What she is is totally ruthless and is loyal only to her family and clan; you are an insider or a total outsider. I don’t know the early political history of McCain or Romney very well but as far as I know neither has the trail of bodies behind them that she does. She does have in common with McCain that she made her most noted strides politically by working with the Democrats and against her own Party. He calls it being a maverick, she calls it being a rogue, I call it being disloyal and untrustworthy.

I don’t know if it is pridefulness or insecurity but she has a special mental file for every perceived slight and holds grudges forever. First you are frozen out and then you feel the cold steel in your ribs – or if you see the freeze out in time, you keep a safe distance from Sarah Palin – I fall into the latter category. She also will not accept any responsibility for anything that goes wrong – a trait she shares with many politicians, however. John Bitney is an experienced legislative hand with a good enough reputation that even after she fired him, he was picked up by the Speaker of the House. Sarah Palin had never worked with the Legislature except in the role of supplicant when she was on the Council and Mayor. But guess who caused all her problems with the Legislature and look at how she is at pains to trash Bitney and blame him in her book.

And there is a streak of unmodulated nastiness in her. I’ve never had a polical boss that didn’t have a list of people in his/her head that he thought the State would be better off without; I have one myself. If you’re at the top of HR/LR they let you know who they’re interested in and you let them know if it is doable. I know every one of the people who would have been advising the Administration on the Wooten-Monegan Affair and I know every one of them would have told the Administration that it couldn’t fire Wooten and that if he could attach a bad motive, they’d even have trouble firing Monegan. I know they were told because Frank Bailey was working in Administration at the time at issue. Yet, not only did they not accept the advise, they kept bedeviling the situation and trying to get Wooten to the point where she wound up firing a powerful and well-connected commissioner and immersing her administration in scandal. She dodged the bullet on it only because Frank Bailey stepped in front of the bullet for her, but you will never make me or anybody else who knows this government beleive that Frank Bailey all on his own set out to make things right about the Governor’s former brother in law.

And the thing with the per diem is just a jab at Juneau, something, in true Mat Valley fashion, she never misses and opportunity to do. So, just to make sure everybody in Juneau knows how she feels, not only will she not stay in the Governor’s House or in the Governor’s Office on the Third Floor of the Capitol, she makes her office in Anchorage and commutes from Wassilla to work but since the Governor’s duty station is Juneau, she keeps herself in travel status and pays herself per diem while sleeping in her own home every night – and was open and defiant about it. She got away with it because her appointed subordinates who are the rule keepers on this stuff covered for her. On numerous ocassions during my career we disciplined classified, unionized employees and even appointees for collecting per diem or other travel allowances while staying in a home away from their duty station that they owned or otherwise had access to. There is even a specific rule brought about by a controversy involving a former commissioner that requires you to declare one of your residences to be your principal residence for travel purposes and does not allow you to collect per diem if you have a residence that you are staying in in the place to which you are travelling.

I could go on about stuff like that but suffice it to say that Sarah was special.

It seems that there are always 2 sides to a story, but, only the facts matter, not the spin. Maybe this person writing this article is not being honest, but, there are facts in there that can easily be verified. For example, go to the link provided by Achance that listed all state financials for the past several years. If you read the notes in the 2005 financials, you will see a clear statement from The Honorable Frank Murkowski stating that he has increased the taxes on the oil producers. Just sayin’ ,as they say. I only want to know the truth, not anyone’s political spin on things be they Republicans or Democrats.

That is for the period July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2008. The previous year’s budget was prepared largely by the Murkowski Administration, but her Administration had the opportunity to amend it and it was enacted under her Governorship. The SFY 2009 Financial Report will be out next month and it will show even greater increases in spending and revenue, including her $1000 per capita pander payment in the fall of ’08 in addition to the almost $2K Permanent Fund Dividend. The SFY ’09 budget is available at the Office of Management and Budget: http://www.gov.state.ak.us/omb/

Under Alaska law, the Governor must propose a complete budget to the Legislature, which may accept it or amend it at its pleasure. The Governor’s proposed budget is normally due about the second week in December and the Legislature convenes the second week in January for, now, a 90 day session. The session was 120 days until last year. In a gubernatorial election year, the Governor is sworn in the first week in December and the Legislature convenes two weeks later than usual so that the new Governor, if there is one, has more transition time and more time to work on the budget before submitting it to the Legislature.

I am not offering this as a criticism of the spending; I’d have spent more actually, but I would have spent it differently. I, especially, would have either spent money or foregone revenue to make Alaska-refined oil products available to Alaskans at a lower price in that period of extraordinarily high prices. High oil prices are a boon to the State government but a brutal tax on Alaska’s people in the rural areas who are dependent on oil for both heating and electricity as well as transportation.

