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India Today, via Associated Press Sarah Palin speaking at a conference in New Delhi on Saturday.

NEW DELHI — Sarah Palin said on Saturday that she wasn’t ready to announce a presidential run. “I don’t think there needs to be a rush,” she said during an appearance at a conference here in New Delhi. Running for political office is a “life-changing decision that so affects a family,” she said, and many questions still needed to be answered.

Ms. Palin’s speech at a conference organized by the media group India Today touched on many subjects, including her sympathy with the people of Japan and their “humble cooperative spirit,” the dangers of a green-energy policy and her children texting her news of a moose in the yard of her Alaska home. Ms. Palin made numerous references to America’s entrepreneurial and pioneering spirit, and India’s unlocking of the same to become a vibrant global giant.

Together, she said, the two countries will lead the world in the 21st century. “There is no natural limit for United States and India relations,” she said. India is the second-fastest growing major economy in the world after China, but is still hobbled by extreme poverty, inefficient infrastructure and political corruption.

Ms. Palin and her husband, Todd, were in India for such a short time that they did not get a chance to see the Taj Mahal, in part because it is closed on Fridays, the only day they had free time. Instead, according to local media reports, they went to one of New Delhi’s glitzy new shopping malls.

Hundreds of India’s top business executives, journalists and politicians packed a ballroom at the Taj Palace hotel to hear Ms. Palin. After being introduced as the “sexiest brand in Republican politics,” she detailed her upbringing and her Alaskan political career before riffing on central themes — the importance of individual independence, free markets and the need to drill for oil.

A “secure, stable supply of fuel is key to a prosperous America,” she said. “My vision of a free and prosperous America has much to do with energy.” But that won’t come from green energy, she said, which has destroyed thousands of jobs in Scotland and England and helped create a massive debt in Spain.

America should “capitalize on our own resources right there on our doorsteps,” she said, by tapping into billions of barrels of oil that are “warehoused” in Alaska.

In the past decade the India Today “conclave,” as the conference is called, has played host to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Colin Powell, Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto, the writer V.S. Naipaul, Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and the Queen of Jordan, among others.

This year, Ms. Palin’s peers include the Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei, Germaine Greer and the “serial hacker” Josh Klein. The conference has been trying to secure Ms. Palin as a speaker for two years, executives said. “We see there is a change happening in America,” Kalli Purie, the director of the conference, said in an interview before Ms. Palin’s speech. “She represents middle America so it is good to get her perspective.”

Ms. Purie would not disclose the fee Ms. Palin earned from the speech, but said the group paid what Ms. Palin’s representative at the Washington Speakers’ Bureau, a booking agency, sought.

After her speech, Ms. Palin answered specific questions about foreign and economic policy. Asked how she might have the handled the financial crisis that led the United States government to fund billions in bank bailouts, Ms. Palin said she “didn’t think it was such a tough situation that had to lead to all those bailouts.” Instead, she said, the government could have allowed “the free market to decide who the winners and losers should be.”

Quizzed on outsourcing, a hot-button issue in India, Ms. Palin evoked free trade several times, affirmatively, to a smattering of applause from the audience.

She was critical of China and America’s relationship with the country, saying “America is economically linked to China. They hold much of the note,” referring to America’s treasury bills. It is a “dangerous place to be,” she said.

She also criticized her own party. “Too often Republicans have the fighting instinct of sheep — they just sit back and take it,” she said. The party was not always happy with her, she also admitted. “I’m pretty independent and some players in the Republican hierarchy don’t like that.” Her independence may have to do with being a “busy mom,” she said. “I’m so busy I don’t have the time to play some of the games these guys want to play.”

Asked why the party lost the last presidential election, Ms. Palin gave a nod to President Obama. “Candidate Obama had a strong campaign and was the agent of change,” she said. Ms. Palin agreed with moderator that she, too, was a change agent but said, “I wasn’t the top of the ticket.” She quickly added: “I’m not saying I should have been.”

Hillary Clinton was as strong a candidate as Barack Obama, she added, and “she had more experience.” Ms. Palin added that it will “be fascinating to see what Hillary decides to do in the coming months.” Ms. Clinton, she predicts, “will be a strong candidate in the future.”

“It is time for a woman to become president,” she added, though it doesn’t necessarily mean she should run. “There are a lot of good potential female candidates out there. There are a lot of gals.”

