"Former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin has signed to be a contributor on the Fox News Channel, her lawyer has said. Mrs Palin, who ran for the post of vice-president during the 2008 election on a Republican ticket, stepped down as Alaska governor in July 2009. Fox News said that while Mrs Palin would not have her own programme, she would appear on the channel regularly as part of a multi-year deal.

Financial details of the deal have not been released.

"I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News," Mrs Palin said in a statement on the network's website. "It's wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news."

Fox's executive vice-president for programming, Bill Shine, said Mrs Palin had "captivated everyone on both sides of the political spectrum"."We are excited to add her dynamic voice to the Fox News line-up," he added."

Mrs Palin was catapulted to fame when Republican presidential candidate John McCain surprisingly chose her as his running mate for the 2008 election. News of her resignation as governor 17 months before her term in office was up had prompted speculation that she was planning to pursue a career in television. . .It is not the first time Mrs Palin will be signing on with a TV station. In the 1980s she worked part-time as a sports presenter for the KTUU station in Anchorage, Alaska."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8453223.stm

What a hoot. Next they'll hire George W. Bush and that ought to conclude the "brain trust" (not) they've gathered.

They're going to call her Fox program "Vox Vixen."

Hehehe....

This is from the NY Times today, highlighting a new book about the "train wreck" that was described as Palin's campaign for Vice-President:

"Race of a Lifetime", a new book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin which is serialised in The Times this week, reveals that advisers to John McCain were taken aback by how little Mrs Palin knew about politics and history when she was confirmed as Mr McCain's Republican running mate after a cursory, 12-hour selection process.

"You guys have a lot of work to do," Steve Schmidt, Mr McCain's campaign chief, is said to have told the experts he had recruited to tutor her. "She doesn't know anything."

Heilemann and Halperin write: "Palin couldn't explain why North Korea and South Korea were separate nations. She didn't know what the Fed [the Federal Reserve] did. Asked who attacked America on 9/11, she suggested several times that it was Saddam Hussein. Asked to identify the enemy that her son would be fighting in Iraq, she drew a blank. Later, on the plane, Palin said to her team: 'I wish I'd paid more attention to this stuff'."

...Yesterday, in the first serialised extract in The Times, it emerged that Mrs Palin became so overwhelmed by her preparation for one of the Couric interviews that she announced, "I hate this make-up". She smeared it off her face, "messing up her hair, complaining that she looked fat".

Today the authors reveal that the failures affected Mrs Palin's nerves. "Palin flew to Philadelphia to spend the next week concentrating on debate prep. The next two days were a total train wreck. Never before had Palin's team seen her so profoundly out of sorts for such a sustained period. She wasn't eating (a few small bites of steak a day, no more). She wasn't drinking (maybe half a can of Dr Pepper; no water, ever). She wasn't sleeping (not much more than a couple of hours a night, max).

"The index cards were piling up by the hundreds . . .When her aides tried to quiz her, she would routinely shut down – chin on her chest, arms folded, eyes cast to the floor, speechless and motionless, lost in what those around her described as a kind of catatonic stupor."

...One of her advisers sent an urgent SOS to McCain headquarters, the authors continue. "They began discussing a new and threatening possibility: that Palin was mentally unstable."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...ticle6984739.ec