Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live” and the New York Times

In case you missed it, here’s the opening skit from last night’s Saturday Night Live, in which alumna Tina Fey returns to play the role of a lifetime: the “hockey mom” governor. It was pretty much the only bright spot in a pretty limp episode, and Fey’s Palin impression was spot-on:

Click the picture to see the video.

And in case you missed it, the New York Times vetted Sarah Palin themselves and the title provides a pretty good summary: Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes. It paints a picture of a “hockey mom” — the bad kind that the Canadian Hockey Association have been trying to rein in for the past few years. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.

When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”