$urprise! Who's doing stuff behind $arah Palin's back?

$arah Palin was shocked to find out that an official legal fund, called The Alaska Fund Trust, was launched to solicit donations to pay the governor's, her family's and her employees legal bills! $he knew nothing about it.

The trustee of the AFT, Kristan Cole, real estate professional, chair of the Board of Agriculture and Conservation (formerly known as the Agricultural Revolving Loan Fund Board), member of the Royalty Gas and Development board, wife of Brad Cole, who's a member of the Real Estate Commission, former beauty queen and daughter of a convicted embezzler, broke the news to the governor yesterday:

"The first and only time I have spoken with the Governor about the Trust was yesterday to alert her that I was responding to this violation of the law and leak of preliminary and confidential materials from the complainant."

According to Meg Stapleton's statement to the Associated Press, $arah Palin must have had an inkling about the Trust:

"The continuing generosity of Alaskans and Americans is overwhelming as many reach out to assist Governor Sarah Palin and her family with their legal bills.

However, the official legal defense fund for Governor Sarah Palin has not been formed and the Governor cannot accept monies for those obligations from any other entity than the one in formation. Numerous federal and state laws to need to be abided by and the official legal defense fund will have very strict donation guidelines.

We thank everyone interested in helping the Governor. The best way to assist her will be through this official fund which will launch later this month."

Meghan Stapleton
Palin Family Spokesperson

Spokesperson means she speaks on behalf of $arah and her family, no? A mouthpiece, as if the governor or her family were uttering the words themselves...

SarahPac is authorized by $arah Palin. From the website:

Who is behind SarahPac?

Gov. Sarah Palin believes all Americans must work together for the future, regardless of their party affiliation. Gov. Palin is the honorary chair of SarahPac, and its supporters are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and those unaffiliated with any political party.

SarahPac solicits donations to the Alaska Fund Trust.


A legal document, the Alaska Fund Trust Agreement, has a whole paragraph regarding successor trustees, using $arah Palin's name in big capitals:

In the event that the original named Trustee herein shall desire at any time to be relieved of his duties herein, said Trustee may resign by written notice to SARAH PALIN, who may appoint a successor Trustee with the qualifications set forth in paragraph 4 above. In addition, SARAH PALIN shall have the same power to appoint a substitute Trustee in the event of the death, incapacity, or failure to act in accordance with the terms of this instrument of any Trustee. In the event of SARAH PALIN's inability to act as a result of incapacity or other reasonable cause, the proper legal representative of SARAH PALIN shall have the right and authority to seek the appointment of a substitute Trustee.

Wow! Kristan Cole put the governor's name in BIG CAPITALS in a legal document without any consultation with the governor???

So many things going on behind $arah Palin's back: the Trust, her spokesperson speaking, her SarahPac asking for money to be given to the official legal fund...



Bad, bad people!
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$arah Palin's Dairygate revisited

$arah Palin said in her resignation speech:

"We took government out of the dairy business and put it back into private-sector hands - where it should be."

Some highlights from a long article by Andrew Halcro about Dairygate:

After less than a year in business, the Valley Dairy has successfully produced 30,000 pounds of contaminated cheese, failed to pay lease and tax payments promptly, mishandled milk waste around the Wasilla Creek and obtained state loans through fraudulent information and insider dealings on behalf of the Director of Agriculture and the Chair of the Agriculture Board.

The Valley Dairy operations
There is no question that the Valley Dairy is being run by people with a track record of defaulting on government loans. Between Kyle Beus and Karen Olson, they've defaulted on $4 million in loans.

This past fall, after discovering that Beus had made a draw of $15,000 from the dairy's account, Olson was heard by her former office administrator saying, "we're all F--ked...probably doing some jail time," as she paced the floor.

According to the former Milk Room Supervisor, the dairy has continued to dump milk in their septic system as well as spilling milk behind the dairy, after promising DEC that it would be cleaned up before it drains into the Wasilla Creek.

Beus has been seen by employees making cash sales to customers in the ice cream room and pocketing the money, as well as paying employees in cash.

In December, Office Administrator Kay Schaugaard was let go after voicing concerns about Olson's derogatory language concerning her religion. "We're not hiring any more f---ing Mormons," Olson said a number of times. After Schaugaard was let go she filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission for wrongful termination.

