This ought to be news to the Sarah Palin who, after SCOTUS cut the penalty on Exxon for ruining Alaska, made a statement condemning the decision (h/t Undiplomatic via Sully):

"I am extremely disappointed with today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court," Palin said. "While the decision brings some degree of closure to Alaskans suffering from 19 years of litigation and delay, the court gutted the jury’s decision on punitive damages."

Palin added, "It is tragic that so many Alaska fishermen and their families have had their lives put on hold waiting for this decision. My heart goes out to those affected, especially the families of the thousands of Alaskans who passed away while waiting for justice."

Palin said the decision today undercut one of the principal legs of deterrence for those engaged in maritime shipping in Alaska waters. She called on state and federal agencies to be vigilant and firm in regulating such activities.

But this Sarah Palin, the Sarah Palin running to be Vice President, and terrified of saying the wrong thing, apparently doesn’t disapprove of the decision.

COURIC: What other Supreme Court decisions [than Roe v. Wade] do you disagree with?

PALIN: Well, let’s see. There’s –of course –in the great history of America rulings there have been rulings, that’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are–those issues, again, like Roe v Wade where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know–going through the history of America, there would be others but–

COURIC: Can you think of any?

PALIN: Well, I could think of–of any again, that could be best dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue with. But you know, as mayor, and then as governor and even as a Vice President, if I’m so privileged to serve, wouldn’t be in a position of changing those things but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today.

No Sarah, contrary to what Dick Cheney believes, you would not be in a position of changing a SCOTUS decision. But surely, even as a plain old "Joe Six Pack" living in Alaska, you must still oppose the Exxon v. Baker decision?

For some unfathomable reason, Sarah wasn’t even able to muster the name of the case that has been obsessing Alaska for almost two decades.

This may not just hurt her chances to be VP. If I were the Governor of Alaska forgetting that ordinary Alaskans just got screwed out of fair payment for being treated cavalierly by the richest company in the world, I might start worrying about whether I’d still be Governor in a few months. 

Update: For comparison, here’s Biden’s answer to the same question:

If you’ve swung by Drudge today, you know the latest manufactured outrage is that Gwen Ifill has a book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, coming out on inauguration day.

Oh no!! A mistrial!!!

Now, frankly, I do think it rather inappropriate for Ifill to moderate this debate, what with the built-in financial incentive she’s got to see Obama taking the oath of office on the day her book comes out. 

But, as Judd Legum and Michael Calderone argue, it’s McCain campaign’s own damn fault.  Judd writes:

If that’s true, it just shows the McCain campaign’s incompetence. The debate moderators were agreed to on August 6. Ifill’s book was reported in the Associated Press two weeks earlier:

"We have an awkward history about how to talk about race in the nation and in newsrooms," says Gwen Ifill, senior correspondent for PBS’ "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" and author of "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama," slated for publication early next year.

But I think Judd is being overly hard on the McCain campaign. Judd must forget that McCain was very very busy in early August, with stuff that was way more important than vetting Ifill. They surely were totally focused on vetting Sarah Palin. Right?

For the record, McCain says Gwen Ifill, who threw mostly softballs for Dick Cheney in 2004, "will do a totally objective job, because she is a highly respected professional," though he seems to be hedging his right to complain after the fact. Which is no surprise, since they’ve been working the ref for several days already.

Really, really doesn’t want to be deposed by CREW.

Last week, the judge in CREW’s lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney approved our request to take the depositions of David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff.

On the eve of that deposition, Vice President Cheney and the other defendants filed an emergency petition for a writ of mandamus with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Mandamus is an extraordinary remedy and defendants seek it here to have the D.C. Circuit intrude directly into the district court litigation by demanding that the district court judge vacate her discovery orders. The petition is based on a claim that the discovery authorized by the district court raises serious separation of powers concerns merely because the deponent is David Addington.

I double dog dare the Appeals Court to tell David Addington that, even if such a deposition would present a problem according to Article II, separation of powers complaints are not available to the Fourth Branch.

In comments to Marc Ambinder, the McCain campaign has resoundingly confirmed what Nate and Sean had to say about Sarah Palin’s continuing importance to the ticket. She is critically important to the campaign’s efforts to mount any kind of ground game.

Here’s Sean, who has been road-tripping to gauge field operations of both campaigns.

As most of you know, I’ve been on the road for the past three weeks, so far visiting at least a dozen McCain campaign offices in six battleground states as well as Palin’s first solo rally in Carson City, Nevada. If McCain dumps Palin, it is over.

