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Alaska Governor Sarah Palin isn’t keeping a low profile in the days following the defeat in the presidential election. Palin is out giving a series of interviews to try and get her side of the story out on some of those reports leaking out of the McCain-Palin campaign at the end. After a series of stories suggesting that, among other things, Palin was unsure whether Africa is a country or a continent, she fired back at some of those items that had to have come from the GOP campaign. “That is cruel and mean-spirited, it's immature, it's unprofessional, and those guys are jerks,” she shot back yesterday and she’s scheduled for more interviews in the coming days.

Now it seems Palin will be making a return trip to the “Lower 48” sooner rather than later. She will make an appearance at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Miami where she will appear on a panel discussion titled, “Looking Toward the Future,” CBS News’ chief political consultant Marc Ambinder reports. Palin will also have media availability, which is certain to attract plenty of attention.

Meanwhile, Palin spent last weekend going through her family’s clothes to try to determine what belongs to the RNC, which spent some $150,000 on outfitting the Palins for the campaign trail. “She was just frantically ... trying to sort stuff out," Palin’s father, Chuck Heath told the AP. “That's the problem, you know, the kids lose underwear, and everything has to be accounted for. Nothing goes right back to normal," he added.

Excerpts of a newly uncovered radio interview then-state senator Barack Obama did with a Chicago radio station in 2001 has made its way onto YouTube and also onto the Drudge Report. The portions of the interview put up seem to focus on the Supreme Court during the Civil Rights era.

“One of the I think the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court-focused I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change and in some ways we still suffer from that," Obama says in part of the interview posted.

In a statement sent out by the campaign today, John McCain’s senior policy adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin claims the interview is evidence that Obama would pursue “socialism” as president. "The American people continue to learn more about Barack Obama,” Holtz-Eakin said. “Now we know that the slogans 'change you can believe in' and 'change we need' are code words for Barack Obama's ultimate goal: 'redistributive change.' … No wonder he wants to appoint judges that legislate from the bench – as insurance in case a unified Democratic government under his control fails to meet his basic goal: taking money away from people who work for it and giving it to people who Barack Obama believes deserve it. Europeans call it socialism, Americans call it welfare, and Barack Obama calls it change.”

CBS News' Joy Lin reports:

In a foreign policy speech last week, Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee launched into his main point of disagreement with the Bush administration’s handling of Middle East politics after Sept. 11. "This administration’s bunker mentality has been counter-productive both at home and abroad," said Huckabee. "They have done as poor a job of communicating and consulting with other countries as they have with the American people."

Huckabee elaborated on those comments in an interview yesterday with CBS News.

"The greatest challenge we face in this country is understanding the war that we are in from the perspective of the enemy, not from our own Westernized perspective, and that gives me great concern because I think a lot of Americans want to Westernize the mindset of Islamic jihadists," said Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor and ordained Baptist minister told CBS News that the war is with an enemy that is "theological in his nature" and "unlike wars that we’ve ever fought."

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Click here to listen to the interview.

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In his speech last week, Huckabee reiterated his support for General Petraeus and the surge in Iraq. But he argued that the Bush Administration failed to utilize all its diplomatic tools in combating the threat of Islamic extremism and made poor strategic decisions based on faulty intelligence. Huckabee also said the current administration had failed to engage in a discussion with the American public about the nature of the enemy. He differentiated between Al Qaeda, which he said must be destroyed "as a movement" because its leaders would never engage in rational dialogue, and Iran, which Huckabee believes can be "contained as a nation."

"We have to realize that there is something driving the views that are being built upon by Al Qaeda," Huckabee told CBS News. "And it really goes back to the teachings of Sayyid Qutb and if we don’t understand how he helped to shape this concept of taking the entire Islam faith back to a 7th century mindset, and what that would mean in terms of domination and really control of the world, we won’t understand just how ferverently committed the members of Al Qaeda really are."

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