Sarah's Exit

I was away all day. Anything happen?

Just a couple words on this Palin thing. It could very well be, and probably is, a realization that an elected official in Alaska can't maintain the schedule necessary to run a Presidential campaign, and that these things begin earlier and earlier and she needed to be on the road as soon as possible. I think she could have stayed governor until 2010 and still made the campaign appearances necessary, but obviously she and her handlers didn't.

But the timing of the announcement just doesn't make any sense. The Friday afternoon of a holiday weekend is when you dump news you don't want anyone to know about. There's also the matter of that virulently negative Vanity Fair article, the consequent backbiting between some of the peripheral players, and then those leaked internal campaign emails depicting Palin in a bad light. You can argue that this pushed Palin to resign because she needed to get control of that story, and only a road tour would do it. But you could also view the leaked emails as a shot across the bow. Clearly the McCain people, who obviously hate her, have a wealth of material on her, and if she stayed perched up in Alaska they could control the spigot and destroy her drip by drip.

There's also the matter of the $500,000 in debt from legal defenses, which can easily be made on the lecture circuit, with the added benefit of raising name recognition. But I cannot help but think that this hastily arranged resignation got her out of Alaska before something very damaging hit her, and Palin must think that she can avoid harm by resigning first and then depicting the matter as inherently partisan and political, with no need for an independent investigation because she's no longer Governor. Max Blumenthal hints at something here.

Many political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators have been seizing paperwork from SBS in recent months, searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home on pristine Lake Lucille in 2002. The home was built just two months before Palin began campaigning for governor, a job which would have provided her enhanced power to grant building contracts in the wide-open state.

Seems like a small chink in the armor, but this is almost precisely what brought down Ted Stevens in Alaska, so it probably has more resonance there.

From a political perspective, this hurts, but not too much. Expect a couple months of Palin's supporters in full victimization mode, claiming that everyone from the mainstream media to David Letterman forced her out of her job. She thrives on the politics of resentment, and this just seems like a "you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" moment.

...I finally watched that press conference, and she may as well have been speaking in German. I have no idea what she just said. I do appreciate David Kurtz' three-word assessment: Real winners quit.

Governing Iz Hard

And now I'll wade into the continuing Sarah Palin adventures. No, not her war of words with an 18 year-old, but her serious failure to govern in Alaska.

As the legislative session draws to an end this weekend, Ms. Palin is pushing no major bills, and neither are state lawmakers. Many pivotal alliances between the governor and minority Democrats are obsolete, undone by mutual bitterness from the election. The rush of oil revenues that helped Ms. Palin press for big-ticket projects in the past has been replaced by a budget deficit that will require taking at least $1 billion out of state savings [...]

Twice the governor has rejected Democrats’ choice to fill a vacant State Senate seat in heavily Democratic Juneau; they have responded by rejecting the three Democrats she has nominated. This week, the state Democratic Party held a news conference to criticize Ms. Palin’s trip to Indiana, prompting a sharp retort from the governor’s office insisting that she has spent far more time in Juneau than previous governors had.

The biggest policy fight has been over how much federal stimulus money the state should accept (the governor initially held a news conference to say she would accept only 55 percent of the $930 million available; she soon signaled her willingness to accept more, though not enough for lawmakers). The State Senate, often her foil, took matters to a new level this year by stripping some of the governor’s priority projects from its proposed budget, including some in support of the natural gas pipeline. The Senate has yet to go along with a bill backed by Ms. Palin that would require parental notification and consent before young women under 17 can have abortions.

The governor recently nominated Wayne Anthony Ross, a board member of the National Rifle Association, to be Alaska’s attorney general. Mr. Ross, who is expected to be confirmed, has told lawmakers that he opposes many federal efforts in Alaska like increasing protections for polar bears and beluga whales and limiting resource development. Years ago, he described gay men and lesbians as “degenerates.”

The State Senate seat is really amusing. She keeps sending nominees who recently changed their party affiliation to Democratic to apply for the position, and most recently she sent the names of all three rejected nominees to fill the one seat. The latest nominee's claim to fame appears to be that his wife sold her shoes. Earlier, she tried to change the rules so that a Republican would be eligible for the seat previously held by a Democrat, which, um, didn't work.

Then there's the Attorney General nominee.

Sarah Palin's choice for attorney general once wrote a column defending the statue of a KKK figure as an expression of free speech and mocked the psychology of a college student who protested the display.

Wayne Anthony Ross has come under intense scrutiny since the Alaska Governor and former vice presidential candidate announced his nomination. His resume includes derogatory remarks about homosexuals, accusations of sexism, and bizarre comments downplaying the fallout of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But his most controversial incident may have come in December 1991, when he penned an op-ed for the Anchorage Times, a copy of which was obtained by the Huffington Post, entitled "KKK 'art' project gets 'A' for courage." ... [T]he column was filled with racial and political insensitivities that, even in the relatively homogenous Alaska, were bound (perhaps designed) to stir the pot.

Considering that this is all happening in Palin's official role as the chief executive of Alaska, it's no wonder that Washington Republicans are souring on Palin's prospects to lead the Party in 2012.