In the Colorado Springs volunteer office, “you could hear a pin drop” in the days before Palin was picked. In Reno, the volunteering had been anemic; the Saturday morning after the Palin pick, organizers arrived to an early morning volunteer line waiting at the door.

Our direct observation shows McCain is being overwhelmingly outworked on the ground as it is; take Palin away and you can add 2-5% to Obama’s total in every close state due to ground game.

And here’s the McCain campaign.

Palin is directly responsible for doubling the size of the campaign’s field operation, according to a senior campaign official, as she’s been a huge fundraising draw, bringing in, according one reliable estimate, more than $30 million for the RNC and its joint accounts. In the 12 hours after the announcement, she raised $4.4 million for the campaign.

She is directly responsible for luring more than 100,000 people to McCain-Palin events — and that’s on the low end of a guesstimate.

She has helped the campaign recruit thousands of additional volunteers. In the last two weeks, for the first time this year, the campaign has recorded more volunteer door knocks and phone calls than the same weeks 4 years ago.

 "Given that 2004 is the measuring stick, we’re proud of that," a campaign official says. "We were nowhere close to 2004 stats until about 3 weeks ago."

Her choice has gotten some of the louder social conservative voices to shut the heck up and stop complaining about McCain. The money and people that she has brought has been put towards opening at least 100 new field offices over the past two weeks alone.

Had McCain not found a way to gin up enthusiasm for his ticket, his get-out-the-vote machine would likely be half its size. [my emphasis]

Now, I’m not surprised in the least that two McCain officials are confirming what Sean has to say–Sean’s doing some of the most valuable reporting of the campaign this year, showing us data that doesn’t make the polls or the pundits. And empty campaign offices are a pretty sound measure of the ineffectiveness of a campaign’s ground game.

But I am shocked by the clarity of the confession these campaign officials made–all in an attempt to refute the appearance that Palin has become an anvil for the campaign. That is that, up until ten weeks before the election, the McCain campaign was far under-performing their field goals, perhaps by as much as half. 

Now, given the fact they out-performed the same-week totals from 2004 in the last two weeks, they’re obviously trying to play catch-up.  Probably, they’re trying to combine voter ID with persuasion, particularly in places like OH and GA that are already voting.

But in some key ways, you can’t make up for the two month advantage Obama has had. You can’t build the kind of block-by-block campaign organization you ideally want if you don’t start recruiting volunteers in earnest until mid-September. You can talk to voters, but you can’t really establish a relationship with them, nor amplify the efforts of each volunteer over time.

Nate and Sean are right. The McCain campaign will have to win or lose with Sarah Palin. But in their attempt to convince Ambinder that she remains critical to the ticket, these McCain staffers have admitted that McCain has already badly lost in a key measure of the campaign. 

When I discovered that CBS had put out an embeddable clip of the exchange they used for the teaser advertising yesterday’s installment of the Couric-Palin comedy hour (effectively pre-empting their own broadcast), I wrote this in an email:

I actually wonder if they haven’t gotten as much traffic as they expected.

AFAIK, they treated today’s clip differently than they did the last ones–they made the clip available for embed at the same time as they released the teaser of that clip (which is the one I put up on a post).

In other words, I suspect that they didn’t get the traffic they wanted, because people were watching the fun bits on YouTube the next day. So they pre-empted those YouTubes and have the embed up with two ads.

I guess the proper word is "viewership"–meaning I suspected that CBS’s ratings for their Couric-Palin interviews weren’t all that great.

Turns out I was right.

Katie Couric’s newsmaking interviews with the Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, last week had only a slight impact on the ratings for her CBS newscast. But if the network could have added up all the other viewers the interviews (and its spoof) racked up, on places like CNN, YouTube and “Saturday Night Live,” Ms. Couric would surely have been more seen and talked about than in any week since she began her tenure as anchor.

Ms. Couric received a rush of attention for the two interviews, in which Ms. Palin, governor of Alaska, spoke haltingly on, among other topics, her state’s “narrow maritime border” with Russia. Clips turned up across the spectrum of television and Web sites.

The first interview last Wednesday, for example, has been viewed more than 1.4 million times on YouTube, while the parody of the interview on “SNL” was streamed more than 4 million times on NBC.com, viewed in full more than 600,000 times on YouTube and in shorter clips many more hundreds of thousands of times.

Still, the “CBS Evening News” gained only about 10 percent in audience from the previous week — and it was actually down from the same week the year before. The newscast averaged just under 6 million viewers for the week, up from 5.44 million the previous week. A year ago Ms. Couric’s program drew about 6.2 million viewers. (CBS was also a distant third last week behind ABC, which won with 8.07 million viewers, and NBC, with 7.98 million.)

