies,” by John Wooden Legs, which appeared in the anthol­ogy, We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of Amer­i­can His­tory, edited by Nathaniel May, Clint Willis, and James W. Loewen:

Our land is every­thing to us. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes talk the Cheyenne lan­guage to each other. It is the only place where Cheyennes remem­ber the same things together. I will tell you one of the things we remem­ber on our land. We remem­ber our grand­fa­thers paid for it–with their life. My people and the Sioux defeated Gen­eral Custer at the Little Big Horn.

And that’s why you should always read to the end of the person’s name.

(via Huff­in­g­ton Post)

If you haven’t seen Jon Stew­art and Jim Cramer’s Thurs­day night smack­down, you’ve missed a fine piece of tele­vi­sion. Like Stewart’s Cross­fire appear­ance, Stewart’s seri­ous beef with Cramer is just another reason why cable news and its per­son­al­i­ties have gained more trac­tion rather than less in the age of viral media.

A friend and I dis­agreed on the claims of this New York Times arti­cle on Stew­art when it came out, but I think the Cramer saga sup­ports my agree­ment with article’s main claim in ret­ro­spect. Which is that Jon Stew­art may be more trusted than any other news anchor because the comedy format allows him to avoid the con­straint of taking non­sense in good faith, a fea­ture that is part and parcel of being a SERI­OUS NEWS PERSON entails. He can openly mock what deserves to be openly mocked.

Last night, it was hard not to admire Cramer to some extent for sit­ting there and taking it to the chin over and over from Stew­art. Cramer was meek, apolo­getic, accept­ing, when he didn’t have to be. After all, Cramer is only one man whom Stew­art was destroy­ing sym­bol­i­cally for the anger of an entire class of people who des­per­ately want to see jus­tice of any kind done.

Poor Bris­tol and Levi.  The stars are aligned against them.  First, the baby.  Or, wait, before that, the genealogy. 

The latest is that Levi’s mother has been arrested for the abuse of Rush Limbaugh’s favorite treat, also known as hill-​billy heroin: Oxy­Con­tin.  This might put a damper on the birth of Gov­er­nor Palin’s first grand­child, due this weekend.

I think Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin are on to some­thing about the sub­text of all this Ayers stuff bil­low­ing up out of the McCain cam­paign these days. Martin writes:

At best, this is to say that Obama doesn’t believe in Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism. At worst, and this is where the new ad goes, it means Obama doesn’t suf­fi­ciently love Amer­ica and is actu­ally apart from it.

And Smith concurs:

It’s not about an obscure ’60s rad­i­cal; it’s about chal­leng­ing Obama’s Amer­i­can­ness, which is why the lan­guage of the ads, delib­er­ately or inad­ver­tently, echoes the lan­guage of viral emails that do that more directly.

But in another sense, I think Martin and Smith stop a step too short in their analy­sis.