you probably won’t like it.

All it takes to file an Ethics Act Complaint, a Whistle Blower Complaint, a lawsuit, an EEO complaint, a union grievance, and all the other stuff like that is a piece of paper and a decent vocabulary or a lawyer trying to score political points. If you’re in government and HAVEN’T had them filed against you, you must not have been doing your job, especially if you’re a Republican. I used to keep a pretty good collection of them on my office wall. I was so proud of a couple of them that I had them framed.

That said, she brought a lot of it, most of it actually, on herself. When the Moneghan/Wooten/Troopergate thing first broke, she said she was as pure as the driven snow and welcomed any inquiry. Well, that didn’t last long and before it was over she was using every strategem in the book to keep the wraps on it. None of them were illegal and I might have done some, even most, of them myself, but I wouldn’t have gotten myself into the mess to begin with. And I wouldn’t have let a governor I worked for get into it either.

She and her insiders used their Blackberries like a bunch of Ninth Grade girls and said some “indiscrete” things. When the Public Records Act requests for her email first came in, again she said she was pure as the driven snow. She wasn’t; nobody is and she even had her AG write a new (and very stupid) formal opinion trying to protect some of her emails. She’s still fighting giving that stuff up, but she’s going to lose, her AG’s Opinion is going to be over-ruled by the Courts, and it is going to once again embarrass her.

OK, she’ll get a legal defense fund and the lawyers will get paid. I know this game and how they bill stuff like this, so an amount will be discretely agreed to. Along the way, she needs to learn that anything you do as a public officer will become the public’s business and you can run but you can’t hide. Even if you’re innocent, which she mostly is, running makes you look guilty. She’s done a good job of looking guilty.

And, just for the record, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; her administration isn’t reticent to threaten people with Ethics Act charges, especially if you were in the Murkowski Administration. In 2007, I took a contract to represent a State employee group in trying to force the State to bargain some aspects of retirement benefits. The issue had nothing to do with her administration, it was a Murkowski initiative with which I disagreed but which was not in my portfolio when I was there. Since I’m well aware of who my enemies are, some of them even visit me here, I was very careful to make sure I was within the Ethics Act before I took the contract. But sure enough, the State is a one trick pony even in the Palin Administration. The very week that the Labor Board found probable cause that the State had violated the bargaining law, I got a very long, detailed and threatening letter from the Attorney General about the Ethics Act. I’m not your everyday patsy, so I responded with a very long, detailed, and threatening letter about all the Ethics Act issues I’d like to discuss under oath in a public forum. Never heard from them again but it’s par for the course that they like to dish it out but they don’t like to take it. And, frankly, I don’t care who’s governor, the State will pay for threatening me for as long as anybody associated with it is there and I can draw breath.

I don’t even think she’s big league enough to be governor of my state, but enjoy your love affair.

You don’t know a damned thing about Alaska politics or what she’s done or not except what you learned from a press release from either her or the McCain so-called campaign. Now when you have some facts about what she might have actually done and just who she “took on” and why, come back and write a diary. There’s lots of Sarah Sycophants who could learn something.

She got lucky and found a spot where there really wasn’t any effective organization. She got to take advantage of McCain’s desperation. Remember, I wrote a comment here just before she was selected in which I said something like, “if he’s going to pick a nobody, he might as well pick a nobody from nowhere, at least she’s a woman.” She’s real good at being in the right place at the right time and even better at self promotion. It remains to be seen whether she’s good at running a government. Right now, my observation is that she’s not. That said, I’d still vote for her over BHO, but I’d have to hold my nose.

The email thing is beyond stupid. She should have known better, but, worse, people around her should have known better. State policy on email, internet, phone use, etc. has been the same since the mid-Nineties; it’s the State’s equipment, you have no expectation of privacy, you are enttiled to de minimis personal use, anything you do on State equipment is public record. During my time with the State, I probably averaged firing one employee a month for violating that policy. The State was so methodical and consistent about it, that the unions normally didn’t even grieve the discipline or dismissal.