And asked about her husband’s prospective title if she entered the White House, Ms. Palin made the familiar “First Dude” crack, then suggested a new moniker: “First Gentleman.”

Quickly, though, she added: “Man, that’s getting way ahead of ourselves, isn’t it?”

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From Today’s Times:
- Forging ahead amid speculation about a government shutdown, House Republicans pushed to approve the largest spending cuts in recent history Friday. Time is running out before the government’s current funding plan expires, leaving just two weeks for Congress to come to an agreement — one week of which will be spent in recess. And The Times’s David M. Herszenhorn reports even a temporary agreement might be too difficult to reach in time.

- Tensions mounted on the House floor this week as the budget debate continued, amendment by amendment. The Times’s Jennifer Steinhauer describes the scene on Capitol Hill, where the rhetoric has intensified as representatives sparred until late in the night Thursday and again on Friday.

- Up in Wisconsin, the Democrats are still missing in action, protesting the governor’s efforts to bring public employees unions to heel, Monica Davey reports. And the unrest over Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to cut the bargaining rights and benefits of public workers is spreading to other states. Michael Cooper and Katharine Q. Seelye provide a survey of other states where unions and lawmakers are at odds.

- As violence spreads in Bahrain, The Times’s Mark Landler reports on how the United States overlooked signs of trouble in the Persian Gulf nation. The Obama and Bush administrations have been skeptical of accusations of human rights abuses against Bahrain, and now President Obama finds himself struggling once more to handle an unpopular and strategically critical ally.

- Health care providers who refuse to perform professional duties because of moral or religious convictions lost some of the protections granted to them by the Bush administration on Friday. Seeking to correct what it sees as an imbalance between the patient’s and the health care provider’s rights, the Obama administration reversed most of the rule that protects doctors who refuse to perform abortions on moral grounds, among other procedures, The Times’s Robert Pear reports.

Weekly Addresses

- Mr. Obama’s weekly address was similar to a trainer giving a pep talk to runners about a long marathon ahead: The race to out-educate the global competition. He spoke from Intel headquarters in Portland, Ore., where he lauded the tech company as an example of leadership in innovative math, science and technology training and education. He said that companies like Intel won’t have to look overseas for qualified employees if Americans rise to the educational challenge posed by international peers. “If we want to win the global competition for new jobs and industries, we’ve got to win the global competition to educate our people. That’s how we’ll ensure that the next Intel, the next Google or the next Microsoft is created in America, and hires American workers,” he said.

- The Republican address, delivered by Tom Price of Georgia, focused on the budget they will offer as an alternative to Mr. Obama’s proposal this week. He assured the public that the House majority is hard at work keeping its “Pledge to America” by working on a bill to cut spending by $100 billion over the last seven months of the current fiscal year. “As part of our focus on job growth, committees in the House are combing through job-crushing government regulations, and conducting rigorous oversight of how the government spends the people’s time and your money,” Representative Price said.

Around the Web:

- Soon, Republicans may be asking themselves how much they’re willing to pay to repeal the health care overhaul. The Congressional Budget Office says that reversing the bill would add $210 billion to the nation’s deficit over the next decade, Reuters reports.

- Frank Bailey, one of Sarah Palin’s closest advisers while she was governor of Alaska, is writing a tell-all memoir based on thousands of personal e-mails, The Associated Press reports. Tentatively titled “Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: A Memoir of our Tumultuous Years,” the book does not yet have a publisher.

- TV Guide: Martin Bashir, widely known for his interviews with Michael Jackson and Diana, Princess of Wales, will begin hosting his own show on MSNBC. The program will have its premiere on Feb. 28 at 3 p.m., says The Huffington Post.

- If Presidents’ Day sales featured mementos of past leaders, Ronald Reagan memorabilia would be the big seller this year. Nineteen percent of respondents to a Gallup Poll say Reagan was the greatest American president. This year’s win makes him number one on the list for the third time since Gallup started asking the “greatest president” question, reports Politics Daily.

Washington Happenings:
- Mount Vernon will transform from historical site to Presidents’ Day party hall when it hosts a “Surprise Birthday Party” for George Washington on today, tomorrow and Monday.

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WASHINGTON – As protesters in Egypt pressed forward with calls for the resignation of Hosni Mubarak this weekend, former Vice President Dick Cheney said that the longtime Egyptian leader had been a “good friend” to the United States who deserved to be treated well.

