http://www.adn.com/politics/story/476430.html
When the investigation appeared to stall, Palin — more than a year before she was elected governor, and about two months before launching her campaign — pushed trooper commanders to take action against Wooten. At one point, Palin and her husband, Todd, hired a private investigator….

… It’s nearly impossible to know whether other complaints have come in about Wooten in the last two years. His personnel file is confidential. But the fact he remains on the force is an indication that he hasn’t had the sort of trouble that Grimes warned against.

http://www.aksuperstation.com/news/local/26967749.html
An audio recording released by Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday implicates an aide pressuring the Public Safety Department to fire a state trooper embroiled in a custody battle with her sister. Previously the administration maintained that no pressure was exerted to get rid of trooper Mike Wooten.

What I’ve found so far indicates that Wooten was no choirboy. OTOH, he doesn’t seem to be worse than many Portland Police Officers. It also indicates that Palin has been after the Public Safety Department to get rid of him for nearly three years. The most worrisome aspect, certainly from the McCain Campaign’s perspective, is her denial of any pressure put on Monegan by her or her office followed by admitting to pressuring Monegan when she discovered (by investigating the investigation?) that there was proof that her administration had pressured Monegan. While that fits right in with Bush Administration strategy, is that really how the McCain campaign wants to be seen?

Cue Benny Hill Music.

Sarah Palin’s sister Molly married a guy named Mike Wooten who is an Alaska State Trooper. Mike and Molly had a rocky marriage. When the marriage broke up, there was a bitter custody fight that is still ongoing. During the custody investigation, all sorts of things were brought up about Wooten including the fact that he had illegally shot a moose (yes folks this is Alaska), driven drunk, and used a taser (on the test setting, he reminds us) on his 11-year old stepson, who supposedly had asked to see what it felt like. While Wooten has turned out to be a less than stellar figure, the fact that Palin’s father accompanied him on the infamous moose hunt, and that many of the dozens of charges brought up by the Palin family happened long before they were ever reported smacked of desperate custody fight. Wooten’s story is that he was basically stalked by the family.

After all this, Wooten was investigated and disciplined on two counts and allowed to kept his position with the troopers. Enter Walt Monegan, Palin’s appointed new chief of the Department of Public Safety and head of the troopers. Monegan was beloved by the troopers, did a bang-up job with minimal funding and suddenly got axed. Palin was out of town and Monegan got “offered another job” (aka fired) with no explanation to Alaskans. Pressure was put on the governor to give details, because rumors started to swirl around the fact that the highly respected Monegan was fired because he refused to fire the aforementioned Mike Wooten. Palin vehemently denied ever talking to Monegan or pressuring Monegan in any way to fire Wooten, or that anyone on her staff did. Over the weeks it has come out that not only was pressure applied, there were literally dozens of conversations in which pressure was applied to fire him. Monegan has testified to this fact, spurring an ongoing investigation by the Alaska state legislature. But, before this investigation got underway, Palin sent the Alaska State Attorney General out to do some investigative work of his own so she could find out in advance what the real investigation was going to find. (No, I’m not making this up).

Interesting stuff. I’ll go and read more about it today.

Also, the guy may be a violent ass (I haven’t seen too much written about him), but it’s still an abuse of governmental power to fire the state Safety Commissioner because he wouldn’t fire the guy. We have rules & regulations & a lawful bureaucracy in place. The proper thing to do would be to expose him and the system that protected him rather than fire the Safety Commissioner. I’ll also be curious to see if any info is brought to light revealing that she tried to get him off the force before the divorce began.

Among other things, after all, she’s being presented as a reformer who has fought against machine politics, and this incident would fit into the same narrative, with her opposing a blue wall of silence that had closed ranks around a corrupt officer who was abusing his wife.

You can take the truth value of all that with a grain of salt if you wish, of course. I’m just saying that that will be the story presented.

And then, it appears, used her governmental power to go after her soon to be ex-brother-in-law. Oh, and fired at least one government employee who didn’t follow her wishes to have her brother-in-law fired. Refreshing indeed!

There are a number of reasons I think Obama would be a much better president than McCain, but “revolutionary change” isn’t one of them.

The last few paragraphs of his Sunday column provide a summary of a theme you may hear in the next few weeks:

And all weekend, analysts will define Palin by gender, guns, her opposition to abortion, her Obama-like inexperience. Since most talking heads are themselves Beltway insiders, they might miss the point as they did with Obama:

It’s the political reform, stupid!

The young Alaska Republican put her political career on the line by challenging the corrupt, old Alaskan Republican bulls on their sleazy pay-for-play politics and their use of the public trust to fill the pockets of their friends. She didn’t merely talk about abstract change in Washington. She challenged corruption at home, challenged her own party bosses—some of whom are already in prison—at great risk to her political future.