On January 3, 2009 at 1:30, Amy Moore, the Valley Dairy's Milk Room Supervisor, told Beus that she had been contacted by the Human Rights Commission to testify in the case of Schaugaard. She told Beus that she was going to have to talk about the things that have been going on in the creamery, including the repeated derogatory comments by Karen Olson.

One hour later, Moore was handed a letter of termination by Olson.

Ironically, the Valley Dairy, which is a private dairy, has asked for more help from the state in three months than the state owned Matanuska Maid did in twenty three years.

If Governor Palin was at all honest about open and transparent government, she would have never appointed such an incestuous group of people to manage the purse strings of Alaska's agricultural community.

But then again what did we expect?

After falsely accusing the prior Matanuska Maid management of corruption and mismanagement in order to justify getting rid of them, is it a surprise that she has allowed her friends and neighbors to get fat off the government trough?


I have said in a previous post that Dairygate is an extremely complex affair. The snippets above simply provide some background to help put $arah Palin's statement into some kind of context.

Dairygate in a nutshell:

Early in June 2007, the board of Mat Maid met and decided to recommend the dairy ceased operating due to projected losses in excess of $2 million.

The Board of Agriculture and Conservation heeded the advice and passed it on to the governor.

$arah Palin disagreed and fired the entire board, replacing all members with unqualified friends and neighbours from the Valley, some with obvious conflict of interest, such as Franci Havemeister (More about her in Andrew Halcro's article). The new board, chaired by Kristan Cole (the legal fund trustee), immediately voted themselves as the operating board for the dairy business, eliminating a whole tier in the management chain.

After bail-outs, many shenanigans and heavy losses, the dairy closed down and the equipment put up for auction in December 2007. No bids were received. Matanuska Creamery offered to lease the equipment and opened for business in March 2008, headed by people known to have defaulted on previous loans.

More shenanigans ensued, further loans advanced, grants obtained, the losses continued and not a dime of the loans have been paid back.

"We took government out of the dairy business and put it back into private-sector hands - where it should be."

$arah Palin failed to add that this transition from the government to the private sector cost the state around $1.5 million and that they have since operated at a loss with bail-out money from the state plus some pork from Ted Stevens ($624,000)

Where has the money gone?


The new Board of Agriculture and Conservation tried to pin all of Mat Maid's shortcomings on the previous management once they took over. But new evidence shows they were set up even before they recommended the dairy's closure. Guess who played a prominent role in the set up? Our dear Meg Stapleton!

Read more about fraud and the set up from Andrew Halcro.
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Queen Sarah's Court

The trustee of the new and improved Sarah Palin Legal Defense Fund is Palin's childhood best friend, Kristan Cole.

Kristan Cole represented Alaska in the Miss America beauty pageant in 1983. Sarah didn't win the Miss Alaska contest 1984, losing to an African American contestant, Maryline Blackburn.


Kristan Sapp, as she was known then, didn't figure among the semi-finalists in the Miss America pageant and Miss California won the crown...





But our Sarah won another crown, she's now the Queen of Alaska, known to the rest of us mortals as governor.

Sarah Palin's court consists of no less than 100 high school and church buddies. Oh, yes! The Queen bestowed the highest honours on the chosen few, drawn from the Mat-Su Valley nobility.


Kristan Cole holds two honourable positions in Queen Sarah's court: she was appointed to the Royalty Oil and Gas Development Board in May 2007. Her term expires in 2012. A month later, Kristan was appointed to the Board of Agriculture and Conservation and her term expires later this year.

All members of the Board of Agriculture and Conservation were beheaded, oops, sacked by Queen Sarah in June 2007 and replaced by people closer to her own heart in what became known as Dairygate.


Kristan's consort, Brad Cole, wasn't left out, being honoured with an appointment to the Alaska Real Estate Commission. He is the current Chairman of that commission.

Who better than the Queen's loyal lady-in-waiting to preside over the backlash against the peasants, otherwise known as the citizens of Alaska?

Further reading about Dairygate
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Sarah Palin's church buddies

Continuing on the theme of Sarah Palin's buddies, let's leave her high school and move on to her church.

During the time Sarah Palin was mayor, her church became involved in taking over the board of the local hospital, Mat-Su Providence. The more conservative, fundamentalist churches, over a period of three or four years, were able to elect and control the operating board of the hospital. At the first meeting where they had control, they passed a resolution ending all abortions at the hospital. The Wasilla Assembly of God and its membership were a key leader in this group.

