Alaska Governor Sarah Palin hasn't exactly been clear on her reasons for resigning, or what she plans to do to "effect positive change outside government at this moment in time, on another scale, and actually make a difference for our priorities."

One of the most obvious ways for her to continue pushing for her priorities once she officially steps down, though, is to campaign for some of the Republican Party's candidates most in need of help for 2010. Palin remains a star in conservative circles, and she can pull in money and crowds for Republicans across the country.

Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele wants her to do just that. In a statement released the day Palin announced her resignation, he said, "I plan on talking to Governor Palin very soon. She is an important and galvanizing voice in the Republican Party. I believe she will be very helpful to the party this year as we wage critical campaigns in Virginia and New Jersey."

Steele was referring to two gubernatorial campaigns where the GOP has a real shot at electing a Republican to take over for a Democratic governor. As a governor -- or, by then, former governor -- herself, those campaigns would be the most natural choices for Palin's assistance. So far,  there's no real indication she will go to New Jersey, but the Washington Post's Anita Kumar believes Palin is set to stump for Republican Bob McDonnnell. "McDonnell's campaign has not heard from Palin's staff to set up a specific event, but it's been made pretty clear in recent days she plans to spend some time here this fall," Kumar reports.

For now, even if Palin does end up campaigning in either state, it's unclear exactly what the end game would be. Getting on the stump for her fellow Republicans would be a prerequisite if she wants to run for president in 2012, or later -- nothing better than having other politicians owe you favors. On the other hand, if Palin does want to get out of politics, as NBC's Andrea Mitchell has reported, doing some events this fall would be a good way to keep her name in the news, boosting book sales and speaker's fees.

If you've never seen the MTV reality show "The Hills," well, you're not missing much. Even as a former fan of some of MTV's reality television, I find it impossible to get into the show. The cast is not just dumb and obnoxious; their real sin is that they're just plain boring. But one couple from the show, Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, have risen to fame. Now, they're using that celebrity to spread the gospel of radio host, 9/11 Truther and all-around conspiracy nut Alex Jones.

The two -- known in the tabloids as "Speidi" -- appeared on Jones' radio show last week after he found out they were fans of his. Big fans, apparently: Pratt spent quite a while listing all the Jones material he'd devoured recently, while his wife added, "We've been nonstop researching the Internet ... for information for at least a month, all day, every day."

And it got weirder from there. Turns out that Pratt and Montag are 9/11 Truthers like Jones, and that they subscribe to some of the even more outlandish conspiracy theories out there. When Jones brought up one of the more widespread ones, about the government implanting microchips in everyone, Montag said, "This is very serious. It says in the Bible this is the mark of the beast, and that is a sign of worshiping the devil. So over my dead body would I ever get a chip in my body. My body belongs to Jesus Christ. I am a disciple of Jesus, and I will speak out to Christians ... this chip is the end of humanity." Birth control, too, involves a government conspiracy theory, according to Montag:

I feel like God was telling me that this was something just created by the government that is really bad for my body, and I was just getting sick. I researched it, and one of the founding people who invented birth control said it was the worst thing they had ever done. They wished they'd never created it, how it morally corrupted society. It's just sickening to him, how it devalues women, how it causes depression, how it can cause cancer, how it sterilizes your body, and what it does to your body, how most women are suicidal sometimes on it.

Not to worry, though: According to the reality star, "Most Christians understand what's going on. They understand they're being persecuted. They understand this is the end of the world. They understand the New World Order, the One World Currency, is all in Revelations in the Bible, so they're taking me very seriously and they know when I mean something, that it's a message."

But of course, there's just no satisfying the kind of hardcore conspiracy theorists who make up Jones' audience. In fact, a few are already worrying that the reality stars are really just CIA plants spreading disinformation.

There are really only two choices here: Either Montag and Pratt are dumber, and crazier, than anyone dared to believe, or this is the best piece of comedy performance art since Andy Kaufman died. (The latter seems very unlikely.) Either way, it's disturbing, and a little sad.

President Obama is popular. Healthcare is a mess, and everyone knows it. The president’s proposed public option enjoys massive public support. Even the Republicans, who’ve spent decades studiously avoiding the issue, are playing on Democratic turf by sort of talking about reform. Who could possibly stop the president and his allies now?

Well, the healthcare industry is happy to give it the old college try, with an assist from the Senate Finance Committee. The Washington Post has a major article today showing that the healthcare lobby has kicked into high gear, spending $1.4 million a day on lobbying. The effort involves 350 former government staffers and members of Congress, and while presumably the lobby isn’t monolithic, it’s clear where industry interests lie. Their focus is on the Senate Finance Committee, which has produced the most conservative of three bills moving around Congress, and the only one without a public plan.

