Romney even adopted Palin’s language in his speech at a Consol Energy research facility:

PALIN: “It’s time for the greatest nation on earth to tap into its full potential, and one surefire way to do so is to tap into what is beneath this earth.”

ROMNEY: “The course that I will put us on is to take advantage of what comes from above the ground as well as what comes from below the ground so that America can finally become energy-secure and independent of the oil cartel.”

“Romney’s energy and environmental platform calls for stripping EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and expanding oil-and-gas leasing to include areas that are currently off limits, including the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, among other measures,” The Hill’s Ben Geman writes.

Romney denied that global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels at a Consol Energy facility last year. Consol has given $5000 to the Romney campaign and $150,000 to the Romney SuperPAC.

“I think it should be Sarah Palin,” McCain told CBS’ This Morning, laughing. He then listed other possible picks — Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R). Watch it:

If McCain was joking, it’s both an admission of his own error in judgment for picking Palin in 2008, and a sleight against the former Alaska Governor-turned-TV-celebrity.

It’s not entirely clear what the change in leadership will mean for the fiscal health of the company or for Big Hollywood’s coverage in particular. It’s had to imagine that any one person, much less any set of people, will be able to neatly replace Breitbart as an enthusiastic fundraiser or as a public face of the brand. The Undefeated made just $100,085 at the box office, and Bannon’s other movies haven’t exactly set the world on fire. Big Hollywood already devotes considerable space to the complaint that Hollywood isn’t responsive to conservative values and is leaving a substantial conservative market untapped. Whether Bannon’s elevated role in the company increases the volume of those complaints or provides new perspective on them remains to be seen.

Which is funny, because the movie doesn’t particularly deserve it. This is not to say it’s good. Julianne Moore’s Palin impersonation is dandy, but for most of the movie, Game Change mostly feels like a very high-minded episode of Saturday Night Live: you’re mostly comparing the impressions and the reality in a way that doesn’t let you enter the narrative, a process that’s not aided by the less-than-naturalistic dialogue.

But most importantly, the only way this exhaustingly-trod story could have been genuinely revelatory is if it had any insight into Palin’s personality. But except for a single scene where Palin breaks down while talking to her son Track, who is deployed overseas, Game Change has next to no interest in translating a woman whose motivations and worldview have been infuriatingly indecipherable to large swaths of the American electorate. Instead, it zips through a cycle of emotions dominated, in this retelling of the narrative, by Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace: excitement that they’d found a potential star, dismay that she wasn’t living up to expectations, and then a sense of oracular satisfaction that they saw Palin was awful before most other people did. it’s a weirdly self-satisfied—and self-justifying—narrative.

And that attitude, more than anything else about this oddly overdue project, is what makes Game Change frustrating. Sarah Palin has everything to lose and precisely nothing to gain from depictions that point her, as Game Change does at various point, as an overzealous evangelical Christian; a dummy; defiant of authority; or even as a horror movie monster, raging against her advisers in a claustrophobic stairwell. And those of us who dislike Palin have everything to gain by recognizing that we really, truly won: Palin’s gone from the national stage. And her fiasco of a campaign has guaranteed that if Republicans nomination someone who is ludicrously underinformed, grievance-driven, and prone to wacky policy positions, they’ll do it through a highly-vetted process that likely exposes that person to the American electorate over an extended period of time. We should accept that, be done with the victory dance, and get down to examining the next generation of plausible Republican rising stars. The greatest damage we could do to Sarah Palin—and one of the better things we could do for ourselves—is to move on from her, totally and irrevocably.

But during their discussion, Palin opened up a new front in her attack of President Obama, apparently suggesting America’s first black president wants to return to the days “before the Civil War”:

Now, it has taken all these years for many Americans to understand that that gravity, that mistake, took place before the Civil War and why the Civil War had to really start changing America. What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin.

Watch it:

The “different classes” system Palin seems to be referring to is perhaps better known as slavery.

The entire conversation is based on the mischaracterization of Derrick Bell, a pioneer in legal scholarly work. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School, and the video that Hannity insists is a scandal shows Barack Obama, then a student, speaking at a rally in support of Professor Bell. Students and faculty were protesting to urge Harvard to hire more minority faculty.