The CBS newscast didn’t even record its highest audience totals last Wednesday and Thursday, when the interviews were broadcast. Monday was the network’s best-rated night of the week.

Mind you, I’m not sure what to make of this data. The CBS executives interviewed in the article seem happy with the attention anyway, because it has boosted Couric’s brand. (Note to all women reporters who have credibility problems tied to the impression you’re a lightweight: interview Sarah Palin while you still can, because she will, by comparison, make you look like a fricking genius.)

And obviously, CBS tried to adjust to this new reality. After having lost ad revenue for last week’s interviews, they finally figured out they should release their own embeddable videos, so they can attach an ad before and after the clip, though a number of blogs simply made a new YouTube from that clip by stripping out the ads. I expect we’ll see more of the early release of content, with some way to prevent people from stripping the ads.

Still, I find the phenomenon an important milestone. One of the most important events of the campaign, thus far–Palin’s disastrous performance on CBS–has happened in the dispersed world of YouTube rather than on the broadcast network that created that event. That will have a range of effects, I suspect, not least in giving broadcasters an incentive to create content that bloggers will respond to. But what other effects it will have, I’m not sure.

The WSJ has a profile of Nora Dannehy, the prosecutor Michael Mukasey picked to further investigate the US Attorney purge. It includes a bunch of details that might make you more confident the investigation will be thorough.

In her 17 years in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Connecticut, Nora Dannehy has sent a governor and a state treasurer to prison. Is she up for tackling such a lengthy and politically dicey investigation? Legal peers and former bosses say the long-distance runner is up to it.

“She’s stubborn as hell and very, very smart,” said William Gerace, who went up against Dannehy in the investigation of his client, Lawrence E. Alibozek, who as a deputy chief of staff for Gov. John G. Rowland was accused of taking payoffs. “She doesn’t play politics.”

Because of the litany of public corruption cases Dannehy, 47, has prosecuted, she has a reputation as a pitbull, say attorneys.

But it’s not so much the profile that ought to give you pause–it’s the detail that the investigation already has a due date: in 60 days.

Today, Dionne Searcey, the newest addition to the WSJ’s legal gang, delivers us some background on the career prosecutor, who will have to turn around her investigation in a mere 60 days: [my emphasis]

Or roughly December 1. In other words, after the election (so results of the investigation can’t further sink the Republican Party), but before the next President appoints his own Attorney General. Or, to put it differently, long before the inevitable battle over whether Harriet Miers and Karl Rove have to testify, and whether the Administration has to hand over their own secret timeline of the firings.

Here’s the guy I’d like to interview Friday morning: John Bitney.

You’ll recall this WSJ article explaining that the McCain team realized they were using normal methods to prepare seasoned candidates for debate, which wasn’t working for Palin.

More broadly, the McCain campaign aims to halt what it sees as a perceived decline in the crispness and precision of Gov. Palin’s latest remarks as well as a fall in recent polls, according to several advisers and party officials.

McCain officials denied any problems inside the campaign. "The nature of political campaigns, with all their ups and downs, is for insiders and outsiders and no-siders to register complaints, often anonymously," said Tucker Eskew, a counselor for Gov. Palin. "We all in this campaign understand that, and we’re not distracted by it, even as we welcome well-intentioned and good advice."

Some prominent Republicans and senior members of Congress have expressed worries about certain facets of the Palin campaign, particularly that Gov. Palin may be "overprepared" and not encouraged to be herself, an adviser said.

"She hasn’t had the time or inclination to question the judgments of the people telling her to hit her marks," said one Republican strategist. "Gov. Palin is a team player, but the campaign needs to adjust to a game plan that works for her."

[snip]

Meanwhile, the more experienced advisers assigned to her by the McCain campaign are accustomed to working with seasoned candidates, not someone "completely green on the national stage," one strategist said. Several Republican backers have griped that the campaign has put the candidate in difficult situations, from sitting for high-profile television interviews to popping into meetings with foreign leaders, some of whom made sexist remarks, said several officials.

"It’s time to let Palin be Palin — and let it all hang out," said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist. [my emphasis]

 And along with the entire Palin family, they’ve shipped in one of Sarah’s own staffers.

Also, a key Alaska staffer joined the Palin operation Sunday.

It makes sense, right? Faced with the realization that you’ve got to let Sarah be Sarah, that you’ve got to replicate what she did in Alaska rather than prep her like you’d prep a Hillary Clinton or a Susan Collins, you bring in the staffers who prepped her for her very successful gubernatorial debates, right?

No.

