Alaskan blog Palingate, which broke the story on March 3, additionally serves up some compelling speculation on the mystery of why Sarah Palin was standing in front of a snowmachine in her TV commercial spot promoting the Iditarod, which is rather famously a dog-sledding event. Opportunistic product placement or spontaneous scene propping? You decide.

Beyond that, the jokes write themselves: The CBS story notes that Citgo has been the target of repeated Wingnut boycott initiatives. Palingate includes a video from the 2008 Primary where Sarah admits to a Venezuelan interviewer that she believes Hugo Chavez is a dictator. Chavez responded at the time by calling Sarah a confused “Beauty Queen.” Elsewhere, Salon split the difference by dubbing Sarah the “Hugo Chavez of Alaska.”

Optically, this is a bad look for the Palins. But perhaps embracing foreign socialist Enemy-of-America sponsors and cashing paychecks from dictators is just a “common sense solution” for energy self-sufficiency she hasn’t shared with us yet. 

Later, Whitman contacted a number of reporters to apologize for her vast wealth, which has mistakenly led her to believe that anyone she doesn’t recognize is either the wedding photographer or a member of the catering staff.

The Washington Post has more detail and snarky press reactions here.

Please stop letting your thirteen-year-old nephews write and produce your web ads, especially when the RNC is turning out much more effective and professional-looking videos. Or are you saving money so that you can hand the 2010 elections over to the GOP on the most expensive platter in the world?

Where “literally” equals “metaphorically,” that is:

During an appearance on a right-wing Internet radio show on Monday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called upon voters who oppose the health care bill to get loud.

“Well I couldn’t agree with you more, as to the timing and the sense of urgency,” Bachmann told a caller to the show, Hot Tea Radio. “That’s why with everything within us we need to start literally banging garbage lids together, to create enough noise so that our neighbors and our co-workers realize where the time clock is at this point, because the second hand is literally banging up against 11:59 on the clock on freedom when it comes to health care.”

The people who elected this kook literally eat their own boogers every day when the Clock o’ Freedom strikes 12.

I look forward to tonight’s reflections on the humble, poor black people of the earth, avuncular mustaches, shishkabobs and concentrated numbers of warring religious factions in the HOLY city.

In an encouraging sign that science may yet survive vigorous efforts to replace it with “common sense,” Dan Brown novels and radio call-in shows, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that the End of the World, should it occur, will likely be initiated by something other than CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

The Court rejected an appeal in the case of a woman who was seeking to halt operation of the LHC in order to avert the Earth’s destruction, possibly as a result of the accidental creation of a localized Black Hole, or some other damn thing that only happens in cartoons and Star Trek movies.

Despite the Court’s decision, scientists at CERN remain concerned that the project may yet be shut down by its own Meddling Arrogance boomeranging backwards through Time...or possibly at the insistence of God, who is by His own admission a Jealous Guy.