At the New York Times, cable news chronicler Brian Stelter has the story that Sarah Palin’s original contract with Fox News will not be renewed:

Yes, Ms. Palin’s contract with Fox News has ended, and no, it is not being renewed. A Fox spokeswoman confirmed Friday that Fox had parted ways with the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee, effectively reducing her exposure to the channel’s millions of loyal viewers.

It was unclear whether the parting was Ms. Palin’s choice. Bill Shine, an executive vice president at Fox, said in a statement, “We have thoroughly enjoyed our association with Governor Palin. We wish her the best in her future endeavors.”

As of last week, Ms. Palin remained in negotiations with Fox News about a new contract. Her original contract with the network started in January 2010 and ended this month.

This makes a lot of sense. As I’ve written before, Fox News’ schtick has always been to hire intensely polarizing figures, from Dr. Keith Ablow, who spends most of his time making outrageous statements about gay and transgender people, to former Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman who, tragically and hilariously, comments on criminal justice issues, despite having plead no contest to charges he perjured himself in the O.J. Simpson case. Palin would seem to be in that tradition: since she stepped on the national stage at the Republican National Convention in 2008, Palin’s primary talent has been for incendiary rhetoric.

But Palin’s not rooted in any particular extreme viewpoint. Her policy perspectives have always been too squishy for her to represent much in the way of an particular constituency or any cause other than herself and her own fans. She was never particularly a ratings hit on Fox—a special planned around her turned out not to be the sort of draw the network hoped for. And unlike Ablow and his ilk, Palin was never even particularly successful at tweaking liberals in her appearance on the network, ginning up the kind of publicity that could have made her a worthwhile investment even if she wasn’t particularly popular with the network’s core audience.

The Palin family as a whole seems to hope for careers in show business, but this is only the latest in a string of failures for them. The TLC show Sarah Palin’s Alaska saw declining ratings and wasn’t renewed for a second season. Bristol Palin’s Lifetime show was yanked from the network for lower viewership, but not before landing $354,348 in tax subsidies from the state of Alaska. Todd Palin was reduced to appearing as one of many celebrities on NBC’s military reality show Stars Earned Stripes.

Maybe now that Fox News has cut ties with Palin, the rest of the television industry will follow suit. Sarah Palin long ago proved she had no real aptitude for governance when she quit her job as governor as Alaska. Her time on Fox proved she didn’t have much spark as a source of news or opinion. And the rest of her family’s efforts suggest that as entertainment, the Palins have nothing to offer us but diminishing returns.

Yesterday, I wrote a piece about how organizers in New Orleans were likely overstating the potential economic impact of the Super Bowl, which the city will host on Sunday, February 3. It’s easy to think that such an overstatement is no big problem — if cities get a boost from such events, what’s it matter if it is $40 million or $400 million? But it is a problem, because the studies into the benefits of hosting a major sporting event attracting a professional sports franchise are almost always used to justify substantial public investment into the construction or renovation of stadiums and arenas. And, as we’ve repeatedly examined here, those deals almost always turn out badly for the taxpayers who finance them.

Take New Orleans, a city whose taxpayers dumped $121 million into the renovations of the Superdome to keep the Saints in town after Hurricane Katrina. To be sure, the Superdome needed renovations after the storm just to be safely used. But less than a decade later, the financing scheme that was used to pour public money into the project is going wrong. Very wrong.

And it isn’t alone. Miami is selling taxpayers on stadium renovations by saying they are vital for future Super Bowls. Dallas already made such a sale. In cities across the country, new facilities are the impetus for getting big events, keeping professional teams, or attracting new teams. In almost every case, proponents wield an economic impact study to tout the benefits brought by a new facility and the professional sports franchise and mega-events it would attract or keep happy. In each of those cases, the estimate was almost surely overstated, especially when research shows that new arenas don’t boost overall growth of metropolitan areas, and that the presence of a sports franchise probably doesn’t either.

For any city with a stadium or arena, turning down an event like the Super Bowl would be absurd, if only because there is an impact on the surrounding economy, however large or small it is. The problem arises, though, when these studies are used to persuade the public into financing expensive stadiums and arenas that are not good investments and never will be.

Sports leagues and proponents of new stadiums use “these promises of riches to convince cities that the construction of a new…stadium at significant public expense is a profitable investment, especially if it includes the promise of a future” event like the Super Bowl, sports economist Victor Matheson wrote in one study of the problems with economic impact estimates. “[T]his creates ample reason to be skeptical of any claims made about the reported economic impact since the sponsors of the impact studies have a financial interest in results that show large economic benefits from the game.”

When those deals occur, they almost always go bad, as they have in Glendale, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and virtually everywhere else. And every time, cities that sell the myth of economic vitality are left with burgeoning debt, and the taxpayers who financed the projects end up facing higher taxes or cuts to programs on which they rely to service that debt.

The problem isn’t that impact estimates are overstated. It’s that they are often overstated for the explicit purpose of selling a bad product.

The bridge is yours.

-The existence of the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus is my new favorite thing ever.

