Former Republican vice presidential candidate and on-again Fox News contributor Sarah Palin is once again teasing the possibility that she may run for political office.

During a July 9 interview on Sean Hannity's radio show, Palin explained that while she hopes somebody with “new blood” challenges Mark Begich (D-AK) for his Senate seat, she has “considered” a run, “because people have requested me considering it.”

Palin joins an ever-expanding roster of Republicans who have used their employment at Fox News as a staging ground for a possible political run, including Liz Cheney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Angela McGlowan, Pete Snyder, John Kasich, Geraldo Rivera, Keith Ablow, Allen West, Scott Brown, and Palin herself during her previous stint as a Fox contributor. 

In 2010 and 2011, Fox and Palin drummed up interest in her regular appearances on the network -- which were otherwise just Palin lobbing trite, canned attacks at the Obama administration -- by repeatedly suggesting Palin was gearing up for a presidential run.

Even after Fox suspended the contracts of contributors Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in early 2011, the network kept Palin under contract for months until she made her formal announcement deciding not to run (or, as Fox Nation put it at the time, “Palin Passes on Presidency”).

Those intervening months were marked by Fox personalities repeatedly speculating on whether their colleague would run for president, including several pointing to various events -- such as her June 2011 bus tour -- as definitive evidence Palin was going to enter the race.  

The fact that Fox suspended Gingrich and Santorum while continuing to employ Palin and Mike Huckabee was critiqued at the time by none other than Fox's new media critic, Howard Kurtz. In a piece for The Daily Beast, Kurtz criticized the network for allowing its employees to “utilize the platform of the country's top-rated cable news channel, and pad their bank accounts to boot” while pondering a run for office.

With Palin back at Fox, it seems the mutually beneficial “will she or won't she” machine is kicking into gear again. On cue, Fox Nation is currently featuring Palin's comments on Hannity's show as their top story.