THIS IS A NEWS SOURCE? – AT 7:23 P.M. ET:  A professional Palin hater is making charges that are sweeping the internet.  They're trivial, but it's shocking to me that any clown like this would be taken seriously.  From the Washington Post:

A Maryland man who wrote a parody of Sarah Palin's autobiography and who says he and his wife flew to Los Angeles to attend the taping of Palin's appearance on NBC's "The Tonight Show" claims NBC sweetened the audience's laughter during her appearance to drown out the deafening silence, which he says was on occasion only broken by his own derisive guffawing.

Responding to Micheal Stinson's claims on the political Web site Daily Kos, NBC said Friday that "neither the audio nor the laughs were enhanced for Sarah Palin's segments on 'The Tonight Show' " this past Tuesday.

I'll take NBC's word on this.  I saw the performance.  I've worked on The Tonight Show.  When I was there we didn't employ "sweetening."  I got no feeling whatever that there was any sweetening during Sarah's appearance.  You can usually tell because, even if you have a very good "track man" (as in laying down a laugh track), the timing of the laughter is rarely precisely right.  It's like lip-synching a song.  Some words go well, and others don't. 

The idea of using this guy as a news source really annoys me.  Get this:

"We're artists and what we mostly need money for is to make more art," he said. He and his wife brought eight copies of their book and distributed six among audience members and show crew. The other two they kept. When some in the audience rose to greet Palin, Stinson says he and his wife danced in place and jumped up and down while waving copies of the book which, he says, were not confiscated by security "to their credit."

Security also did not ask them to leave when his wife continued to dance and wave the book after everyone else in the audience had sat back down, he added. They just asked her to please be seated.

Real class act.  This is what makes news.

March 5, 2010