...And the Alaska Senate just did some nailin' Palin, rejecting her Attorney General candidate, Wayne Anthony Ross. FAIL.

Link-Trolling For Sarah Palin Supporters

"We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity."

Todd Palin’s half-sister was arrested Thursday after police say she broke into a Wasilla home for the second time this week to steal money.

Palin is the husband of Gov. Sarah Palin. He declined comment.

Also too, Palin tried to replace a Democratic state Senator from Juneau with a "Democrat" who switched his party at the last minute to get the job. Davenoon has the details:

Meantime, Palin is engaged in a less nationally-visible effort to deny a state senate appointment to a highly popular and competent state house member -- Juneau Democrat Beth Kerttula -- who happened to voice the uncontroversial view last August that Palin was "not ready" to be Vice President. When state Sen. Kim Elton resigned last month to take a job with the US Department of the Interior, Palin was obligated by state law to name a registered Democrat to replace him; the local party organization forwarded Kerttula's name to Palin as its sole recommendation -- a decision that was reasonable, given Kerttula's surpassing qualifications for the job and given the near-certainty that she'll win the seat outright next year during the fall elections. Palin, however, opted instead to nominate a conservative legislative aide, Tim Grussendorf, who had actually switched his party affiliation to qualify for the job. Palin wasn't required by law to accept the local party's recommendation; by the same token, the senate Democrats weren't required to accept her choice. And so yesterday, the senate Democrats rejected Grussendorf by a majority vote in closed session.

Palin, however, is now insisting that an obscure, 22-year-old legal memo requires legislators to follow a completely different process than the one laid out by the relevant statute, and she's rejecting the senate democrats' rejection -- a decision that not even her party colleagues in the legislature agree with. It's an unbelievably petty dispute, for which the governor deserves the blame. While the legislature is trying to get access to federal stimulus funds that the governor stupidly rejected, Sarah Palin seems determined to provoke a court battle to defend her ongoing, grudge-driven administrative style.

Palin probably hopes that more people criticize her, otherwise she'd have no legislative agenda. But I'm sure she'll be fine in that department...

Jindal Monitoring

Turns out that Mount Redoubt in Alaska has erupted, and the consequent ash plume is falling today. Studies by the National Weather Service led to the cancellation of flights in an out of Anchorage Airport as a precaution, as ash can cause jet engines to malfunction.

Leading one to ask Bobby Jindal if he still opposes "something called volcano monitoring," which may have saved many lives today up in Alaska. Or monitoring of any sort by the National Weather Service, you know, like on hurricanes...

It Might Be A Good Idea To Know When A Volcano Will Erupt

Bobby Jindal's dismissive reference to "volcano monitoring" was plain stupid. Disaster preparedness is obviously something we should fund, and someone who runs a state that was recently devastated by a natural disaster should know that. Proper volcano monitoring can save thousands of lives and millions of dollars. And this is made more urgent by the fact that there is an active volcano about to erupt in Alaska, and residents are being evacuated, thanks to the monitoring systems.

I happen to have a weird stock of knowledge about volcanoes thanks to a show I edited on Yellowstone and the giant caldera underneath the park. This is very serious and dangerous stuff, and the knowledge about when a volcano may erupt would be the difference between life and death for an untold number of people.

It's more of the anti-science talk that is driving Republicans into the furthest recesses of extremist irrelevance.

FAIL.

UPDATE: Krugman:

But both sides, I thought, agreed that the government should provide public goods — goods that are nonrival (they benefit everyone) and nonexcludable (there’s no way to restrict the benefits to people who pay.) The classic examples are things like lighthouses and national defense, but there are many others. For example, knowing when a volcano is likely to erupt can save many lives; but there’s no private incentive to spend money on monitoring, since even people who didn’t contribute to maintaining the monitoring system can still benefit from the warning. So that’s the sort of activity that should be undertaken by government.

So what did Bobby Jindal choose to ridicule in this response to Obama last night? Volcano monitoring, of course.

The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

The Burdens Of Sarah

It is not a good time to be a Governor. It's an even worse time to be a Governor when the main natural resource propping up your petro-state is dropping in price. This is the world of Sarah Palin, Alaska's spunkiest reactionary.

A number of factors seem to have contributed to the bumpy homecoming: a residual anger among Democrats for the attack-dog role Palin assumed in the McCain campaign, lingering resentment from Republicans for the part she may have played in McCain's defeat, and a suspicion crossing party lines that the concerns of Alaska, at a time of economic crisis, will now be secondary to her future in national politics.

Nearly every move that Palin makes or does not make, acknowledges Joe Balash, one of her closest aides, is analyzed through a new political prism, scrutinized for its effect on a possible 2012 presidential candidacy. "There's nothing we can do to stop it," he said. "People wonder why she's doing something or not doing something."

The result of all this scrutiny and second-guessing, says one Republican ally, is that "the governor has been feeling beaten up."

