Sean Parnell has been sworn in as the new Governor of Alaska. Good luck, Governor Parnell.

I think more eyes are on former Governor Sarah Palin though. In her farewell address she said what so many have been thinking: that she sees private life as an opportunity to do more for her causes than she could as Governor.

I wish her and her family luck as they move on to the next stage of her career, away from running for office and toward a different kind of activism. She can write columns, make speeches, raise money, travel the country, and get cheers instead of ethics complaints. She can be herself without being second guessed, and most importantly without having her children under constant attack. She can be a perpetual ‘rock star’ without any of the disadvantages that come with appearing on a ballot ever again.

I hope she’s a great help to Republican candidates in 2010 and beyond, with peace and comfort to her family as she does so.

God, I miss the days of the Bush administration, when we didn’t do things like this.

Referring to the long history of Russia-U.S. trade stretching back more than two centuries, Obama told an audience of business people in Moscow:

“Along the way, you gave us a pretty good deal on Alaska. Thank you.”

Contra Reuters, this was not a “pointed quip” (as Ed Morrissey notes, it only works as one if you assume that the President wanted to insult his hosts): it was a “somebody didn’t read the briefing materials (particularly the bits about Vladimir Zhirinovsky) gaffe.”  What’s next?  Thanking the Chinese for their involuntary help with training up our Navy during the Boxer Rebellion?  That should go over well: they’re even touchier about their history than the Russians are.

And I actively dread thinking about what the current President is going to say, the next time that he visits Japan.

Moe Lane

Crossposted at Moe Lane.

If Sarah Palin had intended to make media heads collectively explode, she couldn’t have planned it better. She called a press conference on short notice, then announced that not only would she not seek a second term as Alaska’s governor, but she intended to resign later this month. All that would remain for her to do is pop some Orville’s, sit back and enjoy the show as the punditocracy begins wildly speculating about that which it does not know. As crazy as this sounds, consider how crazy the reaction has been so far to her announcement

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, claiming she had been talking to people “very close” to Gov. Palin, reported:

“I have been told that she has told her supporters she is out of politics, period. She is fed up with politics. She doesn’t like her life. She feels that she needs to raise her family. She’s sick of the commute from Wasilla to the capitol, and she really does not want to run for higher office. This is not the case where she’s stepping down in order to clear the way for a presidential run. In fact she has told some of her biggest backers in the national Republican Party that they are free to choose other candidates for 2012.”

Sounds very cut and dried.

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From anchorage television station KTUU:

WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin will resign her office in a few weeks, she said during a news conference at her home Friday morning.

The governor gave no reason why she will resign, but there has been much speculation that she intends to run for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.

Update: A tweet from the governor:

“We’ll soon attach info on decision to not seek re-election… this is in Alaska’s best interest, my family’s happy… it is good, stay tuned”

- JP

From the diaries by Erick

Couer, a Canadian mining firm - no American firm is much interested in trying to do business in Alaska - just prevailed today before the USSC in its appeal of the 9th Circuit’s order stopping work on the Kensington Mine, a gold prospect, near Juneau.  This project is a graphic demonstration of the bad faith exhibited by various environmental groups in dealing with mine permitting.  Couer worked with the Greenies and secured what was thought to be an agreement that its “dry-stack” tailings disposal scheme.  Of course, as soon as Couer began permitting and development, the Greenies just used another guise to sue to stop the project.  The umbrella group that is funded by a regular who’s who of greenie groups is called the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, SEACC.  Vehicles with stickers in their window showing a little boy urinating on the letters SEACC are fairly common even in this lefty town.

What went to the USSC was the question of whether the rock taken out of the mine and from which ore is extracted is “fill” to be regulated by the Corps of Engineers or a pollutant to be regulated by the EPA.  The court concluded that since is was the same stuff that came out of the ground that was being put back in and onto the ground, it was fill rather than pollution so, reversing the 9th Soviet, a 6-3 Court re-instated the Corps’ permit.

For those of you who don’t live in mining areas, this is how wierd it gets: the very stuff taken out of the ground when put back in is held to be a pollutant by the EPA.  Interestingly, Couer played the politics of the Democrat/Greenie world pretty hardball; Alaska Natives are a pretty solidly Democrat constituency.  Couer worked with the Native Corps to mount most of their recruitment in the Native villages, most of which suffer chronically high unemployment.  Consequently, the Ds, usually opposed to anything like a mine in order to satisfy their greenie friends had to choose who they would alienate - good move.  Now we can celebrate for a few days until the envirowhackos think up a new cause of action or get some Democrat in DC to outlaw the mine without regard to the USSC.

Tourism has recently been up a little in Juneau, Alaska. More folks than ever have been interested in taking bus tours through Alaska’s capitol city with a major attraction being the Alaska State House where Governor Sarah Palin goes about her daily work. In fact, the tours have been gaining in popularity since before John McCain asked the governor along for his run for the White House. The bus tours are so popular that adorable little Piper has even set up a lemonade stand to sell tourists a glass of lemony goodness to quench their thirst for something wet as well as something cute.

And Palin haters in Alaska are livid. They want the bus tours stopped and little Piper’s stand razed to the ground. Palin Derangement Syndrome strikes again. It’s an ugly, ugly thing, this PDS.

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The article, written by Amanda Coyne, is surprisingly almost balanced, or at least as balanced as we’re likely to see from such a leftist media outlet as Newsweek.

