Todd Palin

One day ahead of the New Hampshire primary, Newt Gingrich announced that he has received the coveted endorsement of Alaska's Palin -- not Sarah, the former governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate, though. At a Rotary Club lunch at the Nashua Country Club, Gingrich said he has the backing of Todd Palin, better known as the First Dude. Palin's wife, who teased a presidential candidacy for months, has yet to make an endorsement of her own. Gingrich, once seen as the last, best chance for conservatives to stop Mitt Romney from running away with the GOP nomination, has been sinking steadily in the polls.

The Iron Dog has begun. Yes, there is Alaska's world-famous Iditarod race that runs each year from Anchorage to Nome, but those are mere dogs compared with this annual test of men, metal, ice and lunacy. The world's longest and most grueling snowmobile race got under way over the weekend in the town of Big Lake, near Wasilla. It is scheduled to proceed more than 2,000 miles across frozen lakes, hills, forests and tundra to Nome and then on to a finish in Fairbanks, nearly a week after the start.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's husband defended his role as a close advisor to his wife Wednesday but adamantly denied that he meddled in her administration to try to settle a family dispute. The Republican vice presidential nominee and her husband, Todd, are the focus of an abuse-of-power investigation by a legislative panel.

One day ahead of the New Hampshire primary, Newt Gingrich announced that he has received the coveted endorsement of Alaska's Palin -- not Sarah, the former governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate, though. At a Rotary Club lunch at the Nashua Country Club, Gingrich said he has the backing of Todd Palin, better known as the First Dude. Palin's wife, who teased a presidential candidacy for months, has yet to make an endorsement of her own. Gingrich, once seen as the last, best chance for conservatives to stop Mitt Romney from running away with the GOP nomination, has been sinking steadily in the polls.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's husband refused to testify in the investigation of his wife's alleged abuse of power, and key lawmakers said Thursday that uncooperative witnesses were essentially sidetracking the probe until after election day. Todd Palin, who participates in state business in person and by e-mail, was among 13 people subpoenaed by the Alaska Legislature. His lawyer sent a letter to the lead investigator saying he objected to the probe and would not appear today to testify.

The husband of former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has quit his oil field job on the North Slope. Todd Palin's resignation as a production operator for oil giant BP comes almost two months after his wife stepped down as Alaska governor and shortly before the release of her highly anticipated memoir in a deal rumored to be worth millions. "Todd loved his union job on the Slope and hopes to return," Meghan Stapleton, Sarah Palin's personal spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.

The quiet man standing next to Sarah Palin is nothing like the other three campaign spouses caught in the whirlwind of the presidential race, and not just because he's a man. Todd Palin is a conservative, a moose hunter, an oil worker, a union man, a snowmobile racer, a hockey fan and a onetime backer of Alaskan independence. And in the frontier society of Alaska, his bona fides are not that unusual. He's a "true Alaskan," said Ben Harrell, owner of the Mocha Moose cafe here.

It was mid-February and Todd Palin, Alaska's first gentleman, was speeding across 2,000 miles of ice and snowy tundra en route to victory in the world's most grueling snowmobile race. That same week, his wife, Republican Gov. Sarah Palin, was in Juneau requesting more money for the state budget and assuring legislators they'd soon see her plan for a natural gas pipeline that could one day be the most expensive construction project in North America.

The Alaska Senate on Friday found Gov. Sarah Palin's husband and nine state employees, including some of her top aides, in contempt for ignoring subpoenas in the Legislature's investigation of the governor's firing of her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan. The Senate said it would seek no punishment for the witnesses' failure to testify before its judiciary committee last fall.

There's a not-so-subtle agenda underpinning Joe McGinniss' "The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin," although it's never made explicit until late in the book. "The time has come to strike the tent," McGinniss begins the closing chapter. "[N]o matter how much my book sales might benefit from a Palin presidential campaign in 2012, I sincerely hope that the whole extravaganza, which has been unblushingly underwritten by a mainstream media willing to gamble the nation's future in exchange for the cheap thrill of watching a clown in high heels on a flying trapeze, is nearing the end of its run. " If you're a Palin supporter, this will only give you ammunition to dismiss "The Rogue" as one more piece of liberal propaganda, yet another "lamestream media" smear campaign.

There's a not-so-subtle agenda underpinning Joe McGinniss' "The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin," although it's never made explicit until late in the book. "The time has come to strike the tent," McGinniss begins the closing chapter. "[N]o matter how much my book sales might benefit from a Palin presidential campaign in 2012, I sincerely hope that the whole extravaganza, which has been unblushingly underwritten by a mainstream media willing to gamble the nation's future in exchange for the cheap thrill of watching a clown in high heels on a flying trapeze, is nearing the end of its run. " If you're a Palin supporter, this will only give you ammunition to dismiss "The Rogue" as one more piece of liberal propaganda, yet another "lamestream media" smear campaign.

