The editors and colleagues of The New Ledger weigh in on Sarah Palin’s shocking announcement that she will resign the governorship of Alaska: three possible reasons why she did it, what Republicans should take from the media assaults that led to her decision, and an answer to whether she’s got any shot at the presidency.

There aren’t green shoots in this economy. They’re just weeds. Everyone with eyes has known that, and today’s jobless report is just the added proof. But here are three ways that President Obama could start to change that, if he’d like to start bringing the economy back.

In our dealings with North Korea, we’ve paid a terrible price for the North Koreans’ well-founded conclusion that our words and warnings mean nothing in practice. Backing our diplomacy with principle comes with a cost in short-term expediency, to be sure, but the long-term cost of its absence has been much greater. From it, North Korea has inferred a license to disregard both our demands and its own commitments.

To the puzzlement of many, one of the first changes our new President made to the White House was sending back to Britain a bronze bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had watched over the Oval Office since the September 11th attacks. There was little explanation for this gesture, or hint of its significance. Yet the significance of Churchill for Americans, and for all mankind, need hardly be hinted at. He was the greatest statesman of the calamitous twentieth century, and among its greatest men of letters.

Full of action, violence, and the occasional sex scene, Johnson uses short, simple sentences to keep the pace high and the images immediate. Nothing is still in Nobody Move. The characters move from one location to another, running away from or chasing someone, as Johnson himself jumps back and forth between locations, moving us inexorably toward the climax.

As members of Congress debated and voted on the Waxman-Markey climate legislation last week, a disturbing story was quietly spreading about an internal report that called the science and policies informing that bill into question — a report whose conclusions proved so inconvenient to the White House that it was rejected with prejudice.

The Waxman-Markey Act went through an array of very significant changes. About 85% of the emissions permits will not be auctioned off in the early years of the law’s operation. Instead, they will be gifted to politically-favored businesses, in states and districts with lawmakers critical to the bill’s passage. Farmers and certain electric utilities will particularly benefit. This amounts to an outsized transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to private industrial interests. Why is such a thing being allowed with nary a word of debate or public outrage?

In the debate over climate change, it seems we have lost sight of our true goals. The focus for Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman has become a cap-and-tax scheme as an end in itself — and it will be America’s working families who will pay the ultimate price with higher bills and lost jobs. We have a unique opportunity and a responsibility to reduce emissions and preserve our economy — the American public is desperate for solutions, but a national energy tax is not the answer.

Being an Inspector General in the Obama Administration appears to be a dangerous and risky thing. Congress and the media should ask why this should be the case, and why speaking truth to power is so frowned upon.

Gov. Sanford betrayed us, just as he betrayed his family; he lied to us and wasted our time. But that’s not what is so frustrating — it’s that at a time and place when the nation desperately needs champions of our traditional liberties, he was one of only a few people who could really have made a difference.