Saturday Night Live is a comedy show. It’s not Meet the Press. It doesn’t “ask the tough questions” or “set the agenda.” It attempts, with varying degrees of success, to make people laugh. That’s it. Whether they skewer and savage people in order to do so, they don’t care. When you come on a show like that, you are prepared in advance to get worked over. Palin knew that. Palin came on to be a good sport. And she was. She was polite, gracious. (More so than some of the famous actors who come through there, believe me.)

However, I assume that, like Meet the Press, SNL feels an obligation to offer their special forum to any and all public figures and officials who are current. Headline making. And in SNL’s case, would make for a hit show. Several people decried SNL for giving her a spot on the show. You’re kidding, right? The woman is the Vice Presidential nominee of one of the two major parties in this country. Don’t put her on SNL? With all of her exposure and the Tina Fey performance? What reality are you in?

If you think an appearance on Saturday Night Live would sway voters and actually affect the outcome of the election, you may have more contempt for the electorate of this country than the Republican National Committee does. And that’s a lot of contempt.

Alec Baldwin, writing for the Huffington Post, about Palin’s appearance on SNL this past weekend.

Honestly, people, why are you taking this Palin-on-SNL-thing so seriously? Alec Baldwin didn’t even take it seriously enough to memorize both his lines.

So Alec Baldwin’s got this new tell-all coming out, titled A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce and a source who’s read an advance copy says that Alec talks in detail about contemplating suicide after his cruel voicemail to his 11-year-old daughter leaked to the press.

“He writes about how he was serious about suicide. He definitely put a lot of thought into the different ways he could accomplish it,” says the source. Eventually, Alec writes that he decided to seek treatment, because he was no good to his daughter or anyone else in his depressed, suicidal state.

Ugh, I don’t know how I feel about like 8000 celebrities doing interviews or writing books about how at one point in their lives they contemplated suicide. Like, is it a positive thing because it gives hope to people who are currently very depressed that things do improve? Or is it shameless exploitation of a very real issue that does claim lives? I mean, for every celebrity who rants to People magazine about how they were once suicidal, like, tens of thousands of people actually do kill themselves, leaving loved ones in devastation. Do these sort of admissions from celebrities help things? Hurt things? Have no impact whatsoever?

What do you guys think?

Father of the Year Alec Baldwin poses with his girlfriend, Nicole Seidel, at a charity bowling event in NYC.

Hopefully he’s infertile!

Honestly this is a huge cheapshot… but what the hell, I haven’t written for the Beet in weeks and I know everyone misses my particular brand of spite. How do I know? Letters… telegrams.. and that one airplane skywriting message that truly went above and beyond.

ENGLEWOOD, Fla. (AP) — Alec Baldwin wants Floridians to be more aware of the plight of manatees. The actor and producer has recorded two 30-second public service announcements for the Save the Manatee Club. The animals are on the federal endangered species list and at risk of being seriously injured or killed by boat strikes.

I really don’t have a joke other than to say that Manatees have done their level best, via evolution, to go extinct. They swim around two miles per hour, on the surface of the water, and they weigh a jillion pounds each. So motor boats pick them off like deer on a highway. Also, they are also called “sea cows” - I think, so this is totally not a jab at the Manatee by this guy. If it were up to me I’d ban motor boats and the beer guzzling yahoos that pilot them.

It’s actually all kind of sad, and I imagine if the manatee were cuter it would get starlets excited about saving it. As it stands it only gets a gravelly voice guy who occasionally loses his temper on the phone.

After StupidThoughtlessLittlePigGate and splitting from his agency (and then crawling back), Alec Baldwin stated on The View that he would not be returning to his hit show (and the thing keeping Aaron Sorkin up at night since he quit smoking crack), 30 Rock. “If I never acted again, I couldn’t care less,” he said.

Baldwin’s 30 Rock contract pretty much assured he’d be coming back, but Tina Fey said in a recent interview that if he comes back, it will be because he wants to.

“I was on vacation so I didn’t actually see him on ‘The View,’” Fey said. “It was my one week of vacation this year, and that went down. I figured, I’m going to let all the talking happen and see what the actual action is, and the action is, he’s going to be at work. No one’s going to make him do it under duress.”

When asked about Baldwin’s famous temper, Fey responded that “thankfully, my relationship with him is solely professional and I have not had to deal with that at all.”

Via Page Six:

HEARING the enraged voicemail message from Alec Baldwin to his daughter brought a flood of bad memories back to the man who first introduced the “30 Rock” star to Kim Basinger on the set of 1991’s doomed “The Marrying Man.” “It all kind of brings it to the surface again for me personally,” said David Permut, producer of more than 20 movies, whose latest, “Charlie Bartlett” with Robert Downey Jr., just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. “If I were homeless on the streets and had a tin cup in my hand and somebody pulled me off the sidewalk and offered me a script to produce with Alec Baldwin committed to starring in it, I’d pass.” While “The Marrying Man” was a flop, it achieved legendary status because of Baldwin’s expensive flare-ups with Disney executives, which included wall-smashing, cellphone-destroying and chair-throwing. Reflecting on the star’s current critical success on NBC, Permut told The Post’s Mandy Stadtmiller, “When he plays a no-good [bleep], he excels. My personal feeling is that when he has to portray anybody with some vulnerability and sensitivity, I don’t think the audience buys it.”

In the wake of StupidThoughtlessLittlePig-Gate, Alec Baldwin has begun making the talk-show rounds to apologize for calling his 11-year-old daughter names clearly intented for his ex-wife on her voicemail. He started things off today with a pre-taped interview airing on The View, where he manages to kinda-sorta apologize for turning his anger toward Kim Basinger on his daughter and plug his website at the very same time (video here). Now that’s talent!

Said Baldwin, “Obviously, calling your child a pig or anything else is improper and inappropriate and I apologize to my daughter for that. There’s nothing wrong with being frustrated or angry about the situation. It’s the way you do it, and as people often do in this world, I took it out on the wrong person.”

The embattled actor recently split from his agents at CAA, and the rumor mill is now reporting that he bailed because CAA also represents FunnyOrDie.com, which put together a (hilarious!) video of Alec Baldwin’s voicemail addressed to Dora the Explorer. (FunnyOrDie.com is also responsible for the infamous Will-Ferrell-and-the-Drunken-Two-Year-Old-Landlord video, which has been quite the viral hit.)

What? This is all absolutely in the stapler’s best interest. But CAA plans to hire a bodyguard for themselves and the stapler. Just in case … there are photographers around.

Alec left Creative Artists Agency on Monday. CAA had repped him since 2002, placing him in The Departed, The Aviator, Will & Grace, and 30 Rock. Talk about crap agents … I guess they failed to place him in a state of mind in which calling his 11-year-old daughter a “rude, thoughtless little pig” was in any way acceptable behavior.

“This is strictly for personal reasons,” said Baldwin’s publicist Matthew Hiltzik. “It has absolutely nothing to do with his extremely talented agents who’ve done great work with Alec.”

[via Defamer, where they're serious enough about this stuff to read the L.A. Times each and every day]