Mr. Cheney, speaking on Saturday at an event celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the late President Ronald Reagan, stopped short of saying what he thought would or should happen in Egypt, saying that the Egyptian people would determine the outcome.

But Mr. Cheney said that from the standpoint of American interests, while democracy and freedom in other countries were to be celebrated, they were not the only important issues. On other fronts, he said, Mr. Mubarak had long helped the United States.

“He’s been a good man, he’s been a good friend and ally of the United States,” Mr. Cheney said. “We need to remember that.”

He recalled meeting with Mr. Mubarak in Alexandria in 1990, when Mr. Cheney was the secretary of defense in the administration of George H.W. Bush and helped lead diplomatic efforts to put together a coalition to oust Iraq from Kuwait after Saddam Hussein’s invasion.

At the time, Mr. Cheney said, Mr. Mubarak was among the first Arab leaders to publicly sign on to the effort, allowing the United States to use Egyptian air space and the Suez Canal to get troops to Saudi Arabia. Later, he added, Mr. Mubarak sent two divisions of the Egyptian army to fight alongside American troops in Kuwait.

Mr. Cheney did not directly address other aspects of the alliance, from Egypt’s longstanding peace treaty with Israel to its role in taking and interrogating terrorism detainees through the Central Intelligence Agency’s rendition program. But he alluded to other policies Mr. Mubarak had undertaken over the years beyond his help in the first Gulf War.

“I think President Mubarak needs to be treated as he deserved over the years because he has been a good friend — not only of the United States, but a lot of other folks that we do business with, work with and have dealt with too. So you’re looking for a balance here.”

While sidestepping a question about whether it was in the interest of the United States for Mr. Mubarak to stay in power, Mr. Cheney hinted that his retirement after ruling Egypt for 30 years might not be the worst thing for him personally.

“I also think that there comes a time for everybody, when it’s time to hang it up and move on and someone else can take over,” Mr. Cheney said. “That’s true if you’re running a company, or if you’re a vice president, or if you know you are president. You get to a point where the years add up, the burdens become tougher to deal with. But as I say, that is a decision only the Egyptians can make.”

Mr. Cheney also suggested that people outside of the White House may not know exactly what the Obama administration has been saying to Mr. Mubarak. Mr. Cheney said that it was important for diplomatic communications to remain private so they can be effective.

“It is very hard for some foreign leader to act on U.S. advice in a visible way,” Mr. Cheney said. If “you tell me as the president of the United States that I’ve got to do X, and you do it publicly, then if I do X, my people think I’m not my own man — I do the bidding of the Americans. It’s exactly the wrong way to go.”

He added: “There is a reason why a lot of diplomacy is conducted in secret. There are good reasons for there to be confidentiality in some of those communications.”

Mr. Cheney’s remarks came during a period of turmoil over the confidentiality of diplomatic communications due to the leaking of more than 250,000 State Department cables to WikiLeaks, which has made several thousand of them public alongside a consortium of news organizations, including The New York Times, that obtained access to the archive.

Some commentators have attributed to the WikiLeaks documents a role in the current protests. The Egyptian protests were sparked after a similar uprising in Tunisia, which many believe was fueled in part by revelations in the cables about the corruption of the Tunisian government.

Mr. Cheney spoke at a program hosted by the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative group that now owns Mr. Reagan’s former ranch in California. His remarks are available on the C-SPAN Web site, with the portion devoted to Egypt beginning at about the 36-minute mark.

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Cliff Owen/Associated Press Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, at an election night gathering hosted by the National Republican Congressional Committee.

If Republicans reject Michael Steele as chairman of their party Friday afternoon, as seems likely, it will represent a 180-degree turn from their approach just two years ago.

In January 2009, as President Obama settled into the Oval Office, Republicans chose a charismatic African-American to be a very public face of the party.

But now, two years later, the Republican National Committee seems poised to select a virtual nobody from a group of white party activists who have each pledged to burrow into just one task: raising money.

The decision will be made Friday afternoon in a series of votes by the committee’s 168 members at its winter meeting in Maryland.

Mr. Steele is fighting to stay, but party officials told my colleague Jeff Zeleny on Thursday that they saw little chance he would succeed. That is in part because of a series of gaffes by Mr. Steele and accusations about financial mismanagement under his watch that has left the committee in debt going into a presidential election cycle.