Well ain't that a shame. It may be that she's feeling beaten up because her bad policies, ethics violations and obstructionist behavior is catching up to her. Her Attorney General had to resign for his role in Troopergate. She has to pay back taxes for past per diem expenses of trucking her whole family around Alaska on the public's dime. And her daughter Bristol managed to cough out the truth about the futility of abstinence-only education, which should be a benefit and a refreshing dose of reality, but will be met with shock in the social conservative milieu.

It might not be all the pressure, it might be that Palin is a bad politician.

Mark Begich (D-AK)

Mark Begich is pulling away in the latest counts in the Alaska Senate race. His vote lead over ConvicTed Stevens has grown to 2,374, and there are only 14,000 or so left to count. 538 has called it:

Stevens would have to win by a margin of over 25% of the outstanding ballots to tie Begich.

That would require something of a Gravelanche.

Currently, Begich leads by 0.77%, which is outside the free 0.5% recount zone. The recount fee is a paltry $15,000, not a sum Stevens has ever had trouble acquiring via one means or another. Given his likely expulsion by either the Republican caucus or the U.S. Senate as a whole (though we are in "reconciliation" mode, so who knows?), it seems unlikely anyone besides Stevens himself would have the desire to pursue such action. Still, the Anchorage Daily News calls such a recount "likely."

Congratulations, Senator Begich.

I think the Alaska Republicans would step in to stop a recount that would most likely be unsuccessful. No reason to stick with a felon any longer than you have to.

No wonder the Senate Republicans deferred the question of expelling Stevens from the caucus today. The writing was on the wall.

UPDATE: NBC and the AP have both called it for Begich. That's 57 Democrats in the Senate. (58 if you want to count Lieberman)

If You Don't Know, Alaska Where Your Ballot Is

I concur with Nate Silver that something is definitely fishy about the Alaska numbers. Nowhere else in the country did the pre-election polls so wildly differ from the post-election reality. Don Young and Ted Stevens, one unspeakably corrupt and the other a convicted felon, both won their elections, apparently, despite being down by double digits in the pre-election polls. I thought there might be a backlash against the "Washington elite libruls" who punished Stevens with a conviction, but that doesn't explain Young. And it certainly doesn't explain this:

Indeed, it seems possible that the number of "questionable" ballots could be quite high. So far, about 220 thousand votes have been processed in Alaska. This compares with 313 thousand votes cast in 2004. After adding back in the roughly 50,000 absentee and early ballots that Roll Call accounts for, that would get us to 270 thousand ballots, or about a 14 percent drop from 2004. It seems unlikely that turnout would drop by 14 percent in Alaska given the presence of both a high-profile senate race and Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket.

More than unlikely. Now, I know the outcome of the Presidential race was apparent by about 4pm local time there, but you would think having a native son (well, daughter) on the ballot would seek to counteract any depressed turnout.

Shannyn Moore has a great write-up on this. And Digby says what we're all thinking:

If this were coming from anywhere but the state that had legislators who proudly belong to something they called the "Corrupt Bastards Club" (with hats!) I would adopt a wait and see attitude. As it is, I have no problem saying that this stinks to high heaven and is probably exactly what it looks like.

Something's very, very wrong.

The Final Days

I fully expect one last-minute "Shocking revelation!!! Must credit Drudge!!!eleventy!1!" for each remaining day until the election. John McCain has run his entire campaign from news cycle to news cycle, and so they'll grasp on to whatever they can manage to find. Today's big hit is a 2001 interview with Barack Obama about the civil rights movement, where he lamented the movement's propensity to lean on the courts to mandate changes as opposed to building social change from the bottom up within local communities. That's pretty much all he said, but because he used the words "redistribute" and "wealth" every conservative in America figures they've cracked the Da Vinci Code and revealed Obama for the Maoist-Leninist-Marxist-Communist-socialist that he is. The key quote is this:

"And I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that," Obama said.

That's not only a pretty conservative (not in the political sense) argument, it's echoed by conservative legal scholars.

Now here's how the McCain campaign deliberately misinterprets it:

"Barack Obama expressed his regret that the Supreme Court hadn't been more 'radical' and described as a 'tragedy' the court's refusal to take up 'the issues of redistribution of wealth.' No wonder he wants to appoint judges that legislate from the bench," Holtz-Eakin continued.

This is reminiscent of the "global test" brouhaha from 2004, where Bush officials went ahead and misinterpreted a line from John Kerry for their own ends. It's a very common and even tired political trick.

On the substance of whether or not we should accept "redistribution of wealth" in society, perhaps it's better to flip the question. Does the McCain-Palin ticket defend the extreme concentrations of wealth - with CEOs earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute and sitting on the proceeds rather than creating jobs - that exists in this country today? The owners of the top 1% of wealth have more than the bottom 90%. The top 1% wage earners make more than the bottom 50%. Is that in any way sustainable or preferable? Can anyone look into the eyes of the 47 million who have no health care or the other 50-60 million who would go bankrupt if they tried to use theirs and tell them that extreme concentration of wealth is a positive social good?

I would put up the time-honored concept of progressive taxation against the attempt to protect the massive, depression-inducing income inequality we have today.

And furthermore, the definition of socialism, in general terms, is when the state collectivizes the ownership of the means of production and distributes wealth equally across segments of society. You know, like in Alaska.

