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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.Read more here.
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.
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3 comments - Post a comment :
Regarding the state trooper "scandal":
If your ex-brother-in-law had threatened to kill your sister and your dad, and if you were governor, then what would you do?
If I was governor, then he'd be in jail. Making threats like that while carrying a gun can't possibly be legal.
If my sister were governor and didn't do everything in her power to protect me, I'd be pretty upset at her.
That being said, divorce makes both the ex-husband and the ex-wife a little insane, and not in a good way. Being a state trooper is a high-stress job, with an attendant higher divorce rate-- so the commissioner has probably seen things like this before, and assumed that it would blow over. Lucky for him, the threat (if actually made) was never carried out.
For more details, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/30/AR2008083002366_pf.html
tihamer:
My apologies, Blogger cut off the URL of your link, so I'll put it here for you:
Long-Standing Feud in Alaska Embroils Palin
If I were governor and I did as you suggest I would consider my actions of intervention to be an abuse of my power. So, hopefully I would be courageous enough to not intervene. Innocent until proven guilty applies to all of us, even the guilty.
Thank you for your comment.
Thanks for fixing the url, Paul.
An abuse of power? Perhaps. I don't know. I think there is a difference between kickbacks and trying to protect someone you love.
It reminds me of some of the scandals that Obama and McCain (and the Clintons) have been involved in-- Unless we've been in their shoes, and subject to the temptations they've faced, we should be careful about judging them. Then again, if they fail again and again, then they should be removed from office so that they don't face those temptations. But we still can't judge them as persons.
I don't know if the scandals on both sides even out; I haven't examined them closely. We're all fallible human beings. So we need to judge the politicians on what they promise, given their record on keeping their promises so far.
Obama and Palin's short records make it tough to make such judgements, even though they give them both credibility as outsiders.
OTOH, Obama has voted twice to abandon to death born-alive babies who have survived abortion, which is more than even NARAL wants. And we know that Palin really believes her pro-life views.
So given the truth of Martin Niemoller's famous poem, I think the choice is obvious. Otherwise the generation that birthed Roe v. Wade will suffer involuntary euthanasia.
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