Indeed

Chicago is known for many things - great sports, great food scene, great jazz, and legendary comedy clubs. Yesterday, my roommate Nimit and I were sitting around bored and I suggested we check out one of the comedy clubs. After a quick Google search, I found out that four comedy clubs are withing a short walking distance of my apartment. We decided to check out the closet one, The Playground. We saw it was only $5 on Monday-Thursday so we went in. Seven days a week, The Playground has comedy troupes perform. The show was highly inappropriate... and extremely funny. Because The Playground are all improv troupes, every night, and every show, in theory, could be completely different. I can't wait to check out more Chicago comedy shows; including some of Chicago's more legendary Chicago clubs like i.o. and Second City.

1. Yes, I did watch the whole entire Michael Jackson memorial service yesterday afternoon. I actually thought the service was tasteful and very well organized. Jennifer Hudson performed beautifully, and I even have to take my hat off to Al Sharpton for a very eloquent eulogy. It was a very nice service for the greatest entertainer in Earth's history.

2. One debate I thought was interesting was how influential Michael Jackson has been. Basically, the consensus is that today's mainstream African-American singers have completely shunned Jackson's style - instead aiming for a hyper masculine role while putting down Jackson's androgynous/quasi feminine style. I think that is unfortunate for today's music. Thriller sold almost 75 million albums. Lil Jon and 50 Cent could learn something from the King of Pop.

3. This next bit about Sarah Palin I am taking directly from electoral-vote.com. There has been a ton written about Sarah Palin's resignation in the past few days. The dominant view (Charlie Cook being an exception) is that she is scheming to run in 2012 but her unorthodox move will backfire against her. With a bit of reflection, there is perhaps another story line. The main thing to consider is that she really disliked being governor. She refused to live in the governor's mansion in Juneau and instead lived at home in Wasilla, a suburb of Anchorage 600 miles from the capital. She had endless fights with the Republican-controlled state legislature and has been the subject of over 15 ethics probes and has spent over $500,000 of her own money (which she doesn't have) on lawyers defending herself. The bottom line is that she really hated the job so once she had decided not to run for relection in 2010, why stay at a job that is no fun at all? Palin is also an impulsive person. She makes decisions on the spur of the moment without carefully weighing the pros and cons. Unlike Mitt Romney, who probably has an Excel spreadsheet with a row for every day from now until the Iowa caucuses in January 2012 listing precisely which Iowa villages, hamlets, and farms he is planning to visit that day and what he is going to say there, Palin is probably now focused on making a lot of money in the next 18 months so she can at least afford running in 2012, if she decides to do so. After all, in 2011 she probably won't have an income and it is hard to run for President and charge for your campaign speeches. She needs to make a few million this year and next even to seriously consider running. An upcoming book and paid speeches will fill the bill nicely. Her resignation speech was rambling to the point of being incoherent. It is very unlikely she has a master plan at all. She just didn't like the situation she was in and wanted to get out of it and who knows what comes next.
Many pundits have said she wants to carry the conservative banner and that she is a female Ronald Reagan. I don't think that is true. She is a female George Wallace--an angry representative of the lower middle class who feels put upon by elites. She went to six third-tier colleges before managing to graduate and clearly resents people like President Obama who sailed through Columbia and Harvard Law School and surrounded himself with experts from the Ivy League and M.I.T. While she didn't single out pointy-headed intellectuals as the cause of the nation's problems, when listening to her, one feels she easily could and would probably like to except she is smart enough to realize that doing so would cause them to heap even more scorn on her--and she has incredibly thin skin for a politician, constantly blaming the media and hostile (often Republican) politicians for her problems. Her motto is: "It's not my fault." George W. Bush was no intellectual himself by a long shot, but one didn't feel any rage in him. After all, he went to Phillips Academy, Yale, and Harvard, and was the son of a President, grandson of a senator, and brother of another governor, not exactly prime white trash material. Nobody would mistake him for a downtrodden and scorned worker barely hanging on and feeling the powerful didn't give a hoot about him. And he knew very well that had he been named Smith instead of Bush he would never have been governor of Texas, let alone President. For all her faults, Palin pulled herself up by her own bootstraps and was elected governor of a state by fighting her own battles. Nobody gave her anything. This makes her a fighter to her admirers, who don't give a damn about her IQ, her diplomas, or even her lack of knowledge of government. There is a lot of class resentment here and graduates of fancy universities can't understand why anybody would fall for what they see as a complete nincompoop. She represents Joe Sixpack a lot better than Joe the Plumber, who simply caught a lucky break when John McCain acquired him as his new best friend. Whether she runs for President in 2012 probably depends on how well she likes her new life--once she figures out what it is. There are plenty of politicians who could have run for President and didn't, for example, Gov. Mario Cuomo (D-NY) in 1992 and Al Gore in 2004 and 2008. Palin may decide she likes being a speaker and class heroine and making millions of dollars a year and would prefer doing that until her 15 minutes of fame are up. She probably doesn't know what she is going to do in 2012 yet. God will tell her when he's ready to do so. A Gallup poll taken July 6 shows that 70% of Americans say that their view Palin is unchanged by her resignation, with 43% willing to vote for her and 54% not willing to vote for her in 2012. She is popular with Republicans and unpopular with Democrats (surprise) but independents, who hold the key to any election, want her to leave the national stage 55% to 34%. Fixing that without alienating her base will be hard.