Here’s the farewell speech from Fairbanks on Sunday.

UPDATE CBS is calling it her ‘Mad as hell’ speech.

Groan. More ethics brouhaha involving Gov Palin.

An increasingly Kafkaesque situation where defending yourself against accusations of an ethics violation is itself an ethics violation.

Hot Air puts the case for the defence.

We teased Katie Couric yesterday, wondering whether she’d be giving President Obama the Palin treatment and asking him about his reading habits.

And she did! Sort of.

Up in Alaska, there’s something of a farewell tour going on.

Fox has the latest on Sarah Palin, who has promised to share her thoughts on Twitter once she leaves the governor’s job next Sunday. We’ll be signing up.

UPDATE The latest numbers from Rasmussen are little short of astonishing. With everything the MSM has thrown at her and shouts of ‘Quitter!’ ringing in her ears, she still polls 42% to Obama’s 48% in a 2012 match-up.

The fact that Romney polls a 45-45 tie with Obama on the face of it confirms her appeal is too narrow, but the real story is that she is anywhere near Obama at this point in his presidency.

She’s announced she’s stepping down pretty much with immediate effect and the question is why?

I reckon she’s just had enough of the obstacles being put in her way as governor which are clearly motivated by her national status, such as the ethics complaints.

And there may be a financial consideration, given how much the malicious complaints are threatening to cost her and that they can’t be defended in her capacity as governor.

UPDATE Fox now has video of her announcement, where she basically confirms the frivolous ethics complaints theory. Breathing heavily, she resembled Nixon at his Last Press Conference in 1962 (’You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore’).

ABC’s Womenomics blog finally gets around to wondering whether the stuff being thrown at Gov Palin isn’t a bit, well, sexist.

Revealingly, the author actually describes herself as having until recently belonged to the ‘Big deal, it’s just Sarah’ camp.

That would suggest she was among those unbothered by the lookalike shows back in October.

Vanity Fair editor (no less) Todd Purdum [UPDATE actually National Editor is his title, Graydon Carter is of course the boss man] has a long, long piece on Gov Palin.

Yes, it’s a hatchet job. No, it doesn’t tell us anything new. And yes, the sexism is almost beyond parody (’Has she, like, got post-natal depression or something?’) But like everything else to do with the Governor, it’s still a must-read.

Gov Palin’s great champion Bill Kristol is not amused and NRO’s Jim Geraghty even less so.

Chuck Todd’s on Hardball duty at the moment so the interview with Purdum last night on Hardball was rather more bearable than if Matthews was in the chair.

Conservatives4Palin has 10 mins of video of her addressing the troops – and responding in kind to John Kerry.

She still needs a decent speechwriter though, who can structure her remarks so that she doesn’t just gabble through them.

No surprise that she agreed to talk to Matt Lauer on the Today Show: we noted in December that he had broken from the pack and interviewed her sensibly with no agenda.

And no surprise either that things should have reached such a stage that Letterman thought it was OK to joke about her and her daughter in such a disparaging way.

We noted the double standard during the campaign when a sleazy Palin lookalike contest was an Editor’s Pick on the CBS News website.

Here’s Palin and Lauer this morning.