What does Sarah Palin owe John McCain... and what would she be without him?

Why is Sarah Palin "supporting a candidate [John McCain] that's held in very low regard to the tea party movement"? A caller asked Rush Limbaugh that on yesterday's show, and he said:

[I]f you're Sarah Palin, the one thing you know is that if it weren't for John McCain, nobody would know who you are right now.... And there's, you know, she has some loyalty there. I'm more puzzled by Scott Brown endorsing McCain and then having McCain come into his district so Brown can campaign for him.

I know why she's doing it. Look it: I haven't spoken to her about it, and I don't even want to put words in her mouth. I can only address this were I to be in her shoes. And she's a Republican, and she's made the case that she's a Republican, and this guy put her on the ticket, and had that not happened, she'd be "Sarah Who?"  She owes him something....

Okay, now, look, those of you out there in the tea party that are miffed at Sarah Palin and at Scott Brown, I just want to remind you of one thing, like I said the other day.  If Sarah Palin had not endorsed McCain, can you imagine what the press would do to her?  Can you imagine the refrain: "Oh, he's perfectly fine to be president, you'd run on the ticket with him as president, but he's not good enough to be Senator from Arizona?"  They would kill her.  And in the case of Scott Brown, McCain was the first senator to openly support Scott Brown.  He was being totally ignored by every other Republican in the Beltway.  It's the same deal, folks, it's just loyalty.  It just is.

Now, I think that's plenty of explanation for why Sarah Palin is supporting McCain and not helping J.D. Hayworth (who is challenging him in the Republican Primary).

But I want to talk about the idea Palin is indebted to McCain for bringing her into the political spotlight when he did. Is Palin better off because of that? She is what she is now because of that — because she was plucked unripe, tasted, and sneered at. She and we will never find out what would have happened if she'd been allowed to ripen through a term or 2 as Governor of Alaska and attempted a run for President on her own, building support, gaining seasoning, practicing dealing with debates and interviews while the stakes were still low and the press would be disarmed and friendly.

Just as we will never know The Other Hillary — the Hillary who would have evolved without Bill Clinton — we will never know The Other Sarah. The woman with a male sponsor, subordinate to a man — she may get very far but can she gain the ultimate trust, the Presidency? I have an intuition that our first woman President will be someone who fits the set with The Other Hillary and The Other Sarah.

"Sheryl had checked herself and her 12-year-old daughter into a hotel Wednesday night and returned home Thursday to find it ablaze and Stack gone."

Before his suicide plane crash, Joseph Stack had scared his wife and daughter out of their house.

If only they scored...

... sportsmanship.

"Who do you think made the first stone spear? That wasn't the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire."

"It was some Aspberger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn't even have a recording device to record this conversation on."

Said Temple Grandin to the Wall Street Journal, which is, presumably, responsible for misspelling Asperger.

I mean, really, Aspberger? What is it? Cleopatra's last meal?

Ah! I am distracted by a worm! We all have our mental quirks and orientations, and the point is: The world benefits from the diversity of human minds. I'm inclined to tap out endless assorted bloggings to the web, and Temple Grandin's precursor chips away at stone and invents the spear.

Grandin opposes the "handicapped mentality" some people take toward kids with Aspergers:

"When I see these kids with 150 IQ and their parents want to put them on Social Security [disability], it drives me nuts." These kids "will come up to the book table and start talking about 'my Aspergers.' Why don't you talk about becoming a chemist, or a computer programmer, or a botanist?"

She continues: "It's important to get these autistic kids out and exposed to stuff. You've got to fill up the database." Silicon Valley and the tech companies are like "heaven on earth for the geeks and the nerds. And I want to see more and more of these smart kids going into the tech industry and inventing things—that's what makes America great."

Ms. Grandin lives in a simple apartment in Fort Collins, Colo., and has used the profits from her books to put students through school. "Four PhDs I've already done, I'm working on my fifth right now. I have graduate students at Colorado State—some of them I let in the back door, like me: older, nontraditional students. And I've gotten them good jobs."

"You know what working at the slaughterhouses does to you? It makes you look at your own mortality."

"When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now," she says. Making the lives of others better, doing "something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple."

So Aspergers is not just an aptitude for designing technical things. It also opened a different path into morality.

Did the skater Johnny Weir deliberately allude to Picasso's "Boy with a Pipe"?

After skating in the Olympics last night, Johnny Weir got a wreath of roses, which he wore on his head as he waited for his scores:



And here is the famous painting:

At the Red Stripe Nightclub...

... you can frame your involvement with the people you encounter.

Manly trousers.

These are a little edgy — they're by Isabel Mastache — but I approve:

Meade said: "Yeah, I need a pair of those trousers to wear with my fivefinger shoes."