to elect WJC. Having been on the receiving end of Republican/conservative/libertarian fratricide a time or two, I don’t recomend it.

Hope you had a pleasant Thanksgiving too. I did, friends, family, food, and football rather than the RS Palin peeing contest yesterday afternoon and evening.

I don’t remember exactly but the whole thing couldn’t have been more than a few weeks. Alaska’s government is structured with 14 departments each headed by a Commissioner who is appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Legislature. Departments are structured into divisions headed by a director. Some departments also semi-independent agencies and boards attached to them administratively so that the semi-independent agency or board can use the department’s infrastructure rather than have its own. Directors report either to a Deputy Commissioner or directly to the Commissioner. Commissioners technically report directly to the Governor but usually report through the Chief of Staff. AOGCC was a semi-independent agency attached to the Department of Administration. It had/has three politically appointed “Commissioners” who head the Agency. While they are called commissioners and are confirmed by the Legislature, their authority is limited to their discrete agency and for infrastructure needs, e.g., budget, finance, personnel, procurement, etc. rely on and are subordinated to the Department to which they are attached. I was a director in the Department of Administration and on the org chart reported to the Deputy Commissioner who was also the Ethics Supervisor for the Department. He is the one she refers to in her book. I was good friends with the Commissioner since we had worked together when he was in the Legisltature so the org chart reporting relationship was more of a formality. Also, neither Deputy Commissioner had any real government experience and the Commissioner had no Executive Branch experience, so I was involved in most anything that came along either on a formal or informal basis. The director of personnel and I were both longtime ‘crats who had designed the personnel and labor relations administration programs for the Administration, so one the other or both of us had some involvement in ANYTHING that was personnel related in the government, not just in the DOA.

I knew that there had been some improper political stuff going on between the DC and Randy and both the director of personnel and I had had some harsh words along the lines of, “How bad do you want to be on the front page of the ADN?” with the DC. About the same time I heard from either the Commissioner or the DC that Sarah had complained to the Governor’s Office about Randy. I don’t know how long it had been since she had gone to the Governor’s Office about it or exactly who she said what to over there. Within days of my learning that, the DC came to me and laid out the complaints and told me he had been tasked to deal with it. I advised him to do it as formally as we would for a classified, unionized employee so that we could document having dealt with it because these things always come out. I don’t know that he had or ever saw a letter to the Governor from Sarah, but I can’t tell from her accounting in the book exactly when she did that either. We decided that he was going to go interview Sarah and use that interview as the basis for a formal complaint against Randy which we would then investigate and either clear or charge him. He went to Anchorage to see Sarah and when he returned, he told me that Randy and Sarah had talked it over and worked it out and there was no longer a problem.

Here’s the most charitable explanation I can come up with: the DC was good friends with Randy and had in fact been the Republican Party, and thus Randy’s, attorney in the huge fight over reapportionment after the ’00 Census, when the Democrats, who still had the Governor’s Office, tried to apportion Republicans out of existance. When Sarah saw that the DC, Randy’s friend, was the one handling her complaint, she assumed she had been kicked to the curb and simply clammed up; sort of a precursor of what she says happened in her interview with Katie Couric – she got angry and just didn’t talk. I don’t know that I believe that explanation in either case, but it is plausible. The next we all hear of it is when Sarah resigns and we’re reading about it in the ADN. Suffice it to say that we were VERY unhappy with Sarah Palin.

My experience with two sets of Republican appointees, Hickel’s and Murkowski’s, is that almost all of them are incredibly paranoid about government and government employees. They don’t know where the light switches and rest rooms are and are so paranoid they won’t ask anybody. Sarah went on and on at the time and in her book about how concerned she was for the integrity of the AOGCC and for its reputations. Well if Sarah had kept her mouth shut about it all, nobody would have known a thing about it and it could have been handled. Seamount was a Democrat appointee there and he might have whispered to somebody, but if it’s coming from the Democrats, it is easy to deal with. At that time, there probably weren’t more than a couple hundred people in Alaska that even knew what the AOGCC was or had a clue what it did

Did she contrive it? I don’t know. I can, as I did above, come up with an explanation based on ignorance and paranoia. I can also look at her political history and see that she has always picked somebody to be her bad guy and her target to run against. She couldn’t be more predictable if she was quoting Saul Alinsky; she picks somebody and some issue, personalizes the issue to that person and runs against them. She did that to Nick Carney when she was on the Council, to John Stein when she ran for Mayor, and to Ruedrich and Murkowski when she ran for Governor. As I’ve said before, there is a trail of poltically dead bodies of people, mostly who had helped her, that she has vilified on her way up. One of my political mentors told me to always remember that every butt you kicked on the way up, you were probably going to have to kiss on the way down. Well, she seems to have escaped that by bailing on the Governorship and going for the book deal and celebrity – for now.

I’ve never seen any evidence of it. There were some rumors but with the scrutiny she’s had, there must not be anything to them. She can be influenced all too easily I think; see her pivot from courting former Gov. Hickel and backing the instate gas line to the 180 switch to backing the Canadian route that she’d so criticized Murkowski over. She’s fundamentally an “aginner,” and when she hooked up with Marty Rutherford, she embraced Marty’s ideas about the Canadian route going into her Un-Murkowski act – a deriviative of the Democrats’ “we can do it better” act.

