Like Weebles, Sarah Palin wobbles, but she doesn’t fall down. And every time you think she might be out of the news for a second, she pops back in. Last week Palin gave the keynote at the first-ever National Tea Party Convention. It was a typical Palin speech in every way, resplendent with winks, folksy aphorisms, and not-so-subtle jabs at Obama. (My personal favorite: “How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for ya?”) The consensus: an unremarkable speech, albeit a well-recieved one, in every way.

Except then some people started to look a bit more closely at the video of the speech, and they noticed something: Sarah Palin was reading notes off of her hand. Seriously. She wrote notes on her hand.

(If you can’t read it, the list says: “Energy, tax cuts, lift American spirits.”)

Predictably, the Jew-controlled liberal blogosphere is now making relentless fun of Palin, because, well, writing notes on your hand is kind of pathetic. It’s one thing to read the entirety of a prepared speech from a teleprompter (a comparison that a conservator blogger at NPR, of all places, is making), but if you have to consult your cheat sheet just to remember that you want to lift American spirits, then maybe you’re not the best person to be in charge of lifting American spirits. (And besides, everyone knows that a much better method is to store the information in your graphing calculator.)

Finally, it’d be impossible for me to conclude an article about Tea Parties without including this video of Anderson Cooper making a hopefully-intentional dirty joke about the movement’s unfortunate choice of the verb “teabagging.” Watch till the end—it’s worth it:

by Max Nussenbaum