Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced yesterday that she’s quitting her job with 18 months left to serve.

Julie Nixon Eisenhower, the daughter of former president Richard Nixon and his wife Pat, has donated $2,300 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, the maximum amount allowed for the primary election cycle.

Celebrity support, always important in national campaigns, is likely to play an increasing role in the high-cost, heated presidential campaign of 2008.

When it comes to good-looking supporters, Barack Obama leads the pack, with Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, and George Clooney. And of course, there’s his powerhouse stumper, Oprah Winfrey.

Hillary Clinton is backed by a slightly older, more established, show business crowd which includes Chevy Chase, Danny DeVito, Rob Reiner and Steven Spielberg.

It was a story of connections. But were they real?

“Hillary’s Mystery Money Men,” first appeared on the website the Real News Project on Oct. 18.

The story was then reprinted in the Nov. 5 issue of The Nation and it has circulated widely on the Internet.

It either opens a window on to a significant shift of a controversial Republican money man to the Democratic camp, or it overstates the actions of a hedge-fund savvy financier who may have been hedging his bets by contributing to several candidates.

The piece by Russ Baker and Adam Federman argues that “notorious financier Alan Quasha” was a secret force behind the presidential campaign of New York’s Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Michael Mukasey to be U.S. attorney general might have passed for a meeting of the Yale Law School alumni association.

Mukasey, class of 1967, was introduced to the committee by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., also Yale Law class of ‘67.

What’s so funny about the 2008 presidential race?

Not much so far, unless you count Rudy Giuliani taking a cell phone call from his wife while he was giving a speech to members of the National Rifle Association, a moment that became a YouTube hit.

But, take heart; JibJab.com is back and making fun of the scary side of politics.

JibJab, you may remember, is the Internet humor site that produced the flash animation video, This Land is Your Land for the 2004 presidential race.

The video established the JibJab brand and significantly improved its fortunes.

The This Land video featured singing heads of George W. Bush and John Kerry dissing each other to the tune of the Woody Guthrie song.

While CEO Erik Prince has been the public face of Blackwater USA during recent weeks of intense government and media scrutiny, the often outspoken Cofer Black, company vice chairman, has kept out of the limelight.

Black, one of the nation's eminent authorities on combatting terrorism, is deeply involved in the network of Blackwater-related companies. He also serves as chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions and is CEO of Black Group, LLC.

With more than 30 years of service in the Central Intelligence Agency, Black is known as a superspy. He helped catch the international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "Carlos the Jackal" and in 1999, was named head of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center.

It’s the sort of windfall that not-for-profits don’t receive every day.

A little more than a year old, the Alliance for Climate Protection gained $750,000 when former Vice President Al Gore was named co-recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Friday.

Gore announced that he would give his share of the prize to the alliance, a Palo Alto, Calif., organization he formed last year.

The group’s goal is to increase awareness about threats to the environment from global warming.
It helped put on this July’s Live Earth concerts in seven cities around the world.

One of the most powerful and civic-minded families in western New York has a link to the company that issued one of the largest beef recalls in U.S. history.

Robert Gioia, a Buffalo businessman and philanthropist, is a former chairman of Topps Meat Company, which said Friday that it was going out of business because of a recall of 21.7 million pounds of ground beef that may be contaminated with a potentially fatal strain of E. coli bacteria.

Thirty people in eight states have been sickened, legal action looms, and some wonder why the U.S. Agriculture Department didn’t warn consumers sooner.

Members of the International Peace Operations Association will have plenty to talk about at their October summit in Washington.

The trade group with the Orwellian name is an association of private military contractors, including besieged Blackwater USA, which faces investigations abroad and at home.

The association was formed in 2001, and has grown rapidly with the increased use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its mission is to “promote high operational and ethical standards of firms active in the peace and stability industry.” One of its stated aims is to combat the perception that its members are war profiteers.

The first family of Dallas is not named Perot, or Cuban, or Jones or Hicks.

And it won’t be Bush when the president leaves the White House in 2009 and returns to Big D.

The first family of Dallas is Hunt.

It has been ever since Haroldson Lafayette Hunt moved his oil company to the city in the 1930s so he could be closer to his banker and good train service.

It’s even truer today because of Ray Hunt, the most powerful Hunt - and there have been a lot of them - since old H.L. While H.L. was always trying to find a U.S. president who would listen to him, his son has found one in George Bush.

President Bush nominated former judge Michael Mukasey as the next attorney general on Monday.

As a federal judge in New York, Mukasey has presided over a number of high-profile terror cases, including those of defendants in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He also signed the arrest warrant against Jose Padilla.

The nomination indicates a desire on both sides of the aisle to fill the post quickly, with minimal conflict. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) described Mukasey as “a lot better than some of the other names mentioned.” At the other end of the spectrum, conservative editor William Kristol also endorsed Mukasey.

Fred Thompson’s long-awaited announcement that he is running for president finally came last night, on The Tonight Show.

“You’ve been in the water for a while now,” host Jay Leno observed. “Are you starting to get a bit wrinkly?”

Thompson, 65, said his wrinkles did not come from water. “We’re where we need to be right now, and that’s one of the things I need to talk to you about,” he said. “I’m running for president of the United States.”

Mitt Romney’s years at Bain & Company and Bain Capital are proving useful beyond the millions he is able to pour from his personal fortune into his presidential campaign.

Two of his finance co-chairs - Meg Whitman of eBay and David Brandon of Domino’s Pizza - have Bain ties.

The Washington Post noted yesterday that the campaign had attracted at least $196,000 in donations from Bain employees.

Romney personally loaned nearly $9 million to the campaign during the first six months of 2007.

Mitt Romney made a fortune at Bain Capital relying on business analytics.

Now he’s applying similar tactics to his presidential campaign, hiring Alex Gage, the expert used by Karl Rove in George W. Bush’s re-election.

Gage uses data-mining techniques to predict the behavior of voters, clustering them into groups such as “Flag and Family Republicans.” The approach is similar to that used by demographic marketing companies such as Claritas.

Fred Thompson, who is fashioning himself as the folksy, outside-the-beltway candidate for president, is coming under increasing scrutiny for his family’s lobbying activities.

Before being elected to the Senate, Thompson was a lawyer-lobbyist whose clients included the deposed government of Haiti, the Teamsters Union pension fund and Westinghouse. He resumed his dual careers as lobbyist and TV actor after leaving the Senate in 2003.

Thompson’s lobbying disclosure reports, filed with Congress, show that he received $360,000 in fees between 2004 and 2006. His client was Equitas Ltd., a British reinsurance company that handles asbestos liability for Lloyd’s of London.