It could be worse, I realized. I could live here.

Cold comfort, perhaps, but comfort nonetheless. And so, for providing the enforced monotony that only a dull road trip can provide, and the bleak void to which to compare my own relatively full life, I am grateful to the state of Nebraska. Nebraska has a special place in my heart.

It has no place, however, on a map of the United States.

Let me explain: California is a state. New York is a state. Texas, for the time being at least, is a state. And they deserve to be. They’re big, they’re boisterous — but most crucially, they’re populated. Thirty-seven million people live in California, four million in Los Angeles alone. New York is home to almost 20 million people. If California were a country, it would have the eighth largest economy in the world. If New York City were its own state, it would be the 12th largest — and in my humble New Yorker opinion, the best.

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"If you have already got 96 percent of what you want," Ferguson told Salon, "why not take the remaining 4? That's where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it's really dangerous for the country."

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By stripping down Lyndon Baines Johnson to his essence, Robert Caro has himself become an American legend. Since the publication of "The Path to Power" in 1982, Caro has transformed LBJ’s life into a cautionary tale of Shakespearean dimensions. In some wonky circles, the release of a new volume is heralded like the Summer of Love release of “Sgt. Pepper's.” Can Caro possibly top his “Revolver"?”

I am proud to be one of those wonks.  Anticipating the release of "The Passage of Power," I went full-metal LBJ, and reread every word of the previous 1,040 page “prequel” – “Master of the Senate.” Much like catching up on the last season of “Mad Men” before the new one begins, I time-traveled like the hero from the new Stephen King JFK-themed novel back to 1958, as the Master Senator (and Master Biographer) prepared for their rendezvous with world history.

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Every politician's memoir, especially if written while the author is still in office, is a series of self-serving half-truths. There's really not much benefit to total and complete honesty, and most politicians are convinced enough of their own righteousness that they probably don't even think of their omissions and distortions as dishonest. So, everyone Haley trashes in her book says she is lying. That is not that surprising!

Among the points of contention:

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Who are these people? What business do they know? I am going to go out on a limb and say that these people know the business of political punditry. Part of the business of political punditry, like most jobs in media and publishing, is logrolling.

The back of Matthews' "Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero" features advance praise from historian and frequent "Hardball" guest Doris Kearns Goodwin ("Chris Matthews is a masterful storyteller"); historian, writer and occasional "Hardball" guest Douglas Brinkley ("I give it ten gold stars!"); biographer and Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson ("an awesome and delightful book"); and frequent MSNBC commentator and batty old aunt Peggy Noonan ("an insightful piece of work and a great time!" italics hers); My favorite blurb of all is from NBC anchor and amateur comedian Brian Williams: "Chris Matthews takes on a giant of American life—and triumphs." So in this book, Chris Matthews ... fights JFK? And beats him?

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This is defining adult down. Mitt Romney is tall and has nice hair. He looks like a dad in a Cialis commercial. He's on a stage with smug adulterer Newt Gingrich, serial sexual harassment clown Herman Cain, crazy-eyed witch-burner Michele Bachmann, and out-of-date George W. Bush impression Rick Perry. So, sure, Romney, why not?

What went wrong for Perry, though? I mean besides the fact that he is pretty obviously both dimwitted and lazy. According to Shrum, who quotes the book at length, what went wrong for Perry is that he did not prepare for the debate by reading Chris Matthews' "lyrical new book 'Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,'" which Shrum quotes at length.

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Abramoff pleaded guilty to defrauding his lobbying clients through over-billing and double-dealing. He admitted to bribery and wire fraud. In his interview, Abramoff explained basically How He Did It, and it turns out that it's really not that hard to "bribe" a member of Congress. Offer their staffers jobs and give the members lots of gifts and campaign donations. Then you can write whatever you want into pending legislation, more or less.

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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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Dick Cheney's memoir apparently mentions a lot of books he read and enjoyed. Mostly books about wars and frontier settlers and so on. Good Republican books. But the Washington Post's nonfiction book editor notes that Cheney doesn't mention reading anything while actually in office as vice president:

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The Newsweek Michele Bachman cover posted newsstand sales no higher than most other Newsweek covers. The "crazy eyes" cover moved 47,225 copies, according to Newsweek, though AdWeek says other industry sources say it sold somewhere between 35,000 and 48,000. Is that good? Well, "the magazine's single copy sales averaged 46,561 per issue in the first half of 2011."