Of course, Palin has struggled with history before.

“We’re a very pro-military state up here. We recognize what it is that our men and women sacrifice for all of us to keep us secure. And at this point, we’re watching Obama with his naïve apologies to savages in Afghanistan who turn around and kill our soldiers,” she said, in an apparent reference to the president’s recent apology to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the unintentional burnings of Qurans at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan.

– Zachary Bernstein

For all the Palins complain about their treatment by Hollywood, this deal is actually a sign of the industry’s generosity to the family. Sarah Palin’s Alaska started out with strong ratings for TLC, but they declined, particularly in episodes where Palin was hunting or fishing, and TLC declined to order a second season of the program. Her special on Fox News, one of the things the network hoped would make her a star on the network, didn’t exactly sparkle in the ratings either.

And Palin, more than any other member of her family, ought to have been the draw: she was the one who was rocketed to national prominence and national controversy. If she didn’t exactly turn into a television star, even when she was given a couple of chances in a couple of different formats, it’s hard to see why there’d be a strong market for a show about a second-tier member of the family whose main prior accomplishment in the entertainment industry is a stint on Dancing With the Stars and a novelty appearance on The Secret Life of the American Teenager. For all the Palins complain about the way Hollywood treats them, the industry certainly seems generous about continuing to cut them paychecks.

-It’s quite odd that Sarah Palin’s team thinks media ethics dictate they’d get script approval of Game Change.

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Appearing on Fox News this morning, Sarah Palin said she doesn’t believe the good job numbers:

PALIN: The media is reeling these numbers, that I do not believe are accurate, when it comes to jobs. I still think it is a jobless recovery that is affecting America right now. … So that 8.3 percent unemployment number is an indicator to President Obama and to his allies in the media to make it look like things are getting better.

Meanwhile, displaying characteristic cognitive dissonance, the cast of Fox and Friends — which previously wondered if the Labor Department was “cooking the books” on jobs data — tried their hardest to find the dark lining in the silver cloud. Co-host Steve Doocy discredited GM’s success because it helped unions, while co-host Eric Bolling questioned the means of saving GM: “We usurped the constitution, we usurped free-market capitalism” to do so. As for claims that the bailout saved jobs by saving GM, Bolling offered a ridiculous counter-factual to explain why Obama deserves no credit:

BOLLING: I don’t buy the argument that we saved jobs cause those jobs weren’t going to go overseas anyway. There was just going to be another company, maybe not called GM, it may have been called Ford, who did not take a dollar in bailout money.

Watch both:

As The Economist, which was initially opposed to the bailout, points out today, even Ford worried the entire auto industry would implode if GM were allowed to fail, so it’s unclear why Bolling is so convinced that every person employed at GM today would still have a job without the bailout.

But Doocy really gave away the game a moment later when he said, “We just have done two business stories that are good for the president of the United States…Now here’s some bad news for president of the Untied States,” turning to high gas prices, just as Palin did.

The suggestion that falling unemployment and that the revival of a major American auto-maker is good for Obama, and not, say, the country as a whole, and that rising gas prices are bad for Obama, and not, say, every driver in America, illuminates the Fox News world view which politicizes everything from jobs to Christmas in a nihilist effort to tear down the president.

Good news is bad news for the conservative echo chamber, as it undermines the narrative they’ve doggedly constructed of the past three years that president Obama is bad for the economy.

Perhaps it’s just that, as Comedy Central host Steven Colbert noted, facts have a “liberal bias.”

-Horse-racing fans, rejoice. You get another season of Luck.

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-Sarah Palin accent fans, your fix is here:

Speaking on Sean Hannity’s radio show this afternoon, Palin played her typical game of conflating the “dumbarses” in the “lamestream media” and the political left, assuming that ABC News is airing the embarrassing interview in an attempt to derail Gingrich’s campaign. This will backfire, she argued, because voters don’t care about the fact that fact that Gingrich carried on an affair for six years while married, or that he asked his wife for an open marriage so he could continue the affair, or that he subsequently left his wife after she was diagnosed with a terminal disease:

PALIN: I call them dumbarses. They, thinking that by trotting out this old Gingrich divorce interview that’s old news — and it does feature a disgruntled ex, claiming that it would destroy his campaign — all it does, Sean, is incentive conservatives and independents who are so sick of the politics of personal destruction, because it’s played so selectively by media, that their target, in this case Newt, he’s now going to soar even more. Because we know the game now, and we just won’t put up with it.

