On the heels of President Obama‘s State of the Union address, where he called for the “Buffett Rule”: a requirement that millionaires pay at least 30% of their income in taxes, the richest man in America, Bill Gates, weighed in on solutions to the country’s economic problems. “The United States has a huge budget deficit, so taxes are going to have to go up,” Gates told the BBC. “And I certainly agree that they should go up more on the rich than everyone else. That’s just justice.”

Both Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul declined their invitations to the Donald Trump-moderated Newsmax debate on December 27th, and many pundits have criticized the choice of Trump as moderator (including Mediaite’s own Colby Hall). Many wondered if any candidates would actually go to the debate, but during his visit to Staten Island yesterday, Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich told reporters he would definitely attend the debate.

All politics is local, and it doesn’t get any more local than your own wallet. A new Pew study that shows record wealth gaps between white people and black and Hispanic people is getting some air in today’s news cycle, but another recent Pew study, which shows Republicans making large gains among white voters, deserves attention alongside it. Is this a case of knowing on which side your bread is buttered?

You may like Sarah Palin, you may not. (Full disclosure: I don’t.) But there is one concrete, indisputable fact: she tried to riff on Paul Revere and messed up. She was trying to answer a question, tripped up on her words, tried to recover. But it wasn’t a success.

This happens to people – especially people who have cameras pointed at them – all the time. It doesn’t make them ignorant, or a fool. It means they stumbled over their words. It’s OK.

Here’s what’s not OK: pretending that you did exactly what you meant to do.

Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, George Lucas, and a baker’s dozen of other American billionaires are really taking this whole “season of giving” thing seriously. The Wall Street Journal reports that 16 tycoons have just signed on to the “Giving Pledge,” thereby vowing to donate most of their wealth to worthy causes.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (a charitable organization started by two people whose names escape me) is helping fund a year long series for ABC News. The expensive series, entitled “Be the Change: Save a Life,” will take viewersl all around the world and focus “on the diseases and health conditions that disproportionately afflict the world’s poorest people.”

Facebook may have been down yesterday, but its cofounder Mark Zuckerberg is up. The 26-year-old social-media whiz kid has been listed in the Forbes 400 as the 35th richest person in America, shooting past older media barons like Newscorp’s Rupert Murdoch, who is ranked 38th, and Apple’s Steve Jobs, who is ranked 42nd. Software kingpin Bill Gates of Microsoft still reigns on top of the Forbes list of rich people.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett rank second and third respectively on Forbes’ list of billionaires. While both have been involved in philanthropy for quite some time, it was only recently that they launched The Giving Pledge, a challenge directed toward the country’s wealthy to give away majority of their wealth to charitable causes. Today, 34 billionaires have signed on.

So why can’t the Grey Lady scrape by with a little more profit? Forbes just announced it’s annual rankings for billionaires, and Carlos Slim Helu – who in 2008 became the largest shareholder in The Times and arguably saved the paper from bankruptcy – has been announced the #1 wealthiest person in the world.

The question, koan-like in its infinitude and all-meaningfulness, of whether Rupert Murdoch‘s self-importance outstrips his actual importance at last seems capable of an answer. Today, one of Murdoch’s papers, The Australian, carries a story on a briefing Murdoch gave to announce the unexpectedly rosy results his media conglomerate Newscorps, enjoyed last quarter. The answer appears to be yes.

A glance at my watch indicated it was just before 1am on the first Saturday night/early Sunday morn of the Sundance Film Festival. The setting was downstairs at Ciseros restaurant on Main St in Park City, which had been rechristened for the week as the Island/Def Jam House of Hype aka The Film Lounge, one of the hottest party spots/ gifting lounges during the festival

In October, 1991, James Fallows wrote a hilarious takedown of the Economist that ran in the Washington Post’s Outlook Section. The essay attempted to explain why perfectly intelligent people, like Harvard’s Robert Reich (who at the time was in the middle of a squabble with Newsweek’s Robert Samuelson), would say things like: “I, for one, [...]