Sarah Palin

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin plans to appear on "Saturday Night Live" this weekend, multiple sources told CNN Thursday. "Saturday Night Live" has featured three opening skits in which former cast member and Palin lookalike Tina Fey portrays the Alaska governor. It was not known whether Fey also will appear on Saturday night's program. The live comedy program airs on NBC at 11:30 p.m. ET. Fey first appeared as Palin for the show's season premiere last month in a sketch with SNL cast member Amy Poehler, who played Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Has Sarah Palin started running for president? In the last week alone, the Alaska governor appeared at a Republican fundraiser in Washington D.C., attended a baseball game in New York and even led a small-town parade on the U.S. east coast, 5,000 kilometers from her small town on the western side of the continent. It looks so much like a campaign for the White House, you could almost forget that Barack Obama has just settled into the presidency and will keep it until the end of 2012 at least.

What is one to make of Sarah Palin's defensive, bitter, self-centered speech in response to the mass killings in Arizona? It may well work, in that dog-whistle way the former Alaska governor has, with some ultra-conservatives. But the speech is one more piece of evidence (as if we needed one) that Palin, even at a time when Americans are crying out for healing and unity, is a strikingly polarizing figure. When she first burst on the national scene, I watched her convention speech and could not imagine Ronald Reagan delivering it. She was sarcastic and caustic and harsh -- everything Reagan was not. I felt the same thing watching her post-Arizona video presentation.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will visit South Korea next month to speak at a global gathering of business leaders, organizers said. Palin will speak at the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, which runs October 11 through 13. According to organizers, the former governor will discuss "U.S. leadership perspective on how to lead the world out of the latest crisis. " The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee has remained mum on whether she'll jump into the 2012 race for the GOP presidential nomination.

Fortunes were wiped out this week. Washington seemed paralyzed. And Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin should probably be grateful. In the wild swings of U.S. markets and politics, John McCain's running mate was almost overlooked. That's lucky because Palin has a problem. The problem is that candidates have to speak; not just in prepared speeches and advertisements, but unscripted and on their own. And Palin hasn't been doing a good job of it. Truth is, she's hardly been doing it at all. As you read this, Americans will have just seen her debate against Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden -- her biggest unassisted outing yet. Watch for the reaction.

The first time I met Sarah Palin, I went into her Anchorage office to interview the first woman and youngest governor ever elected in Alaska. As a freelance writer, I had been asked by Kent Sturgis, publisher at Epicenter Press, to write her biography. It was a plum assignment; Alaskans are intrigued by this woman. I took a seat at the end of a couch that was draped with the cape of a brown bear her father had shot on a hunting trip. Rather than sit behind her sprawling governor's desk, she pulled up a chair and began to ask me questions: Did I have a family?

Millions of Americans spent this week ignoring politics and concentrating on summer, soaring temperatures and vacation travel, but there was no getting away from Sarah Palin. A largely overlooked Republican state governor until she ran for the vice-presidency two years ago, Palin was thrust into the spotlight and has stayed there ever since as a television host, prolific internet presence, author of a best-selling memoir and busy public speaker. In just the past week: -- She acknowledged a new chapter in a long-running melodrama surrounding her daughter, a teenaged single mother.

Sarah Palin begins her manipulation of the readers of her book "Going Rogue" in the title, embracing as a badge of honor the accusation leveled at her by McCain campaign staffers during the last bitter days of election 2008 -- even though she's exemplified the political insider throughout her career. In "Going Rogue," she describes the campaign as disorganized and defeatist and writes that Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's aides had a "jaded aura" about them.

During a speech at an event called "Freedom Fest," former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin warned Tea Party activists that while government spending was a bad thing, conservatives should not go too far and start calling for reductions in the military budget. While Palin told the crowd in Norfolk, Virginia, "Something has to be done urgently to stop the out-of-control Obama-Reid-Pelosi spending machine," she also told them, "We must make sure, however, that we do nothing to undermine the effectiveness of our military.

Todd Palin and nine aides were found in contempt Friday by the Alaska Senate for failing to appear to testify in the Legislature's "troopergate" investigation of his wife, Gov. Sarah Palin, a spokeswoman for the Alaska Democratic Party said. But a Senate resolution said no one should be punished, because the 10 did submit statements to the investigator, the Anchorage Daily News reported. The governor's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The investigation concerns the governor's firing of the state's public safety commissioner, Walter Monegan.