But it’s also true that the Republican Party — and Mr. Obama — are in different places than they were two years ago when Mr. Steele was chosen.

In 2009, Mr. Obama was ascendant, having taken office as the nation’s first black president after a thorough drubbing of Senator John McCain of Arizona. Mr. Obama’s approval rating was in the mid-60s in the weeks after his inauguration.

At the time, Republicans were completely out of power, having lost the House and the Senate to Democrats two years earlier. They needed someone who could reach out, especially to minorities, and broaden the party’s appeal.

“It’s time for something completely different, and we’re going to bring it to them,” Mr. Steele said at the time. “We’re going to bring this party to every corner, to every boardroom, to every neighborhood, to every community. And we’re going to say to friend and foe alike: ‘We want you to be a part of us. We want you to be with us, and for those of you who are going to obstruct, get ready to be knocked over.’ ”

But now, the relative positions of the parties are different.

Republicans have taken back the House, putting Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio into the Speaker’s office and making him a natural focus of attention as the highest-elected Republican in the land.

And within months, there will be as many as a dozen candidates officially vying for the Republican presidential nomination. By the middle of 2012, there will be a Republican nominee to officially represent the party in its battle to take back the White House from Mr. Obama.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama is not in the same place, politically, that he was at the time of his inauguration.

He has had a few strong weeks, logging a number of political victories in the lame-duck session of Congress and receiving fairly universal support for his speech at Wednesday’s memorial service for the victims of the Arizona shootings. But his approval rating hovers around 50 percent. And the midterm elections last year proved that he and his party are politically vulnerable.

One of the lessons of those midterm elections was that money matters. Democrats were hammered by tens of millions of dollars raised by outside, independent groups who helped to defeat marginal candidates running in tough districts.

Mr. Steele’s four rivals have promised to make fund-raising their priority, recognizing the possibilities that exist if the party apparatus joins the outside groups in effectively tapping the money that is out there to win the presidency back.

They will need to. The committee is now more than $20 million in debt, and many large Republican donors have made it clear that they will not give money to the committee unless they have more confidence in the leadership.

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, is planning to raise in the neighborhood of $1 billion for his re-election campaign.

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Want to get caught up on all the juicy quotations and funny moments from over the weekend? Here’s a quick rundown of the best.

1. JibJab is back, and this time they’re saying what everyone is thinking: President Obama must be glad 2010 is almost over. With the same sharp wit that made their first political satire go viral, the JibJab creators do a year-end roundup from the perspective of Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “Earthquakes, volcanoes, bailouts in Greece,” the pair sings. “That oil from BP gushed for 12 [bleeping] weeks. From mosques at ground zero to damn WikiLeaks, so long to ya 2010.”

2. Count me as one of the skeptics who’s not really sure that Twitter messages posted by lawmakers are really posted by the lawmakers themselves. But even so, the message in the name of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada on Saturday was one of the more notable. The message said: “@ladygaga We did it! #DADT is a thing of the past.” The pop music queen and the senator have got to be one of the odder pairings of 2010. Ms. Gaga did not reply directly, but posted her own Twitter message: “Can’t hold back the tears+pride. We did it! Our voice was heard + today the Senate REPEALED DADT. A triumph for equality after 17 YEARS,” she wrote.

3. Even for Mr. Biden, the interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” was loaded with good quotes. The loquacious vice president made headlines by insisting that the troops in Afghanistan will begin withdrawing next year. “We are starting it in July 2011 and we are going to be totally out of there, come hell or high water, by 2014,” he said. Later, he referred to Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, as a “high-tech terrorist.”

4. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky offered the newsy soundbite of the weekend, declaring on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Candy Crowley, “I cannot support the treaty.” With those words, Mr. McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, essentially put the White House on notice that they have a fight on their hands in seeking approval of the strategic nuclear treaty they negotiated with Russia.

5. The real Larry King signed off for good last week. But on “Saturday Night Live,” the cast couldn’t help bringing him back one last time. In the comedy version, the fake Mr. King interviews Jermaine Jackson, Dog the Bounty Hunter and Naomi and Wynonna Judd. “Which one of you is the daughter, and which one is the mother,” Mr. King asks. When he’s surprised by the answer, the fake Naomi says: “A lot of people make that mistake. It’s a bosom thing.”

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7:04 p.m. | Updated Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, took to the floor of the Senate at 10:24 this morning to denounce the tax cut deal struck between the White House and congressional Republicans — and kept going for more than eight hours.