What she is is totally ruthless and is loyal only to her family and clan; you are an insider or a total outsider. I don’t know the early political history of McCain or Romney very well but as far as I know neither has the trail of bodies behind them that she does. She does have in common with McCain that she made her most noted strides politically by working with the Democrats and against her own Party. He calls it being a maverick, she calls it being a rogue, I call it being disloyal and untrustworthy.

I don’t know if it is pridefulness or insecurity but she has a special mental file for every perceived slight and holds grudges forever. First you are frozen out and then you feel the cold steel in your ribs – or if you see the freeze out in time, you keep a safe distance from Sarah Palin – I fall into the latter category. She also will not accept any responsibility for anything that goes wrong – a trait she shares with many politicians, however. John Bitney is an experienced legislative hand with a good enough reputation that even after she fired him, he was picked up by the Speaker of the House. Sarah Palin had never worked with the Legislature except in the role of supplicant when she was on the Council and Mayor. But guess who caused all her problems with the Legislature and look at how she is at pains to trash Bitney and blame him in her book.

And there is a streak of unmodulated nastiness in her. I’ve never had a polical boss that didn’t have a list of people in his/her head that he thought the State would be better off without; I have one myself. If you’re at the top of HR/LR they let you know who they’re interested in and you let them know if it is doable. I know every one of the people who would have been advising the Administration on the Wooten-Monegan Affair and I know every one of them would have told the Administration that it couldn’t fire Wooten and that if he could attach a bad motive, they’d even have trouble firing Monegan. I know they were told because Frank Bailey was working in Administration at the time at issue. Yet, not only did they not accept the advise, they kept bedeviling the situation and trying to get Wooten to the point where she wound up firing a powerful and well-connected commissioner and immersing her administration in scandal. She dodged the bullet on it only because Frank Bailey stepped in front of the bullet for her, but you will never make me or anybody else who knows this government beleive that Frank Bailey all on his own set out to make things right about the Governor’s former brother in law.

And the thing with the per diem is just a jab at Juneau, something, in true Mat Valley fashion, she never misses and opportunity to do. So, just to make sure everybody in Juneau knows how she feels, not only will she not stay in the Governor’s House or in the Governor’s Office on the Third Floor of the Capitol, she makes her office in Anchorage and commutes from Wassilla to work but since the Governor’s duty station is Juneau, she keeps herself in travel status and pays herself per diem while sleeping in her own home every night – and was open and defiant about it. She got away with it because her appointed subordinates who are the rule keepers on this stuff covered for her. On numerous ocassions during my career we disciplined classified, unionized employees and even appointees for collecting per diem or other travel allowances while staying in a home away from their duty station that they owned or otherwise had access to. There is even a specific rule brought about by a controversy involving a former commissioner that requires you to declare one of your residences to be your principal residence for travel purposes and does not allow you to collect per diem if you have a residence that you are staying in in the place to which you are travelling.

I could go on about stuff like that but suffice it to say that Sarah was special.

her criticism of Murkowski’s tax legislation, called PPT for Petroleum Production Tax, I think, was that it didn’t tax them enough. That was the whole “corrupt old boys” meme that Murkowski and the Republican legislators had given a sweetheart deal to the Industry.

the slings and arrows of partisan politics are really, really hard on them.

I just want her ardent supporters to know that she has serious liabilities as both a candidate and as an executive. Is she better than Comrade Obama? Of course, ideologically she is. Is she a better executive? Maybe, but Obama has shown far more ability to use, and abuse, also a necessary skill, staff than she has ever shown. You do not cross Sarah Palin, you don’t even argue with her or express a contrary opinion. You can’t be that way and govern effectively. The single most telling thing about her administrative ability is her keeping Frank Bailey after it became evident that he directly pressured a Trooper Lt. in the Wooten matter. He was one of her Wasilla gang and she took all sorts of hits over giving him what was essentially a paid vacation rather than fire him. I took some grief in my time for being unduly solicitous of my staff, but I’d have kicked Bailey to the curb so fast it would have made your head swim to watch it, and I’d have done it even if I’d have told him to make the call. Sometimes your job is to fall on your sword and your reward will be in Heaven. Anyway, any fool should know that all listed Trooper numbers are recorded; fire him for the lack of mission security if nothing else.

In fact, when it first came to light that his discipline had been reduced by a resolution with the union, I had an “Oh, s$%t moment” and called one of my former subordinates that was still brave enough to talk to me and said, “please tell me my name isn’t on that grievance resolution.” Turns out it wasn’t. Literally days after I retired, the Department of Public Safety trotted over with a proposed settlement and my successor, who probably should have questioned it, but I can see why she didn’t, signed off on DPS’ recommendation. The back story is the long-time appointee, like many of us, thought Knowles was going to win the election and she was trying to curry a little favor with the Troopers’ union. It’s an object lesson in what that will get you anyway. That particular appointee didn’t last long after Palin took her hand off the Bible.