In fact, as Robert Reich has pointed out in Salon, an option to buy into a public, government-run insurance plan has become the center of the whole healthcare fight precisely because it’s so threatening to industry -- and the industry complaint is, essentially, that a public plan would work too well at providing cheaper, better coverage. As Sen. Ben Nelson says, “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the game.” (He meant that as criticism.)

A good deal of Republican criticism of the public option has focused on how it would drive practitioners and insurers out of business. That, of course, is another way of making Reich’s point: Either the private members of the industry will lower costs to compete with the public plan, or, yes, they will go out of business. But even if it seems immensely costly to run a large-scale lobbying effort -- $126 million to date, this year -- it’s far cheaper than having to compete with a government plan that could cut into their business.

President Obama was in Moscow on Monday for his first visit to Russia since being inaugurated. While there, he's hoping to bolster relations between the two old Cold War foes, and to make progress towards a new treaty on reducing the amount of nuclear arms each owns.

Reducing the world's capability to wage nuclear war has been a passion of Obama's ever since days at Columbia University, as the New York Times' re-earthing of a 1983 article the future president wrote on the subject shows. It was an issue he worked on in the Senate as well, and used during the presidential campaign to demonstrate his work in that body as well as his bipartisan credentials.

He has one accomplisment to show from the trip already. Negotiators from the two countries have agreed on a strategic framework they hope will eventually replace the START treaty. Obama and Russian President Dimitri Medvedev signed a Joint Understanding that commits each country to reduce the amount of nuclear warheads in their posession to somewhere between 1500 and 1675. That's still quite a lot, obviously, but significantly less than the current limit of 2200. The same holds true for an agreement on the number of "strategic delivery vehicles" -- that is, missiles and bombers -- each country can have. The cap is currently set at 1600, but will shrink to a range of 500-1100.  Negotiations on a treaty are scheduled to continue.

But, to borrow a phrase particularly suited to this situation, there's been a spectre haunting the whole trip -- the spectre of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the former president perceived as the real power behind Medvedev. In fact, the very first question at a joint press conference held by the two current presidents was about Medvedev and whether Obama trusts him and sees him as the one truly in charge. In his response, Obama was diplomatic, but expressed little confidence that Medvedev is really in charge, saying, "My understanding is that President Medvedev is the President, Prime Minister Putin is the Prime Minister, and they allocate power in accordance with Russia's form of government in the same way that we allocate power in the United States."

Reuters/Xinjiang TV via Reuters TV

A video grab from Xinjiang TV shows a crying woman carrying her baby next to a soldier in Urumqi, Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China July 6, 2009.

Every week lately seems to bring a new round of unrest in some corner of the world. Iran, Honduras and now Xinjiang, where 140 people died in rioting yesterday. Any such outbreak of civil conflict, of course, has its own complex history, with rival factions and long-held grievances that aren’t immediately obvious to far-off observers.

Situated in China’s remote northwest, resource-rich Xinjiang is in many ways more akin to neighboring central Asian neighbors like Kazakhstan than it is to heartland China. The predominant population in the far west is not Han, as in much of China, but Uighur -- a Turkic-speaking, Muslim ethnic group, which has periodically attempted to separate from China. The Uighurs have been restive under Beijing’s repressive rule for years (as Glenn Greenwald points out, if they were Christians, we might have noticed), and in the 1990s the region saw a wave of protests, riots and bombings, which brought down a heavy-handed government response.

Sunday’s violence was apparently prompted by a fight at a toy factory in Shaoguan, in the south of China. Last week, local Han workers followed up accusations that six Xinjiang boys had raped two girls by attacking Uighur workers at the factory. Two were killed, and 118 were reportedly injured. The rape story now appears to be false. However, Uighur victims of the factory fight have issued statements to Xinhua, China’s state-run news service, denouncing Xinjiang rioters in terms that are suspiciously friendly to the government. "I believe the government will handle the brawl appropriately," says one. "Why did the rioters destroy our beautiful and peaceful Xinjiang region in such cruel manners?"

The rioting yesterday, apparently touched off by the Shaoguan fight, occurred in Urumqi (pronounced Urumchi), Xinjiang’s capital. Though Xinjiang as a whole remains Uighur-dominated, the Chinese government, as with Tibet, has encouraged Han Chinese to resettle in Xinjiang, and the Uighurs are now a minority in their own regional capital of Urumqi.