"And Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs. … It’s to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans."

The words, folks, of Sarah Palin.

That One's Gonna Leave A Mark

The Anchorage Daily News endorsed Barack Obama yesterday.

Gov. Palin's nomination clearly alters the landscape for Alaskans as we survey this race for the presidency -- but it does not overwhelm all other judgment. The election, after all is said and done, is not about Sarah Palin, and our sober view is that her running mate, Sen. John McCain, is the wrong choice for president at this critical time for our nation.

Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, brings far more promise to the office. In a time of grave economic crisis, he displays thoughtful analysis, enlists wise counsel and operates with a cool, steady hand. The same cannot be said of Sen. McCain [...]

Yet despite her formidable gifts, few who have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth. To step in and juggle the demands of an economic meltdown, two deadly wars and a deteriorating climate crisis would stretch the governor beyond her range. Like picking Sen. McCain for president, putting her one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time.

They oughta know, right?

Meanwhile, this story about the early days of Sarah Palin (neé Sarh Heath) is really strange. Apparently, those who knew her in high school and college are saying the same things that the neighbors of serial killers say about people - loner, kept to herself, shy, etc. They are positively shocked that she emerged from this obscurity to the heights of politics. This is just not something you hear about a Vice Presidential candidate.

Of the 43 fellow journalism, communication and telecommunication majors reached by The Times from the group of 60 in her 1987 graduating class, only five said they recalled much of anything about Ms. Palin. (Two, including Mr. Love, said they had a crush on her.) Most others said they had no memory of her at all, which some found puzzling given the communication school’s size.

University officials, including Ms. Palin’s academic adviser and two former professors who taught her, said they recalled little or nothing about her.

She did not work for the college newspaper, nor the university television station, a university official said. Her senior class yearbook reveals a single photo, no campus activities. Roy Atwood, the adviser, said, “I don’t think she was terribly connected.”

It's spooky. Someone doesn't develop that kind of personality overnight. I don't know what to make of it.

I Loaned My Landlord The Rent Money

Ted Stevens' testimony ended yesterday, and I think he basically admitted guilt on at least one count.

The senator, who testified earlier that he never received free home renovations, told jurors in his federal corruption trial that he wished he had called police when a business executive replaced furniture in his Alaska home with bulky items damaged by cigarette burns.

Stevens, 84, one of the most powerful Republicans in the Senate, added that he tried to refuse the $2,700 massage chair as a gift from another friend in 2001. The Brookstone chair remains in the basement of his Washington home -- on loan, Stevens said.

"We have lots of things in our house that don't belong to us," said Stevens, who is seeking reelection to a seventh full term. "I let him put it in our basement at his request."

I can't tell you how many times business executives insist that they leave expensive gifts in my home. They're not "mine," of course, and I feel sheepish about using them, but as long as the Jacuzzi is on loan, everything's above board.

Closing arguments will be presented today, and we may have a verdict by the end of the week. This has kept Stevens from campaigning in Alaska, but if he ends up being found innocent, I think he sweeps to victory. If he's guilty, he loses. It's the October Surprise we know. Mark Begich doesn't have a lot of control over the matter.

End In Itself

It is sad that, just as there has been no accountability for the criminals in the Bush Administration for the past eight years, it appears there will be no accountability for Sarah Palin and her abuse of power in the Troopergate case, at least for the moment. The Attorney General who could prosecute her is a loyalist, the State Personnel Board which could impose fines or recommend impeachment is made up of Palin appointees, and the Republican legislature isn't interested in a food fight either.

Before the report was released, the idea had been floated that the legislature could institute impeachment proceedings. But since Friday night, that possibility appears to have receded. According to a TPM source who attended Friday's session of the legislative council, State Senate President Lyda Green, an outspoken Palin critic, replied with a flat 'no' when asked, after the report's release, whether impeachment was being considered.

And Green told the Christian Science Monitor over the weekend that even a censure motion is unlikely, since the legislature is not currently in session.

The chattering class saw fit to ignore the incident like good little lemmings on the Sunday shows. But I do think that being found guilty of abuse of power will have an impact in the Presidential race, regardless of how the McCain tries to spin it and lie about it. At the root, Palin was building a brand as a reformer, and this undercuts the image, which has already been badly bruised. The game in Alaska may be rigged, but the public is smart enough to figure this one out if they find out about it. I think there will be efforts made to alert them from Democratic sources.

Tadd!!!

After obfuscation and stonewalling, Todd Palin finally submitted to questioning from the Legislature's investigator in the Troopergate probe. And it really doesn't look good for the First Dude.

Page 4, Line 3: "I had hundreds of conversations and communications about Trooper Wooten over the last several years with my family, friends, with colleagues, just about everyone I could including government officials."

In a July 18, 2008 press release, Governor Palin stated; “To allege that I, or any member of my family....directed disciplinary action be taken against any employee of the Department of Public Safety, is, quite simply, outrageous.

But yet according to Todd Palin's deposition he complained about Trooper Mike Wooten to Mike Tibbles, Randy Ruaro, Ivey Frye, Frank Bailey, Mike Nizich, John Bitney, John Glass and Audie Holloway.

