2nd Thread: Palin to Step Down as Governor at the End of July…”Open Thread* [Updated by Larry Johnson]

READ the first thread below, posted by Ani on Friday afternoon and updated by Larry Johnson. Those comments are now closed, but can all be read. Please post new comments here. – SusanUnPC

ORIGINAL FRIDAY POST: Yes, that is the news. According to NY Times’s Mitchell L. Blumenthal, Sarah Palin to Resign as Governor of Alaska effective July 25th:

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska announced Friday that she would step down by the end of the month and not seek a second term as governor, fueling speculation that she is seriously weighing whether to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2012.

Ms. Palin, who was Senator John McCain’s vice presidential running mate last year and solidified the support of the party’s conservative base, explained her decision at a news conference at her home in Wasilla, Alaska, accompanied by her husband, Todd, and other family members.

“We know we can effect positive change outside of government,” she said in making the announcement.

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Known as Sarah Barracuda when she played basketball in high school, Ms. Palin used point guard analogy in explaining her decision, saying she knows “exactly when to pass the ball so the team can win.”

She said that she planned to hand over the reins of the state government to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, who would be sworn in at the governor’s picnic in Fairbanks later this month.

“This decision came after much consideration,” Ms. Palin told reporters gathered at her home, and added, “I really don’t want to disappoint anyone with this announcement.”

There had been wide speculation that she would seek to be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 2012. Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, who is also considered to be a leading Republican candidate for president in 2012, announced last month that he would not seek re-election.

By leaving office early, Ms. Palin, a 45-year-old mother of five, will be able to travel around the country more freely and not be constrained by the duties and responsibilities of being a governor.

“Some are going to question the timing of this, and let me say this decision has been in the works for quite a while,” she said.

I cannot imagine what her thinking is here, but surely having to deal with all sorts of bogus ethics complaints, paying astronomical legal fees and fending off the non-stop media hit squad doesn’t help her in doing her job as Governor, or in caring for her family.

Whatever her motives or endgame here, I find the witch hunt against her absolutely disgusting. Ironic that prior to Sarah Palin being chosen as Senator McCain’s running mate, she commented about Hillary Clinton being on the receiving end of sexist attacks at the hands of the media. While she was very respectful of Clinton, she said at the time a woman knows she’ll be dealing with this going in, so she’s just got to be twice as good and get on with it. She intimated it would be better to just not mention it.

It is unfortunate that she has learned the hard way just what SoS Clinton has had to deal with for sixteen years.

Your thoughts, please.

UPDATE–Couple of articles with more substance on Governor Palin’s decision and motive.
Here’s what Sam Stein reports:

The head of the Republican Governor’s Association said on Friday that in emails sent to him moments before she announced her resignation as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin discussed expanding the role she played in the Republican Party.

“Part of her decision is she wants to spend more time campaigning for candidates,” Nick Ayers, the executive director of the RGA, told Fox News.

“She felt like she needed to make her colleagues around the country aware, so she had given us a brief heads up,” Ayers said of getting the emails. “We have known for a couple of days she was considering not running for re-election but it was news today that she had gone ahead and made the decision to fully step down and resign.”

My friend, John Batchelor, posted this a bit ago (the original appears at the Daily Beast):

Rather than a blow to a career, Sarah Palin’s decision to resign underlines her self-awareness, writes The Daily Beast’s John Batchelor. She is now unmatched for the 2012 primary.
The early excuse for the Republican circular firing squad of the holiday weekend is that Weekly Standard editor and party brainiac Bill Kristol claims that pugnacious McCain campaign enforcer Steve Schmidt has been caught gossiping to Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum about Sarah Palin’s rambling and incoherent vice-presidential campaign last September and October. (Now that Palin has announced her resignation from Alaska’s governorship, the late excuse for the fisticuffs will certainly be that the boys smelled a special mom baking an apple pie in the kitchen of the GOP and they got in line early with a plate and appetite.)
Purdum, writing with a polite disdain, does flatter Palin as “the sexiest and riskiest brand in the Republican Party,” before he goes on to mention unnamed McCain campaign sources who tell stories of Palin’s erratic behavior on the trail supposedly caused by her “post-partum depression.” Kristol asserts as evidence that Schmidt was the source of this defamatory rumor that Kristol knows that Schmidt has recently emailed Palin out of the blue. “Perhaps Steve was nervous someone would finger him for the Purdum piece,” Kristol proposes.
What Palin begins with an announcement from Wasilla is not only a campaign, it is an Iditarod of a crusade.
Firing back, Schmidt immediately emailed a reference to Bill Kristol’s distant youth when he worked for the perennial GOP chump, Vice President Dan Quayle: “I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”
Meanwhile, the sniping continues to deteriorate, with erstwhile McCain campaign advisers like Randy Scheunemann choosing sides with Kristol (Scheunemann hates Schmidt, who tried to force him out of the campaign as a leaker and confiscated his BlackBerry), while Schmidt reveals that he had the permission of McCain and Palin to ferret out who was leaking unkind details on Palin to the media. No comment yet from the senator and the governor on their genius of a Plumbers Unit. Another campaign aide, Nicole Wallace, and her husband, Mark Wallace, are mentioned as founts of poison on Palin. “This is all news to me,” Nicole Wallace proclaims.
Is this normal after a losing presidential campaign? No. Nor is this a normal year for the Republicans. Kristol and Schmidt and their cronies all know that the Republican brand that they depend upon for a job and for money, lots of money, has been wrecked to the point of no return. They are veterans of a lost cause with one wild adventure to try before history moves on—and the adventurer’s name is Sarah Palin.
Palin’s sudden announcement that she will resign the Alaska governorship at the end of July, delivered alongside the fireworks of the 4th of July, underlines her self-awareness that she must respond to the pyrotechnics of her stature in the GOP—and must respond in an explosive fashion. Discarding the demands of an Alaska job that is at best part-time, undemanding, predictable, banal, means that she will now devote full-time to traveling the “lower 48” in order to speak, speak, speak. Wherever she goes, she is Alaska, moose-hunting, and Wasilla. As a candidate, she begins the nomination hunt with a formula that none of her rivals can match, not even Mitt Romney, not only because she gave up something in order to go for the White House but also because she reached this decision by being drafted.

What is going on right now in the Republican Party—even as the professionals scramble to react with grins and snorts to the news of Palin’s Alaska resignation—are the early scenes of the 2012 campaign for the presidency with Sarah Palin as the once and future hero. Like Joan of Arc, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth Regina, and, skipping four centuries of quarrelsome princes, Margaret Thatcher, the Republican Party has already decided that the governor of Alaska will rescue the GOP from its ruination. What Sarah Palin begins with an announcement from Wasilla is not only a campaign, it is an Iditarod of a crusade—first woman, first mom, and second moose-hunter into the White House.
If you scoff at Palin for president, you are likely insufficiently cynical to work on a national campaign. Eight months after the election, the governor is as natural and gifted a presidential candidate as anyone since Huey Long. The farther she stays away from Washington and the longer she pushes away those sharpies clamoring for her to raise PAC money, to prepare gray-bearded policy positions, network at the barbecues in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina (well, maybe not South Carolina right now), the more box-office irresistible she will be to Republican primary voters. What most recommends the Palin boom is that she is now, 40 months to the election, as celebrated by the GOP right wing as she is reviled by the Democratic left wing.