This tension appears to be at the heart of what happened yesterday. China has long sought to paper over its vast ethnic heterogeneity, and obviously does not look kindly on separatism, especially in a resource-rich region. Not only are the Uighurs occupied, exploited and repressed by Beijing, but they face the prospect of being gradually overwhelmed culturally, and without the worldwide attention Tibet has received for the same danger. (For a comprehensive description of the Uighur's problems, this story is a good start.)

Rioting erupted in the city’s market area, and involved at least 1,000 people before riot police and soldiers managed to lock down the city, likely halting any further public unrest. Demonstrations apparently spread today to Kashgar, another major Xinjiang city.

China has suggested that the victims of yesterday’s violence were members of Urumqi’s Han minority, targeted by angry and fanatic Uighurs, and blamed Rebiya Kadeer and other exiled, Washington-based Uighur activists for instigating the violence. But the Uighur exiles deny the charge, and claim that police fired into the crowds with live ammunition.

It’s extremely difficult to get reliable information out of China, especially at a moment of chaos and lockdown. Nobody will answer phone calls. The government has disabled Twitter, and China Mobile has limited service in Urumqi.

The closest available equivalent to the Twitter feeds coming out of Iran several weeks ago has been the trickle of cellphone videos posted online, apparently from Urumqi. Obviously, we can’t verify them, but these videos below, purporting to be of the riots, are compelling and disconcerting.

South Carolina's Republican Party is in quite a spot right now. The state's governor, Mark Sanford, is one of their own, but after his very public disappearance and then his confession that he'd been in Argentina, with the woman with whom he'd been having an affair, many party members want him gone.

So on Monday evening, party leaders plan to hold a conference call in which they'll ponder the governor's future, and their own path moving forward. According to The State's Gina Smith -- the reporter who tracked down Sanford at Atlanta's airport as he returned from Argentina -- "Options on the table range from doing nothing to formally admonishing the governor for his recent behavior to calling for his resignation."

The discussion will not be an easy one. Already, more than half of the Republicans in the state Senate have called for Sanford's resignation, and other influential South Carolina Republicans have reportedly been pushing him to step down. But the governor's office has said he will not.

Rush Limbaugh's still very confident in Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, even after she announced that she'll be resigning at the end of this month. In a call to a conservative blogger, the radio talker said:

I don't think this precludes her running for office down the road, the Presidency, in 2012, at all. I think these people saying she's an instant target because she quit is just inside-the-Beltway formulaic. And she's not that .... [I]t boils down to this. When you have so many establishment types, inside the Beltway, establishment, elitist types .... just so eager to destroy this woman, it means they're still scared to death of her, and that to me, is the bottom line.

This theme, that liberals and establishment types are "scared to death" of Palin, has been a pretty consistent one among Palin's supporters since the governor announced her decision on Friday. But not everyone's buying it. Indeed, some of the country's most prominent conservatives are sounding as perplexed as everyone else, and almost as sure this won't end well for her.

Former Bush advisor Karl Rove, still one of the Republican Party's best political minds, has his doubts. In an interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace on Sunday, Rove said he thinks the move will hurt Palin's chances if she does decide to run for president:

When you're a sitting governor, you have the tactical advantage if you're think about running for president of turning down a lot of things with an excuse that people will accept -- "I've got a job to do as governor."

She's now removed that. So now the expectations are going to be she's going to be fully available, she's going to be able to come to the lower 48 and she's going to be able to do whatever people ask her to do. And that's going to be a problem. It raises the expectations.

It's also unclear what her strategy is. Again, she said she wanted to lead effective change outside of government. Well, now people are going to be saying what is it that you mean by that? And how are you demonstrating effective leadership for change around America?

.... I'm a fan of Sarah Palin's, but it -- the effective strategies in politics are ones that are so clear and obvious that people can grasp it. It is not clear what her strategy here is by exiting the governorship two and a half years through the term and putting herself on a national stage that she may not yet be prepared to operate in.

Even the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes, who has been a staunch defender of Palin's and works with Bill Kristol, one of her strongest supporters, is skeptical of the move. He began an article on the governor's decision to resign by writing:

Forget about Sarah Palin as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 and probably ever. She may have no interest in seeking the GOP nomination. But if she does, her chances of winning the nomination have been minimized by her decision to resign as governor of Alaska. She's knocked out one of three legs of the presidential stool and a second one is wobbly.

Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara died Monday, the Washington Post reports. He was 93.