Three more Secret Service employees have "chosen to resign" in the wake of a prostitution scandal that emerged last week, the agency said in a news release Friday. Six Secret Service members now have left their jobs in the wake of the incident in Cartagena, Colombia, which came while they were on a security detail in advance of President Barack Obama's trip there for the Summit of the Americas. The agency also announced Friday that a 12th Secret Service "employee has been implicated," having previously said 11 were under investigation.

HBO's new political docudrama "Game Change" isn't just any made-for-TV movie inspired by reality. The film explores the behind-the-scenes decision-making process that guided the 2008 McCain/Palin presidential ticket, and the human qualities of both candidates. Director Jay Roach ("Austin Powers," "Meet the Parents") didn't want to just rehash the story lines that dominated the news that fall. In addition to some of the widely publicized stories -- from the vetting process to the Katie Couric interview and the "Saturday Night Live" sketches -- "Game Change" shows how the campaign staffers, particularly Steve Schmidt (played by Woody Harrelson)

Mitt Romney scored a major victory by taking Ohio, but Rick Santorum continued to defy the odds by winning several contests on Super Tuesday as the race for the Republican presidential nomination now moves to Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi and beyond. In a late-night nail-biter, Romney came away with an Ohio win that he hopes will help him overwrite the narrative that he is incapable of connecting with blue-collar voters. Romney inches forward While it was another disappointing loss for Santorum in a state in which he was expected to perform well, the former Pennsylvania senator did pocket victories in Tennessee, Oklahoma and North Dakota.

After seeing Texas Gov. Rick Perry's lackluster performance in debates and accompanying drop in the polls, some pundits conclude it would take a force of nature to save his campaign. Fortunately for Perry, such a force does exist, and her name is Sarah Palin. A dose of Palin power would do much to revitalize Perry's chances to win the Republican presidential nomination. Of course, such a coveted endorsement comes with costs. Rock stars such as Palin don't just walk into campaign headquarters asking to lend a helping hand.

Sarah Palin, ending months of speculation, said Wednesday she will not run for president, either as a Republican or third-party candidate. "This has been prayerfully considered," the former Alaska governor said on the Mark Levin radio program. "I can be on the right path without being a candidate. " Palin previously said she was still considering a run, but she faced an October 28 filing deadline for the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire. Early primary calendar hampers latecomers "It's a life-altering proposition and she really spent a lot of time talking with her family and being with her family," said a source close to the Palin family.

An earlier GOP primary election calendar could complicate efforts by possible latecomers such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie should he decide to join the crowded 2012 presidential field. "With every passing hour the window is closing," said Nathan Gonzales, deputy editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. "I still believe you have to have an operation in place on the ground in early states and that all depends on how quickly he (Christie) can put that together -- and whether he can be competitive.

A heckler who got into a heated exchange with Bristol Palin at a Southern California bar and restaurant last week has apologized for the incident. Palin had just finished riding a mechanical bull at the Saddle Ranch & Chop House when Stephen Hanks shouted, "Do you ride Levi like that? Your mother's a whore. " As cameras rolled, Palin walked over to him and asked Hanks to repeat what he'd said. "Your mother's a ... devil, dude," Hanks said in a video posted on Hollywood.TV.

Perhaps it was because Rep. Michele Bachmann was in her element at the CNN/Tea Party Republican Debate. With her campaign flagging, the founder of the Tea Party Caucus in Congress delivered a surprise body blow to the GOP front-runner, Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Challenging Perry on his 2007 executive order that required Texas schoolgirls to receive vaccinations against the sexually transmitted HPV virus, Bachmann suggested the governor acted for purely political reasons. "I just wanted to add that we cannot forget that in the midst of this executive order there is a big drug company that made millions of dollars because of this mandate.

When Matt Richardson works from his home in Brooklyn, New York, he likes to keeps the TV on to stay informed, but some celebrity or another is always taking up airtime and bugging him. "A while ago it was Charlie Sheen. And then it was Sarah Palin. And then it was Donald Trump," said Richardson, who is a video producer for Make Magazine. "And after a while I realized there's sort of always someone who I don't really want to hear about. " Like any good hacker, Richardson decided to come up with a fix: He developed a do-it-yourself TV remote control that will automatically mute the television when certain celebrity names are mentioned.

"A true conservative. " The heading atop Texas Gov. Rick Perry's biography on his campaign website sums up the key issue of the race for the Republican presidential nomination five months before the expected start of the 2012 primary season. With the right-wing tea party movement playing the most dynamic role in the campaign so far, the GOP competition comes down to which of the handful of die-hard conservative candidates will emerge to battle initial front-runner Mitt Romney for the nomination.