Vice-President Picks

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I don't know about that, Drew. While I myself am not a fan of Shrub's secrecy and skullduggerous use of Executive Priviledge and other bits of the law, I think a lot of people in the US (Rags would likely call them Neo-Cons) view Bush's legal chicanery as perfectly acceptable, because he's doing it to thwart the evil leftists who are themselves corrupting the Constitution. Now the popularity polls would indicate that those people are in the minority, but I still think they are there.

Palin's team will likely paint the whole investigation as inspired by the Left, even though as you said it appears it was people from her own party who endorsed the commencement of said investigation.

Nonetheless, if there were anyone trying to see the contents of my e-mail account, I would use any legal means at my disposal to keep my correspondence private, up to and including citing executive priviledge. I have nothing in there to be ashamed of, but I value my privacy and would fight tenaciously to defend it. So I can't fault her for trying a legal defense, just as we are not supposed to fault multiple murderers when they come up with ridiculous defenses like the Twinkie defense -- any defense you can use is fair game as long as it is legal!

EDIT: I fixed the typo that T2Bruno found such humor in. I hate this frigging keyboard.

 

This is true, but I was restricting my comments to independents (who tend to be moderate), not neo-conservatives.

Do you expect the same level of privacy with your work computer and the e-mails you send using a company account? My employer needs no warrant to look at my activities on their computer and needs no warrant to review e-mails I send using the company account. Why does the governor of Alaska - an employee of the people of Alaska - not held to the same standard?

E-mails sent with a computer furnished by your employer using your employer's network on your employer's account are subject to review by your employer at any time. If the investigators wanted to see her personal g-mail account, she'd be completely within her rights to tell them to **** off, but that isn't the account the investigators want to see.

 

It depends, I guess, on what you are doing. Drew already touched a part of it - she was a state employee, so any work-related correspondence from her office PC is something the state can look into if the relevant authorities decide to do so.

However, there is a bit more to it imo - as a state employee, she should be held to higher standards of openness and responsibility than your average private person, not less. So even if the private correspondence of a self-employed John Doe is not fair game (and with Bush's laws regarding privacy of correspondence, that is debateable), if said John Doe is a governor of a state and under investigation for abuses, privacy is not an acceptable issue to avoid or deny an official investigation. If she wanted privacy, she should have looked for a different job - she chose to be a public servant, so she has to live with the consequences.

 

Oh, there's more to it still. She's a governor that got elected on a platform of cleaning up corruption, and has. If she refuses, it looks like she may have done so just to set up her own. Still, I think there's more to the issue. Legally, remember that she isn't just a state employee, she's the Governor. This would be like Congress asking to look at the President's e-mail. The legality may be a little different at the state level, but the power differential is the same.

On top of it all, I seem to recall that, while the investigation was approved before she was picked for VP, the investigator had not been selected and that the republicans weren't as involved as they would have liked to be in picking the investigator. I may be mistaken, but I seem to remember hearing that somewhere. Now, I know nothing about the investigator selected other than that he's a democrat. Is he honest? Does he have an axe to grind? Is he the kind of person that might use this to hurt McCain? Does anyone know anything about him? The unfortunate part is that there isn't really anyone we could assume was a truely unbiased party to perform the investigation.

 

I think you would be hard pressed to find a governor -- or anyone in authority, for that matter -- who has not used their "pull" to help a family member or friend. Just how egregrious her use of "pull" in this situation was is something for the investigators to find out. Good luck to them getting past the "Executive Prividedge" shield.

 

This is, however, an issue in which a governor allegedly attempted to use her "pull" not to help a family member or friend, but to punish an enemy - and after being blocked in that attempt by a subordinate, using that "pull" to instead punish him. I think most of us would agree that using your authority to punish an enemy is decidedly worse than using it to help a friend.

 

True, but in this case I think you could make as much an arguement that it was over legitimate job issues. The one guy threatened the lives of people he was involved in a legal dispute with and used a tazer on his 10 year old step-son, the other one refused to fire such a person. Such an individual as the first has no place in a state trooper uniform, while the other should, at the least, have a very good explanation for why the first belongs on the force.

 

The state police department did an investigation and did determine that some of the allegations had merit, but not all of them. Here's a brief rundown of the results of the investigation.

The probe found that Wooten violated internal policy, but not the law, in making a death threat against the father of Sarah Palin and Molly McCann. While Wooten denied making the threat, the investigation ultimately concluded otherwise, but that the death threat was not a crime because Wooten did not threaten the father directly and that the threat was a violation of trooper policy but not criminal law.

They also found that Wooten had committed a hunting violation in shooting a moose without a permit: he had been out hunting with McCann in September 2003 and had shot the animal himself even though their permit was in McCann's name only. McCann had obtained the permit but balked at killing the moose herself, so she handed the gun to her then-husband, who shot the animal.

Wooten was also found to have violated department policy in using a Taser on his then 11-year old stepson in 2003; he told investigators that he did so "in a training capacity" after the child had asked to be tased in order to show his cousin, Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol, that he "wasn't a mama's boy". In a statement to the police, the boy said "that he wanted to be tased to show that he's not a mommy's boy in front of Bristol. Wooten reportedly set the Taser to "test" mode, meaning that it was on low power. He attached clips to the child rather than firing darts from a gun and turned on the power for less than one second. According to Wooten, his stepson "thought it was great and wanted to do it all over again". According to a spokesman for Taser International, if the Taser is fired for just a second, it would feel like your funny bone was hit. Although the Taser incident happened in 2003, it was not reported to police until on or after April 11, 2005, the day that Molly McCann filed for divorce. On June 6, 2005, Sgt. Ron Wall, a police investigator, asked Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol why they "waited so long and brought the incident up after two years." Bristol said "because of the divorce."

