Sure, we could blame it on a malfunctioning database, but who are we kidding: It’s you, taking your vengeance on our groundbreaking series of posts, “Sarah Palin: Get Over Yourselves, She Can’t Be That Bad.” You’re dumbstruck by our sudden advocacy of plucky personality politics, and rather than comment, you’re acting like a sulky bunch of goth kids.

Well, fine. Until you grow up enough to treat us with some level of respect and deference, we’ll just leave the comments broken, and you can spend the day with the whiners at Kos and TPM. Then you’ll come back on your knees, begging us to fix the comments, and maybe we will if your anguish pleases us.

And maybe we will anyway. Soon as we figure out how.

Fannie and Freddie? So last week. Yesterday it was Lehman Brothers going down, Merrill Lynch being sucked up by Bank of America, and AIG holding a $40 billion gun to the head of the Fed.

That would be AIG, “the nation’s largest insurer”, collapsing by Wednesday if its credit rating slips a notch this morning.

And all because you — yes, you — took out an exploding mortgage to pay for your exploding credit-card debt to cover your exploding student loans to get into a good college so you could enjoy financial freedom for the rest of your life.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

A Chaotic Sunday Opens Wall Street’s Week [WSJ]

Last night’s SNL debut was enjoyed by everyone watching on Sarah Palin’s jet. Well, almost everyone:

There were howls of laughter from the sizeable press corps covering Palin’s first foray on the campaign trail without her running man as a chaperone.

But, from the front of the plane, silence. The flight attendants assured us Palin and her entourage were watching. What she thought, though, is anybody’s guess.

Quick-thinking campaign operatives picked up on Chicago Bureau’s remark and issued a release claiming the front-cabin silence stemmed from the following 85 minutes, not the first five.

Live From New York, It’s Sarah (Tiny Fey) Palin! [ABC]

It was either this or Yet Another Contrarian Electoral Essay. We figured you could use a break.

The Onion [via Sully]

TPM scores it a ban; we need to review the footage with the copy desk. Here’s the play from the Times:

Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.

But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”

“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

That would be Laura Chase, Palin’s “campaign manager” during her 1996 run for Wasilla mayor, when the town had less than 5,500 residents. “Bejeepers” is Alaskan for “holy shit that bitch is running wild.”

The McCain campaign responds in a related AP story that “Governor Sarah Palin has never asked anyone to ban a book, period.” Normally we’d parse that for nuance and spin, but since Geezer now favors the efficiency of repeated outrageous lies, we won’t bother.

Instead we’ll have a look at “Pastor I Am Gay“, the other book earning Palin’s Seal of Squeal. Written by Howard Bess, a “liberal Christian preacher” — we’ll pause while you reread that — from nearby Palmer, the book was on the shitlist of Palin’s church, the Wasilla Assembly of God. Bess says the rival church tried to force his book out of stores, and that librarian Mary Ellen Emmons (now Baker) told him several copies disappeared from the now-famous town library.

Must be a sale on scandals today. Buy Censorship, and we’ll throw in Homophobia for free!

Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes [NYT]

GOP campaign downplays Palin book-banning inquiry [AP]

“The McCain campaign said Gov. Palin opposed the bridge to nowhere, but now we know she supported it,” said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor in a statement. “They said she didn’t seek earmarks, but now we know she hired a lobbyist to get millions in pork for her town and her state. They said she visited Iraq, but today we learned that she only stopped at the border. Americans are starting to wonder, is there anything the McCain campaign isn’t lying about?”

Palin never in Iraq, campaign now says [CNN]

If there’s one thing we do fear this fall, it’s not the increasingly whimsical attack ads, but the Rovian ground game. While we remain confident that 51 percent of the American electorate will come to their senses soon enough, we’re not at all confident they’ll actually be allowed to, y’know, vote.

Let’s start with a taste of Andrew Hacker’s article in the latest New York Review, which reminds us of the score to date:

Requiring a driver’s license to vote has a disparate racial impact, a finding that once commanded judicial notice. To apply for the state ID card that Indiana offers as an alternative, moreover, nondrivers must travel to a motor vehicles office, which for many would be a lengthy trip…

The Indiana decision [Crawford v. Marion County Election Board] will not only make it harder to add new people to the rolls; many who had previously voted without photo identification are now required to produce an official photograph. If Marion County (Indianapolis) has the same proportion of unlicensed voters as Milwaukee County, I count it as having more than 44,000 black residents who will be needing transport to motor bureaus to ensure that each item in their nondriver ID application has been properly filled in. Extended nationwide, this means that a lot of on-the-ground assistance is going to be needed.

And if that’s not enough to grab your attention, here’s the breaking news from Wisconsin: state attorney general J.B. Van Hollen has filed a lawsuit against the state’s election board, insisting that it crosscheck driver’s license registrations on voters who registered or changed address since January 1, 2006.

an election official said the lawsuit could force clerks to check data on about 1 million voters. And critics accused Van Hollen — a Republican serving as the state co-chair of John McCain’s presidential campaign — of filing the suit for partisan gain.

We won’t even bother listing suspicions about The Company Formerly Known As Diebold, or the integrity of its equipment in the best of circumstances. It’s enough to note that concerted efforts to Block the Vote are already underway, in states where denying the franchise to significantly large numbers of American citizens would be beneficial to a campaign too desperate to lose.

In other words: It’s the Ballots, stupid.

Obama: The Price of Being Black [NY Review]

Van Hollen’s voter-check lawsuit sets off a tempest [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]