In addition, during an interview with former Legislative Liason John Bitney last July, he said, "People don't know just how much weight Todd's words have. When Todd Palin makes a suggestion, it's not really a suggestion."

Having this many conversations, over two years after the last interaction with Wooten shows a pattern of Palin's obsession with getting even with Wooten.

The guy seems obsessed with getting Wooten fired. He discussed it with a dozen people, and pestered his wife about it so much she asked him to stop bringing it up.

But you know, he didn't work to fire the guy who refused to get rid of his white whale.

Muckraker has more. And the Alaska Supreme Court has denied the effort to stop the investigation, so there's going to be something out of this in the next 48 hours.

Losing Alaska

This LA Times article tracks with a fundraiser I attended over the weekend for Ethan Berkowitz, a former member of the Alaska State House who is running for Congress against longtime Republican Rep. Don Young (and he's going to win). Berkowitz was asked about Sarah Palin and how Alaskans were responding to her national renown, and he said that the state was initially happy for her but many are shocked that someone who was elected governor on a platform of transparency and reform is now stonewalling a legitimate investigation in Troopergate. They're losing their esteem for her.

ANCHORAGE -- Jerry McCutcheon went to Sarah Palin's office here last week to request information about the firing of former Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, the scandal that for weeks has threatened to overshadow the governor's role as Republican presidential candidate John McCain's running mate.

McCutcheon was given a phone number in Virginia to call: the national headquarters of the McCain-Palin campaign.
Why, he wanted to know, did he have to call a campaign office 4,300 miles away to find out what was going on in Alaska government? The longtime civic activist phoned his local state representative, Les Gara, who quickly filed a protest.

These days, many such queries about Monegan -- or anything else involving Palin's record as governor -- get diverted to McCain staffers. A former Justice Department prosecutor from New York flew in recently to advise the governor's lawyer and field reporters' calls about Monegan. Soon after, Palin's willingness to cooperate in the Legislature's probe of the affair ended [...]

The partisan spillover of the presidential campaign into the statehouse, political analysts here say, now threatens Palin's most powerful political capital in Alaska: her commitment to transparency, her willingness to forge bipartisan alliances with Democrats to advance her legislative agenda, and her battle to upend the good ol' boy network.

"Is this going to dilute her image as a maverick who will clean out the rascals from their perches of power, when she herself cannot tolerate questions into her behavior, investigations into the firing of a public safety commissioner?" said Gerald McBeath, political science professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

This editorial from the Anchorage Daily News calls it "abdication" and asks the key question, "Is the McCain campaign telling Alaskans that Alaska's governor can't handle her own defense in front of her own Alaska constituents?" Ouch. Plus, the letters to the editor at the ADN are running strongly negative of Palin's recent conduct. And this won't help - Palin's been caught in a lie:

An internal government document obtained by ABC News appears to contradict Sarah Palin's most recent explanation for why she fired her public safety chief, the move which prompted the now-contested state probe into "Troopergate."

Fighting back against allegations she may have fired her then-Public Safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan, for refusing to go along with a personal vendetta, Palin on Monday argued in a legal filing that she fired Monegan because he had a "rogue mentality" and was bucking her administration's directives.

"The last straw," her lawyer argued, came when he planned a trip to Washington, D.C., to seek federal funds for an aggressive anti-sexual-violence program. The project, expected to cost from $10 million to $20 million a year for five years, would have been the first of its kind in Alaska, which leads the nation in reported forcible rape.

The McCain-Palin campaign echoed the charge in a press release it distributed Monday, concurrent with Palin's legal filing. "Mr. Monegan persisted in planning to make the unauthorized lobbying trip to D.C.," the release stated.

But the governor's staff authorized the trip, according to an internal travel document from the Department of Public Safety, released Friday in response to an open records request.

The document, a state travel authorization form, shows that Palin's chief of staff, Mike Nizich, approved Monegan's trip to Washington, D.C., "to attend meeting with Senator Murkowski." The date next to Nizich's signature reads June 18.

If Palin is starting to become a divisive figure in her beloved Alaska, I imagine it's worse throughout the country.

Stonewall Palin

If you track this from where we were to where we are, it's kind of incredible. So Sarah Palin was caught, on tape, trying to persuade Walter Monegan to fire her ex-brother in Law Michael Wooten. She promised to cooperate with the investigation. Then John McCain picked her to become his Vice Presidential nominee, and the Republican lawyers flooded the zone. Since then, aides who agreed to testify clammed up, cooperation was cut off, and subpoenas were issued. In the past 24 hours:

• Palin said she would not testify, despite pledging to do so earlier.

• She's decided the investigation is politically motivated and partisan, despite there being twice as many Republicans on the Alaska Legislative Council doing the investigating as Democrats, and despite the Republican from her own hometown of Wasilla casting the deciding vote to subpoena aides.

• She's flipped lawmakers who supported the investigation just a couple months ago. Five other Republicans have filed a lawsuit to shut the investigation down entirely.

• The McCain campaign has clearly fed their friendly media the line that this is partisan and part of a sexist plot to bring Palin down.

