I stopped paying much attention to Palin around the time she self-destructed by trying to make herself the victim after the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the shooting of 18 other people in Tucson, Ariz., in January 2011. After that, not only my attention but others’ seemed to drift away. She declared that she wouldn’t run for president, surprising no one, her spots on Fox News became less frequent (to her loud complaints) and, ultimately, the right-wing network didn’t renew her contract (though it was stated as her choice; she was going on to better things). I thought maybe Palin didn’t matter anymore.

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Murdoch, as the Times reports, may have been of late too preoccupied "steering his $73 billion media conglomerate, News Corporation" (I'm sure we can all relate) to pay attention to his wife, but she has not gone unnoticed by the rest of us.

The 44-year-old Chinese-born businesswoman, whose birth name literally means "cultural revolution," has led a colorful life. As she told Vogue two years ago, "I grew up in a little funny town called Xuzhou, in the countryside, very poor. We didn't have hot water." By the time she was in her early 20s, however, she had an MBA from Yale. She has been a media executive and film producer. She is the mother of Murdoch's two youngest children, Chloe and Grace. But what she is most famed for is her thoroughly no-nonsense loyalty to the man who is now divorcing her.

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The former Alaska governor first joined Fox in 2010 and soon become the network's highest-paid contributor, earning nearly $1 million a year. Fox even built Palin a private studio in her Wasilla home and network head Roger Ailes told the AP that "I hired Sarah Palin because she was hot and got ratings." But after a series of sour negotiations, Palin "parted ways" with Fox in 2013, after the network seemingly “cancelled all my scheduled interviews tonight” according to a post Palin wrote on Facebook.

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NSA leaker Edward Snowden may be a rebel-heartthrob to the EFF crowd, but his whistleblowing is grating the ears of the politicians and pundits who built the intelligence-gathering apparatus Snowden unveiled. These folks haven’t spent the past dozen years expanding the parameters of government surveillance just to have some ingrate let us all in on it, and their responses have ranged from calling Snowden a dimwit to calling for his head. From Fox News to the Wall Street Journal, here are the most cringe-inducing reactions.

1. Jeffrey Toobin

Jeffrey Toobin’s quick and vicious takedown in the New Yorker set the tone for attacking Snowden as a naïve nincompoop. “Any marginally attentive citizen, much less N.S.A. employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications,” Toobin wrote. Never mind that even many legislators were in the dark as to the size and scope of the NSA’s operations—Snowden was one warrant short of a wiretap for believing we hadn’t just assumed the highly classified intrusion into our lives.

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On Benghazi and Obama:

"You see, when we ask you to go out in the night and risk your life for America, we promise that we will backstop you and try and get you out if its humanly possible. In Benghazi, we did not do that...I've come to the conclusion that I don't even care what the president of the United States was doing that night. However, I would like to know what the commander-in-chief was doing that night."

On the IRS:

"We already know the IRS is arrogant," he said. "They waste as much money as other government agencies. They enjoy pushing people around, and they can't line dance. We don't need 16,000 more people who can't line dance! And we don't need more people with guns enforcing our health care!"

On America:

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"These girls can’t get their ears pierced, they can’t take an Advil at school without parental permission. Yet, they can go into a pharmacy in this Brave New World of women’s equality and -- quote -- reproductive health and get a morning after pill," she added.

Despite what Ingraham would like you to believe based on her inventive use of air quotes, emergency contraception has been proven safe and effective for women and girls -- which is why Judge Edward Korman ordered the administration to make it available without restrictions in the first place, as he noted in his April ruling:

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Now, on Fox News Sunday, he pompously declared “I am the conduit” for “compromise” on immigration reform, suggesting his ties to the far right in the House as well as mainstream Republicans in the Senate make him the man to broker a deal. Except Paul opposes any kind of specific pathway to citizenship for folks who are here illegally, which is a far-right staple that will make a deal impossible (h/t Crooks and Liars).

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“Sometimes you can be more effective on the outside than on the inside,” she said, echoing sentiments made by other Tea Party firebrands after being pushed out of office, like Allen West. “I’m not going away, I’m not leaving Washington, I’m not leaving the national scene.”

She suggested that her future plans may even include a bid for higher office, and Hannity asked her specifically about another White House run:

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They already failed that test once when they put up little to no opposition to the reauthorization of the controversial FISA Amendment Act in December. And while Democrats wanted to attach to that bill some modest safeguards against government overreach, Senate Republicans pushed for approving the bill with no debate and no changes.

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“This fiction that somehow [the IRS is] totally an independent agency is absurd,” Woodward, who broke the Watergate scandal, said. "You say they aren't answering this question about the 157 visits by the IRS commissioner. They should."