McNamara is best known for having served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and having been the chief architect of the Vietnam War during that time. Before President Kennedy tapped him for the post, he was the president of Ford Motor Company. Afterwards, he served as president of the World Bank.

But McNamara will be remembered for his leadership of the Defense Department during the escalation of the U.S. presence in Vietnam. It's something that dogged him for the last 40 years, and that he expressed remorse for in his later years. After he left office, it emerged that he'd had doubts early on about what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, even as he led the American effort there.

For more on McNamara in Salon, see Charles Taylor's 2003 review of famed documentarian Errol Morris' film about the former defense secretary.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin might not be providing more insight into her surprise decision to resign, but she's wasted no time reacting to the reaction. In a message to supporters posted on her Facebook page, Palin expanded slightly on her rationale, and used the opportunity to attack establishment Washington and the press for the response to her announcement.

From the message:

First, I want to thank you for your support and hard work on the values we share. Those values led me to the decision my family and I made. Yesterday, my family and I announced a decision that is in Alaska’s best interest and it always feels good to do what is right. We have accomplished more during this one term than most governors do in two – and I am proud of the great team that helped to build these wonderful successes. Energy independence and national security, fiscal restraint, smaller government, and local control have been my priorities and will remain my priorities.

For months now, I have consulted with friends and family, and with the Lieutenant Governor, about what is best for our wonderful state. I even made a few administrative changes over that course in time in preparation for yesterday. We have accomplished so much and there’s much more to do, but my family and I determined after prayerful consideration that sacrificing my title helps Alaska most. And once I decided not to run for re-election, my decision was that much easier – I’ve never been one to waste time or resources. Those who know me know this is the right decision and obvious decision at that, including Senator John McCain. I thank him for his kind, insightful comments.

The response in the main stream media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans who are sick of the “politics of personal destruction”. How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it’s about country. And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make. But every American understands what it takes to make a decision because it’s right for all, including your family.

(Hat-tip to Christian Heinze of GOP 12.)

Well, I certainly picked a hell of a day for a six-hour drive. When the news of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's resignation broke yesterday, I was stuck in traffic somewhere on I-95 and unable to blog.

Of course, the other way to look at it is that Palin picked a hell of a day for such a big announcement -- just one more odd element in what was, overall, a bizarre, inexplicable move.

But the drive (and a rental car equipped with satellite radio) did give me a chance to listen to the reaction on conservative talk radio and Fox News. And that confirmed my suspicions about the way the move will be received: Palin's base will, with a few exceptions, continue to love her. They may even support her all the more strongly now -- they were already primed to sympathize with the arguments she made in her speech, especially the ones about being victimized by the national media and about a different kind of politics.

The problem for Palin, assuming she still wants to be in politics, is that she already had a devoted base. The people she needs if she wants to make a run at the presidency in 2012 are the kind likely to be unimpressed by this move -- the Republican establishment, especially money men and veteran operatives, along with more moderate Republicans and independents.

Again, though, that's assuming she wants to mount a presidential campaign, or even stay in politics. NBC's Andrea Mitchell hears Palin's done, but the conventional wisdom -- buttressed by a few signs -- is that this is a preliminary move towards a future at the national level politically. If so, it'd be an unconventional move at best, a fatal one at worst, but that still seems like the most likely explanation.

Still, there are rumors flying about that some sort of scandal is behind all this, and that would make some sense, given the sudden rush to make the announcement. (Some local reporters, given very short notice, didn't even have time to get to the speech.) There will, undoubtedly, be no shortage of reporters looking into that once the holiday weekend is over, but for now, there's no solid reason to believe some bombshell is on its way.

Update: If you're curious about the scandal rumors going around, the two best places to learn about them are probably Max Blumenthal's article in the Daily Beast and the piece by AKMuckraker of Mudflats fame currently up on the Huffington Post.

The rumor getting the most currency on the left side of the blogosphere is that Palin's house was built for free by friends of her husband's looking for favors once she became governor. That could turn out to be true -- really, anything could at this point -- but I'd take it with a bunch of salt for now.

For one thing, as a colleague observed to me today, that sort of story just doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would make Palin quit, even if there was an investigation into it. Everything she'd done up to this point seemed to indicate that she'd stay in office and fight that kind of allegation.

Beyond that, the way Blumenthal outlines the story, the company that built the house would have been spending a lot of money for a very uncertain payoff. When the house was built, Palin wasn't even officially running for governor yet, and there was no guarantee she'd win once she did. That doesn't mean the story's not true -- the company could have decided it was a gamble worth making -- but it's definitely something to consider as these stories make the rounds.