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In her single most high profile speech since her national debut at the Republican National Convention, Sarah Palin blasted President Obama and gave homage to the Tea Party movement on Saturday night at their first national forum in Nashville.

Palin scored a direct shot thirty seconds in, when she welcomed the C-SPAN television audience, saying at least they hadn't been denied access to this event vs covering any health care negotiations, a slam at what Obama has admitted in recent weeks has been a less than successful attempt at transparency.

For 40 minutes, Palin delivered a folksy, sassy, snarky attack, lightened on occasion in giving homage to the Tea Party movement  (in which she was paid $100,000).  Attempting to take the attention off herself and onto the nascent political force (and as well as delivering another shiv to Obama), Palin said:

"This is about the people, and it's bigger than any one king or queen of a tea party, and it's a lot bigger than any charismatic guy with a teleprompter."

Calling it the Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda, Palin slammed the White House on both foreign policy and domestic issues.  With recent reports that she is getting daily emails from former McCain staffers like Randy Scheunemann, Palin hit familiar GOP talking points that scored big cheers in the Nashville crowd, such as criticizing the handling of the Christmas day (attempted) bomber:

"Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at great risk because that's not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this...We need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern."

This 'weak on national security rhetoric' has become a favorite attack on the right in recent weeks.    But as is said in a new New Yorker magazine article written by Jane Mayer, the criticism on the handling of the Christmas Day bomber misses a few points:

According to Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies, in Washington, the military can’t simply grab suspects inside the U.S. and hold them without charge or a hearing. “It violates the Constitution, which extends to everyone inside the U.S.,” she said. “You can’t be seized without probable cause. You have the right to due process, and to a trial by a jury of your peers—which a military commission is not.”

Recorded before her speech (which was televised by all the cable networks and not just C-SPAN) but aired yesterday was Palin's one-on-one interview with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace.  There the former Alaskan governor didn't quite come off as smooth as she had in front of the Tea Party crowd.

Though Palin is extremely controversial, with equal amounts of intensity for her in the country both pro and con, there's never quite been a very adequate rationale even amongst her supporters to justify her quitting during her only term as the Alaskan governor.  And she didn't seem to make a convincing case otherwise when queried by Wallace:

WALLACE: ... with 17 months left in your term. You said, "I wasn't going to run for reelection. So I was going to be a lame duck." You said that the state was being paralyzed, because all of your opponents were filing these lawsuits." Didn't you let your enemies -- your opponents drive you from office?

PALIN: Hell, no. Thankfully I didn't. What's -- what we did was we won, because the state today -- it's not spending millions of dollars to -- to fight these frivolous lawsuits, and -- and frivolous ethics charges. Ethics charges like me wearing a jacket with a snow machine logo on it. And getting charged for an unethical act for doing such a thing.

Little piddly, petty things like that that were costing our state millions of dollars. And costing me and my administration -- my staff members -- about 80 percent of our time fighting those things. "No," we said, "We're not going to play this game."

We picked our battle. And we said, "We're going to get out there, and we're going to fight for Alaska's issues," which usually involve energy independence. We're going to fight for these issues on a different plane. And we're not going to let you guys win. You're not going to let...

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: But -- but...

(CROSSTALK)

PALIN: You're not going to...

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: ... they're going to think they won, cause you're no longer governor. Let me -- let me just make...

(CROSSTALK)

PALIN: I don't think that they...

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: Let me just make this...

(CROSSTALK)

PALIN: I don't think that they think I -- look it. I'm sitting here talking to Chris Wallace today. I think some of them are going, "Dang, we thought she'd sit down and shut up after we tried to do to here what we tried."

WALLACE: Yes. Well I don't know that that's going to be

-- instead of this...

(CROSSTALK)

PALIN: And now we get to talk about energy independence.

Now we get to talk about those things that are important to Alaskans, and our country.

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: OK. But wait a minute. When -- before we were talking about Ronald Regan, do you openly admit he was your political inspiration...

PALIN: Yes.

WALLACE: ... really a formative figure in your...

PALIN: Yes.

WALLACE: ... developing of political consciousness?

Reagan during his entire second term as governor of California was a lame duck. Reagan in that second term was being sharply attacked by anti-war radicals. I can tell you, Ronald Reagan would never have quit.

PALIN: It's a big difference between just getting political pot shots fired your way. I can handle those. I get those -- shoot I -- I got more of those this morning. So what? That doesn't matter. But when it adversely affected the people that I was serving, that's bull. And I wasn't going to put up with that. Again millions of dollars -- a paralyzed administration. My staff not knowing what they could do or say, because the adversaries were continuing to obstruct.  No way. I love Alaska too much to put them through that.

So in that last -- in that lame duck session I'm like no. I'm going to hand the reigns over to the lieutenant governor. He's as conservative as I am. He can progress our agenda -- a common sense conservative agenda for our state. And we can all get on with life.

Palin also failed to take the opportunity to try to transcend the affection that she has only amongst conservatives when she was asked about her condemning White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, but not Rush Limbaugh last week for using the word "retarded" (Palin of course has a son with Down Syndrome).

The former Governor lamely excused El Rushbo because his invoking of the "R" word was "satire", while presumably the tone used by Emanuel was not (Rahm's quote in the Wall Street Journal was "F-ing retarded", allegedly towards some liberal groups considering running ads against centrist Democrats on the health care debate).

Palin also said she thinks Attorney General Eric Holder should resign, based on his alleged transgressions in the Christmas Day bomber affair.

When asked if she would run for the GOP nomination for President in 2012, Palin did not dismiss the prospect.  When asked who she thought were the top contenders for the job, she curiously only mentioned Wisconsin Representative  Paul Ryan, neglecting any of the much higher profile names bandied about (Romney, Huckabee, etc.) over the past year.