Palin: Flailin' failin' and probably bailin' -- a sign from the Hold Palin Accountable Rally, 27 Sep 2008, Anchorage, AK. Prophetic, too: she bailed 10 months later.

I don’t usually read Conservatives for Palin.  For one thing, I don’t have much use for unmitigated laudatoriness toward my former governor about whom I have all manner of reasons to be unfavorably impressed — her incessant untruth-telling, her vindictiveness, her Christianist/Dominionist views, her habit of quitting jobs half-done (though to tell the truth, I’m glad she quit as governor — Sean Parnell ain’t no superhero, but he’s a vast improvement over both his last two predecessors), & her speeches full of the same old tired conservative talking points over & over & over & over [yawn] again.  Oh yes, & let us not forget her famous 2 million dollar meme, which has the distinction of having led to the most popular post on my blog to date. [Ref #1] It also has a nice pie chart that I made, which I will take the opportunity to show off now.

The 2 million dollar meme pie chart, which I created to demonstrate what it cost the Alaska Personnel Board to investigate ethics complaints against Sarah Palin. Notice how 63% of costs were from Troopergate, including the "frivolous" ethics complaint Palin made against herself. Click through on the pie chart to get to my Flickr photostream, where it can also be viewed full-size.

It was with some bemusement, then, that I learned that on Sunday one of C4P’s bloggers took it upon himself to congratulate me for being one of those “with the courage to criticise [sic] those whose lives seem committed to a downward spiral of abusive tabloideeze about all things Palin.”

Why, sir! I do believe that you’re trying to coopt me!

The blog post, “Skinny White Sunday: Alaska Palm Pilot Rocks!” by Rich Crowther [Ref #2], was a sort of Sunday wrap-up of Palin-related news, which in this case included discussion of Phil Munger’s use of the word “slut,” for which I had criticized him. [Ref #3] Interestingly, Crowther said very little about my criticism of Phil, instead choosing to highlight comments I’d made at Phil’s post about Gryphen of Immoral Minority.  Also of interest was that while Crowther made use of the term Steve Aufrecht used in his post criticizing Phil for the same thing — Blogger Tourettes [Ref #4] — Crowther not only didn’t credit him, but even linked to another C4P post (critical of Phil) instead of to Steve’s post. [Ref #5] I’m sure there are a number of C4Pers who now think Crowther is oh-so-very-clever for coining a clever phrase that in fact he just snagged uncredited from another Alaska progressive blogger.

Here’s the relevant section of Crowther’s post.  All the stuff in green is him quoting me.  Links are as they appear in the original.

Mr M has recently been struck down by a bad case of Blogger Tourettes and the issue of the week over at his blog has been “to swear or not to swear”. Is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of Sarah Palin’s outrageous good fortune, or to cuss with aggressive, sexually charged, misogynistic language in trying to oppose that?

They accuse C4P of meddling in Alaskan affairs, but here’s what we don’t understand, how can it be more acceptable for those Eurozone sludgers Patrick Hogwash and Regina la Cochon Rose (at Palingates) to involve themselves in matters Alaska? How can it be appropriate to link to that bilious European blog? Huh?

Interestingly, reader, there are now some Alaska Bloggers (eg Mel@Henkimaa) with the courage to criticise those whose lives seem committed to a downward spiral of abusive tabloideeze about all things Palin:

“[I] think that Gryphen frequently goes over the top & over the line, especially with regard to Palin. (But not only with regard to her. For example, I was pretty sickened by his post a week or so ago about Lesil McGuire & Tom Anderson’s divorce.)”

“I’m not a Trig Truther — I have better things to do with my time than to scrutinize photos of her to see how big her ‘baby bump was’…”

“I don’t care if Gryphen is more worried about this than I am; my concern is mainly where his (or anyone else’s) interest might have a negative impact on the life of innocent people. (As with the more recent ‘Track Truther’ rumor, which questions the facts of Track’s parentage — never mind the impact such reckless rumor-mongering might have on the lives of Track or the family of the supposed ‘real’ father. I think it’s Palingates where I’ve seen this stuff.)”

“I think that Doogan was wrong for outing her [Jeanne Devon]. I think the language Jeanne has used to cut him down is frequently insulting, but not as deeply so as Phil’s slut slur. I think that a lot of Alaska progressive bloggers are just participating in the general level of political incivility that is part of the general culture now.”

“I do have a problem with personal attack & demeaning insult… On that basis too I have lots of problems with Immoral Minority. I have often felt that Gryphen is so caught up in his dislike of Palin that he goes overboard in seeking out things to criticize her about, even on slow Palin news days. I often feel he goes over the top & over the line.”

“Gryphen’s blog, to my eyes, is one of the biggest offenders in the ‘gratuitous insult’ & ‘criticize for the sake of criticism’ category that the Alaska lefty blogosphere has to offer.”