This is however offered in rebuttal to those who tout her as a budget cutter, which even Scope cannot now claim she is though scope tries to minimize the increases in taxes and revenue as well as spending. The only budget cuts that Gov. Palin EVER did were minor line item vetoes for show and for retribution against legislators who didn’t support her. If you don’t want to wade through the long CAFR and Revenue Sources Book, just look at the graph of revenues and expenditure through SFY 08 on page xi of the 2008 CAFR linked above.

You know, Democrats can read too. If Sarah Palin is going to run for office as an energy expert, and fiscal conservative and budget cutter, she’s going to have to explain how she proposed and got enacted a huge tax increase on the oil industry, how spending went up significantly while she was Governor, why she was for the so-called bridge to nowhere in Ketchikan before she was against it. And then there’s why she was against a gas line through Canada before she was for it and gave TransCanada a half billion dollars in seed money. Along the way she can explain why the person most responsible for her changed position on the gas line and the architect of her AGIA scheme once worked for TransCanada.

I don’t remember exactly but the whole thing couldn’t have been more than a few weeks. Alaska’s government is structured with 14 departments each headed by a Commissioner who is appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Legislature. Departments are structured into divisions headed by a director. Some departments also semi-independent agencies and boards attached to them administratively so that the semi-independent agency or board can use the department’s infrastructure rather than have its own. Directors report either to a Deputy Commissioner or directly to the Commissioner. Commissioners technically report directly to the Governor but usually report through the Chief of Staff. AOGCC was a semi-independent agency attached to the Department of Administration. It had/has three politically appointed “Commissioners” who head the Agency. While they are called commissioners and are confirmed by the Legislature, their authority is limited to their discrete agency and for infrastructure needs, e.g., budget, finance, personnel, procurement, etc. rely on and are subordinated to the Department to which they are attached. I was a director in the Department of Administration and on the org chart reported to the Deputy Commissioner who was also the Ethics Supervisor for the Department. He is the one she refers to in her book. I was good friends with the Commissioner since we had worked together when he was in the Legisltature so the org chart reporting relationship was more of a formality. Also, neither Deputy Commissioner had any real government experience and the Commissioner had no Executive Branch experience, so I was involved in most anything that came along either on a formal or informal basis. The director of personnel and I were both longtime ‘crats who had designed the personnel and labor relations administration programs for the Administration, so one the other or both of us had some involvement in ANYTHING that was personnel related in the government, not just in the DOA.

I knew that there had been some improper political stuff going on between the DC and Randy and both the director of personnel and I had had some harsh words along the lines of, “How bad do you want to be on the front page of the ADN?” with the DC. About the same time I heard from either the Commissioner or the DC that Sarah had complained to the Governor’s Office about Randy. I don’t know how long it had been since she had gone to the Governor’s Office about it or exactly who she said what to over there. Within days of my learning that, the DC came to me and laid out the complaints and told me he had been tasked to deal with it. I advised him to do it as formally as we would for a classified, unionized employee so that we could document having dealt with it because these things always come out. I don’t know that he had or ever saw a letter to the Governor from Sarah, but I can’t tell from her accounting in the book exactly when she did that either. We decided that he was going to go interview Sarah and use that interview as the basis for a formal complaint against Randy which we would then investigate and either clear or charge him. He went to Anchorage to see Sarah and when he returned, he told me that Randy and Sarah had talked it over and worked it out and there was no longer a problem.

Here’s the most charitable explanation I can come up with: the DC was good friends with Randy and had in fact been the Republican Party, and thus Randy’s, attorney in the huge fight over reapportionment after the ’00 Census, when the Democrats, who still had the Governor’s Office, tried to apportion Republicans out of existance. When Sarah saw that the DC, Randy’s friend, was the one handling her complaint, she assumed she had been kicked to the curb and simply clammed up; sort of a precursor of what she says happened in her interview with Katie Couric – she got angry and just didn’t talk. I don’t know that I believe that explanation in either case, but it is plausible. The next we all hear of it is when Sarah resigns and we’re reading about it in the ADN. Suffice it to say that we were VERY unhappy with Sarah Palin.

My experience with two sets of Republican appointees, Hickel’s and Murkowski’s, is that almost all of them are incredibly paranoid about government and government employees. They don’t know where the light switches and rest rooms are and are so paranoid they won’t ask anybody. Sarah went on and on at the time and in her book about how concerned she was for the integrity of the AOGCC and for its reputations. Well if Sarah had kept her mouth shut about it all, nobody would have known a thing about it and it could have been handled. Seamount was a Democrat appointee there and he might have whispered to somebody, but if it’s coming from the Democrats, it is easy to deal with. At that time, there probably weren’t more than a couple hundred people in Alaska that even knew what the AOGCC was or had a clue what it did

Did she contrive it? I don’t know. I can, as I did above, come up with an explanation based on ignorance and paranoia. I can also look at her political history and see that she has always picked somebody to be her bad guy and her target to run against. She couldn’t be more predictable if she was quoting Saul Alinsky; she picks somebody and some issue, personalizes the issue to that person and runs against them. She did that to Nick Carney when she was on the Council, to John Stein when she ran for Mayor, and to Ruedrich and Murkowski when she ran for Governor. As I’ve said before, there is a trail of poltically dead bodies of people, mostly who had helped her, that she has vilified on her way up. One of my political mentors told me to always remember that every butt you kicked on the way up, you were probably going to have to kiss on the way down. Well, she seems to have escaped that by bailing on the Governorship and going for the book deal and celebrity – for now.