If she wanted to avoid the expense associated with the email case, all she had to do was face reality and give up the emails. Yeah, there’s some stuff in there that she probably would prefer not to have public; there are no secrets, lots of people have seen some of it, but there is no way to avoid it. She is going to give it up unless she wants to provoke God’s own separation of powers incident when the SC tells her to give it up. I don’t know if it was Admin Commissioner Kreitzer or one of the brain surgeons that work for her who came up with the idea of getting the new AG’s opinion on personal use, but it will get thrown out by the first judge that looks at it and justifiably so. If one is a public officer in Alaska, one simply has to accept that everything you do on State time or using State resources of any kind is a public record. She, or somebody (ies) working for her, seems to think there is some space in there that is all hers and which she can keep private; don’t work that way.

I’ve dealt with the Tpr. Wooten thing ad nauseum; it happened on my watch though Public Safety kept it from me. Public Safety management bet wrong. In the summer of ’06 they were worried that Knowles would win and thought they needed union friends, so they settled with the union and reduced Wooten’s discipline. Thank God my successor’s name is on that rather than mine. Full disclosure: I’d have probably done it too but just to avoid the arbitration, not to curry favor – I didn’t need that.

She shot her mouth off about inviting an investigation before she did one of her own. It quickly became apparent that people close to her were not as pure as the driven snow and she had to either give them up or start backtracking; she made the wrong choice. Once it became apparent that some people close to her had been involved in the matter, she should have kicked them to the curb. Since one of them was her husband, she should have disavowed what he did and promised the people she and he would be good in the future. But, NO!, she has to try to tough it out. End result: Elton’s Kangaroo Court was wrong in stretching the law to try to find something to hang on her and Todd AND the P-Board was wrong in pronouncing her guiltless. Nobody with any knowledge of the matter is satisfied with either result.

You really can’t be cute and coy as a pubic official in this State, especially if you’re a Republican. She has tried throughout this to be cute and coy and it has never worked and will never work. If you hold elected or appointed office in Alaska, your life is an open book and sooner or later the People will get to read that book. Trying to change that just frustrates you and irritates them.

As to the Elton thing; Kertulla dissed Palin, so Palin is going to make Kertulla pay. I don’t have a problem with it. It means JNU won’t have a Senator for awhile, but we haven’t had one in any meaningful sense for years anyway, so who cares?

and now you accuse me of being a lawyer. I’m not, but I used to have a bunch of them working for me.

they have a very visible half a billion dollars of our money that they don’t have to do a damned thing for. Yeah, that is an Alaska Gas Incentive Act alright. One day somebody is going to actually examine the relationship between her DNR darlings, the ones she resurrected after they quit/were fired from the Murkowske Administration, and TransCanada.

She’s clever and has a lot of native political cunning. She doesn’t attend to detail worth a damn, something that doesn’t distinguish her among elected officials. The problem is, she doesn’t take well to people who do attend to detail and might say to her, “whither goest thou?”

The path to retirement as a political appointee is to never tell an elected official anything they don’t want to hear. She’s surrounded herself with people like that. You be the judge.

legal defense rather than relying on the State. You’ll have to ask her why. I do know that some of it might have been for Todd Palin who wouldn’t be covered by the State’s system since he isn’t an officer or employee.

It goes back to her hissy fit when she was with AOGCC and her kiss and tell departure from the Administration. An AOGCC Commissioner’s slot at the time was the sweetest patronage appointment in State government, lots of money, lots of travel, lots of elbow-rubbing in Houston, New York, even London, and no real job except to go to meetings and sign something once in a while. I know what happened with her self-styled outing of Randy Ruedrich and it isn’t what she has all her supporters out there believing.

In politics, you dance with who brung you. She is the black widow of Alaska politics who has built her career on the dead bodies of everybody who ever helped her. You guys all like her and I was really hoping she and McCain would win because I’d much rather she be in DC than here.

Not everybody here knows how governments work and what is really involved in being an elected or appointed official. Frankly, most are better off not knowing; sausage and laws and all that.