Heard a great line a few minutes ago from Sarah Silverman on Olbermann (paraphrasing): “Sarah Palin is as vacuous and annoying as a beauty pageant winner, but without the desire for world peace.”
On the other hand, right now I’m seeing people on Maddow’s show hooting and hollering about Palin’s ties to the Alaskan Independence Party. Now I’m not a great fan of that party or its right-wing populist agenda (it’s affiliated with the Constitution Party, ew); but the main thing that has the liberal talking heads freaked out is the party’s advocacy of secession and its un-Americanism. Well, guys, suddenly jingoistic nationalism doesn’t look so bad when your own team gets to do it, huh?
Compulsory IP licensing (where anyone can use your IP but they have to pay you a fee) is not my ideal – I favour getting rid of IP entirely – but it does seem preferable to the current system, both on rights-based grounds (having to pay to exercise your rights to free speech and press is less unjust than not being able to exercise them at all) and on consequentialist grounds (the creator of the IP can’t restrict the flow of information).