And, yes, he was and is a scumbag, but I don’t think I’d have backed firing him on the original complaint. Old, self-interested complaints from family members on a Trooper in the middle of a nasty divorce ain’t the sort of thing I want to stake either my State’s money or my reputation on. I’d have given him the full thirty day suspension without pay or benefits that is the steepest discipline short of dismissal we did and I damn well wouldn’t have resolved it down; that’s why the whole thing stayed in Public Safety until after I left. They’d have NEVER stuck that resolution under my nose.

Disciplinary standards in AST had dropped badly during the Knowles Administration and it isn’t so much a Democrat thing; Democrats are generally hard on misbehaving LEOs. Trouble is, Democrats can’t say no to their union friends, so when they discipline a cop, the union whines, and the discipline gets reduced or goes away altogether. The Troopers’ contract doesn’t allow the union to grieve a letter of reprimand, so DPS started giving reprimands for things that should have gotten big suspensions. When we tried to ramp up the discipline levels in Murkowski, the union would just come in and slap down the reprimands for other Troopers on similar offenses and that would be the disciplinary standard. Consequenltly, we’d get our discipline reduced on disparate treatment grounds. We were making progress, but it was slow because arbitrators would bite on the disparate treatment. By the last year though, politics was dictating everything, so I’m sure charming old John Cyr just breezed into the DC’s office and said, let’s just get this smelly thing off our plate now that Art isn’t around to say no. The rest is history.

because all the praise is both uninformed and unequivocal. Many of her supporters are absolutely convinced that she is Sarah the Perfect and will brook no questioning of her. I have yet to meet more than a handful of politicians that I even liked and none that I could worship; good enough works for me.

But if she’s being touted as a conservative standard bearer, some people had better be able to point out what makes her a conservative other than on abortion; there’s graphic evidence there. And I rely on little inside knowledge in my criticisms of her record. I haven’t exchanged more than half a dozen words with her since she left the Murkowski Administration and even people that I know well who were inside her administration were very, very tight-lipped for fear of retribution if something got out.

talking points from Palin’s press releases. You were stupid enough in a post in another thread to go on about how much good the gas line had done for Alaska. Fool, it ain’t built yet! The only place that gas line has done any good is in Canada where they’ve been busily spending the half billion dollars Sarah foolishly gave them.

She makes a good lightning rod on the National scene these days and it is good to have somebody to attract the Ds ire, but don’t come on here talking about what a great goveror of Alaska she was. She was a lousy governor who splintered the Republican Party here, was instrumental in giving the Ds a federal office held by Republicans since the ’60, caused our Republican Senate to become a coalition Senate giving great power to liberal Democrat senators, including Elton and French who led the TrooperGate investigation.

And now she writes that book reopening all those old wounds and once again trashing everybody around her. It is always the good and true Sarah, Alaska’s Polly Perfect, and everybody around her is venal, lazy, stupid, or just wrong, and Sarah has to step in and set it right. Lots of people don’t see it that way.

Sarah Palin ran against the evil Murkowski Administration’s gas pipeline deal with the North Slope producers. She went on and on about how Murkowski’s deal was giving Alaska’ s share of the revenue to the producers, our natural gas to the Lower 48, and most of the pipeline construction jobs to Canada. She sought and got the support of former Governor Hickel almost solely on the basis of her support for an in-state gas line to terminate with an LNG plant in Valdez and have spurs to supply natural gas for heating and electricity for the Railbelt (ANC to FAI). Her support for an in-state gas line was one of the things she used to most strongly distinguish herself from Murkowski and much of her support was from the Railbelt on the basis of her promise to bring NS gas to them (Cook Inlet gas to supply the ANC area is running out and the rest of the Railbelt is on expensive oil or dirty coal).

Then, in her quest to be the Un-Murkowski, she hooks up with Marty Rutherford and the rest of the Department of Natural Resources gang that had quit the Murkowski Administration over the gas line deal Murkowski had negotiated. Once she was in office and had appointed Marty as Commissioner of DNR, later she moved to Deputy, I think, and she brought back Tom Irwin, Murkowski’s commissioner of DNR who had quit, never a word was said about an in-state line again. They cranked up the AGIA (Alaska Gasline Inducement Act) and threw it out to seek proposers. It was written specifically to pretty much exclude the NS producers and might have been shortened to “Is your Company’s name TransCanada?” and everybody has pretty much over looked the fact that Marty had worked for TransCanada.

So, you pick it Richard, she was either stupid enough to have been led down the primrose path by her appointees into a deal that flew in the face of her campaign promises or she was disingenuous enough to court Governor Hickel’s support and run on the promise of an instate line and immediately and willfully turn her back on that promise and on Governor Hickel’s support; there is no Door C.

And you don’t have to believe me, it’s all public record and was in the news all through the campaign and the legislative debate on AGIA. If you know enough of the background to read between the lines, she even admits as much in her book although, of course, everything that didn’t work out or which hasn’t yet borne fruit is somebody else’s fault.