Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate who electrified the GOP campaign last year, will resign as Alaska's governor later this month.

She built strong support among conservative Republicans as John McCain's running mate last year, and now says she will step down in three weeks because she can contribute more away from politics.

As you can imagine there is a great deal of speculation as to the reasons behind her decision, but in the clip below you can hear her in her own words. The crux of her logic seems to be that she’s quitting because it’s in Alaska’s best interest, not her own. If it turns out this was nothing more than a way of clearing her schedule to start early on running for president, her primary opponents will never let her hear the end of it.

Update via HotAir: Real Clear Politics has video of Mitchell’s report, including the detail that Palin’s allegedly told her top backers to go ahead and commit to other candidates for 2012. Bill Kristol thinks resigning now could actually be a bold gambit to free herself up for an intense presidential campaign, but I think she’s following more of a Nixonian strategy here. I.e. it could be she’s burned out on politics and dispirited by all the garbage she’s put up with and wants to get away at an opportune moment.

Then again, perhaps she's simply a mother of five who has decided instead of cranking through the political wheelhouse for another term, she wants to take the time to be with her family and her youngest son Trig who suffers from Down Syndrome.

One thing is for sure, her announcement leaves a great deal of questions and speculation.

The Pelosi-Reid Congress is not only spending more of your money and giving themselves raises and bonuses they are also spending more on exotic excursions than ever before. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records shows, involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands.

The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That's a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago.

The cost of so-called congressional delegations, known among lawmakers as "codels," has risen nearly 70% since 2005, when an influence-peddling scandal led to a ban on travel funded by lobbyists, according to the data.

Of course, this would only be shocking news if the reverse was true.

Exit Thought: Aren't these the same hypocrites who scolded auto execs for taking private jets to DC?!

The following is a speech given on the House floor last Friday by California Rep. Tom McClintock, after the passage of the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade bill. The speech is insightful, well constructed, and makes a comparison to the history of the Great Depression many of us have not heard before.

McClintock first discusses California's climate change legislation of 2007 and how it drastically deepened the state's financial woes, and then compares cap-and-trade to the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff that sent the country into the Great Depression. It also doesn't hurt that he casually rips apart the claims of global warming alarmists used as a reason to support the bill.

You can see transcripts of his other speeches here.

California began its new fiscal year at midnight, and celebrated by taking billions in budget solutions off the table.

So how exactly did California get into this mess, and what are state lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger doing to try to get out of it? The Associated Press gets most of the questions and answers right:

Q: How big is the state's budgetary mess?
A: California's $24.3 billion deficit is roughly a quarter of the general fund, which is the state's main bank account for paying its daily expenses. For perspective, lawmakers could eliminate all funding for state prisons and the higher education system and still not save nearly enough money to address the shortfall.

The budget gap is the biggest of any state.