Tina Fey Lines Pockets with Sarah Palin Imitation

Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. Tina Fey Lines Pockets with Sarah Palin Imitation
2. Jessica Alba Sports Muzzle to Score Votes
3. Alec Baldwin Pins Financial Crisis on Clinton, Frank and the Dems
4. Botoxed Hollywood Joe
5. Journo Pulls a Race Card  

1. Tina Fey Lines Pockets with Sarah Palin Imitation

Tina Fey’s resemblance to Sarah Palin has been a key part of a snarky “Saturday Night Live” strategy to give the GOP vice presidential candidate the Quayle treatment.

SNL has repeatedly featured sketches belittling the Alaska governor.

Writers of the show apparently fail to see any humor in Dem presidential candidate Barack Obama saying there are 57 states in the U.S. or Dem veep candidate Joe Biden talking about FDR’s television appearance after the 1929 stock market crash.

They do, however, see plenty of comedy fodder on the other side of the political aisle as was evidenced in the most recent SNL installment.

With a reference to the Biblical End of Days, Palin’s faith was made fun of.

With a skit in which Fey says, “Marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers,” her view of marriage was mocked and her daughter denigrated.

Meanwhile Fey is using the attention her Palin lampoon provides to boost her own cash and cachet.

According to the New York Post, a Fey rep is shopping a humor book to Manhattan publishers, and it has already received an opening bid in the neighborhood of $5 million.

Wonder if in the solitude of the voting booth Fey will opt to keep the Palin character going with a double maverick pick.

2. Jessica Alba Sports Muzzle to Score Votes

In trying to get out the vote, some Hollywood celebs tend to be overly dramatic.

In the last election, Cameron Diaz claimed that failure to vote would result in the legalization of rape.

P. Diddy, of course, has his running “Vote or Die!” program.

Now Jessica Alba is getting into the election act with an ad that has her wearing a Hannibal Lecter-type mask.

With tears running down her cheeks the actress appears muzzled, accompanied by this message: “Only you can silence yourself. Make them hear you. Register to vote now.”

Why a muzzle?

“If you don't register and vote and make a difference, and hopefully change the bad things that are happening in our country, you are essentially just binding and muzzling yourself,” Alba explains to People magazine.

The Democrats are always seeking new ways to motivate younger voters who overwhelmingly vote the Dem way.

“I think it is important for young people to be aware of the need we have in this country to get them more active politically,” Alba says.

She adds, “People respond to things that are shocking.”

A staged muzzling—I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!

3. Alec Baldwin Pins Financial Crisis on Clinton, Frank and the Dems

An outspoken figure has publicly nailed the Democrats for their role in creating the credit crisis, particularly with regard to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Was it John McCain or one of his campaign aides?

No, believe it or not it was Alec Baldwin.

As part of a panel on HBO's “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Baldwin responded to co-panelist Garry Shandling’s finger pointing at Bush by saying, “…Democrats have a lot of the responsibility for this as well. I mean, it was [Bill] Clinton who killed the Glass-Steagall, and it happened under a Democratic president.”

After correctly citing the Clinton administration’s contribution to the crisis, Baldwin mentioned the bailout king himself, Barney Frank.

“Barney Frank and his committee,” Baldwin explained to the astonished Maher, “they kept propping up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saying everything's fine, everything's fine, everything's good. And it was his job to know everything wasn't fine. And Barney Frank let you down and let us down as well.”

Baldwin went on to talk about the final bailout bill, stating, “I want to say there's blame to go both ways. But I will say, I want to, I maybe keep beating this to death, but I still think anyone in this Congress who voted to add $140 billion to that bill, they should be ashamed of themselves. That is a disgrace. It's a disgrace. This Congress is a disgrace, Democrat and Republican.”

I never thought I’d say it but I actually agree with Alec Baldwin.

4. Botoxed Hollywood Joe

Economic times being what they are, folks in Tinseltown are “naturally” concerned about the supply of botox needed at the ready.

Goddess forbid there would ever be a shortage.

It could happen, though, if pols like Joe Biden continue to hog the stuff just to put on their best debate faces.

At the recent veep debate, Joe’s frozen eyebrows and ironed forehead made him look as though he had gotten confused and thought he was going for a part in “High School Musical.”

It seems as though handlers gave Joe the wrong juice because what the Delaware senator really could have used was some truth serum.

That may have prevented him from telling whoppers like the one in which he said he had “always supported” clean-coal.

It was just weeks ago that Biden said, “We're not supporting clean coal.”

And even though Barack Obama said he would negotiate with Iran's president without preconditions, during the debate Biden insisted that the insinuation was “simply not true,” when in fact Biden himself had previously labeled Obama’s willingness to talk without preconditions as “naïve.”

5. Journo Pulls a Race Card

Under the guise of an “analysis,” writer Douglass K. Daniel recently demonstrated his skill as a verbal contortionist, finding racial issues in some of Sarah Palin’s remarks.

As a media ethics professor, I see this kind of “journalism” as providing a case study in breach of ethics.

Daniel claimed that when Palin said Barack Obama was “palling around with terrorists” the statement “carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.”

He wrote that Palin’s words might “avoid repulsing voters with overt racism” but asked whether there might be “another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee ‘palling around’ with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?”

He then asserted that because we are in a post-Sept. 11 America “terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims…,” and because Obama was relatively unknown when he began his campaign “the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.”

“Portraying Obama as ‘not like us’ is another potential appeal to racism,” Daniel deduced.