• She's changed her story about why Monegan was fired, now suggesting it was because of a "pattern of insubordination," which Monegan calls a lie. And get this - she's claiming he went over her head to go to Washington to seek funds for sexual assault prevention. That's right.

This alleged pattern of "outright insubordination" is said to have culminated in Monegan planning a trip to Washington to go after federal funds for an initiative to fight sexual assault crimes, which had not yet been approved by the governor. (Van Flein's account was in sync with the line taken last night by a McCain campaign spokesman at a press conference in Alaska.)

The issue of Monegan's work on the sexual assault initiative doesn't come completely out of the blue. In a lengthy exploration of Palin's record on combating sexual assault crimes, ABC News reported yesterday that Monegan was the "chief proponent" for an "ambitious, multi-million dollar initiative to seriously tackle sex crimes in the state," and that Palin's office "put the plan on hold in July," just days before Monegan's firing.

But whatever the role of the sexual assault initiative in Monegan's departure from state government, this is by now the third substantive explanation given by Palin for that departure. And, to one degree or another, all those explanations contradict each other.

It's interesting that Palin faulted Monegan for trying to combat sexual assaults in Alaska, particularly child sex assaults. This is a woman who as mayor of Wasilla charged rape victims for their own exams, and in a state with a troubling record on sexual assault, for her to fire those who wanted to make combating it a priority is very curious.

Evangelicals and social conservatives have embraced McCain's vice presidential pick for what they call her "pro-family," "pro-woman" values. But in Alaska, critics say Gov. Sarah Palin has not addressed the rampant sexual abuse, rape, domestic violence and murder that make her state one of the most dangerous places in the country for women and children.

Alaska leads the nation in reported forcible rapes per capita, according to the FBI, with a rate two and a half times the national average - a ranking it has held for many years. Children are no safer: Public safety experts believe that the prevalence of rape and sexual assault of minors in Alaska makes the state's record one of the worst in the U.S. And while solid statistics on domestic violence are hard to come by, most - including Gov. Palin - agree it is an "epidemic."

Despite the governor's pro-family image, public safety experts and advocates for women and children struggled when asked to explain how Palin's leadership has helped address the crisis. And current and former officials from Palin's administration confirmed that an ambitious plan to tackle the crisis has apparently sunk into doldrums after arriving at the governor's office.

"She's really done a lot of work on oil and gas, but when it comes to violence against women and children. . . we haven't been on her radar as a priority," said Peggy Brown, executive director of the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. The Juneau-based group is an umbrella organization for shelters and anti-violence programs around the state.

I don't know if it has to do with a far-right belief that treating rape victims equals abortion or what, but clearly Palin has turned a blind eye to a very serious epidemic in her own state, and on numerous occasions has actively worked against preventing sexual abuse.

But this is kind of a tangent. Clearly there's a massive cover-up going on here, complete with lies, politically motivated stonewalling and personal attacks against public officials. Right-wing lawyers are suing to shut the whole thing down, smearing Democrats involved with the probe in the process, in an effort to muddy the waters and create the impression that this is a partisan witchhunt. The goal is to pressure everyone involved into refraining from tackling the real issues here.

And if you want a comment out of Palin about this, forget it. She ain't talkin'.

Given the kind of disrespect for the rule of law and the Constitution that we've been through over the past eight years, this kind of steamrolling and stonewalling should be met with great concern. Sarah is growing up in Fourthbranch Cheney's image here.

Sarah Palin, Elitist

Marcy Wheeler gets at something I missed in the first read of Sarah Palin's taxpayer-funded payments to herself for travel to her own home in Alaska:

As Governor, Palin's first purportedly anti-Juneau act came when she took the oath--it in Fairbanks, not Juneau. Then, she told her Commmissioners they didn't have to live in Juneau.

But overall in the last few months she’s seen less of Palin, who’s moved most of her operations up to Anchorage, the biggest city in Alaska and a place much friendlier to the sort of conservative pro-business pro-drilling stance that’s marked her tenure as governor. “She had started off by telling her Commissioners that none of them had to live in Juneau, which makes Juneauites nervous. We’re always convinced that they’re going to try and move the State Capitol again.”

In fact, when Palin called a special legislative session earlier this year to push through her pipeline plan, she wasn't in Juneau that much [...]

But that's just Sarah and her top aides--the Executive--that have effectively been working outside of Juneau.

She has also said she would not veto an ongoing attempt to move the legislature out of Juneau--even though the measure would bypass a measure passed in 1994 that gives Alaskan voters a say in whether the capitol will move or not.

It seems that Governor Palin's a pretty big fan of moving out of Juneau--or at least not being in Juneau.

Wasilla is not actually a small town. It's part of the metro region of Anchorage in what is a small state. It's closer to a suburb, or more to the point an exurb, than a small town. Juneau, which is 600 miles away, has a population of about 30,000 in its metro area, but it's smaller than Anchorage.

This would be like if Arnold Schwarzenegger decided he would never move to Sacramento and instead run the state out of his home in Brentwood. And then charge taxpayers for his per diem expenses for living at home.

