What did Fake Steve Jobs have to say about the iPad and Google? Don’t miss it, especially his live-blog of his own event last week.

That Katie, she’s such a trooper. You could build an entire schtick around just her.

Why hasn’t Red Letter Media released Part 1 of his Attack of the Clones Review?

Because he’s been busy on an Avatar review. Enjoy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJarz7BYnHA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

In the course of one weekend I mounted defenses of lefty comic-book writer/artist Joe Sacco and Jay Leno.

Unsaid in the Leno piece is that I think you can make the case that NBC’s own decisions in the Tonight Show debacle are minimally defensible: That is, they might not be optimal–and you or eye might have made different ones–but taken as discrete decision points, each one is not crazy. It’s just the totality of the decisions which lead to corporate madness.

Consider the entire episode from NBC’s point of view, with a series of if/then propositions:

If Conan demands the Tonight Show, then you can either give him the show and displace Leno, or lose Conan. I would have told Conan thanks for your service, good luck on future endeavors. But it wasn’t totally crazy for NBC to think that, with five years of breathing space, they could figure out a way to finesse the situation.

If you’ve given Conan Tonight, then you can’t let Leno out of his contract. You have to keep him off of the air for Conan’s sake–you’ve just decided to hand O’Brien the franchise, you have to protect him in the time slot and keep Leno from setting up a competing franchise somewhere else and eviscerating Conan’s early ratings.

If you’re keeping Leno at NBC then you can either pay him between $14M and $18M to do nothing, or you can try to find a spot for him to do a show.

If you’re committed to putting Leno on the air, a cheap, low-ratings, high-margin primetime show is a viable possibility.

If Leno’s low-ratings show angers affiliates so much that they’re willing to preempt network content, then you have to make a change somewhere to get Leno’s prime-time show off the air.

If pulling Leno’s prime-time show costs $80M, and pulling Conan’s Tonight costs $60M and–most crucially–Conan still hasn’t proven he can find an 11:30 audience, then you have to push Conan aside and reinstall Leno.

Drug legalizers vs. sexual harassment.

Who you got?

Following Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running mate, there were a lot of people who argued that the very inclusion of Palin on the ticket provided case-closed evidence that McCain was not fit for office. This argument was normally built around Palin’s thin record of public service and/or Palin’s private character.

So how the John Edwards revelations are particularly striking, because not only is he a liar/adulterer/etc., but he comes off, at least in Andrew Young’s telling, as a borderline psychopath. Coupled with his incredibly thin record of accomplishment, doesn’t that make his inclusion on the Democratic ticket in 2004 an automatic disqualifier for John Kerry?

I understand that not everyone knew in 2004 that Edwards was such a monster, so I’d be completely satisfied with Palin-haters who are willing to retro-spectively disqualify Kerry.

People keep telling me how smart Tyler Cowen is, so he must be. Still, writing about the iPad he says,

In the longer run the iPad will compete with your university, or in some ways enhance your university. It will offer homework services and instructional videos and courses, none of which can work well on the current iPhone or Kindle. The device also seems to allow for collaborative use.

Can you imagine one attached to every hospital bed or in the hands of every doctor and nurse?

In the longer run? I don’t think it’s obvious that, in the longer run, the iPad will exist any more meaningfully than the Cube or the Mac Mini does. To simply assert that a 24-hour-old piece of equipment is going to compete with the university . . . My goodness.

And as for how the iPad will revolutionize medical care, isn’t this already happening, sans iPad? For the last couple years, two of the three doctors’ offices I frequent have been using really sexy, mini-netbooks for all docs, nurses, and assistants. They have touch screens and seem to contain medical records, patient intake information, prescription information, etc. Perhaps an iPad could add marginal benefits to an already improving system, but this isn’t the invention of the wheel.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the iPad looks like a neat toy. And with a medium-sized list of improvements and modifications it could be made even better. But let’s not get carried away by the Steve-o-mania.

Exit question: I saw that Al Gore was in the front row at the Apple event yesterday. I wonder what the carbon footprint of that entire show was–including transportation for guests, lighting,etc. I hear that the internet and technology is so amazing these days, that Jobs could have just sat in his office and streamed the whole spiel over the web without incurring any unnecessary carbon expenditures.

I mean, I wouldn’t be concerned about these little nickel-and-dime C’s except that the planet is under imminent threat of cataclysm. So you would think that every little bit counts, no?

I like Cliff Chiang’s work a ton (particularly his Green Arrow/Black Canary stuff), but I hadn’t seen this before today: It’s Chiang’s Star Wars Imperial propaganda posters. Solid Gold.

Just asking. Notice how delightfully bitchy Wired is being about the new toy:

10:21 Mark McClusky notes: In the web demo, you could see a broken plugin icon on NYTimes site. Does that mean there’s no Adobe Flash support on iPad?

Updated thoughts: Two Galley Friends immediately likened it to the mostly-forgotten Cube. That’s a little tough. But maybe not wrong. My own first-blush reaction was, Hey, they made an iPhone Touch DX!

And isn’t that really what the iPad is? At least for now? With nothing more than the iPhone OS, it’s a super-slick smart-phone/Kindle/netbook hybrid. Only it lacks a smartphone’s portability, the Kindle’s readability, and the netbook’s power. For me, this last bit is the killer. Unless I’m missing something, you can’t word-process on it, except for in-browser applications, like Google Docs. If you could power Word into it–or even the Apple knock-off–it might be versatile enough to carry around on reporting trips. But even then, the iPhone OS’s inability to keep multiple applications running at the same time seems goes from being a minor annoyance to a crippling short-coming.

All of this isn’t to say that a second-generation iPad might not be killer. If it had: (1) A camera to facilitate video-conferencing; (2) A beefed-up OS enabling it to run multiple applications simultaneously; (3) A real-deal word processing application allowing you to do actual work on it for hours at a stretch–then, I could see dropping $500, or even $650 on it to have as a travel accessory.

But even then, it’s a twilight device. Without built-in cellular service, it can’t replace your iPhone and I don’t think it’ll ever replace either your laptop or desktop machine. Do people need a third computer in their lives? A computer that is really only useful for short stretches of time, ie, travel? Maybe. Maybe not.

More thoughts on this tomorrow, but other items of note:

* Amazon breathes a sigh of relief, no? With just an LED screen, the iPad can’t compete with the Kindle’s ink, and can’t be taken as a serious challenge to dedicated eReaders.