Hey GOP, Take the Palin Cure: She’s hot, she’s blue collar, she’s electable.

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The Republican Party has been doing a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing since the presidential election. Half the conservative columnists and bloggers say the GOP lost because it overemphasized social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. The other half says the party didn’t emphasize them enough. And everyone denounces Project ORCA, the campaign’s attempt to turn out voters via technology.

But I’ve got a suggestion for cutting short the GOP angst: Sarah Palin for president in 2016.

You think I’m joking? Think again.

In 2008, Palin, running as my party’s vice presidential candidate, was widely supposed to have cost John McCain the election. But that wasn’t so. A national exit poll conducted by CNN asked voters whether Palin was a factor in their voting. Of those who said yes, 56% voted for McCain versus 43% for Barack Obama.

Furthermore, Mitt Romney, the GOP’s anointed contender this year, got almost a million fewer votes than McCain did in 2008. (Meanwhile, President Obama, although winning reelection, lost far more voters than the Republicans, with nearly 7 million fewer voters checking his name on their ballots than did in 2008).

Read more from this story HERE.

Alaska Won’t Have State-Run Health Insurance Exchange

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Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell has opted not to create a state-run health insurance exchange and will instead rely on the federal government to run the program. Parnell made the decision months ago and said he was standing by that as the Nov. 15 federal deadline for states’ choices looms.

“I think the federal government should pay for its own requirements, rather than the state,” Parnell said.

A health insurance exchange is an online website where consumers can shop a variety of health insurance options. Some states already have sites up an running while others are planning to work with the federal government to implement a hybrid exchange. But several states took Parnell’s stance, opting not to run their own exchange.

“They were only going to be funding a part of the health insurance exchange development and I just did not want to take us down the road of further entangling our finances with the Affordable Care Act if, indeed, the federal government would be financing it themselves,” Parnell said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Murkowski Named One of Most Likely GOP Senators to Vote With Democrats in 2013

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Senate Democrats will enter the new year with an expanded majority of 55-45, having gained two seats in the election. They may be emboldened, but Republicans will retain the ability to slow down or halt their agenda with the use of the filibuster, which requires 41 senators.

If Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to wield the filibuster as routinely as he did in President Obama’s first term, Majority Leader Harry Reid will need to pick off at least five Republican senators to advance initiatives.

Here are his five most likely targets…

Lisa Murkowski

The Alaska Republican has been less loyal to party’s leaders since she lost her GOP primary race in 2010 but won re-election as a write-in candidate.

Murkowski later broke with the GOP on a series of defining votes, such as the DREAM Act, repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the Paul Ryan budget. This year, she spoke out on her party’s need to stop alienating women voters and made a public showing of support for Democrats against House and Senate Republican leaders on the Violence Against Women Act.

Read more from this story HERE.

‘Unleashing the Monster’ of Climate Change, or a New Energy Source? You Won’t Believe What Researchers Are Doing With Alaskan ‘Ice’

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(TheBlaze/AP) — A half mile below the ground at Prudhoe Bay, above the vast oil field that helped trigger construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline, a drill rig has tapped what researchers think could be the next big energy source.

The U.S. Department of Energy and industry partners over two winters drilled into a reservoir of methane hydrate, which looks like ice but burns like a candle if a match warms its molecules.

The nearly $29 million science experiment on the North Slope produced 1 million cubic feet of methane, according to the Associated Press. Now, researchers have begun the complex task of analyzing how the reservoir responded to extraction.

“If you wait until you need it, and then you have 20 years of research to do, that’s not a good plan,” Ray Boswell, technology manager for methane hydrates within the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, remarked.

Much is unknown but interest has accelerated over the last decade, Tim Collett, a research geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, added.

Read more from this story HERE.

BP Ordered to Pay State of Alaska $255 Million Over Lost Royalties Due to Negligent Spills

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A subsidiary BP has been ordered to pay the state of Alaska $255 million for royalties the state lost because of production shutdowns after two North Slope oil spills in 2006 and a subsequent pipeline replacement project.