However, there are a lot of facts that were not included in the piece…

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The Sarah Palin Blog has broken the news that a Defense Fund for the Alaska governor is up and running:

A defense fund to help Sarah Palin pay her mounting legal bills is now up on the web and operational…

According to the organizer,the defense money raised will go directly to Thomas Van Flein, Governor Palin’s private attorney.

The fund is managed by Clayton Paslay, also the organizer of FreeAmericanCitizens.org, a non-affiliated PAC.

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(Via AoSHQ) I suspect that Attorney General Holder isn’t going to be very thrilled about this:

Stevens case closed, case against prosecutors open

WASHINGTON — A federal judge dismissed the corruption conviction of former Sen. Ted Stevens on Tuesday and took the rare and serious step of opening a criminal investigation into prosecutors who mishandled the case.

“In nearly 25 years on the bench, I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case,” U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said.

Sullivan appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Justice Department lawyers who repeatedly mishandled witnesses and withheld evidence from defense attorneys during the monthlong trial that ended with Stevens’ conviction in October.

The article goes on note that the special prosecutor has been put into place specifically because the judge does not have confidence in the Justice Department’s ability to conduct an internal review of its past conduct. Whatever your opinion of former Senator Stevens and the original trial, that’s a pretty definite negative statement about the DoJ’s professional ethics.

More as we get it: in the meantime, here’s a previous NRO article (also via AoSHQ) that’s somewhat critical of Sullivan’s preliminary decisions yesterday.

Governor Sarah Palin announced today that she is proposing legislation which will allow Alaska to accept only a little more than half of the federal stimulus funds for which her state is eligible. Palin gave several examples that underlined her reasoning for wanting to reject the funds. In total, if the bill were passed, $515 million (55%) of the nearly $1 billion would be rejected by the state.

Stating that she was wary of federal “strings,” attached to the stimulus funding, the governor asked:

“Will we chart our own course, or will Washington (D.C.) engineer it for us?”

Expressing her commitment to the principles of federalism and the division of powers envisioned by the founders, Gov. Palin quoted Thomas Jefferson:

“When all government domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided on one government on another, and will become as oppressive as the government from which we separated.

Rejected by Palin’s bill will be millions that the governor says will force Alaska to increase the size of government, spend more taxpayer dollars or pass new legislation which Alaskans might not want.

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The winter in Alaska has been a particularly harsh one this year. The early winter piled on top of economic hard times has caused some troubles for native people and those that live in remote areas in Alaska. But this is not a new tale of woe, it IS Alaska, after all. While nothing to entirely dismiss, one wonders, why CNN suddenly found this story so compelling? Could it be that they want to portray Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as just as harsh as the winter?

Native peoples and their neighbors in Alaska have been surviving for generations in the same manner. They hunt, fish, and store foods in the summer to survive the harshness of winter, and since becoming a state, they marshal their money to buy fuel and other items brought to them by American ingenuity. Not an easy life, but a life they are used to nonetheless. It hasn’t really changed much for a long time in that remote part of the world. Yet, despite the sameness of it all, suddenly CNN finds Alaskans are “struggling to survive.”

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Ashley Judd is the narrator of an ad for the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund which portrays Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a heartless enemy of warm, furry critters. Actually, the ad is not a new one, but simply a refresh of a video which has long been used to attack Gov. Palin:

Defenders of Wildlife launched similar attacks against Palin soon after she was selected as former GOP presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate, but until Judd’s appearance the spots garnered little attention.

The governor has released a statement in which calls the ad campaign “reprehensible and hypocritical.” It is that… and much more.

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The Juneau Empire’s blog is reporting that Gov. Sarah Palin sent the Alaska legislature a supplemental budget request today that slashes general fund spending by $268.6 million and asks for authorization to withdraw some funds from the state’s savings accounts to bring the budget into balance by the end of the fiscal year. The governor has already put a state hiring freeze into effect.

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There are only 26 surviving members of the Alaska Territorial Guard, a unit composed of mostly Native militiamen which was established to guard the territory of Alaska from the threat of Japanese attack during World War II. The militia was deemed necessary because Japan had made incursions into the Aleutians and occupied some of the islands in 1942.

Now the Army, in its bureaucratic wisdom, has decided to cut off retirement pay for these patriots, most of them now in their eighties. They stand to lose as much as $557 in monthly retirement pay at the end of this month. Another 37 of the militiamen have had their applications for retirement pay suspended.

At Libertarian Republican, Eric says the Pentagon’s decision could be “a first sign that the incoming Obama administration may be planning retribution for the State of Alaska.”

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Governor Sarah Palin delivered her third State of the State address before the Alaska legislature Thursday night. She announced a hiring freeze for state jobs (exempting public safety) and restrictions on all non-essential state purchases, while urging the legislature to practice spending restraint:

“These actions reduce the draw on savings as we monitor revenue for the rest of 2009,” Palin said. “For too long, Alaska’s economy has struggled with fluctuating revenue due to global commodity prices. In a volatile economy, numbers are not fixed, but principles are.”

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Governor Sarah Palin will deliver her State of the State address at 7 p.m. Alaska time (10 p.m. CST) tonight. The ADN Political Blog says there were rumors around Juneau that the governor hired a professional speechwriter to draft what will be her third State of the State presentation.

Palin communications director Bill McAllister says that is not the case, but some friends did volunteer some of their own time to help with the first draft.

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