Dr. Susan Lemagie, a Palmer OB-GYN, fought back, filing suit on behalf of a local woman who had been forced to travel to Seattle for an abortion. The case was finally decided by the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled that the hospital must provide valley women with the abortion option.

The Alaska Supreme Court held unconstitutional a state law that permitted hospitals to refuse to provide abortion services.

"The reasons a doctor and patient choose a medical procedure, so long as it is legal, must not be subject to the approval of hospital's board of directors, according to their own values."

This happened before Sarah Palin had the power to appoint her people to various positions all over the state, but surely she used her influence as mayor of Wasilla so her church could gradually take over the board of the local hospital. Now that she's the governor and can hire and fire at her pleasure, things must be a lot worse.

Luckily for the women of Mat-Su Valley, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled against the hospital board of directors.

Don't forget that she has now appointed a judge who's more to her liking to the Supreme Court.

How long before this issue of banning abortions rears its ugly head again?

Image: Jaques Callot, 1630
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Sarah Palin's buddies

If Sean Parnell could no longer serve as lieutenant governor, Corrections Commissioner Joe Schmidt would replace him. Gov. Sarah Palin recently appointed Schmidt to fall behind Parnell in the line of succession, said Bill McAllister, her director of communications.

If anything should happen to Parnell and Sarah Palin, Schmidt would become governor.

Who is Joe Schmidt? Joe and Sarah go way back. They went to high school together in Wasilla. She appointed him to the post of Corrections Commissioner when she became governor.

In Schmidt's first year as commissioner, in 2007, there were 49 internal investigations of prison guards. Half resulted in disciplinary action, four resulted in terminations and another four people left their jobs voluntarily. He would not give details about the problems, citing personnel rules.


"We are doing the right thing. We are going to be trustworthy. And, if I have to go through this until my last day, then that's what I'm going to do," he said of his efforts to make the department more accountable to the public. "Ethics and honesty is what we are about."

In April 2008 the Alaska Correctional Officers Association voted in favor of a “no confidence” measure. In a press release from her office, Sarah Palin said “Commissioner Schmidt has my full support as he and his team continue to bring remarkable reforms to the Department of Corrections, (...) Joe has my unconditional support.”

What do the staff have to say about Joe?

"I am a female and work at Alaska’s only maximum security prison. Sarah Palin appointed a good buddy of hers to be our Commissioner of Corrections. Joe Schmidt has deliberately made management decisions that have made our jobs, as correctional officers, more life threatening.

We tried going to Sarah Palin with our concerns but she wouldn’t listen to us. We then decided to submit a ‘no confidence’ vote in Schmidt. Out of the 733 correctional officers working in the state of Alaska over 500 of us voted. Out of those less than 20 said they had confidence in Schmidt. The rest of us voted ‘no confidence’ in his leadership. This was unprecedented. At no time, before Schmidt was appointed as our commissioner, had we ever initiated a ‘no confidence’ vote in one of our commissioners.

Surely now, we thought, our governor Sarah Palin will hear and investigate our concerns regarding Joe Schmidt. That didn’t happen. Rather she publicly said that she stood by Schmidt and that 97% of Alaska’s correctional officers are just a bunch of “disgruntled employees”.

MRSA is running rampant in our institutions and we are deliberately being understaffed. Joe Schmidt is not only allowing understaffing but is actively encouraging it.

Prisoners with MRSA are being treated but not officially diagnosed with the bacterium. By not having cultures done, to determine the presence of MRSA, they are then able to be released right back out into the general prisoner population. If they were officially diagnosed then they’d have to be medically isolated. Consequently other prisoners and staff members keep contracting MRSA.

When a staff member contracts it, we’ve had two new cases in the last month and a half alone at my facility, they are told to “pin point exactly” where in the institution they contracted it. It’s a bacterium that can only be seen under an electron microscope yet we’re supposed to say exactly where we got it???

The department, under Joe Schmidt’s leadership, will not pay medical costs or reimburse leave time used, for any staff members that come down with MRSA unless they can prove that they got it at work. The very same place that contagious prisoners are being treated and then sent back home to their cells to expose every other prisoner and staff member they come into contact with.

We are also constantly under staffed. Rather than calling officers in on overtime, when we’re under manned, we’re left short handed. There are many officers willing to come in and work. All the department has to do is ask.