Was she governor or not? (She was.)
Did she sign the new tax or not? (She did.)
Was it designed to “share” “unjust” profits with the State? (It was.)

Q.E.D.

Palin supporters need to figure out how to paint her support of a windfall profits tax as something other than what it was.

Good luck with that.

My overall opinion is that yes spending increased, but not that significantly, and, the major spending was in the Department of Administration . It would be hard to determine what the individual costs were that make up that number, unless you go to the details that list what appears to be state House or Senate bills passed for funding that bill. It would take me a month to go back and look up each bill in order to see what spending was passed by the legislature. The audited financial statements always include notes, which I quoted a few above. They explain any major increases or decreases in spending. I guess the biggest point I am making is that the Governor, and any other single person doesn’t control what is spent, it comes from the legislature that is made of of 60 Democrats and Republicans. I’m sure Palin has a “slush fund” so to speak that she can tap for her own reasons, but, I doubt it contains serious money. I would think that whatever she can tap would be in the Department of the Governor. That spending area in the 2008 financials was actually cut. It is my understanding that Palin didn’t take the pay raise that she was actually entitled to. I don’t believe that any Governor has that much control over the budgets. They can make recommendations, or request that certain projects are passed, but, with a legislature made up of both parties, they will finally decide if that project gets funding or not. The Alaska legislature does not appear to be overwhelmingly a majority of one party or the other, as is the case in Washington today. I don’t think they can ram things through because one person asks them to. I may be very naive, and, I am aware that shannigans can take place in any state, but, I am just not seeing it in the financials. What has been made to appear as hanky panky, if it does exist, is on a small scale, according to the 2008 financial information. Yes spending increased, just as it has every single year as shown on the graph (page 19) in the 2008 financials. Many Governors of states are busy slashing budget items, and in many cases even essential services, in order to balance their budgets. It appears that Alaska has not had to do that because they have been frugal , have passed legislation in order to insure that funding doesn’t happen without the money being there to spend. It seems to me that every year things cost more. I can’t buy a loaf of bread for a buck anymore. The increase in spending in Alaska seems to reflect that.

Yes, in 2008 the petroleum profits shyrocketed from previous years, and, that was from the time period when we were all paying close to $4 for a gallon of gas. The state of Alaska, Palin, and no one in the administration sets the price per barrel as traded on the stock market. As noted above, petroleum is Alaskas major source of revenue. I don’t think anyone can dispute that. It seems fair to me, that in the Palin administration, the legislature passed a taxing law on the petroleum producers in the state. They tied it to average price per barrel, and as we all know that the price is volatile. I personally don’t see that as a “windfall profits tax” as has been said. Palin did not set the tax rate, she may have made recommendations as to the rate, but, the legislature passed the rate and the law. Isn’t this all about how sausage is made. Everyone likes it, but, no one wants to see how it is made. They only care about how good it tastes or doesn’t.

As to the pipeline project, that much has been said about, again, the twenty-fifth legislature all played a part in that. If Palin was wrong for supporting it, then also to were the entire legislature.

I have no intention of doing any diaries that include the name Palin. In fact, I do agree that things need to be ironed out, and, each one of us has to look into the information for themselves. I’m sorry if someone doesn’t have accounting knowledge, but, look at it kinda like your checkbook. Money goes in (revenues) and money goes out (the checks you have written). I will not participate in any name calling, flaming, attacks or anything else. I am willing to participate in rational discussions that include factual information, such as the financials. I have no interest in anyone’s personal opinions, they are what seem to make diaries blow up. About this Achance is correct, no one seems to want to do the research.

I too will begin adhering to the Hinz rule because every so often I allow some of these people to goad me into saying something that makes me look no better than they. But until and unless RedState institutes rules and guidelines regarding comments on Sarah Palin, I have no plans to keep quiet about her if I have something to say.

If SP is the candidate her supporters think she is, she will be able to stand up to the scrutiny. If not, well, maybe it would be best to close down the Palin diaries, close ranks around her, paper over anything questionable, hope the voters don’t notice her supporters tend to foam at the mouth a bit, and pray that’s enough to get her over the line in ’12.

You’re the only one that’s responded with rancor so far. What does that say about you? You write decent stuff and make your own contribution here when you’re not talking about Sarah Palin, but when it comes to her, you seem like an old-fashioned Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.

If Sarah Palin can be defended from Achance’s criticisms, then you do her a disservice by flipping out and attacking her critics instead.

Don’t be like the Obamanauts. Seriously.