NP: Radiohead, In Rainbows

A couple of things about the big Sarah Palin announcement:

• Anderson Cooper made me laugh hard as he went to break, calling it "a stunning announcement, not just grammatically, but politically."
• About that basketball metaphor. You don't dribble out of a full court press. You pass out of a full court press. You rely on your teammates to find the open spaces against a full court press. You only dribble out of a full court press if you think your teammates are crap and that you're the only player who can get the job done. Now, I've seen it said that she's saying that she's passing the ball to her lieutenant governor, but Steve Benen points out that this isn't all that great of an interpretation, either, for someone who wants to be a leader.
• What do I think this is all about? Palin has always seemed to rely on the sorts of cartoonish caricatures of how things actually work that are generated by the right wing noise machine, so absent any other shoe dropping -- which is a matter of much speculation -- she's trying to be bold and maverick-y by not settling for what other elected officials do when they don't seek re-election for their current office. As Nate Silver puts it in yet another great analysis, " I can't think of someone who has done something comparable to what Palin did today running for national office, let alone winning it." That's sort of the point. She's a maverick!
• I can't totally discount the "crazy like a fox" theory, which is that, come 2012 -- or perhaps more importantly, 2016 -- it's not going to matter because our institutional memory is so short, both in the media and as a culture. This is clearly the talking point that her Republican backers have been running with so far.
• As Gail Collins at the New York Times points out, the timing seems exceptionally weird, as Fridays are normally dead zones for news dumps even without a major holiday. Unless -- and this feeds into the "crazy like a fox" theory as well -- Palin thinks that getting people to talk about her on the Fourth of July will create some sort of powerful, subliminal association with patriotism.
• For a more traditional approach to wading into possible presidential waters. Colin Powell spoke to CNN about less costly, more efficient government, which could be seen as an attempt to woo the more grown-up, fiscally conservative wing of the Republican Party, who tend to be at odds with the neocons and the socio-religious wings -- both of which are big on Palin -- to begin with.