We are talking only about newsstand sales, not total circulation, but this does mean that Bachmann's incredibly controversial and very buzzy crazy eyes did not "move the needle," as annoying people say. Of course, the actual article about Bachmann, inside of the eye-grabbing cover, was pretty bland. But since when does the quality of the journalism have anything to do with newsstand sales?

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The reports are in about the books President Obama is looking at on his annual trip to Martha’s Vineyard. According to reports from the Los Angeles Times and the AP, Obama purchased five books on his trip to the Vineyard bookseller Bunch of Grapes: Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante.

The second wave came when, according to Alexis Simendinger, White House aides listed for reporters the three books Obama brought with him to the Vineyard: two more novels — Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land — and one nonfiction work — Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

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That's what she told the crowd assembled at Women's National Republican Club in New York, where she was apparently booked to speak at the same time that she was booked to be interviewed on cable news by that guy from "The Apprentice." The New York Observer was there:

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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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Everyone already knows everything about that election. It will be fun, I guess, to watch famous people pretend to be other famous people. For a while. But that particular pleasure usually wears off about three minutes into your average "SNL" political cold open. And we are all already intimately familiar with nearly everything our dramatis personae will do and say.

I, for one, would rather watch a film dramatizing the 1948 election. Or 1876! Almost any close election that happened prior to the age of 24-hour cable news and blogs would be infinitely more interesting to watch unfold on television than the one everyone in the nation just sat through.

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But, honestly, I don't understand what led him to actually call in to "The Opie and Anthony Show." I mean, there was some interesting, informative discussion of Rumsfeld's history and politics and so on. I think. But all anyone will remember is that comedian Louis C.K. repeatedly asked Rumsfeld if he was a lizard person.

This is an edited version of the interview, as uploaded by Louis C.K.:

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The fun parts of "In Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: A Memoir of Our Tumultuous Years" (woof) are, of course, the e-mails from Palin herself, who always comes off as everyone's worst BlackBerry-addicted boss. Here's what she wrote to her staff after an invitation to speak at a fundraising dinner was rescinded because she never confirmed her attendance (she is very bad at showing up to meetings or scheduled appearances on time, or at all):

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So the paperback version of his book "No Apology" is out, and he has excised and altered various passages that he had originally included in order to make himself look like a moderate pragmatist, because he realized that "Tea Parties" are still in fashion.

As the Boston Phoenix reports, there are two significant changes: The book no longer offers even a qualified defense of the stimulus, and now it makes sure the reader knows that Mitt Romney really hates "Obamacare," even though it's basically a national version of Mitt Romney's Massachusetts healthcare plan.

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In November 1972, shortly after Nixon was reelected, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to leave the executive branch and maybe run for office again. (He had been, prior to the Nixon administration, a congressman from Illinois.) He looked to have his eye on the Senate. First, though, he needed some good foreign policy experience -- he'd been stuck running the Office of Economic Opportunity, and then the Cost of Living Council, both organizations with mandates that Rumsfeld didn't agree with -- and so he had a meeting with the president, to discus his options.

Nixon was in a chatty mood, and Rumsfeld recorded his every thought, for his files.

First, Nixon was unimpressed with the entirety of the United States Congress: "The President said that the Senate and the House were a joke. There was no strength there."

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"Rambling" does not even do it justice, actually. Highlights:

• "[Nixon] said 'politics is a game of inches' and that we had 49 touchdowns and they, the Democrats/McGovern, had one touchdown and a field goal -- the field goal being Washington D.C.."
• "The President then said, 'Richard Nixon doesn't shoot blanks.'"
• "Next week we should think through how to best serve, and that he will have the individual conversations with each. He said we are too busy doing things instead of thinking. He said that Richard Nixon does more thinking because of the discipline he imposes on himself. We ought to think through where the Administration ought to go. He said that with one exception he will have no appointments on Sunday afternoons because he has missed enough football games already."

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Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says in a new book that he wanted to oversee the initial reconstruction of Iraq following the United States’ invasion of the country but he was rebuffed by President George W. Bush.

"Bush didn’t cotton to the idea," Rumsfeld writes in his yet-to-be-released memoir Known and Unknown, excerpts of which were obtained by POLITICO.

"'What if we had a problem with North Korea?'" Bush asked, according to a scene that Rumsfeld said took place just before the 2003 invasion.

"'Well, Mr. President, if that happened,' I replied, 'I would come home immediately.' The President thought about that for a moment. Then he shook his head. 'No, Don, you need to be here.' I should have pressed the point harder."

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