Mr. Sanders is fiercely opposed to the deal to continue all of the Bush-era tax cuts, even for the highest-income Americans. He thinks that it is a huge and unnecessary giveaway to the rich. And he has already put Senate leaders on notice that they will have to jump over all the procedural roadblocks available to him. As a result, a vote to overcome a filibuster is already set for Monday afternoon.

But unlike Senate Republicans who have made a strategy of throwing obstacles in the way and then heading back to their offices or just going home, allowing the Senate clock to tick its way toward the inevitable, Mr. Sanders on Friday decided to use the floor time available to him to make a full-throated display of his opposition to the bill.

“I think everyone knows, the president of the United States, President Obama and the Republican leadership have reached an agreement on a very significant tax bill,” Mr. Sanders began. In my view, the agreement that they reached is a bad deal for the American people. I think we can do better, and I am here today to take a strong stand against this bill, and I intend to tell my colleagues and the nation exactly why I am in opposition.

“You can call what I am doing today whatever I want,” said Mr. Sanders, who often calls himself a socialist. “You can call it a filibuster. You can call it a very long speech. I’m not here to set any great records to make a spectacle. I am simply here today to take as long as I can to explain to the American people the fact that we have got to do a lot better than this agreement provides.”

While Mr. Sanders may have not set out to create a spectacle, he certainly got some attention. Many of his colleagues were not at the Capitol to listen; many were not even in Washington. For example, the Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, who personally sealed the tax cut deal with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was home in Kentucky.

But even if they were not in the Senate chamber, or near a television set to watch C-Span, Mr. Sanders’s very long speech was amplified with modern accouterments not even dreamed about when Mr. Smith went to Washington. As the minutes and hours ticked by, his staff sent out a flurry of Twitter messages, including quotes and updates on his remarks. His filibuster is also being streamed live on http://sanders.senate.gov.

His speech, however, was more interesting and more lucid in chunks larger than 140 characters.

“This nation has a record breaking, $13.8 trillion national debt at the same time as the middle class is collapsing and poverty is increasing,” Mr. Sanders said. “It seems to me to be unconscionable, unconscionable for my conservative friends and for everybody else in this country to be driving up this already too high national debt by giving tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires who don’t need it and in some cases, Mr. President, don’t even want it.”

(He was referring to the Senate President pro tempore, not speaking to Mr. Obama directly.)

“Two of the wealthiest people in the world — Bill Gates of Microsoft, Warren Buffett, Berkshire — billionaires. They said ‘It’s absurd. We don’t need a tax break.’ All over the country, you hear a lot of folks who have a lot of money saying ‘don’t drive up the deficit and force our kids to pay higher taxes to pay off the national debt in order to give tax breaks to the richest people in this country.’”

Beyond the continuation of lower income tax rates for high-earners, Mr. Sanders also railed against other aspects of the tax deal including a provision granting a generous tax exemption to wealthy estates and the continuation of a 15 percent rate on capital gains and dividends, which he noted would mean a big tax break for rich people who live off passive income from accumulated wealth.

“The agreement between the president and the Republican leadership also calls for a continuation of the Bush-era 15 percent tax rate on capital gains and dividends, meaning that those people who make their living off their investments will continue to pay a substantially lower tax rate than firemen, teachers, nurses, carpenters, and virtually all the other working people of this country. And I just don’t think that’s fair. That’s wrong.”

Mr. Sanders also dismissed assertions that the tax cut deal was worthwhile because it will keep jobless benefits flowing to the long-term unemployed, saying that assistance should have been approved regardless of what happened to the Bush-era rates. “Let me be very clear,” he said. “In the midst of a serious and major recession, at a time when millions of our fellow Americans are out of work, through no fault of their own, but they have been out of work for a very, very long time, it would be, in my view, immoral and wrong to turn our backs on those workers.”

And then, at 4:20 p.m., another Tweet:

Sen. Bernie Sanders is trending FIRST in the nation right now. We will continue to tweet the senator’s speech. #filibuster

A later Tweet knocked down a report that Mr. Sanders was going to end his speech at 6 p.m.

About 6:40 p.m., this update arrived: Sen. Bernie Sanders is now in his 9th hour of non-stop #filibuster. Sanders has not left the floor once in that time.

But around 7 p.m., the gentleman from Vermont left the floor.

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