Sarah Palin, Thursday afternoon:

“Would you make the birth certificate an issue if you ran?” she was asked [by conservative radio host Rusty Humphries].

“I think the public rightfully is still making it an issue. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know if I would have to bothered to make it an issue, because I think that members of the electorate still want answers,” she replied.

“Do you think it’s a fair question to be looking at?” Humphries persisted.

“I think it’s a fair question, just like I think past association and past voting records — all of that is fair game,” Palin said. “The McCain-Palin campaign didn’t do a good enough job in that area.”

Sarah Palin, Thursday night:

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We hate to let a good idea go to waste, and Pedonator’s inspiration the other night deserves more than languishing in an off-topic comment thread.

So let’s catch up.

Our project is to crowdsource a Sarah Palin biopic. But not just any movie — a musical.

It’s such a fabulous idea, we’re afraid to mention it in public without registering it first with the Writers Guild. Think Sound of Music meets Little Shop of Horrors. Think Gypsy meets Rocky Horror. Think My Fair Talibunny.

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Just to round out today’s discussion of People With Stuff Up Their Arse, we offer this breaking news from the Gateway to Fergus:

An inmate at the Merced County Main Jail had a homemade knife surgically removed from his body cavity last month, according to Merced county Sheriff’s officials.

He now faces concealed weapons charges.

The inmate, 19-year-old Rance Johnson, approached corrections officials Nov. 18, complaining about an item stuck inside his rectum, causing pain…

Johnson told investigators he had no idea what the item was, that he’d found it in an interview room and tried smuggling the weapon by inserting it into his rectum. The item was wrapped inside tissue paper and placed in a sandwich bag before it was inserted.

Since we’re ignoring the Senate healthcare debate this week, we’ll note here that the invasive-rectum procedure was covered by generous taxpayers. “It’s unfortunate,” said Sheriff Mark Pazin, “but it’s a mandated surgery.”

Merced County Main Jail inmate’s stashed ‘shank’ is surgically removed [Merced Sun-Star]

We apologize for not getting to this yesterday (we had already filled our Bummer Quota), but it’s still worth notice:

Republican senators feel burned by Al Franken — and not by his old jokes.

The Republicans are steamed at Franken because partisans on the left are using a measure he sponsored to paint them as rapist sympathizers — and because Franken isn’t doing much to stop them.

“Trying to tap into the natural sympathy that we have for this victim of this rape — and use that as a justification to frankly misrepresent and embarrass his colleagues, I don’t think it’s a very constructive thing,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in an interview.

It’s a complicated issue, as such things are. An employee of defense contractor KBR was “drugged, beaten and gang-raped at age 19 when stationed in Baghdad.” KBR argued that gang-rape is a condition of employment subject to arbitration. An appeals court disagreed. Franken submitted an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill that denied funding to private contractors who require that gang-rape be subject to the same procedures as overtime and coffeebreaks. Thirty Republican Senators opposed the amendment, saying that regulating gang-rape is an unnecessary intrusion into the free market.

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In what would have been a watershed moment in American political discourse, Sarah Palin was almost required to speak English at a book-tour stop:

Officials at the Minnesota mega-mall this week told reporters planning to cover the Minneapolis-area stop on Palin’s Going Rogue book tour they must address the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate who resigned as governor last summer by her old title — a common honor, actually, which normally is accorded to former governors.

But the mall also was banning foreign reporters, permtting “only English speaking press.” That’s not a common requirement.

Palin, who normally speaks in a dialect combining Dog Whistle and Chalkboard Fingernail, is a special-needs candidate whose few encounters with English-speaking press have not gone well. But now that the Mall of America has backed down, we’re stuck again with tortuous run-on sentences that would put Faulkner to shame.

Palin’s English-only book-stop: Mistake [Chicago Tribune, via Think Progress]

A recurring theme of our recent blathering has been disappointment: Not that Barack Obama isn’t living up to our impossibly high standards (we’ve expressed serious reservations for more than a year), but that we’re finding it increasingly difficult to get excited about anything he does. Symbolically and substantively, it’s one misfire after another.

Yes, we know he’s not John McCain, and we’re grateful for that. Just as the Nobel committee is grateful he’s not George W. Bush. But relief will only take you so far.

We didn’t sign up for that. We signed up for what we hoped would be a refreshing generational change in American politics. Although Sarah Palin quickly disabused us of that fantasy.

Still: Has it really come to this? Is the best we can say about Obama that he’s not one of them?

We’re looking for some help here. What have we overlooked? What about Obama truly represents a force for good, and not just a coffeebreak from evil? What remains to keep us from retreating into comfy cynicism?

And no, Bo doesn’t count.

Is Chris Schenkel still around? No? Then somebody else will have to call the splits next June when Sarah Palin fronts for the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America in Vegas:

“Sarah Palin is a great friend to the bowling industry and we’re so proud and honored to welcome her as our keynote speaker at International Bowl Expo 2010,” said Steven Johnson, executive director of the BPAA.

“Regardless of your political affiliation, Ms. Palin is a force in American politics and culture. Her presence underscores the impact and importance of bowling, one of our country’s leading national pastimes and a growing $10 billion industry.”

We’re sticking with our suspicion that Talibunny is conducting market research for her Six Flags Over Wasilla theme park. But it could just as easily be argued that she’s taking an early swipe at Barack Obama for his lack of grace on the lanes.

Sarah Palin strikes new ground as keynote speaker at International Bowl Expo 2010 [Bowling Digital]