This morning on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol reaffirmed his “contrarian” take on Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R-AK) recent decision to quit. The “Kristol Ball” argued that Palin is now “all in” for a “high risk” presidential run. Depending on her “talents and abilities” Kristol used a strained comparison to President Obama to lay out Palin’s winding road to the White House:

KRISTOL: Everyone said [Obama couldn't] compete with people with these long records. … He seems to have gotten President. I don’t think it is foolish for Palin to think, “You know what, if that’s the world we live in now where people don’t value — maybe correctly — experience in years of experience in Washington, or two terms counts more than two and half years as Governor of Alaska. Maybe she thinks she gets out there and becomes a leader of the conservative movement, and then a leader of the Republican Party, and then conceivably a nominee of the Republican Party, and then conceivably a president just as Obama did.

Watch it:

Kristol has been particularly unreliable as of late, and has been extremely poor in predicting the likely success of would-be presidential candidates. In 2006, he declared that “Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single democratic primary.” Earlier in the program, Karl Rove expressed a less charitable view than that of Kristol, saying, “[E]ffective strategies in politics are ones that are so clear and obvious that people can grasp it. It is not clear what her strategy is.”

Last May, hate radio talker Rush Limbaugh called Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, a “reverse racist,” referring to Sotomayor’s past comment that a “wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Today on CNN, former Secretary of State Colin Powell criticized such comments. Saying that Sotomayor is a “gifted” and an “accomplished woman” with “a judicial record that seems to be balanced and tries to follow the law,” Powell added that calling her a “reverse racist” is “nonsense”:

POWELL: What we can’t continue to have is to have somebody like a Judge Sotomayor…called a “racist,” or a “reverse racist” and she ought to withdraw her nomination because we’re mad at her. Fortunately the senators who will sit on this hearing in the Judiciary Committee after a few days of this kind of nonsense said, “Let’s slow down. Let’s examine her qualifications and the way we’re supposed to at a confirmation hearing.”

When host John King asked about the GOP’s “sensitivity” toward minorities, Powell took aim at Limbaugh directly, firing back at his claim that Powell only supported Obama’s candidacy for president because he is black:

POWELL: And when you have non-elected officials such as we have in our party who immediately shout racism or somebody who is quite prominent in the media says the only basis upon which I could possibly have supported Obama was because he was black and I was black even though I laid out my judgment on the candidates, then we still have a problem.

King later noted that Limbaugh has also said that Powell is no longer a Republican. “Mr. Limbaugh of course is entitled to his opinion but he’s not on any membership committee,” Powell replied, adding, “He doesn’t decide who I am or what I am no more than I decide who he is or what he is.” Watch it:

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In the wake of her resignation speech on Friday, Max Blumenthal reported for The Daily Beast that Sarah Palin may have quit her job in order to avert a major, yet-to-be-disclosed corruption scandal. Blumenthal explained that “political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators…[are] searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home.” In response, Palin’s attorney sent a letter to several major news outlets threatening to sue for republishing rumors of any federal investigation:

Gov. Sarah Palin’s attorney threatened Saturday to sue mainstream news organizations if they publish “defamatory” stories relating to whether Palin is under federal investigation.

This is to provide notice to Ms. Moore, and those who re-publish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post, that the Palins will not allow them to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law,” Van Flein warned, citing Alaska liberal blogger Shannyn Moore.

The LA Times reports today that “the FBI’s Alaska spokesman said the bureau had no investigation into Palin for her activities as governor, as mayor or in any other capacity.” “There is absolutely no truth to those rumors that we’re investigating her or getting ready to indict her,” Special Agent Eric Gonzalez told the Times. It is not clear if this also applies to rumored IRS investigations.