A three-member arbitration panel unanimously ordered BP (Exploration) Alaska Inc. to pay the state $245 million, plus another $10 million in fines, by December 3.

The panel heard the case over four weeks last May and June in Anchorage, and reached its decision Oct. 31, the state said in a release Thursday announcing the award.

The amount of the settlement cannot be appealed.

‘We’re absolutely pleased with the result,’ Alaska Attorney General Michael Geraghty said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Alaska Election Results

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The races in Alaska held a number of surprises including the gap between President Obama and his challenger, Mitt Romney. With almost 99% of precincts reporting, Obama received a little over 41% of the vote and Romney, over 54%.

This 13 point gap is nowhere near the significant divide reflected in other red states such as Oklahoma where Romney took 67% of the vote, or Wyoming where he received 69% (Romney’s top percentage came from Utah where he received 73% of the vote). Gary Johnson received just 2.5% of Alaska’s vote.

In the lone house race, Don Young dominated, receiving over 64% of the vote, meaning a significant percentage of Obama voters also cast a vote for Young.

Mr. Sen Tan, the one judge where a concerted non-retention effort was made by the Alaska Family Council, was able to retain his seat with a 53/46 vote, the closest of any Alaskan judge up for retention this year.

For the remaining Alaskan results, including individual state house and senate races, please click HERE.

Oil Industry Targets Senators in Alaska Oil Tax Fight

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The energy industry is making a concerted push to defeat state senators in Alaska who have blocked a $2 billion tax cut favored by oil producers.

Through television and radio ads and direct mail, industry-linked advocacy groups are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to urge Alaska’s 506,000 voters to cast their ballots for “oil tax reform.” That would entail ousting a bipartisan group of 16 state senators in the 20-member chamber, all but one of whom are up for re-election this year, political experts say.

The big three energy companies—Exxon Mobil Corp., XOM -1.45% ConocoPhillips, COP -1.32% and BP BP.LN -1.40% PLC—can’t legally make direct donations to campaigns. But oil-company-employee political-action committees have made contributions, energy executives have held fundraisers and two Republican senate candidates work for the industry.

“We’re proud that we’ve been part of the Alaska family of companies that has brought this wealth to its people,” said Bob Bell, a Republican Senate candidate from Anchorage whose engineering firm did nearly $1 million in work for BP last year and who favors the tax cut.

But the targeted senators raised and spent more than their challengers according to the latest campaign-spending reports, although a last-minute surge of spending could change that balance. They have received backing in part from government-employee unions, which have grown along with government payrolls because of an influx of oil taxes. The taxes and other oil-related payments account for 90% of state revenue.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Extraordinary Aurora Over Pond in Fairbanks, Alaska

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This is one of the best videos we’ve seen of this year’s aurora.

It was taken at Olnes Pond in the Fairbanks North Star Borough, a little over twenty miles from our home.

It is a time-lapse production set to a beautiful instrumental.

Watching the nighttime sky dance as it does in this video is one of many reasons we could never leave the Last Frontier.

Credit for this extraordinary video goes to Taro Nakai, Micrometeorologist (a researcher of micrometeorology: the dynamics of the interaction between plant and atmosphere), who is a postdoctoral fellow of International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Video: Bristol Palin Wins Legal Victory Over Bar Heckler

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By Jennifer Madison. Bristol Palin has won her legal fight with a man accused of heckling her on her reality show Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp.

The 22-year-old was named in a lawsuit filed by Stephen Hanks, who was seen in an episode shouting obscenities about her mother, former U.S. Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, during an altercation with Bristol at a Hollywood bar.

Hanks claimed he never signed a waiver to appear on the show and that Bristol invaded his privacy by outing him as a gay man in filings naming the reality star and A&E network.

Bristol’s docu-series premiered in June of this year and followed her as she moved to Los Angeles with her three-year-old son, Tripp, whom she shares with ex-fiancé Levi Johnston.

In episode of the Lifetime network series shows a verbal argument erupting after Bristol is heckled while she rides a mechanical bull at the Saddle Ranch on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip. Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s the full video of the heckling incident [caution: this is unedited; the heckler who sued Palin uses repeated profanities]: