Laura McGann Goes To Alaska

To find out more about Sarah Palin, Laura McGann has gone to Alaska.

From The Reform Candidate? by Laura McGann:

A look at Palin’s rise to power in Alaska, however, raises questions about what “reformer” means here and whether it carries the same heft in her home state as it does with a national politician. While Palin combated the cash-for-favors reputation of the Republican Party in Alaska, she has also found herself in the middle of two scandals that question her use of power.

The latest scandal has been percolating on national blogs for weeks and made the front-page of The Washington Post on Sunday. Palin stands accused of having fired Alaska’s public-safety commissioner because he would not dismiss her sister’s ex-husband, a state trooper, who the Palins have been feuding with since before she became governor. Though a full report from an independent investigator is due this fall, emails from Palin and a tape recording reveal that the governor at least pressured the commissioner to fire her ex-brother-in-law, after she previously denied having done so.

Read more here.

Misgovernment For Profit

From Follow This Dime - Why Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush's Washington by Thomas Frank:

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president's friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president's former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president's liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash "misplaced" in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska's leading politicians are apparently on the take -- our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay -- or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

Read the rest here.