Turns out, the guy that prepped her for those debates is one of the guys Todd Palin had fired because of a personal issue (Bitney was dating the ex-wife of one of Todd’s best friends).

John Bitney, the policy director for her campaign for governor and the main person who helped prepare her for debates, said her repetition of words was “her way of running down the clock as her mind searches for where she wants to go.”

That’s not to say some other Alaskan can’t prep Sarah just as well. But I would imagine Bitney is going to have an interesting time watching the debate tomorrow night.

What’s stunning about this clip is not that she can’t name a single newspaper she reads (not even the Anchorage Daily News, from which she hired a key staffer).

It’s that her immediate retreat to claiming she got her news from many, unnamed, sources so closely resembles something Bush once said in an interview:

BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you’ve got a beautiful face and everything.

I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. But like Condoleezza, in her case, the national security adviser is getting her news directly from the participants on the world stage.

HUME: Has that been your practice since day one, or is that a practice that you’ve…

BUSH: Practice since day one.

HUME: Really?

BUSH: Yes. You know, look, I have great respect for the media. I mean, our society is a good, solid democracy because of a good, solid media. But I also understand that a lot of times there’s opinions mixed in with news. And I…

HUME: I won’t disagree with that, sir.

BUSH: I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.

And we know how well that worked out.

Engaging in a bit of trash talk before Thursday’s debate yesterday, Sarah Palin made fun of Biden’s age.

And I do look forward to Thursday night and debating Sen. Joe Biden. We’re gonna talk about those new ideas, new energy for America. I’m looking forward to meeting him too. I’ve never met him before, but I’ve been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in like second grade.

Set aside the fact that Sarah Palin’s interest in the US Senate pretty obviously began about twelve years ago, when she started sucking at Uncle Toobz’s earmark teat while Mayor of Wasilla. Palin’s crack, though an obvious lie, is sort of funny, flipping Biden’s extensive experience on its head.

It’s about what I would expect from a woman spouting words written by Steve Schmidt and Tucker Eskew.

Yet, even while they’re taking digs at Biden’s age (he’s six years younger than McCain), they’re turning an Obama joke about McCain’s erratic behavior into another fit of false outrage about age.

This morning on MSNBC, Gibbs returned to the make-fun-of-the-elderly joke well. "Just yesterday, John McCain said we shouldn’t fix blame. He took a breath and then fixed blame. He said the fundamentals of our economy are strong, and he flip-flopped. He opposed the bail-out of AIG, and then he supported it. This guy zig-zags. Look, if he’s driving a car, get off the sidewalk." (Video here.)

That Swampland post and this Politico post were written after the McCain team sent out an outraged email (see Duncan on the former here).

Seeing as how Sarah Palin’s biggest drawback for voters–out of many–is the age and past health problems of her running mate, I’m not sure the campaign really should have made age-based attacks fair game.

But now that they have, I say, let’s have that discussion about McCain’s age, shall we?

Update: LOLOLOL!!! Katie is doing herself proud with her Palin series–from tonight’s installment:

Gov. Palin at Monday’s event in Columbus, OH:   I do look forward to Thursday night and debating Senator Joe Biden. We are going to talk about those new ideas, new energy for America. I’m looking forward to meet him too. I’ve never met him before. But, I’ve been hearing about his senate speeches since I was in like 2nd grade.

Katie Couric: You made a funny comment, you’ve said you have been listening to Joe Biden’s speeches since you were in second grade.

Gov. Palin: It’s been since like ‘72, yah.

Katie Couric: You have a 72-year-old running mate, is that kind of a risky thing to say, insinuating that Joe Biden’s been around awhile?

Gov. Palin: Oh no, it’s nothing negative at all. He’s got a lot of experience and just stating the fact there, that we’ve been hearing his speeches for all these years. So he’s got a tremendous amount of experience and, you know, I’m the new energy, the new face, the new ideas and he’s got the experience based on many many years in the Senate and voters are gonna have a choice there of what it is that they want in these next four years.

Of course, the follow-up should be, "Sarah, do you remember any speech Biden made?" Because I’m betting–given that Palin wasn’t chosen until the following day–that Palin didn’t even watch Biden’s acceptance speech.

Turns out it was the First Dude who decided he and the family would be sitting in on Sarah’s debate prep this week. 

For his part, Mr. Palin has worried about the frequent separation of his wife from her family, friends and Alaska staff, an adviser said. Accordingly, her family will be with her in Sedona during this week. Also, a key Alaska staffer joined the Palin operation Sunday.

In fact, the First Dude just decided that Sarah needed him around–she’s already been traveling with Willow.

You think maybe this or this had to do with Todd’s worries about his wife?