It is something I’ve begged and begged Obama to do with the ham-fisted pols in Chicago and Illinois—to not merely talk about change far away, but to take a principled stand even if that stand runs counter to his political interests at home; to challenge the thugs of his own party, to give us a reason to believe he’s the man he says he is. He has politely declined.

In this, Obama obviously has more experience than Palin.

Sen. Obama spent 8 years in the Illinois Senate. For those of you who are not from Illinois, corruption in the Illinois General Assembly is kind of like shit in a barnyard; it’s pervasive, but the local residents live with the sight and smell so much that they barely react to it anymore. He didn’t make any revolutionary changes there. Why should we expect him to do it in Washington?

Palin has won an election in the 47th-largest state in the union, and while she might be qualified for this position in 2012, it’s very hard to argue she is now. And so we’re left with McCain picking Palin not because she’s a strong, competent leader who happens to be a woman, but because she’s a woman, full stop.

I get that she’s a sop to the social conservative wing of the GOP, and in that sense, she makes some sense; certainly, if I was a Huckabee voter I’d feel a bit better today. But as an appeal to independents or Clinton Dems — not going to happen, sorry. They’re not stupid, and they know a gimmick when they see it.

I hardly ever read Gail Collins, as she seems to me to be 99% snark and 1% substance, but her column today is that one in a hundred:

The idea that women are going to race off to vote for any candidate with the same internal plumbing is both offensive and historically wrong….

Over the last week, we have heard over and over and over that Tuesday was the anniversary of the day women got the right to vote…. After that big moment of enfranchisement, women went through a long period in the desert where they had the vote but not much else. Then came the great revolutions of the 1970s….
[W]omen could be excited and moved by symbolic candidacies that promised a better, more inclusive future, like Shirley Chisholm’s presidential race and Geraldine Ferraro’s presence on the Democratic national ticket.

This year, Hillary Clinton took things to a whole new level. She didn’t run for president as a symbol but as the best-prepared candidate in the Democratic pack. Whether you liked her or not, she convinced the nation that women could be qualified to both run the country and be commander in chief. That was an enormous breakthrough, and Palin’s nomination feels, in comparison, like a step back.

(emphasis mine)

About the Hillary voters, I don’t have any definitive evidence.

She’s the head of a conservative household - how much you want to bet that her husband isn’t exactly Mr. Mom?

This assertion may lean a bit unfairly into stereotype. This article is a puff piece, but assuming it’s true, it suggests that Mr. Palin does a little around the house. I’m not suggesting that cooking, bills, and driving are somehow praiseworthy or even a fair share of the housework, but at least it sounds like he’s not a stereotypical do-nothing.

At home, Palin takes care of the cooking, the bills and other domestic paperwork, in addition to driving the kids to extracurricular activities like basketball and soccer, according to his wife. He divides much of his time between Wasilla, where Track is recovering from shoulder surgery, and the capital in Juneau, where the Palin daughters are in school.

“He can go on just an hour or two of sleep a night. He says, ‘I can sleep when I die,’ ” said Sarah Palin. “There is no way I could have done this job without his tremendous contributions to the home life. He’s able to keep it organized, like a well-oiled machine.”

I really think this endures due to the confusion — indeed, I’ve seen Bill referred to as, well, “Bill” quite a bit of late; I don’t think it’s meant as a slight, at least not by everyone who does it.

That said, I think it reads as a slight, which is why I’ve tried to be scrupulous about using Sen. Clinton’s name in the same way as I use Sen. Obama’s — I may refer to either by either name, but I try to make sure if I refer to Hillary, I’m also referring to Barack, and if I’m referring to Obama, I’m also referring to Clinton. It’s just common courtesy for the Junior Senator from New York, and the person I still think should be our next Attorney General, if only because it would make the wingnuts’ heads explode.

Hillaryclinton.com has “Hillary” in big letters across the top. There’s also “Get email from Hillary”, a “Hillary” tab, and on the left we can “See Hillary’s speech at the DNC” on “Hillary TV”; we can also “Follow Hillary through Denver” or “Contribute to Friends of Hillary”, get a “The Hillary I Know” bumper sticker from “The Hillary Store”, and the whole thing is paid for by “Friends of Hillary”.

It’s not because we don’t take her seriously. It’s the way she has branded herself.

Second, and more morbidly, maybe ex-Hillary supporters would be attracted to a McCain/Palin ticket precisely because they anticipate the likelihood that McCain could die in office.

Not unless they really think any vagina will do. Palin is, as Jeff so nicely put it, incandescently anti-choice, she’s a climate-change denier, and she would like to see creationism taught in public schools. (She’s been too smart and/or too busy with other things to push for it, but she did say she was in favor of it.) I’d vote for Senator Clinton in either position on the ticket, but I’d as soon vote for Palin as for James Dobson.

That would be as soon as you can show me clear evidence that hell has frozen over.

Hence the pun.