During a recent interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) once again criticized President Obama for “spreading the wealth” while at the same time boasting that Alaska spreads its own wealth. “We have a share of our oil resource revenue goes back to the people who own the resources. Imagine that,” she said. But somewhat shockingly, later in the interview (and in a part that did not air on Hannity’s program last night) Palin actually said that she would rather have Alaska pull in less money in oil revenues that more:

HANNITY: The price of oil is going up again. It’s not quite at $140 a barrel, but it’s certainly on its way up to $70 and $80.

PALIN: Yeah, well and I thank God it’s not at $140. You know people say, “Hey, Alaska! Eight-five percent of your state budget is based on the price of a barrel of oil. Aren’t you glad the price is going up?” I say, “No!” The fewer dollars that the state of Alaska government has, the fewer dollars we spend. And that’s good for our families and for the private sector.

Watch it:

The Mudflats writes, “The less we have, the less we spend? And here we all were worried about the economy. So exactly how much of the 85% of our state budget does she wish will go away? Inquiring Alaskan minds want to know. Welcome to the 2012 election.”

Last year, Peter Doocy, the son of Fox and Friends co-host Steve Doocy, grabbed his 15 minutes of fame when asked Sen. John McCain on MSNBC’s Hardball if then-Sen. Hillary Clinton was “hitting the sauce.” The young Doocy followed it up with an appearance on Fox and Friends and “reporting” at the Democratic National Convention that included twittering with the Denver Broncos cheerleaders. Now, TVNewser reports that Doocy has been hired as “a general assignment reporter” for Fox News. Doocy previously filed reports for the Fox News-affiliated student website Palestra and served as an intern on his father’s show in 2004.

In recent days, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly has criticized the “liberal media” and CNN for what he viewed as a paucity of coverage of the deadly attack on the Army-Navy recruiting station in Little Rock, AR last week. “Only Anderson Cooper at 10 o’clock covered the story,” O’Reilly said of CNN. (In fact, CNN had reported on the attack over a dozen times.) Despite O’Reilly’s insistence that Fox News has been following the attack story more closely than its competitors, when the lone survivor of the attack, Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, spoke with reporters earlier today, only CNN and MSNBC carried the press conference live. Fox News never cut to the press conference, choosing instead to focus on Newt Gingrich’s criticisms of the Obama administration from last night’s congressional Republican fundraiser:

So the question is, will O’Reilly complain about his network’s failure to cover today’s presser? Or is Fox News above such complaints because its not part of the “liberal media”?

Yesterday, Jane Hamsher reported that the detainee photo amendment sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was stripped from the war supplemental in committee. The amendment would have allowed the Obama administration to suppress any “photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained” after 9/11 by U.S. forces. This afternoon, Graham and Lieberman held a press conference to register their objections to dropping the measure and announce that they had “added our original legislation as an amendment to the FDA regulation of tobacco bill that’s on the floor right now”:

LIEBERMAN: [W]e’re going to vote against cloture on the bill, and I’m going to do everything I can to see if I can convince other Democrats to do that.

We’re just not going to roll over because some folks in the House don’t like this amendment. [W]e’re going to do everything we can to hold up the supplemental appropriations bill until we’re sure that this amendment prohibiting the release of these dangerous photographs is on that bill. And then we’ll continue to do everything we can to attach it to other legislation, to slow up the process.

Graham said the amendment was needed because “These photos, if they’re released, will be used by the enemy to incite violence as they walk down these streets.” A “senior Democratic aide” told the Weekly Standard that the two senators would “attach [the amendment] to every piece of legislation that comes down the pike.”

At the College Republican annual conference last weekend, RNC Chairman Michael Steele confronted the issue of race and the Republican Party. Lamenting the problem that “a lot of these people don’t have the technology of Internet or television,” one attendee asked Steele, “With you being chairman of the party, what are your strategies for reaching out to African American and inner-city communities?” Steele first responded by sarcastically brushing off the notion of reaching out to African Americans, before pointing to the sole African American attendee to single her out for “special recognition“:

STEELE: What? To reach out to black people? I ain’t doing anything. Black people don’t vote for Republicans, why would I bother with them? […] I’m just messing with you. That is the point I wanted you to get to. Stop it, I know what you meant. But I wanted to illustrate a point. And unfortunately you were at the wrong end of that point. But this is my reality. I look in this room and I see one young black woman here.

ThinkProgress attended the conference and recorded audio of Steele’s speech. Listen here:

Later in the speech, Steele cautioned the GOP students that they should be prepared to hear “vacuous” responses when they first speak to African Americans about President Obama.