She could easily dilute the impact of the Couric interview. It was 2.5 years ago!

A few real interviews where she showed herself to be reasonably thoughtful and knowledgeable is all it would take to make people completely disregard her earlier abysmal performance, and chalk it up to simple nervousness at being new on the national stage.

But she can’t do that, because it wasn’t nervousness; what was on display then, and what’s on display every time she opens her mouth, is thin-skinned vicious ignorance and stupidity. She knows (or should know) that any future real interviews, anything less of a softball than what Sean Hannity gave her, would reveal the exact same ignorance.

Because we weren’t wrong about her even for a moment. Tina Fey had her number right from the beginning, down to about 10 decimal points.

I figure Palin will respond to her current doldrums with the tried-and-true surefire go-to method of the High School beauty queen: with a makeover.

From all quarters, she’s told she needs gravitas? Well, the first adviser who suggests she crack a book or something will be fired instantly, and the one who suggests she get a new hairstyle and a new set of glasses that doesn’t accentuate the ditzy, vacant look in her eyes will get a raise and a bonus.

She may attempt the same “touch of gray” gravitas that Dan Quayle went for when he needed to look less like a spoiled, ignorant Fauntleroy, but ultimately, I think she’ll reject the gray on instinct.

So her new look, rolled out within the next month, will be to look almost like a New York career woman, but to hedge against her base deserting her, she’ll double down on rustic clothes instead of the expensive stuff she likes to wear. A stockbroker with a lumberjack shirt.

Sorry to inject a serious note into a fine bit of smartassery, TB, but just thought I’d mention that it’s Palin in 2012 or never, for the very, very simple reason that her looks aren’t going to last.

Think of what’s happened to Ann Coulter’s popularity, now that her face has taken on the shape appropriate to someone who’s trafficked in violent hatred for decades. I suspect Palin needn’t fear the same level of gargoylism, but that ditzy look just isn’t as attractive on someone in their 50s. By 2013 or so, expect someone younger, cuter, and slightly less baldfacedly ignorant to step up and claim the mantle of Cute Dumbass Holy Warrior. That’s Palin’s true concern, whether she knows it or not, and the new CDHW might not be so all-fired lazy that she doesn’t spend an hour or two learning how to fire a rifle before demonstrating her fake bona fides all over television.

Putting my money on Darrell Issa. I’m sure he’s already got the articles of impeachment written, and only has to decide whether it’s Acorn or socialism or the fake Hawaiian birth certificate that they’ll use to destroy Obama.

If they really get cheeky, they’ll impeach Obama for a genuine High Crime: refusing to prosecute Bush et al for torture and other war crimes. They do not lack for sheer gall.

“That’s not exactly something an ordinary person would distinguish at first glance as being “my old block of PGP gibberish” rather than “my new block of PGP gibberish”.”

If you’re a genuine top-rank hacker, and you never had too many different PGP keys, you might very well recognize the key.

However, he wouldn’t need to recognize the key by just looking at it. It would show up as invalid the moment he tried to run it through his decrypting software.

AND, what’s absurd is the notion that he “no longer has access” to his older key. I don’t use PGP keys, but I’m fairly certain that the private key would be just another string of characters. It’s *absurd* that he wouldn’t have access to older keys.

If he’d said, “that’s an older key that I no longer use”, that’s different, except then, the proper response is to send him a copy of the key you’re *currently using*, not offer to chat unencrypted over IM.

That offer would’ve set off all sorts of alarms were I in Manning’s shoes, and apparently he (or whoever was pretending to be him) was quite concerned with security and rightly so. So this is all quite fishy indeed.

In fact, the scenario as stated beggars an already impoverished imagination.

Can one of the many legal eagles here answer a fairly simple question for me?

We know about the repressive conditions Manning is being held under because someone (House?) visited him and talked to him about it.

Is there some obvious reason related either to the conditions of Manning’s incarceration (and his ability to receive visitors) or the likely nature of Manning’s defense that would prevent Manning from answering some of these questions?

Would Manning going on record about his early contacts with Lamo, for example, preclude entire avenues of defense? It seems to me the only obvious avenue of defense it closes off would be if Manning planned to claim that the government has no admissible evidence that he contacted Lamo at all, and so wouldn’t want to provide them with an effective confession of that.

Or would his lawyer have simply told him to shut up about the details of the case on general principles?

Prozac doesn’t work that way; It builds up in the blood, so you don’t get immediate gratification from it (it’s useless as a recreational drug), and you don’t get some immediate effect from missing your dose, either.

If his voice was slurred and otherwise “druggy”, it has to be a different drug. He may be on anti-psychotics, and they papered over that to (a) protect Lamo’s privacy, and (b) protect Lamo’s credibility. There are so many obvious lies in what we’ve been told that this one wouldn’t even register.

The cops wouldn’t care about the theft of some Prozac, but I’m sure there’s some anti-psychotic drugs which they’d really prefer to keep of the street.

Even garden-variety tranquilizers could’ve caused him to appear spacey to the cops.

I agree that the Lamo story stinks more the one digs into it (and most folks’ eyes glaze over at the very first twist in a rather complicated set of prevarications and unexplained circumstances), but it’s hardly shocking for someone in high-tech in any capacity (and Lamo certainly is that) to have multiple laptops.

I have 4, 3 of which I’m used to swapping hard disks in and out of for different reasons. I had 5 when I still had the company laptop. That’s not especially hardcore or anything; the thing is, when you buy a new laptop, there’s no reason to get rid of the last one, and its resale value is comical. So you keep it around, maybe stick Linux on it and run a personal website on it, or it becomes the laptop you keep in the car, or it just sits in a closet until someone steals your regular laptop.

It’s just not suspicious in and of itself.