It's actually kind of an elitist pose. She'd rather be with her own near the big city of Anchorage than go down to that cowtown Juneau. That's kind of being missed here.

That's Not A Taxpayer Ripoff You Can Believe In

I think this one's going to cause a stir. A1 of the Washington Post:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a "per diem" allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.

The governor also has charged the state for travel expenses to take her children on official out-of-town missions. And her husband, Todd, has billed the state for expenses and a daily allowance for trips he makes on official business for his wife.

Palin, who earns $125,000 a year, claimed and received $16,951 as her allowance, which officials say was permitted because her official "duty station" is Juneau, according to an analysis of her travel documents by The Washington Post.

The governor's daughters and husband charged the state $43,490 to travel and many of the trips were to and from their house in Wasilla and Juneau, the capital city 600 miles away, the documents show.

This comes from the lady who put the luxury plane on eBay (and then sold it at a loss). The one who is jes folks, the reg'lar ol' hockey mom from moose country. Who makes six figures and sticks the taxpayers with her travel bills. Not just for events around the state, but for trips to her house.

That's a serious shock to the narrative system.

I love this spin:

Gubernatorial spokeswoman Sharon Leighow said Monday that Palin's expenses are not unusual and that, under state policy, the first family could have claimed per diem expenses for each child taken on official business but has not done so.

Yeah, aren't you happy she didn't charge more? What's the matter with you people?

I think Josh Marshall is right: the only response to this message of Sarah Palin as a reformer is derision.



...in her defense, Palin did generously allocate a hundred dollars to educate doctors about traumatic brain injuries.

Amateur Hour

Another sign that the Republican Party has divested itself of all competent people is that they have this firecracker of a Vice President, but they did such a craptacular job of vetting her that they have to send her up to Alaska for a week off the campaign trail to hide her away.

CHUCK TODD:Well Ron, We’ve been able to see that there are a few folks who are saying [Palin is] actually going to hole up in Alaska for a little, she’s got to see her son off who’s going to be deployed to Iraq, so we may not see her on the campaign trail for a little while.

RON ALLEN: Yes she hasn’t been home for a long time, and she’s obviously got some business to deal with there.

Usually, what you do after introducing someone to the nation, and getting a positive reception, is you CAPITALIZE on it. But the McCain campaign is so terrified of an unscripted moment or a need to answer questions that they literally have to send her 6,000 miles away from the media glare. In fact, they're going to try and get through the entire campaign without having a question lobbed at their VP nominee.

Now, aside from this being a direct threat to democracy and the desire to show the nation only propaganda and nothing else, this is just bad strategy. Here's the one asset to the ticket - really the only thing firing up the base right now - and they sock her away. I know there's a lot for her to work on in Alaska - there's that road to nowhere to build, with $100 million in taxpayer money connecting about 10,000 people to one another, and there's that ethics inquiry to squash, and a subpoena to avoid, and there are all those issues to learn about, except for energy, where she's so smart that she actually believes, contra George Bush and John McCain, that we can totally drill our way out of crisis, and her perspective is great for Alaskans and oil companies but bad for humanity... so yeah, maybe she needs a week or so.

But still, taking your best asset off the trail with 8 weeks to go until the election? That's just dumb. And it's not like it'll stop the media hounds, either.

Who the heck is running the McCain campaign, and are they trying to lose?

...And The Lies

I'm firmly committed to a "hissy fit" strategy about Republicans attacking the very people who have made this country great. But I would be remiss if I didn't continue to provide perspective on how Sarah Palin just stood up there and willingly lied in front of her countrymen last night.

I've already discussed the earmarks and the bridge to nowhere - Palin is as besotted with porkbarrel projects as anyone in Washington. That's how Alaska operates. But let's also note this fiction - that Barack Obama has no record.

In reporting on Gov. Sarah Palin's September 4 speech at the Republican National Convention, numerous print media, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time magazine, the Dallas Morning News, Reuters, and an article and a column by Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle, uncritically reported Palin's claim that Sen. Barack Obama "is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform -- not even in the state senate," without noting that Obama has played key roles in the passage of reform legislation at both the federal and state levels. For example, Sen. John McCain, a co-sponsor of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, thanked Obama for his work on the bill.

Obama was a lead co-sponsor of that bill (S.2590), which sought to "require full disclosure of all entities and organizations receiving Federal funds" -- an amount that approximately totals $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks and loans. While signing the bill into law on September 26, 2006, Bush recognized Obama as a sponsor of the legislation, saying, "I want to thank the bill sponsors, Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, Tom Carper from Delaware, and Barack Obama from Illinois." Moreover, in a press release upon Senate passage of the bill, the bill's primary sponsor, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), referred to the legislation as the "Coburn-Obama Bill." In media reports, the bill has also been referred to as the "Coburn-Obama" legislation or bill.

There are plenty more, too. But it takes some kind of chutzpah for a lady to lie about her own record while claiming her opponent's is non-existent. Of course, lying is all in the Republican family.

GIBSON: Senator, since I've been following politics, every single presidential nominee has said that the first quality they look for in a vice presidential pick is the capability and the readiness to take over as president.

Can you look the country straight in the eye and say Sarah Palin has the qualities and has enough experience to be commander in chief?

