My mom and a few others I know who remain dumbfounded by Sarah Palin's appeal have voiced concerns to me that Palin may have presidential ambitions, and scarily enough, succeed. To be honest, I've never felt that was a serious concern, because Palin has never appeared interested in doing actual work--just look at her bailing out on the Alaskan governorship--more than exposure and fame and the riches associated with that. Guess what, Mom? Looks like I was right:

Pundits can debate the political costs and benefits of Sarah Palin's decision to step down as Alaska governor, but the monetary advantages of leaving her $125,000-a-year public service post are beyond dispute.

Since leaving office at the end of July 2009, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee has brought in at least 100 times her old salary – a haul now estimated at more than $12 million -- through television and book deals and a heavy schedule of speaking appearances worth five and six figures.

But you don't get to that income level without expecting some serious accomodations for your work. Palin's demands--uncovered by some enterprising students at CSU* Stanislaus, who found part of her speaking contract riders in the garbage, awaiting shredding--are perhaps not ludicrous as removing all the brown M&Ms but certainly do indicate a tendency towards the diva.

1) Sarah Palin is scared of real questions from real America. Audience questions must be pre-screened: ""For Q&A, the questions are to be collected from the audience in advance, pre-screened and a designated representative... shall ask questions directly of the Speaker."

2) Palin needs two bottles of water near her lectern. And "bendable straws are to be placed in or near the wooden lectern." Presumably for drinking the water, but they could also be used to illustrate vividly the horns of the devil as he congratulates Obama on Obamacare.

3) Like much of America, Palin likes to be transported in large vehicles: If she's not being flown first class commercial from Anchorage, "the private aircraft MUST BE a Lear 60 or larger." As for ground transportation: "transportation will be by SUV(s) from a professionally licensed and insured car service. If SUV(s) are not available, black town cars may be substituted"

4) Sarah Palin needs three hotel rooms: "A pre-registered one-bedroom suite and two single rooms in a deluxe hotel." One of those hotel rooms is just for her folksy sayings. Another is for if she needs to personally apply advanced interrogation techniques to any terrorists she comes across.

The mainstream media is focusing on her bendy straw fetish, because it's the most innocuous. I wear lipstick too. I get the straw thing, and bendy straws prevent the straw from falling too far into the water bottle. Whatever. What gets me is that they don't blink an eye over the folksy hockey mom demanding Lear jets and first class accommodations for her and whatever entourage with whom she travels. Nor do they mind her insistence on pre-screened questions. All that elitism from the pitbull with lipstick and they focus on her not wanting to smudge it.

However, there are some who find her speaking demands some cause for concern. California Attorney General Jerry Brown wants to make sure that California taxpayers aren't ponying up for Palin's lavish lifestyle:

California Attorney General Jerry Brown said Tuesday his office had launched an investigation into the finances of a state university foundation and the alleged dumping of documents related to Sarah Palin's upcoming speech at the school.

Brown also intends to look into whether the California State University, Stanislaus Foundation violated public disclosure laws. "This is not about Sarah Palin," Brown said in a prepared statement. "The issues are public disclosure and financial accountability in organizations embedded in state-run universities."

Matt Swanson, president of the foundation board, did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment about the investigation. [..]

The document, dated March 16, does not include compensation details for Palin, who commands speaking fees as high as $100,000. Her appearance at the university gala is expected to draw a large crowd, with tickets selling for $500 each. Palin's fee and accommodations will be covered entirely by private donations, not state funds, Swanson said earlier in the day.

The students who found the document said they acted on a tip that documents were being shredded when campus staff members were supposed to be on furlough.

*corrected (h/t acoustichobo)

Elisabeth Hasselbeck was one of Sarah Palin's biggest fans during the 2008 election so it surprising to see her bash Sarah Palin over her over the top "Re-Load" Face Book chart and called it despicable.

In never-thought-you'd-see-the-day news, staunch conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck went off on The View yesterday, railing against none other than Sarah Palin.

Why? Because Palin, for whom she campaigned during the '08 election, released an ad that put 20 Democratic members of Congress literally in the crosshairs.

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The former Alaska Governor's Facebook page features her political action committee's ad targeting the 20 Democratic incumbents, with a SarahPac map marking districts where Democrats voted "yes" for health care reform with guns.

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Hasselbeck also opposes health reform, but she's actually far more upset about how people on her own side of the political spectrum are handling themselves.

"I think the way some Republicans are handling this is nothing more than despicable," she said in response to Palin's tasteless ad. "It's disappointing to see this coming from the Party, and I would hope that leaders like Sarah Palin would end this."

The violence that we predicted is taking place and it's even scaring the likes of Hasselbeck.

Maybe David Broder should have waited until his own newspaper divulged their newest poll results before writing a slobbering column about Sarah Palin. Because wouldn't ya know, she's taken a huge dive in the polls.

I wrote a while ago that going off on her book tour would give her a nice bounce in the polls, but while the money was great, the hype would wear off long before 2012 came rolling along, and she's not going to be able to tour the country with as much positive media coverage as she did this time around.

Here's what the poll said:

Although Palin is a tea party favorite, her potential as a presidential hopeful takes a severe hit in the survey. Fifty-five percent of Americans have unfavorable views of her, while the percentage holding favorable views has dipped to 37, a new low in Post-ABC polling.

There is a growing sense that the former Alaska governor is not qualified to serve as president, with more than seven in 10 Americans now saying she is unqualified, up from 60 percent in a November survey. Even among Republicans, a majority now say Palin lacks the qualifications necessary for the White House.