"President Obama could easily come out through his spokesperson and say this is where Mr. Schulman was. And here are the dates. Here is who he met with," O'Reilly said. "The fact that the President doesn't do it, should raise the curiosity of every reporter, Mr. Woodward, every reporter. Yet, as I said, the major network news on television ignored the story last week in its totality. It's amazing."

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On a list of days that will live in infamy, October 13, 2004, is, for most people in the outside world, probably pretty close to the bottom. If we consider dates like December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963, and September 11, 2001, to be at the top of the Infamy List, then 10/13/04 would have to fall somewhere between March 6, 1969 (Major League Baseball introduces the Designated Hitter rule), and May 19, 1999 (George Lucas releases the first Star Wars prequel).

But that was just for the outside world.

In the insular, gossipy microcosm that was Fox News, the day that saw the release of a salacious sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill O’Reilly—our biggest star and most fearsome newsroom presence— had the same effect as Lee Harvey Oswald flying a Japanese Zero into the World Trade Center.

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Not surprisingly, the "bombshell" quickly fanned flames of "coverup" allegations. Fox News included the revelation in its hourly news roundup every hour so far today, starting at 5 a.m., and it's a safe bet that by this afternoon, "John Doe" will become the latest confirmatory data point for those who have long believed that the Obama administration essentially let Stevens and the other Americans die by delaying a rescue mission, and then covered it up.

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Behold Juan Williams:

What we're seeing with four out of 10 families, now the woman is the primary breadwinner. You're seeing the disintegration of marriage, you're seeing men who were hard hit by the economic recession in ways that women weren't. But you're seeing, I think, systemically, larger than the political stories that we follow every day, something going terribly wrong in American society, and it's hurting our children, and it's going to have impact for generations to come.

Marvel at Erick Erickson:

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And I would always tell them the message isn’t so much pushed as it is pulled, gravitationally, with Roger Ailes as the sun at the center of the solar system; his vice presidents were the forces of gravity that kept the planet-size anchors and executive producers in a tight orbit; then all the lesser producers and PAs were moons and satellites and debris of varying sizes.

An organizational flow chart at Fox would be tough to draw up, as title alone was not the ultimate signifier of status. Sometimes the anchors outranked their executive producers, as was the case with "The O’Reilly Factor." (In fact, Bill had procured an EP title for himself, but he outranked the two other EPs on the show, both Stan, who oversaw TV, radio, and the website, and Gayle, who focused on television and also served as a fact-checker.) Sometimes the anchors were relatively weak — as was the case with a lot of weekend shows, and maybe some of the newswheel hours — and a strong senior producer or producer outranked, or at least pretended to outrank, the host. (For example, Lizzie from "The Lineup," who was only a producer but was tough enough that she probably could have bossed around Ailes himself had she been left alone in a room with him for more than five minutes.)

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Unfortunately, that same day we got more details about the Justice Department’s broad, aggressive targeting of the Associated Press in a national security leak probe. Then came the news that the department had obtained the personal and professional email and phone records of Fox News’s James Rosen, under the dubious and shocking claim that he might be a criminal “co-conspirator” in the leak of national security secrets. While Holder says he didn’t know about the AP dragnet because he recused himself from the leak investigation, since he was among the administration officials interviewed for it, NBC News revealed late Thursday that he personally signed off on the unprecedented (as far as we know) warrant for Rosen’s records.

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We should maybe state at the outset the "fourth place" thing isn't quite as bad as it sounds, because HLN has been doing insane ratings lately thanks mostly to Jodi Arias (and the channel's stunning shamelessness in general). HLN is regularly kicking CNN's ass, too. But it is still pretty bad, considering that last year MSNBC was challenging Fox for ratings dominance some nights. Now, it's once again far behind the conservative cable news leader. And worse, CNN has finally, apparently, caught up.

One theory, from Deadline Hollywood, is that MSNBC is suffering because Obama is suffering. The crazy scandals we all love hearing about so much are making liberals too dispirited and depressed to tune into their favorite liberal shows, I guess.

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I was in my third year as the lone Associated Press correspondent in Port-au-Prince when the quake struck. Suddenly, I was joined by journalists from all over the world. The double homicide on Route de Delmas could easily have led our main story for the day, fitting cleanly with the angle emerging in most news reports within 72 hours of the quake: the onset of violence.

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Rosen wasn't charged. In truth, the government never really intended to charge him. They just needed a judge to agree that Rosen probably violated the Espionage Act so that they could get their warrant to read his emails, as part of their real investigation into his source, an intelligence analyst named Richard Kim. It worked. That's the scandal: that the government could charge a journalist with, effectively, spying, simply for reporting. Barack Obama yesterday announced that he did not want his Justice Department treating the act of reporting as criminal. He is going to convene a panel, and urge the passage of a shield law. The question is, what will he do about Holder?

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