The New York Times reports on what kind of pressure Palin was feeling before her resignation.

Though this piece seems a tad too sympathetic for my tastes it does introduce some new information that is very interesting.

Here are a few snippets that I found the most interesting:

Friends worried that she appeared anxious and underweight. Her hair had thinned to the point where she needed emergency help from her hairdresser and close friend, Jessica Steele.

“Honestly, I think all of it just broke her heart,” Ms. Steele said in an interview at her beauty parlor in Wasilla, the Beehive.

Many of us have also made note that the Governor looked underweight to the point of illness.

Late last week, as her sport utility vehicle made its way through the town of McGrath, Ms. Palin said in an interview that the seeds of her resignation had been planted the morning Mr. McCain named her as his vice-presidential choice.

“It began when we started really looking at the conditions that had so drastically changed on Aug. 29,” she said. “The hordes of opposition researchers came up here digging for dirt for political reasons, making crap up.”

I have refuted this before but let me do it once again. There was NO opposition researchers up here that I, or any of my fellow bloggers, are aware of. The things that were "dug up" were done so by local bloggers and out of state reporters. The bloggers were trying to reveal the truth about the Governor and the reporters were simply trying to sell papers or magazines. Which Palin helped them to do quite nicely.

As for "making crap up" that task was adequately performed by the Governor herself, who simply could not keep her stories straight to save her political life. (Andrew Sullivan did a great roundup of those lies right here.)

Feuds begat feuds. Ms. Palin alleged in June that Mr. Letterman’s joke that one of her daughters had been “knocked up” by the Yankees star Alex Rodriguez during a recent trip to New York encouraged “sexual exploitation” of younger women.

Her comments then prompted a Republican lawmaker, State Representative Mike Hawker, to accuse Ms. Palin of underfinancing sexual abuse programs. Ms. Palin, in turn, directed public safety officials to give her fodder for a retort, requesting that they put out a statement saying her policies would reduce sexual assaults on minors.

Even Ms. Palin’s supporters came to believe that she was losing focus amid all the fighting.

So you can imagine what her detractors were thinking.

In mid-spring, as the country grew alarmed over the swine flu, Ms. Palin skipped a briefing for administration officials on the outbreak by her chief medical officer, Dr. Jay C. Butler. A spokeswoman, Sharon Leighow, noted that the teleconference took place about a month before the first case of the flu was reported in Alaska and that at the time the governor was meeting with top staff on the issue of federal stimulus funds. Since then, the state has had 122 confirmed cases of the H1N1 flu.

Dr. Butler said he resigned his post in June in part because the administration asked one of his highly regarded division heads, the state public health director, Beverly Wooley, to resign. “I felt that it was not a good time to be downsizing,” said Dr. Butler, who is now working on a swine flu vaccination at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Butler said the governor’s office apparently deemed Ms. Wooley insufficiently supportive of the parental consent bill backed by Ms. Palin.

Ms. Leighow would only say, inexplicably, that Ms. Wooley had been terminated by the health department, not the governor.

Woolley was another example of somebody not willing to play ball the way Sarah Palin wants to play ball being thrown under that bus which has ravenously devoured so many other victims of Palin's ego.

John Coale, a Washington trial lawyer and a Democrat who befriended the governor, said that during a political trip to Atlanta in December she expressed concern about her personal finances and complained that whenever she left Alaska “there was tremendous criticism up there.”

To Mr. Coale, the Palins seemed unprepared for the national stage. “I don’t think they got it, that they were in the arena,” he added. Mr. Coale helped Ms. Palin set up a legal defense fund and a political action committee to pay for her political activities. But both caused additional problems.

While the defense fund has raised more than $250,000, according to its trustee, the money cannot be spent pending resolution of an ethics complaint that contends that the contributions could amount to improper gifts.

Well this is interesting news. I wonder how it jives with Margaret Carlson's Thursday report on Countdown that John Coale told her the Defense Fund paid "most" of Sarah" legal bills already?

Does that mean this $250,000 is going to her just for shits and giggles? Or has somebody else paid the bill already and she owes them money from the fund to pay them back? And if this money has not been freed up then WHO has been paying for all of Sarah's air travel to make those public appearance in other states?

Well great now I have more questions then when I started this article!

If anybody has any answers please leave them in the comment section or e-mail them to me. Thanks.