Wanda Sykes discusses the bailout. She wants oversight of the $700 billion and receipts. Furthermore, she talks about the democratic and republican national conventions, what we should do with people who don’t vote, and she shares her thoughts on Sarah Palin.

With Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Katie Couric, SNL parodies Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin. Some of the outlandish funny portions are actually true (see the real exchange between Palin and Couric below).

In an interview with Katie Couric, Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential nominee (in case you forgot) was asked why she did not obtain a passport until last year. Palin’s responded by associating a passport to elitism. She claimed that she wasn’t part of “that culture,” because she had to work two jobs. Certainly, she was being coy, but her reasoning is faulty, because she assumes that all young people with two jobs likely do not have passports, or all young people with passports are preps and probably don’t work two jobs. I am from a very small rural town in the south, and I’ve held a passport since I was 18 or 19 years old. We weren’t rich, so I worked two jobs most of my life, whether it was picking tobacco or waiting tables, I worked hard so I could travel. The truth is Palin did not have the drive or need to see other cultures or “intellectual curiosity” to do so. Rod Dreher agrees:

I suppose that’s an answer that might be politically effective, but it’s cheap. Palin is only three years older than I am. We come from the same class, and both grew up in small rural towns. We also grew into adulthood in an era of cheap international airfares. When I was a young adult, I worked summer jobs, and saved enough to go travel in Europe when the fares were super-cheap. I did it because I was intensely curious about the world, and how other people lived. That curiosity was planted in me by my elderly great-great-aunts, farm girls who volunteered as Red Cross nurses in World War I, and who served near the front lines. They grew up in relative poverty, Lois and Hilda did, but they revered learning. They lived in cities for most of their lives, but spent their last years in a little cabin in the country, a short walk through a pecan orchard from my house. I think back on them in wonder, so grateful I had those few years with them when I was small. They represented, and showed to me, a sophisticated worldliness embedded within a love for their own little patch of ground. I learned to read early, and I can recall — literally, the picture comes to mind as I write this — sitting on Aunt Lois’s lap (she smelled like medicine and Keri lotion) by the fire reading the words “Kissinger” and “Moscow” in the newspaper with her, and asking her what Moscow was, and who Kissinger was. And she told me. Lois believed quite naturally that it was important for an intelligent person to care about the affairs of the world, but I also recall her speaking with disdain about a couple in our extended family who loved to discourse on politics and international goings-on, but whose pseudo-sophistication led them to see country people — their neighbors — as mere rubes.