We also have mandatory posts that are never to be left unmanned. They are being manned by “phantom” officers. Which is to say one officer assigned to two posts. The officer’s name will be filled in, on paper, as filling in a certain post when in actuality he or she is working another one as well.

Twice, in the last year, we’ve had “man down” alarms go off in the facility and not enough officers to be able to allow anyone to respond to the emergency. By the grace of God, both times, the alarms were accidentally set off and no officer’s life was in actual jeopardy. But we may not always be so fortunate. When that happens, whether an officer loses his or her life to MRSA or a prisoner assault, we’ll be able to credit Sarah Palin and Joe Schmidt with murder."

Joe Schmidt is the perfect guy to replace Sarah Palin, should circumstances warrant it. His qualifications are impressive. Joe is Sarah Palin in trousers. He thinks like her, talks like her...

Perish the thought!

Sarah Palin has a seemingly endless stream of extremely 'competent', 'well qualified' and 'talented' people from her church and her high school to fill every important position in the state of Alaska.

Way to go, Sarah!

Member of staff account of conditions found here, in the comments section.
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Sarah Palin's Dairygate

Dairygate is a very complicated story. Researching it made me dizzy, so I'll try to keep it as concise as possible and provide links for further reading. I could be here all night and not make much sense at all. So what's new? Most of the accounts concerning Sarah's gates seem to elicit the same question, "Does this make any sense to you?"

Take a deep breath, here we go!

In 2007, the state Board of Agriculture and Conservation (BAC) considered a request for $600,000 to the state for a review of the operating expenses of the Matanuska Maid Dairy, an unprofitable state-owned business. Milk prices were too high and competition from national brands was impossible to match. The Alaska Creamery Board, a sub-committee of the BAC, which oversaw the dairy and made the request, met in May and discussed privatizing or possibly closing the dairy. It subsequently voted to close it, and on June 13 the Board rejected Sarah Palin's public request that it keep the dairy open, saying it stood by its decision to close the dairy plant as of July 7.

On June 18, Palin fired the entire membership of the BAC, and replaced them with an assortment of Mat-Su Valley residents, all without any experience in running a dairy, but with family or business connections with the Valley's milk producers, which then installed itself as the Creamery Board, and voted to keep the dairy open for 90 days while reviewing options. The loan was immediately approved and payments to the milk farmers connected to the Board continued uninterrupted. On August 29, 2007, Palin announced that the business could not be made profitable and would be offered for sale. It had suffered $300,000 losses. She said that the board could use the $600,000 help with the transition to a private operator.

On December 7, with a required minimum bid of $3.35 million for the dairy, no bids were received and all dairy operations were scheduled to close later that month. Two of the Valley's dairy farmers came forward and offered to lease the equipment to start their own dairy and a further grant of $200,000 was made available to them, provided they started production at the now renamed Matanuska Creamery by the end of December. They only started operations in March 2008, but received the grant anyway. Matanuska Creamery is owned by one of the biggest milk farmers in the area, Kyle Beus, and Robert Wells, a Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman, who is also president of Alaska Farmers and Stockgrowers Inc.

On top of the two grants provided by the state, Ted Stevens arranged a $634,000 USDA grant for Beus and Wells' new venture, Matanuska Creamery, in March of 2008.

Between September and November 2008 Matanuska Creamery applied for a further loan from the state. After much wrangling over personal guarantees, which were removed in a meeting on November 21, the Board, which is comprised of Governor Palin's appointed friends and neighbours, ended up voting to give the Mat-Su Valley business a $630,000 loan. The BAC approved the unsecured operating loan fully knowing that the business did not have the cash flow to make the payments.

Matanuska Creamery didn't have a very good start. 30,000 pounds of cheese in their cold storage, which had already been sold in "cheese futures" deals without insurance, were found to be contaminated with e.coli, listeria and staph and had to be thrown away. Matanuska Creamery made a loss of $250,000.

This is an extremely simplified account of all the shenanigans that went on in the transition from state owned MatMaid to privately owned Matanuska Creamery.

The cost of privatizing MatMaid cost the state of Alaska more than $1,4 million so far. Add the $634,000 in federal grants and the costs are astronomical, considering that it was seen as a failed operation as far back as April 2007.

Hey, it's only taxpayers money and it keeps Sarah's pals in Wasilla and Palmer in business, so what seems to be the problem?

For further reading, click here.
If you want to read loads of posts about it, go to Andrew Halcro's blog and search Mat Maid or Matanuska Creamery.
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