-All I want for Christmas is the new Buster Keaton: The Ultimate Collection.

-Amazon is making a comedy about people who work at a news website.

-Someone is making a Sleepless In Seattle musical because everything is weird.

-The first jOBS clip is here. Pretty impressed by Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak:

On Twitter yesterday, someone joked of the news that J.J. Abrams will be directing Star Wars Episode VII that Hollywood had clearly chosen to drop bad entertainment news when I got back from the Television Critics Association press tour and the Sundance Film Festival for the express purpose of making my head explode. My initial reaction to the news that the Weinstein Company is planning a sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was that it was further proof this was true. After all, Ang Lee’s wuxia epic has one of the great ambiguous endings of all time, leaving it unclear whether Ziyi Zhang’s Jen Yu had committed suicide or achieved transcendence when she jumped at the end of the film.

But the summary of the second film, and in particular, the news of its focus, actually sounds promising:

The sequel continues to revolve around Yu Shu Lien, the character played in the original by Michelle Yeoh. It’s not immediately clear yet which actors will reprise, but some likely will. “This introduces a new generation of star-crossed lovers, and a new series of antagonists in a battle of good and evil. It has a Knights Errant quality. There is an alternate universe in the books, a martial forest that exists alongside the real world, full of wandering sword fighters, medicine men, defrocked priests, poets, sorcerers and Shaolin renegades. It’s so vast and rich, and I found characters from the second and third books in the series to create a most interesting stew while being as true to the source material as I could be.”

Yu Shu Lien is a fantastic character, an independent operator who is as interested in the fate and moral orientation of Jen, who emerges as a potential protege for her, as she is in reconnecting with her long-lost love, Master Li Mu Bai. Her failure to connect with and direct Jen ends up putting her priorities into deadly conflict. I’m excited to see her off on her own again. Particularly if Yuen Woo-ping comes back to choreograph her fight scenes.

This post discusses plot points from the January 24 episode of Parks and Recreation.

One of the reasons Parks and Recreation has been able to argue so convincingly for the virtues of public service over the years is that it’s largely avoided national political controversies. It’s much easier to make the case for Leslie Knope’s slow but steady improvement of the deeply strange little town that is Pawnee, Indiana, is that she isn’t caught up in Congressional gridlock, partisan posturing, or hearings that are more for show and substance. You can dislike Congress, as most Americans do, you can be disgusted with the national political climate, and still like Leslie Knope’s good intentions.

So it was a daring move for the show to take on recent national politics as it did last night, when Leslie’s commission on jobs for women turned into a very Pawneean version of Rep. Darrell Issa’s all-male panel on contraception coverage in Obamacare. But last night’s episode worked because it took the form of a national debate and applied it to a small-town issue, the lack of women in the garbage pickup corps. It was a decision that worked because it expanded our understanding of Pawnee, something that I’d hoped Parks and Recreation would do more of this season. The show’s gotten stuck on the final accomplishment of Leslie’s initial goal to turn the pit behind Ann’s house into a park, as if it’s on a valedictory run, rather than setting itself up for what I’ve become convinced is a probable renewal given NBC’s comedy ratings woes. And it’s nice to see more of the city and city government.

The episode also worked because it was an example of how Parks and Recreation handles national political conversations best: making political subtext text, and carrying it to its logical and bonkers conclusion, but in very small-stakes settings. Want to reveal the irrationality of religious conservative objections to equal marriage rights? Have Marsha Langman get incensed over a wedding between two male penguins. Interested in exploring the extent to which racist sentiment lingers in politics in the name of traditions? Bring on the Pawnee town hall murals, with their cheerful, Technicolor portraits of atrocities. Want to have some fun with special interest group manipulation of politics? Wamapoke leader Ken Hotate is a brilliant, original creation that the show has doled out perfectly over the years.

And if you want to get at the real sexist sentiments that animate panels like Issa’s, just go to Pawnee, where it’s still the nineteenth century. “Technically, I’m not allowed to reserve this conference room without my husband or father’s signature,” Leslie explained of the room where she held her meeting to kickstart her new jobs initiative. In conversation with the Pawnee’s first City Councilwoman, the older lady explained to Leslie that “I once started a commission to try to get more jobs for women in city government. They dismissed me, said it was my time of the month. Admittedly they were right. Because of the calendar.” It turns out that Leslie’s colleagues are still keeping tabs on her menstrual cycle, too. The sanitation department’s proud of their lone female employee, of whom they say “She’s the best secretary we got. Except for Dan. Dan’s awesome.”

This stuff is all very silly when it’s confined to Pawnee. But it’s not. And it’s operating on stages much larger than the sanitation department’s attempts to show up April and Leslie with a refrigerator even they couldn’t move on their own. These sentiments have been disguised and packaged up again in much more sophisticated language that’s used to shape debates with much higher stakes. In Pawnee, the continuation of rampant sexism is hilarious because of Leslie’s ability to bowl right over it, with the help of some friends from the local coup kitchen and a sturdy dolly. Outside of Pawnee, it’s downright terrifying.