Doug Adams, the former potato chip salesman who founded the Iowans4Palin website last year, was asleep Sunday morning at home in Storm Lake, Iowa, when his wife, Diane, woke him up with a panicky phone call. “She was squealing,” Adams said Sunday night. “I was kinda scared.” Diane told him to get down to the lake post-haste.  Sarah and Todd Palin were there, and Sarah was about to run the half-marathon. Diane had risen early to walk the course. Adams thought his wife was joking at first, since they had just returned the night before from Indianola, more than 150 miles from Storm Lake, where they'd trekked to watch Palin's "tea party" speech Saturday afternoon.

The evening before her big "tea party" speech in Indianola, Iowa, Sarah Palin arrived to raucous cheers and no small amount of delighted surprise at a meet-up of Conservatives4Palin in a sprawling restaurant just outside Des Moines. Conservatives4Palin is a website that chronicles, defends and promotes all things Palin. It was co-founded by Rebecca Mansour, who has been Palin's speechwriter since coming to the attention of the former Alaska governor through the website. About 200 people had turned out at the Machine Shed, one of those restaurants with a manufactured kind of folksiness and lots of jars of jam and old-fashioned candy for sale in front.

Sarah Palin has left Iowa, her “One Nation” bus tour stopping in Saturday at the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan in Dixon, Ill., but looking back on her whirlwind visit to the Iowa State Fair on Friday, and some comments she made in response to reporters, it seems she is not just stringing her indecision out for fun and fame. She appears to be weighing her options and believes that the rules of timing and engagement do not apply to her. “Each campaign that I have ever run in these 20 years of elective office have been kind of unconventional, right, Todd?

Sarah Palin’s relationship with various Alaska reporters and talk show hosts was frequently rocky, but she seemed to have an especially hard time with Dan Fagan, a radio personality on KFQD who supported her early in her political career then became one of her biggest antagonists. “Fagan calls us, running the state, 'crack whores,'  plus other sexist and derogatory terms,” she wrote to some of her top aides, and husband Todd Palin on April 15, 2008 “ …perhaps he needs to be called out on the things he says on his show also …amazing what he gets away with.” A short time later, her deputy press secretary Sharon Leighow replied, “Did you hear John Tracy has given his notice?

Todd Palin, better known as the First Dude, played a particularly influential role in the administration. At times, his personal business concerns appeared to shape Sarah Palin's official agenda. Todd Palin sent his wife an email to her personal account July 4, 2008, complaining that the Peter Pan Seafood operation that he provided with salmon out of the Bristol Bay was "plugged up" -- meaning that the processor was at capacity and couldn't handle any more fish. "Way to [sic] early to be on limits," he wrote.

Doug Adams, the former potato chip salesman who founded the Iowans4Palin website last year, was asleep Sunday morning at home in Storm Lake, Iowa, when his wife, Diane, woke him up with a panicky phone call. “She was squealing,” Adams said Sunday night. “I was kinda scared.” Diane told him to get down to the lake post-haste.  Sarah and Todd Palin were there, and Sarah was about to run the half-marathon. Diane had risen early to walk the course. Adams thought his wife was joking at first, since they had just returned the night before from Indianola, more than 150 miles from Storm Lake, where they'd trekked to watch Palin's "tea party" speech Saturday afternoon.

Sarah Palin earns more than husband Todd, who takes a lot of deductions for his fishing and snow-machine-racing careers, according to the Palins’ 2007 and 2006 federal tax returns, released Friday. The Alaska governor makes $125,000 a year. Plus, since she took the job in December 2006, she hasn't paid taxes on the more than $17,000 she received in controversial per diem payments for working out of the family's lakeside home in Wasilla -- some 575 miles from the capital of Juneau.

No one can say Sarah Palin wasn't reading the local papers – down to every last letter to the editor on every last topic. On July 26, 2008, when Palin noticed a letter in the Anchorage Daily News that briefly criticized her for not attending the Miss Alaska pageant, she took action. Palin appears to write a response and then goes looking for someone else to send the letter, or one like it, to the paper. The governor's response to the writer, Judy Spry, is written in the third person and begins "Dear Editor.

The central domestic scandal that rocked Sarah Palin's administration as governor -- the firing of Public Safety director Walt Monegan in an affair known as Troopergate -- is the subject of dozens of feverish emails from inside her administration, with the governor insisting that Monegan had "spoken untruthfully" about pressure to fire Palin's ex-brother-in-law. In a chaotic scramble to respond to Monegan's claims that Palin at one point describes as a "cluster," the former governor appears not to remember a key meeting Monegan said he had with her, in which he claimed Palin herself had brought up the issue of the controversial trooper, Mike Wooten.