Any amateur can speculate that Chris Christie will enter the presidential race, or posit a Mike Bloomberg third-party run, or imagine Hillary Clinton launching a primary challenge against Barack Obama. After all, those three have actually won elections and expressed political ambitions. It takes a real pro to decide to build buzz around someone who not only hasn't ever run for anything, but who's never expressed a desire to run for anything.

Rice, the national security advisor in George W. Bush's first presidential term and secretary of state in his second, is currently a professor at Stanford with the requisite right-wing think tank fellowship. She has not said or done anything "political" in years. But Curl has been hearing things!

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The New Black Panther Party is a cartoonish fringe group of a couple guys who play "'60s radical" dress-up and say mean things about whitey for Fox cameras in order to scare old white people. They have been explicitly rejected by the old Black Panther Party. For some reason, various conservatives have dedicated themselves to proving that this weird, marginal group of Nation of Islam cast-offs is somehow supported by or deeply connected to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular, because, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama, those are two guys who very obviously share the values of extremist anti-white proponents of racial separation.

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• She has done drugs.
• She had sex with a basketball player before she married Todd.
• She is mean and petty.
• She is a bad mother.
• She had an affair after she married Todd.

There is also, obviously, some stuff about Trig's birth, but I have not yet read the book, so I couldn't tell you how far down the rabbit hole that goes.

Here's my reaction to those revelations: Sarah Palin is a person! She's done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she'd dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody's perfect, laugh off the "gossip," and move on.

Sarah Palin might not be smart.

The Palins always prefer grand self-pitying martyrdom to quiet dignity, of course, which is why picking on them can be so profitable: They will always respond, and always help you drum up more publicity for your Palin-attacking venture. Instead of depriving the book of oxygen, they launched a multimedia attack on Joe McGinniss before he'd finished the first draft, and what they accomplished was ... giving him more material and ensuring that even more breathless anticipation awaited the book's release.

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"I'm not ruling anything out," Wurzelbacher told The Ticket in an interview Thursday. He added that he thought it was an "interesting idea" and that people have been asking him to run for office since he confronted Obama four years ago. He's spent much of his time since then on the speaker's circuit, he said, encouraging others to run for office.

"I like the idea of it -- just regular Americans running. If a regular guy runs, right away the media's going to attack him," Wurzelbacher said. "What kind of education does he have? What does he know about this? My answer to that is, regular Americans aren't experts, but dammit, look where the experts have gotten us. Maybe we need some regular guys in there. That's what I've been doing the past two and a half years, just encouraging regular Americans to run. Tell the liberal media to go to hell and I don't care what you guys say about me, I'm going to try to fix this country."

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Arpaio told the tea-party leaders that he expects political pressure, but he pointed out that as the chief law enforcement officer of Maricopa County, he's taken an oath to respond to citizens who approach him about enforcing the law.

Maricopa County Sheriff's Office Lt. Justin Griffin confirmed to WND that Arpaio is "waiting to receive all the documentation and all the investigative material from Dr. Jerry Corsi, and then he will look into the matter and compare it to the Arizona revised statutes."

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I've already written about why I think liberals pondering "buyers' remorse" over Obama is useless and divisive. My discussion with Melber and my Facebook friend made me realize something else. One of my primary complaints about Obama supporters in 2008 was the way so many blamed the Clintons for the GOP crusade against them, as though Republicans would have played fair if only the unethical Clintons hadn't given them Whitewater, Travelgate and most notably, sex scandals. That was unfair to the Clintons, and it was also naive. It hugely underestimated the ferocity of modern-day GOP attack politics. Now I find myself wondering if progressives are over-focused on Obama's perceived shortcomings when it comes to dealing with Republicans, because we likewise don't want to deal with the amoral political savagery of the enemy he faces.

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I ducked the question because I honestly have no idea -- and I have no desire to refight the bruising battles of the 2008 Democratic primary. I'm firmly on record questioning the notion that Obama was the clear progressive, compared to Clinton. There was absolutely no evidence that was true. One advantage to Clinton, I thought, was that she knew the extent to which the right wing would go to sabotage a Democratic president. On the other hand, I had sympathy with people who dreaded a sequel to the ugly Clinton Wars, and thought a different Democrat might have a better chance to avert a rerun of '90s-style partisan warfare. I didn't agree, but I thought that was a fair and reasonable hope.

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LaFave's political differences from Bachmann's go beyond the spheres of LGBT rights, however, as a short clip discovered on Vimeo suggests. Captured outside the U.S. Capitol in 2009 when Obama was sworn in, the video shows a friendly LaFave (who appears with her long-term partner Nia Wronski) telling the videographer of her excitement about the "reawakening of the country" and the "start of something new." Wronski expresses a desire to see more barriers broken down.

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After Giuliani left his (second) wife in 2001 by announcing his infidelity at a press conference, he moved in with his good friends Howard Koeppel and Mark Hsiao, a gay couple who've been together since 1991. They were so close, these three, that Koeppel asked if Giuliani would perform their wedding ceremony. Giuliani said he would, once gay marriage became legal in New York.

Then Giuliani ran for president. And he decided that marriage is between a man and a woman (followed by two more women). His sudden change of heart propelled him to a distant third-place finish in the Florida Republican primary, followed by his exit from the race.

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But Scott Conroy at RealClearPolitics wondered what happened to the tour that was supposed to be heading through the Midwest and Southwest at some point in this rapidly ending month. It seems like Sarah Palin just went home to Alaska, to eat salmon or something.

