Time has always had a snarky side. It was a running joke at Mad magazine during the 1960s that Time was trying to be their competition. They regularly ran jokes about TV sitcom writers stealing material from Time, and the like.
Consider this line stolen.
I enjoyed this one:
Mayor McCheese
Mayor
“I’m not aware of his stance on a single issue.” — Ross Autry, personal adviser to this project on Facebook, where I asked for help from anyone. Hey, 100 is a lot of people.
He probably doesn’t have much support in Israel.
This is what I came in to say.
I just finished reading the whole issue over lunch, because it was all I had for reading material. What a waste of paper! The whole issue was nothing but a bunch of short, inconsequential fluff pieces on celebrities “written” by other celebrities. Palin’s piece on Glenn Beck was written far too well for it to be written by her, for example.
The best part of the issue was Joel Stein’s column, which is kind of pathetic, really.
Whoever compared Time to People magazine is right on the money–at least for this issue, anyway.
And this counts as a “double issue”?! What a load of crap.
You’re welcome. 
Just wishing won’t make it so!
Exactly. First you need socialized medicine. Then you need to see a death panel. Then, if they authorize it, you’ll be killerated in the middle of the night a combination of Trotskyists and Black Panthers.
-Joe
Sarah Palin is influential.
She is widely admired and respected, and looked to as a role model, and source of important ideas.
No, really.
Vomit all you want, yet it is a fact. Don’t ever forget that the world is like that.
Tris
Agghhhhhh MAKE IT STOP!!! MAKE IT STOOOPPPPPPPPP!!!
Watch what you ask for. I now want to vomit gigaliters.
My contempt for Sarah Palin borders on mental illness, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate to call her “influential.” To a non-ignsignifant part of the American population she is a totem and an oracle.
This. She gets talked about enough in the US that I’ll concede her a spot on a national influence list.
But does the rest of the world even care? I suppose English speakers might be aware of her just through shared media, but I can’t imagine anyone outside the US is really paying attention. Does Europe have anything to say about Palin? Does China? India?
For a world influence claim don’t you have to be able to affect the world in some way?
“In the world” is out to lunch. I agree with that.
On the same list (albeit in the entertainment category): Conan O’Brien and Ashton Kutcher.
Popular, yes. Successful, yes. But among the most influential people in the world- even in entertainment? Not really. How influential is somebody who just lost the Tonight Show due to low ratings and an actor with a string of lackluster movies and a popular prank show but who’s most famous for shagging/marrying/tweeting with the older MILF ex-wife of a superstar whose most popular movie alone probably outgrossed all Kutcher’s movies combined?
In entertainment the most influential people are probably people whose names are unknown to most people outside the industry and thus they wouldn’t make good copy and nobody wants to see a glossy of them. True, they can greenlight a $240 million remake of GRAPES OF WRATH set on a space station with a signature or turn a pizza delivery boy into a superstar overnight with a phone call but- they themselves look like Larry Bud Melman and nobody ever asks for their autograph. What O’Brien and Kutcher are is “talked about” and “popular” and in the media all the time- they have super high Q factors, but that’s different from influence.
I think Sarah Palin is exactly the same. There are officials in India and China whose actions directly affect hundreds of millions of people but Americans wouldn’t recognize their name and they might not have any attractive 8 x 10s so let’s go with Sarah Palin: she’s on TV all the time, even her enemies admit she looks good, and it’s a lot better than some name our readers don’t know who affects a billion people they’ll never meet.
Thank god I’m not the only one.
Someday, you will join us.
When hungry people can’t eat at the moons of Nibia, I’ll be there. And when some cop is beatin’ up a guy at the Antares maelstrom, I’ll be there. I’ll be there in the way guys yell when they’re mad 'round Perdition’s flames.
Maybe they use the number of times she has a thread devoted to her on the SDMB as one of the criteria…
Remember; being influential is not necessarily a good thing. Sarah is nothing like Hitler but he had a lot of influence on the world.Look at WW2!