MCCAIN: Oh, absolutely. Having been the governor of our largest state, the commander of their National Guard, she was once in charge of their natural resources assets, actually, until she found out there was corruption and she quit and said it had to be fixed.

The "largest state" thing - in landmass, 47th in population - is so absurd it ought not be dignified. But this "she is commander of the Alaska National Guard" is just as juvenile.

Maj. Gen. Craig Campbell, the service commander of the Alaska National Guard, told McClatchy that Palin has "no command authority" over the Guard when it comes to national security. The Guard responds to in-state natural disasters and civic emergencies, but Palin hasn't approved any of these activities during her tenure, allowing Campbell to have authority over Guard operations.

Just to be clear, Palin's lack of national security experience, to my mind, is not necessarily a disqualifier for national office. Plenty of capable national candidates have run without direct experience in foreign policy. Few have been as unprepared as Palin, but that need not be a deal breaker.

The problem here is that McCain and his campaign keep lying about this. Instead of crafting a compelling defense for Palin's lack of qualifications, the Republican campaign just creates its own reality.

Exactly.

...I agree with James Fallows, this speech is likely to have played much better in the hall.

UPDATE: The governor's plane never went on eBay. She's a pathological liar.

Bridge To Somewhere

Turns out that Sarah Palin has been caught in a lie on the first day on the job:

During the unveiling of his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) tried to cast her as a “reformer” and “fiscal conservative.” She boldly claimed that with regard to Sen. Ted Stevens’s (R-AK) infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” she told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks“:

I championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. In fact, I told Congress — I told Congress, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ on that bridge to nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, I said we’d build it ourselves.

It appears, however, that Palin is lying. As Bradford Plumer first noted, the Anchorage Daily News interviewed Palin during her 2006 campaign for governor. At the time, federal funding for the bridge had been stripped by Congress. They asked if she was in favor of continuing state funding for the project. “Yes,” she responded, noting specifically her desire to renew Congressional support:

Yes. I would like to see Alaska’s infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now–while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist.

The lying is a persistent issue with Palin. She actually campaigned hard on that bridge to nowhere, and then switched positions when the bridge became a punchline, but she's still using the funding to build an access road, because otherwise she would have to return the funding to the federal government. Runaway spending! Despite this, of course, Palin is being portrayed as a crusader against earmarks, and I expect that zombie lie to hold because... well, because she said so. Forget the $346 million in earmarks requested just last year.

There's also the DPS firing scandal, a good primer for which is here. The court tapes have been released, and the Washington Post had a chat with the fired DPS chief, Walt Monegan, which is more than the McCain campaign did.

The July firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan by Gov. Sarah Palin, who was announced as John McCain's running mate on Friday, has unearthed a stream of soap-opera-like details about Palin, her husband, her family and top state appointees. The controversy has also cut against Palin's reputation for holding an ethical line and standing up to colleagues in the Republican Party over matters of principle.

Monegan, 57, a respected former chief of the Anchorage Police Department, said in an interview with The Washington Post's James V. Grimaldi on Friday that the governor repeatedly brought up the topic of her ex-brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, after Monegan became the state's commissioner of public safety in December 2006. Palin's husband, Todd, met with Monegan and presented a dossier of information about Wooten, who was going through a bitter custody battle with Palin's sister, Molly. Monegan also said Sarah Palin sent him e-mails on the subject, but Monegan declined to disclose them, saying he planned to give them to a legislative investigator looking into the matter.

Palin initially denied that she or anyone in her administration had ever pressured Monegan to fire the trooper, but this summer acknowledged more than a half a dozen contacts over the matter, including one phone call from a Palin administration official to a state police lieutenant. The call was recorded and was released by Palin's office this month. Todd Palin told a television reporter in Alaska that he did meet with Monegan, but said he was just "informing" Monegan about the issue, not exerting pressure.

"She never directly asked me to fire him," Monegan said.

That's a thin reed to hang propriety on. And it's not the first time she tried to get rid of someone who crossed her. The police chief and library director supported her opponent in the Wasilla mayoral race in 1996, so she fired them. The police chief sued, and lost, because the judge said that technically, the mayor could fire him for whatever reason she chose. That's the kind of spoils system to expect with her as VP.

There's more from Monegan here. And she might end up being deposed in the case. Lest anyone not get why this is important, Josh Marshall breaks it down.

We rely on elected officials not to use the power of their office to pursue personal agendas or vendettas. It's called an abuse of power. There is ample evidence that Palin used her power as governor to get her ex-brother-in-law fired. When his boss refused to fire him, she fired him. She first denied Monegan's claims of pressure to fire Wooten and then had to amend her story when evidence proved otherwise. The available evidence now suggests that she 1) tried to have an ex-relative fired from his job for personal reasons, something that was clearly inappropriate, and perhaps illegal, though possibly understandable in human terms, 2) fired a state official for not himself acting inappropriately by firing the relative, 3) lied to the public about what happened and 4) continues to lie about what happened.

These are, to put it mildly, not the traits or temperament you want in someone who could hold the executive power of the federal government.

Indeed.