Palin has lost ground among conservative Republicans, who would be crucial to her hopes if she seeks the party's presidential nomination in 2012. Forty-five percent of conservatives now consider her as qualified for the presidency, down sharply from 66 percent who said so last fall.

Among all Republicans polled, 37 percent now hold a "strongly favorable" opinion of Palin, about half the level recorded when she burst onto the national stage in 2008 as Sen. John McCain's running mate.

Among Democrats and independents, assessments of Palin also have eroded. Six percent of Democrats now consider her qualified for the presidency, a drop from 22 percent in November; the percentage of independents who think she is qualified fell to 29 percent from 37 percent.

And to all those who are enthralled with the mystical independent voters, she's dropped eight points. It's still very early, but these plummeting poll numbers shouldn't be ignored.

Since the book tour, she's become a Fox News analyst, appeared with on all the Fox shows, including with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, and was the highly paid main speaker at Tea Party National Convention. I guess it doesn't take a scandal or a major gaffe to sink this quickly after all. Or maybe Americans are getting saturated with Palin and she's losing her "populist edge."

I don't think she should be taken lightly myself, but I found these numbers quite surprising. I expected the bump she got from the book tour would last a bit longer. Joe Klein makes a good point when he says:

The speech was inspired drivel, a series of distortions and oversimplifications, totally bereft of nourishing policy proposals — the sort of thing calculated, carefully calculated, to drive lamestream media types like me frothing to their keyboards. Palin is a big fat target, eminently available for derision. But I will not deride. Because brilliance must be respected, especially when it involves marketing in an era when image almost always passes for substance. (See the top 10 unfortunate political one-liners.)

I don't agree with his use of the word "brilliance," but in the era of 24/7 cable TV, Fox News and Frank Luntz, marketing is a huge weapon. I have no doubt that she will improve as time goes by, but if America isn't buying her act at this point, I'm not sure they ever will.

The Moderate Voice has more.

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Oh, man, is Meghan McCain ever asking for it:

In an appearance on ABC's The View, Meghan McCain also took issue with a number of recent statements from Sarah Palin, criticizing the former Alaska governor for defending Rush Limbaugh's use of the word "retard" and for suggesting that President Obama launch a war against Iran in order to win a second term.

McCain described Former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo's call for a literacy test for voters as "innate racism."

McCain obviously also has issues with Palin, but it was Tancredo's speech -- in which he thanked God that McCain's father lost the election -- that stuck in her craw:

"It's innate racism, and I think it's why young people are turned off by this movement," McCain retorted on The View.

"I'm sorry, but revolutions start with young people, not 65 year old people talking about literacy tests and people who can't say the word 'vote' in English," McCain added.

McCain, a self-described "progressive Republican," criticized Palin's assertion that President Obama could get himself re-elected to a second term if he launched a war against Iran.

"You should never go to war unless its the absolute last circumstance," McCain said.

As for Palin's defense of Rush Limbaugh for using the word "retard" after calling for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's resignation over the same word last week, McCain said it was a symbol of "exactly what is wrong with politics today.

"We can't placate and say Democrats can say one thing and Republicans can say another thing," she said.

McCain added that the rhetoric coming from the Tea Party movement and from Republicans like Palin "will continue to turn off young voters, and anybody who says different is smoking something."

Why, if she only watched Fox News, McCain would know that America loves this movement and it's full of revolutionary fervor and all kinds of vim and vigor and pep!

Translation: Intraparty heretics like Meghan McCain are political roadkill. Like her dad.

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Sarah Palin quit as Alaska's governor because, she claimed, she needed to "do the right thing for Alaska".

But has anyone sat down and figured out how much this stunt is actually going to cost Alaska's taxpayers?

One of our wise Alaska friends e-mailed the other day, pointing out that Palin's resignation is likely going to wind up costing in the vicinity of $200,000 or more, because a special session is going to be required to name a successor to the lieutenant governor's post.

Indeed, Greg Sargent is reporting that one of the reasons Palin repeatedly gave for resigning -- that defending her on the ethics complaints was costing taxpayers a bundle -- was fundamentally false.

All this for the sake of someone who already has a history of quitting on the state when she hit rough sledding -- but using the splash she made from doing so as a stepping-stone to higher office.

John Ziegler, Palin's Biggest Fan, dropped that point in passing the other night on The O'Reilly Factor -- as though it were an admirable thing to do, of course.

Crisitunity at Swing State Project explored this in a bit further detail:

One other thought about Alaska that just about everyone in the tradmed seems to be missing. Sarah Palin did have a job in between being mayor of Wasilla and Alaska Governor: she was chair of Frank Murkowski's Oil and Gas Commission. How long was she on this Commission? Less than a year... until she quit in January 2004 with a big public huff (leaving the Commission in the lurch with only one member), saying "the experience was taking the 'oomph' out of her passion for government service and she decided to quit rather than becoming bitter." She publicly cited her frustration with being unable to be all straight-talky and mavericky about the corruption and backbiting on the Commission, but the resignation also came at a very convenient time for switching over to lay the groundwork for her successful 2006 gubernatorial run.

As DavidNYC at DailyKos acidly observed:

Don't forget that she also quit four different colleges en route to getting a degree in journalism. It seems that the one lesson Sarah Palin's learned her whole life is that quitters always win.

The best part is that the taxpayers pick up the tab for it, too. Apparently, "what's right for the people of Alaska" is to give them the shaft -- now that she's "too big" for them, especially.