Bill Maher laments the end of the summer mental health break.

My favorite part:

"So I don't know how this happened, or when exactly this stupidifying of the whole year. Maybe it was the advent of Fox News. Maybe it was when we made stars out of the Kardashians. Maybe it was the day John McCain decided to let an ill advised summer fling with a ditzy moron last all the way into November.  Whatever it was we have got to get summer back. We've got to be able to enjoy stupidity again. Hard earned, respectable, stupidity. That's what my goal is in the age of Trump."

By the way the whole show last night was very solid.

From the opening monologue, to the interview with  Dan Savage, to the great folks on the panel, the show pretty entertaining from start to finish.

Which is great, because the show last week was absolutely terrible and was bad to the point where I almsot skipped this one.

Glad I didn't.

Hey, you know when I said that we were on fire? Yeah, that might have been an understatement.

This is a current map of the fires now raging all over Alaska.

You know it is actually almost harder to find a place that is NOT on fire.

Teabaggers dramatically losing support in Utah. Yes, I said Utah!

Courtesy of Mother Jones:

Life is good if you're a tea party Republican from Utah. With all that momentum, there's little reason to doubt the the movement's long-term viability in the Beehive State. Right?

Well, no. A recent poll conducted by Brigham Young University's Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy shows that overall support for the tea party in Utah has dropped from 53 percent during last year's elections to 46 percent in April.

Among independent voters, support for the tea party has plummeted by nearly fifty percent, potentially helping moderate Democrats. But for "strong Republicans," support for the tea party climbed from 76 to 82 percent. The poll issues a clear warning for candidates like Chaffetz, Hatch—and, down the road, even Lee—who hope a hard push to the right will secure their political futures.

The takeaway: as the tea party continues to consolidate its support among Republicans, independents (i.e., the voters who end up deciding elections) are drifting away in increasing numbers. Whether this trend continues taking hold in Utah—the heart of the conservative heartland—could be a bellwether for its national viability.

News Corp suffering potentially fatal fallout from their phone hacking scandal, turnout for Sarah Palin's movie and Bristol's book sales almost non-existent, and now support for the Teabaggers falling like the Palin family IQ. 

Didn't I tell you that this was going to be a great summer? Perhaps next time you won't doubt your Uncle Gryphen so much.

San Francisco Chronicle reviews "The Lies of Sarah Palin" by Geoffrey Dunn.

Overall the review is pretty positive, though the reviewer, William Howell fresh off of Gilligan's Island I presume, did have one minor quibble.  He said essentially that after all of the horrible things Dunn reveals about Palin, that "the reader loses any insight into her underlying appeal."

If what Howell is getting at is that he cannot understand how somebody, who Geoffrey descibes as incredibly self centered and essentially devoid of compassion, could have managed to garner such crazed support from a certain segment of the population, that is a question which many of us here in Alaska have wondered about for almost three years now.

Still the review does pick up on the essential theme running through the book.

According to Dunn, Palin repeatedly has lied about her own political positions (such as whether, as governor of Alaska, she really did support the "bridge to nowhere") and the positions of her political opponents (such as President Obama's supposed support for "death panels" in the 2010 health care overhaul). He says she has lied about things big (such as her reasoning for stepping down as governor 18 months before finishing up her term) and small (such as whether she played varsity basketball all four years of high school). He says she has lied about matters personal (such as how she informed her daughters about her selection to be the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate) and public (such as the extent to which she broke from John McCain's camp during the 2008 presidential election).

But for Dunn, really, this is just the beginning. He wants to show Palin for the self-involved, power-hungry, petty, unlettered, undisciplined dimwit that he says she is. Whether arguing the point himself or quoting others to do so, Dunn presents Palin as mentally unstable, a "town liar," a political hack who trades on personal threats, a "political parvenu in constant [and haphazard] search of the political limelight," an offender of federal election law, a loose cannon who has left "a trail of political wreckage" in her wake.

Dunn gives nearly anyone and everyone who has been buried under this wreckage a full and sympathetic hearing. As a reader, you are told that they are hardworking, principled, committed folk; that they have sacrificed a great deal for their community, state or country; and that, without exception, they were grossly mistreated by Palin.

Indeed, whenever he extols the virtues of anyone at any length, Dunn reliably follows with a blow-by-blow accounting of Palin and her entourage striking down this kindly soul. Reading this book, I kept thinking of those horror films in which the old, wise sheriff is killed off to demonstrate the evil residing within some killer before he (occasionally it) moves on to more deserving victims.

In Dunn's book, though, there are no deserving victims. Indeed, every time he complimented someone, particularly someone who runs in conservative circles, I began to hear the screeching violins playing as the camera pans out and reveals Palin's breath on some cracked window.

Speaking as one of those "victims" I have to say that it is quite gratifying to read how Dunn isolates Palin's modus operandi and  then identifies each and every time that she uses it to go after ALL of those foolish, brave, or careless enough to cross her.

After you read how aggressively she tries to defame, shame, and emasculate her perceived opponents it certainly paints everybody on Palin's enemies list in a much more sympathetic light.

By the way for those of you asking me to offer up MY review of Dunn's book, don't hold your breath.  I am not a book reviewer, and I am much too close to the subject, and to Geoffrey, to offer anything that could be considered a reasonable and dispassionate book review.

Instead I wholeheartedly endorse the book, as well as the OTHER books that will ultimately reveal the truth that Sarah Palin so desperately does NOT want you to know.

P.S. Dunn's book must have really hit Sarah where it hurts because I have received a number of comments, and e-mails trying extremely hard to undermine his research and poke holes in his revelations.  As I have said before, this should prove to be a very troubling summer for Snowdrift Snooki, very troubling indeed.