As Palin enjoys her sojourn to the 49th state, she has not reconnected with key early-state figures like Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and she may have jeopardized whatever political momentum she gained from her recent reemergence in the 2012 discussion. Her political action committee's website still greets visitors with a stale banner, announcing the nationwide bus tour beginning "[t]his Sunday, May 29th."

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Liberals have a tendency (much more pronounced in 2007 and 2008 but still evident) to imagine that Barack Obama is just as liberal as them. Because he's obviously smart, because he dabbled with genuine leftism in his youth, and because he opposed Iraq, liberals think he's actually Paul Krugman, forced by electoral circumstance (or cowardice) to talk and govern like George H.W. Bush. Coincidentally, this is also Newt Gingrich and Stanley Kurtz's thesis. It's silly when they say he's hiding his socialism behind a veneer of centrism and it's silly when liberals say he's doing the same.

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Of course in a confrontation between a Kos blogger named "Angry Mouse" ("who often reacted to the communications director's answers to questions with an audible sigh or a skeptical, elongated 'OK,' according to The Hill) and a professional liar for the executive branch, I must reluctantly side with the blogger. Especially after this, as recounted by Dave Weigel:

Pfeiffer was only booed (lightly) once. That was when he was asked why Obama had filled out a survey in 1996 stating his approval of gay marriage, but had moved right on the issue as president.

"First of all," said Pfeiffer, "someone else filled out that questionnaire."

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Top-rated Mr. Limbaugh has taken the biggest fall. He had a 3.0 share of listeners for his WABC-AM midday slot -- a 33% slide from October and from last April. Mr. Hannity’s afternoon show was down 28% from its fall peak, as was fellow conservative Mark Levin's evening program.

Rush isn't the only right-wing radio shouter with a declining audience. Glenn Beck was dropped by stations in New York, by a chain of stations in Connecticut, and by a station in Madison, Wis.; Hannity and Beck were both dropped in Philadelphia.

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Trump's is not the first, and will not be the last political book that was rendered ridiculous or blatantly incorrect before or very shortly after its release. It's not even the only one released this year! Here are some of our favorite sad, wrong books:

"Where's the Birth Certificate?" by Jerome Corsi, 2011

Oh, there it is! Sorry, Jerome Corsi, but you couldn't have realized that your entirely pointless search for the "long-form" birth certificate would end nearly a month before your book's publication.

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"America has won the war on terror," Bush shouts. "Tonight, I am proud to say, Osama bin Laden is in hell." The president explains that the terrorist mastermind was "taken out" by American forces in Afghanistan, along with the entire senior leadership of al-Qaida. Crowds spontaneously gather in celebration outside the White House, with handmade signs ("THESE COLORS DON'T RUN," "LET'S ROLL") in plain view of cable news cameras set up beforehand according to a White House communications office suggestion. A professional-quality sound system blares Lee Greenwood. Then, fireworks.

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After the president, in a moment of profound humiliation for the nation as a whole, released a scanned copy of his original, "long-form" birth certificate in order to quiet a preposterous television clown whose ridiculous political ambitions are currently being indulged by a political press that knows exactly how ridiculous the entire game is, Newt Gingrich immediately had the perfect Republican response: "All I would say is, why did it take so long?" Gingrich told Talking Points Memo. "The whole thing is strange."

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Huckabee's crime? He supports Michelle Obama's anti-obesity initiative, because modern-day culture-warrior right-wingers do actually think encouraging healthy behavior for children is an infringement on liberty. And because of that suppot, Huckabee is clearly a left-wing Nazi Progressive -- "like John McCain" -- who conspired with McCain to ... sabotage the Romney campaign, in 2008. (???)

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Corsi is best known, still, for his famous "Swift Boat" book, which was full of easily debunked lies about John Kerry, but which was not easily debunked until all the lies had been properly reported and disseminated. Since that book he's gone "full fruitcake," repeating every single right-wing conspiracy theory that comes down the pike, from the NAFTA superhighway to the truly weird "abiotic oil" theory, which says petroleum doesn't come from biological material.

Corsi already wrote his silly Obama book, in time for the 2008 elections, but he forgot to make that book about how Obama was secretly born in Kenya, because that particular conspiracy theory had just been invented at the time. So now he's giving it another go, with "Where's the Birth Certificate."

Drudge's "FLASH" is very, very funny, so I'm just going to reprint it:

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As Cashill explains:

In his definitive 2010 biography of Barack Obama, "The Bridge," New Yorker editor David Remnick features a photograph of a dapper young Barack Obama sitting between his grandparents on a Central Park bench.

The bench is real. The grandparents are real. The wall behind them is real. Barack Obama is not. He has been conspicuously photoshopped in. Who did this and why remains as much a mystery as Obama's extended stay in New York.

The video evidence:

So, yes, this is actually just a picture of Barack Obama's grandparents hanging out in New York, where they did not live and where Obama was attending college, without their grandson, who was I guess secretly in Pakistan, at the time. I think that's what has been definitively proven here. Obama was being a Marxist Muslim in Pakistan.

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So documentarian Alex Gibney writes today of Boehner's recently hired policy director, Brett Loper. Before joining team Boehner, Loper was, naturally, a medical device lobbyist, whose job was to protect the profits of the medical device industry at the expense of, among other things, the federal deficit. And before that, he worked for the gloriously amoral Tom DeLay.

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