Playing catch-up with Sarah Palin

Having missed all the excitement of Sarah Palin's surprise resignation, I'm playing catch-up. Some things stand out while perusing the blogs and news sites:

1) Sarah Palin's lies: in her resignation speech and subsequent interviews, Sarah referred to the costs incurred by the state in dealing with frivolous ethics complaints, lawsuits and requests for public records as running into millions of dollars. The state published a spreadsheet showing these costs as $1.9 million. Her shiny new spokesperson, testosterone charged David Murrow, later pointed out that the salaries of various state employees were included in the calculations, giving a somewhat distorted picture of the real costs. Sarah Palin lying? What a surprise!

2) Margaret Carlson discussed Sarah Palin's legal expenses with Keith Olbermann on Countdown. John Coale, who masterminded both SarahPac and the Alaska Fund Trust, told Carlson that the legal fund paid most of Sarah Palin's legal expenses. How could the fund pay for anything if it's frozen pending the outcome of an ethics complaint?

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3) SarahPac published their figures: they raised around $733,000 since January 2009. Not bad, but not very good either... Sarah's fans claim the figures could be better if they had not diverted their focus onto the Alaska Fund Trust to help retire Sarah Palin's legal liabilities. A certain pro-Palin site ran a begathon and reported the total amount raised as $130,000, but that includes donations since the start of the fund, so nobody knows how much was raised in the begathon itself. There's a lot of confusion about SarahPac and the Alaska Fund Trust all over the place: who pays for what, what's legal, what isn't, etc... All very Sarah Palin.

I went through the list of donors (over $200) and didn't see any of the names of the high profile bloggers from that pro-Palin site. There are some possibilities: they didn't donate. They donated very little. They donated a lot in little amounts in order to remain anonymous... The only person I recognized was our troll Greg. The poor guy donates very often, every time he gets an itch somewhere... his total was nearly $2,000, from small $25 itches to $250 bigger ones.

4) Shannyn Moore discusses the constitutional conundrum regarding the appointment of the next lieutenant governor. Sarah Palin seems to leave some sticky mess behind, whatever she does... One comment on Shannyn's post is quite interesting:

By: TeamSarah4CHOICE on July 13, 2009
at 6:10 am

I wanted to bring up one more thing Palin is not talking about & needs to be complete before she leaves office.

Here goes: On June 17, ADN reported that
1) In April 29 letter – APOC asked the governor if she has any other gifts she hasn’t reported.
2) Palin response to APOC: “Mail continues to arrive. There are boxes of unopened mail at this point, even mail that was delivered in 2008. Thus, as initially disclosed, ‘we continue to open boxes’ and we consider any parcel ‘received’ at the time it is opened. I have reported those gifts received thus far that are required to be disclosed,”
—i.) Does this mean Palin will WAIT to open the gifts to avoid disclosure?
—ii.) It would seem to ME Palin has it wrong – the gifts ‘received’ date should be the post mark of the gift.
—iii.) The IRS, banks, etc ALL USE the “POST MARK” as the date received – NOT the date “opened.”

Next question:
Roughly a week after Palin’s Personal Personnel Board dismissed the Arctic Cat walking billboard – Palin filed with the APOC a written request for EXEMPTION of Financial Disclosure regarding Arctic Cat.
—i) What ever happened with that request?
—ii) IF: APOC decides Palin must follow the AS 39.50 law, THEN: Will she be able to skip out on that disclosure after her “iQuit” date?
—iii) Wouldn’t it be interesting if IN the secret Arctic Cat contract was a line suggesting the Gov wear the Arctic Cat logo.

This is important because:
a) Palin’s Personal Personnel Board SHOULD have investigated the Arctic Cat contract that Palin wants to keep secret and,
b) AS 39.50 requires, by law, that Palin DISCLOSE ALL GIFTS/DISCOUNTS for her family.

These are VERY pertinent questions. I'm very curious to see how APOC will proceed...

5) Pat Buchanan wants Todd Palin to drown Levi Johnston...

6) Finally, there's the ghostwritten Sarah Palin op-ed on the Washington Post. The only thing that makes it remotely palinesque is the use of "progressing" somewhere in the piece. Are they trying to preempt any claims about the op-ed being ghostwritten? "I wrote it all by my own little journalist degree self. Why, I even used my pet verb 'to progress', also, too."

Yeah, right!

Some people appear to be impressed by the op-ed, regardless of authorship.


There we have it: there's never a dull moment when it comes to Sarah Palin.

She may have resigned as the governor of Alaska, but unless that other shoe drops, she seems to have plans to enter the national stage, which means that blogs like mine can't afford to walk into the sunset just yet!
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