So, good call media! Way to go to covertly hype this, even Gingrich opponents, for being so brilliant they sure are dumb.

Listen here:

In fact, the interview is not “old” but Marianne Gingrich’s first TV interview since her divorce from the former Speaker in 1999, and it does make news about how Gingrich — who often defends “traditional” marriage on the campaign trail — treated his wife of 18 years.

But Palin, who calls herself a feminist, completely ignores the substance of Gingrich’s actions to portray him as a victim of just another tawdry lamestream media smear. “I have a degree” in journalism, she reminded Hannity.

PALIN: I think what governor Perry is getting at is that governor Romney has claimed to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain and people are wanting to know, is there proof of that claim? And was it U.S. jobs created for United States citizens. … You know, own up to the claims that are being made. And that’s fair. That’s not negative campaigning. That’s fair to get a candidate to be held accountable to what’s being claimed. [...]

Nobody should be surprised that things about Bain Capital and maybe tax returns not being released yet and records not being as transparently provided to the public as voters deserve to see right now — don’t be surprised that that’s all coming out today, cause it would come out as an October surprise [by Democrats] had these GOP candidates candidates not brought them out today.

Watch it:

A number of conservatives have come to Romney’s defense on the Bain attacks and accused Gingrich and Perry of employing left-wing attacks — Rush Limbaugh even compared Gingirch Fidel Castro — so Palin’s stance should provide the GOP candidates some cover.

Ultimately, McCain’s selection of Palin only changed the game in that it made McCain look like a gambler. The selection didn’t actually chane the dynamic of the race, and Palin has essentially retreated into the small-town Alaska from whence she came in the years since. The selection of her didn’t even stem from particularly novel thinking, unless playing women and people of color off against each other counts. Not to go all Slim Charles on it, but the game was the same–it just got more fierce.

The story I’d really like to see out of that book, actually, is the one about John and Elizabeth Edwards, Rielle Hunter, and the fact that he went ahead with the 2008 campaign despite the mess in his personal life. Hubris and denial aren’t emotions that can be fit into rationality, which makes them particularly interesting. What happened behind the scenes in Palin’s brief, dizzying ascent has been done to death. The Edwards’ follies and tragedies are still somewhat inexplicable. And in a country where we’ve only ever had one divorced President, the idea that you could totally escape the expectations Americans have for the private lives of presidential candidates (Clinton, at least, only ever had Chelsea with Hillary) is a kind of magical thinking.

From the start, Ailes has steadfastly denied any such political bias or agenda on the part of his network. Politics, schmolitics: “I hired Sarah Palin because she was hot and got ratings,” he declares.

Ailes’ quote is stunning in its own right, but it’s worth noting that were it coming from a progressive figure, he would likely be immediately tarred and feathered by conservatives as a sexist. Since Palin was picked to run for vice president, conservatives have bristled at any reference to Palin’s looks or suggestions that her appearance has contributed to her popularity.

Take conservative media criticism site Newsbusters, for instance. When Fox News contributor Juan Williams called Palin a “centerfold” and said her attractiveness contributed to her success, Newsbusters cried “double standard,” writing that Williams’ “demeaning” comment reflects liberals’ “need [of] some way of dismissing her without addressing the issues.” When comedian Bill Maher made a similar suggestion, Newsbusters cried that Maher had “denigrated Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann as merely ‘attractive.’” When Newsweek magazine ran an article mentioning the “supposed hotness of Republican women,” including Palin, Newsbusters cried “sexism.” When the hosts of the entertainment show The Talk called Palin “hot,” Newsbusters questioned their “intelligence.”

Now, the head of the country’s most popular cable news network, to which Palin owes a good deal of her success, is making the same insensitive assertions as Williams and Maher, and essentially confirming them; will Newsbusters and other conservatives speak out? Of course, Ailes’ network happens to be an ideological ally of Newsbusters, and one that regularly features its president.