Alaska

Something fishy is happening in Alaska again, and this time it involves the arrest of Sherry Johnston, the other grandmother of Sarah Palin’s new grandbaby:

That's not what Kyle Young, a troopers drug investigator who was involved in the case, wrote in an e-mail last week to all members of the Public Safety Employees Association, the union that represents troopers and other law enforcement officers around the state.

Young wrote that after it became clear who Johnston is, "this case became anything but normal."

"It was not allowed to progress in a normal fashion, the search warrant service WAS delayed because of the pending election and the Mat Su Drug Unit and the case officer were not the ones calling the shots," Young wrote.

Considering the defiance we saw from Sarah Palin over the trooper-gate report, I wouldn’t be shocked one bit to find out she was involved in delaying the arrest. Ethics is a bad word to these people.

A new ethics complaint has been filed against Sarah Palin:

Zane Henning, a North Slope worker from Wasilla, said he filed the complaint with the attorney general. He says Palin is promoting her future political career on state property, pointing in particular to the governor's Nov. 10 interview with Fox News Channel host Greta Van Susteren.

"The governor is using her official position and office in an attempt to repair her damaged political image on the national scene," Henning wrote.

The GOP’s sweetheart is also become the countries most ethically challenged Governor. Ernie Fletcher may have met his match

Ted Stevens reelection bid has gone down the tubes. The AP is now calling the race for Begich.

Poor Ted Stevens:

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens dropped further behind Democrat Mark Begich in his re-election bid Tuesday as the convicted felon's 85th birthday became a grueling wait that could determine whether his decades-long hold on power is over.

The longest-serving Republican in the history of the Senate trailed the Anchorage mayor by 2,374 votes out of 290,198 counted as election officials continued tallying absentee and other ballots. Begich had led by about 1,000 votes before Tuesday's count.

Things are looking very good for Begich. Every time new numbers come out of Alaska, he moves further out in the lead.

Now that Sarah Palin is done playing celebrity (hopefully), she gets to go back to work in Alaska and face some big problems:

Palin's state budget proposal is due in a month, with plummeting oil prices slashing Alaska's revenues by billions of dollars.

The 1,700-mile natural gas pipeline she bragged about on the campaign trail — "We began a nearly $40 billion-dollar natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence," she said at the Republican National Convention — is nowhere near being built.

Some hard feelings linger over her administration's initial decision to ignore subpoenas in the investigation of whether she abused her power in firing the public safety commissioner who wouldn't oust her ex-brother-in-law from his job as a state trooper.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if she ended up not getting that oil pipeline done? What if her state ended up following suit of the rest of the states when it comes to economic hard times? Her actions in the next couple of years can cause more harm than good when it comes to her 2012 aspirations. I doubt she can do much to come out looking more prepared for high office, but she sure can put the final nail in her coffin. Oh it will be so much fun to keep an eye to the north these next four years.

Sarah Palin talked a lot about education, but let’s look at her own state for some clarification:

• Alaska's dropout rate, at 8 percent, was double the national average in the 2005-2006 school year, according to the latest figures available from the U.S. Department of Education.
• 38 percent of today's ninth-graders will have no high school diploma 10 years from now, according to the Alaska Commission on Postsecondary Education.
• Alaska ranks 50th, or last, in the number of ninth-graders who will likely have a bachelor's degree in 10 years, according to the commission.

And amongst that 8 percent of dropouts is Palin’s own son. These numbers will be interesting to keep an eye on when Palin tries again in 2012. Perhaps she should talk to that “terrorist” Bill Ayers about how to fix her state’s education problem.

As the votes continue to get counted in Alaska, Democrat Mark Begich is now beating Ted “series of tubes” Stevens by a margin of over 1,000 votes. It’s amazing that the state with the smallest populace takes so long to tally the votes.

Democrat Mark Begich now leads felon Ted Stevens by 814 votes in the Alaskan Senate race. There are still about 40,000 more ballots to count, which Alaska says will be done over the next week. I guess they are waiting on Todd Palin to bring them in via snow machine.

This is pretty amazing and a show of how incompetent Sarah Palin really is:

The campaign of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said the Alaska governor was unaware of a visit by Russian energy officials to Anchorage on Monday.

Eight high-level officials from Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled energy conglomerate, traveled to Anchorage earlier this week to meet with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources and the chief executive of ConocoPhillips to discuss energy projects and the possibility of expanding into new markets.

The meeting on Alaskan soil comes at a time of chilly relations between Russia and the United States following Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August. Both Palin and John McCain have been critical of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on the campaign trail, and Palin raised eyebrows last month in an interview by saying that Putin “rears his head” by dispatching Russian jets into Alaska’s airspace.

Russia wants in on that new pipline that is supposed to help ease us off foreign dependency. I wonder if Palin's administration will let them in on it? Regardless she should have at least known this was happening.

Just now breaking on MSNBC. The panel voted unanimously to release the report, which can be found here. Here's finding number 1 on page 8:

They are saying she abused the powers of her office. Sounds like Palin is a big fat liar.