The investigation initially cleared Wooten on all of the alcohol-related charges, but this was subsequently overturned. They ultimately found that Wooten did "take [an] open beer with him when he drove away in his trooper vehicle" on one occasion in the summer of 2004 (while off duty and in civilian attire), violating both the law and internal trooper policy. Wooten was also cleared of numerous other allegations made by McCann and her family, including that he had taken illegal steroid and testosterone supplements, that he had physically assaulted McCann, and that he had illegally shot a wolf.

As a result of these findings, Wooten was suspended for ten days. The suspension letter referred to seven other negative actions in his personnel file, in addition to the Taser, moose, and beer incidents. After a union protest, the suspension was reduced to five days, but Wooten was warned that he would be fired if he committed any further misconduct. Union president Rob Cox has denied that Wooten was a "rogue cop" and pointed to his service on an emergency reaction team. Union executive John Cyr said that many of the negative items in Wooten's personnel file were minor, and that the only complaints ever filed against him were those by Palin and her family.

 

Wow. I wonder what it takes to fire a cop.

 

T2, he really couldn't be charged with most of this stuff using normal standards of criminal law. There's no real way to prove conclusively enough to charge him that he threatened anyone, just as it can't be proven that he once drove with an open beer can while off-duty (this came from the testimony of the man who was in the car with him at the time, and Alaska state troopers are allowed to use their cars for personal use). The moose thing was really just a matter of semantics. His only crime was pulling the trigger on behalf of his wife. He was actually cleared of everything else, so the only thing left that you could actually use to fire him was the tasering incident, which by all accounts was conducted safely and wasn't even reported until two years after the fact; and even then it was only reported to give McCann an advantage in her divorce proceedings.

 

... which in sum sounds very much as if Palin ordered that some dirt, any dirt, be dug up on that guy in order to justify the application of disciplinary law - because disciplinary action would be only thing justifying his firing. The fact that the tasering incident was two years back strongly suggests that and that the episode was intended to have a desired result.

That's bad, not only because it indicates abuse of power, or worse, indifference or ignorance to the fact that it is abuse of power, or perhaps a feeling of entitlement - but it is bad also because it is basically defamatory towards that trooper. That Palin apparently had no qualms about any of that is an interesting conclusion one can draw from that episode. It means she cannot properly distinguish between her official function and private interpersonal relations.

 

They may not be able to prove any criminal charges, but the incidents did aparently reach the level of 'violating state policy'. I also think they sound like more than enough to fire him, though having worked in a state position myself, I can say that it really is almost impossible to fire someone in a state position. There's too much fear of the paperwork to authorize a replacement. Throw in the union's actions, I think this sounds more to me like a little version of the 'good old boys'.

 

Uh Oh. It looks like the Palin smear campaign is being traced back to the Obama campaign. Not that it is that big of surprise. Now the truly interesting things will be if the media will continue the investigation and report it (doubtful) and/or if the Federal Election Committe will investigate. What was done is called "astroturfing". Astroturfing is creating a phony "grass roots" movement. It is illegal because campaigns are required to include who approves and pays for all forms of advertising.

This is the summary.

 

The question though Snook, and the article you linked to makes no mention of this, is: Was this PR firm hired by the Obama campaign? Are these people on Obama's payroll? If not, then I fail to see how the actions of this particular private company are that much different than any of the various 527 groups, which are also private. Further, 527 groups are not employed by the campaigns (either Democrats or Republicans), so saying that this links backs to the Obama campaign without a paper trail indicating that it in fact does, is not particularly convincing.

If, on the other hand, you are arguing that there are private companies working on behalf of the campaigns, even though they technically aren't on the payrolls of the campaigns, all I can say is "You betcha." Of course, that isn't news and it happens on both sides.

 

Well, that all seems far from damning evidence, but if it is supported, then an investigation should commence. It'll be interesting to see how the media handles this one.

 

527 groups are subject to the same FEC rules that campaigns are.

 

I'm sorry - are we seriously entertaining blog posts from the friggin' Jawa Report? Seriously? Is that the level of discourse we, as thinking adults, are going to subject ourselves to? What's next - the hard-hitting expose' "The Real McCain" from the Democratic Underground? Is it really so hard to post sources that are subject to accuracy and accountability?

Christ on crutches.

 

True, but what is your point? You're saying this private company links back to the Obama campaign, and I'm saying that it likely does not. 527s do not work for, nor are they employed by, the campaign. A 527 commercial does not come with a tag line of "I'm Senator John McCain/Barack Obama and I approve this message" because, well, they didn't approve the message before it was made into a commercial. You cannot claim that a private company speaks for a campaign if they are a 527. For example, if MoveOn.org releases a commercial that is negative of McCain, you cannot say that is the fault of the Obama campaign.

 

Wasn't the swiftboat veterans for truth or whatever they were called a 527? I guess what goes around comes around but even so it would be nice if the big wigs had controls of their footsoldiers. I know I sure as hell blamed that on Bush and his camp so we shouldn't be too upset if attacks directed at Palin will be blamed on Obama. Then again I do not see there being anything all too wrong with "digging up dirt" on an opponent that is relatively unknown. We all know that politics is dirty and American more than most and from my foreign perspective I have seen the dems lose two elections in a row partly because they did not play nearly as dirty as the opposition. Maybe it is time for them to fight fire with fire.

 

Indeed they were.