The announcements at the end of last week, broken first at Malia Litman’s blog, that Sarah Palin would not be renewing her contract with FOX News, didn’t surprise many. It certainly didn’t surprise me.

It did drive Palin back into the news for a few brief hours, though. She even made it to the top of Twitter for about six hours. It may be the last time she’s able to do that.

As of today, September 19 in the Year of Our Tebow 2012, I have been “blogging” for ten (10) years.

Mitt Romney is scared, and his choice of Paul Ryan to be his VP proves it.

What scares him isn’t Obama or Obamacare or higher taxes. What scares him isn’t Harry Reid’s comments about him not having paid taxes over the last decade (that’s more embarrassing than frightening). What scares him isn’t unions or liberal SuperPacs or progressive think tanks who will run ads against him.

What scares him is Kansas. And it scares him a lot.

Sam Brownback just purged the Kansas GOP of anyone who gets in his way, and Romney doesn’t want that to happen to him. But how to avoid it? Maybe naming Romney’s former legislative director as his VP will help.

In her landmark book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America published in 2001, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover working in a series of minimum wage jobs (waitress, nursing-home aide, maid, etc.) to learn what life is like for the “working poor” in America. For most of those thrown off the welfare rolls, women in particular, these were the jobs that were available to teach the former welfare recipients the “dignity” of work. What Ehrenreich found was demanding and exhausting work paying sub-poverty wages so low that workers could scarcely afford to feed and shelter themselves, no job security, no benefits, and no future.

Eleven years later in The American Way Of Eating Tracie McMillan has traced a similar path, only this time exploring the economic and societal implications of how we grow our food, harvest it, ship it, and market it in America. Why do Americans make so many bad food choices? Why do we eat so poorly? What is a “food desert” and why do we have them? The answers reside in the ever more powerful supermarkets with their massive infrastructure and distribution systems which have displaced the local grocers, and with the cookie cutter restaurant chains where the food is not so much cooked as it is assembled from pre-packaged portions which are microwaved and served to a clientele who want a night away from their own kitchens where they, most likely, would have been emptying a salad bag into a bowl while a frozen packaged entree slowly spins in the microwave. Combine that with a populace who increasingly know less about the food they eat and seemingly spend more time watching cooking shows on TV and cooking less because they “don’t have enough time” and we have serious food issues in America.

Fondly nostalgic without ever descending into weepy misty water-colored memories, Lucking Out is populated with a who’s who of the 70′s culture explosion when a new breed of critics reinvented the rules, rock and roll collapsed inward upon itself and reemerged angry and raw, and porn stuck its head out from behind the peepshow curtains and found out that the time was right to come out and play with the non-raincoat crowd.

Beginning with the literary force of nature that was Norman Mailer whose letter of recommendation put Wolcott on the road to what should have been perdition, we also encounter Mailer’s bête noire Gore Vidal, Alfred Kazin, Groucho Marx (describing Marilyn Monroe as having “square tits”), Clay Felker, Robert Christgau ( the “self-proclaimed, scepter-wielding Dean of American Rock Critics” working the kitchen like June Cleaver while wearing only a pair of red sheer bikini underwear), Ellen Willis, Paulene Kael (whose presence permeates almost every page and to whom an entire section is devoted), Lucian Truscott IV, Joan Didion (wickedly eviscerated and hung out to dry by Kael), William and Wallace Shawn, Al Goldstein, Ed Asner, James Toback, Harold Brodkey, Andrew Sarris (whose entourage played the Sharks to Kael’s Paulette-Jets in a critics dance of death), David Lynch, Suzanne Farrell, Alene Croce, George Balanchine, Gelsey (“A name that falls in the mind’s ear like a sprig of mint”) Kirkland, Ugly George (a paleolithic Joe Francis armed with a shoulder-mounted camera and a perpetual hard-on), Tom Verlaine, John Cale, David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, The Ramones, Lester Bangs, and of course, Patti Smith.

News. Analysis. Passionately taking a stand. Flair and style. Where else are you going to find the combination of independent media and kick-ass activism that is FDL? No matter who the writer and no matter what the subject, FDL makes you think — and that’s why you come, and keep coming back.

FDL isn’t in anyone’s Veal Pen, and we don’t get big checks from George Soros, someone’s trust fund, corporate PR accounts, or anyone’s campaign coffers.

Instead, we have members. If you are one, thanks; if you haven’t become one already, now is the time.

It’s time to return the favor, and by “return the favor” I mean that I would like to ask you all pitch in to help keep FDL (and myself) on the intertubes for a good long time. And even if that Rapture thing happens this weekend, hey, it’s not like you can take it with you. So just click on the little “Become A Member” above.

Because I want to help the producers of Galt!: The Musical I slapped a little something together…

In Mark Harris’ classic baseball novel, Bang The Drum Slowly, players and coaches for the mythical New York Mammoths (modeled after the New York Yankees) fill the dead hours spent in hotels while on road trips by adjourning to the hotel lobby where they make a show of playing a card game called “Tegwar”. Tegwar (The Exciting Game Without Any Rules) is a con game whose express purpose is to extract as much money as possible from the passing starstruck fans who want to join in yet don’t want to appear like rubes by admitting that they don’t know what the hell is going on in the game. Befuddled by nonsensical winning hands like Red Rooster, Banjo, Coney Island Tatey or Butchered Hog, but caught up in the glow of hanging out with real live major league ballplayers, the fans are easy pickings and, unsurprisingly, the ballplayers always win.

Next Monday is when the Nobel committee begins to announce the various 2010 prizes. The candidates are carefully vetted, but there must be something that gives one person that little something extra that sets them above their colleagues. A recent blogpost by Paul Krugman suggests just what that something extra might be.