The person who wrote all that is no admirer of C4P, far from it, but she is certainly the first liberal blogger in Alaska to address openly and honestly the very real problems which some of the leftist bloggers have – not least in the way in which they have been supporting those reaching beyond decency in their sometimes color-blind desperation to build a conspiracy… any conspiracy. [Ref #2]

I appreciate that Mr. Crowther was kind enough to point out that I’m “no admirer of C4P, far from it,” and also to recognize that I’m a she, not a he (since I sign a lot of posts with my nickname Mel, some people erroneously assume that I’m male).  But I also noticed that Mr. Crowther was very careful to take my comments out of their context, particularly to omit anything I said that was critical of Palin or her followers, even if it was part of the same sentence or comment that he elected to quote, or complimentary to any Alaska progressive blogger.   Since Mr. Crowther never linked to the post where my comments were made, it also made it that much more difficult for any C4P reader to check the quotes & place them in context. The result is to give a very unbalanced representation of my views — perhaps in tribute to that favorite news source of conservatives, Fox News: fairly unbalanced.

So here I am to restore the balance of what I was saying.

The most egregious example was Mr. Crowther’s first quotation of my words:

“[I] think that Gryphen frequently goes over the top & over the line, especially with regard to Palin. (But not only with regard to her. For example, I was pretty sickened by his post a week or so ago about Lesil McGuire & Tom Anderson’s divorce.)”

“I’m not a Trig Truther — I have better things to do with my time than to scrutinize photos of her to see how big her ‘baby bump was’…”

“I don’t care if Gryphen is more worried about this than I am; my concern is mainly where his (or anyone else’s) interest might have a negative impact on the life of innocent people. (As with the more recent ‘Track Truther’ rumor, which questions the facts of Track’s parentage — never mind the impact such reckless rumor-mongering might have on the lives of Track or the family of the supposed ‘real’ father. I think it’s Palingates where I’ve seen this stuff.)” [Ref #2]

Here, typos and all, i’s the portion of my comment on “PA’s Palin Poll – Another Critical View by Another Close Friend” [Ref #6](which was a crosspost of Steve Aufrecht’s post “Blogger Tourettes”) from which Mr. Crowther was selectively quoting.  (Note: all the quotes Mr. Crowther made of my words were from my comments to that same post.):

You ask,

Do you support “Gryphen” (Jesse Griffin) (http://theimmoralminority.blogspot.com/)? Have you read his stuff? What do you think? He may be hung up about Palin’s child’s birth certificate. What do you think about Palin’s kid’s birth certificate? Do you think the birth certificate is a fraud?

I answered about Immoral Minority in my comment immediately prior to your comment. Yes, I read it. Sometimes I appreciate it. Sometimes I don’t. As I said above, I think that Gryphen frequently goes over the top & over the line, especially with regard to Palin. (But not only with regard to her. For example, I was pretty sickened by his post a week or so ago about Lesil McGuire & Tom Anderson’s divorce.)

As for Palin’s kid’s birth certificate — how would I know if it’s a fraud? I’ve never seen it, nor has anyone that I know, since Palin has never released it. It would be nice if she would, because then maybe it would put to rest all the Trig Truther stuff. That she hasn’t released it might indicates that either

(1) she thinks it’s nobody’s business, even though she’s brought Trig & the manner of his birth so much into the public spotlight that she’s made it other people’s business; and/or

(2) she for some reason thinks it serves her interests to keep the Trig Truther rumors alive by not putthing a quash to them once & for all with a disclosure of the birth certificate; and/or

(3) one or more of the claims she has circulated about Trig & the circumstances of his birth is a lie.

Maybe all three. I’m not a Trig Truther — I have better things to do with my time than to scrutinize photos of her to see how big her “baby bump was” — but her tale of the long plane rides from Texas to Anchorage after her water broke certainly seems suspect. And if true, certainly demonstrates her irresponsibility.

I don’t care if Gryphen is more worried about this than I am; my concern is mainly where his (or anyone else’s) interest might have a negative impact on the life of innocent people. (As with the more recent “Track Truther” rumor, which questions the facts of Track’s parentage — never mind the impact such reckless rumormongering might have on the lives of Track or the family of the supposed “real” father. I think it’s Palingates where I’ve seen this stuff.) [Ref #6, comment at 6:24 PM]

Notice how Mr. Crowther carefully leaves out the context of my criticism of Palin’s own behavior with regard to Trig, including the famous account of the “my water broke & then I endangered the life of my child by taking a long journey from Texas so my child could be born in Alaska” airplane trips. And then even a drive from Anchorage to Wasilla.  Oh please.  Notice how he makes me seem even more critical of Gryphen than I am by omitting what I say about sometimes appreciating his blog.

From the same comment at Progressive Alaska, Mr. Crowther quotes this:

“I think that Doogan was wrong for outing her [Jeanne Devon]. I think the language Jeanne has used to cut him down is frequently insulting, but not as deeply so as Phil’s slut slur. I think that a lot of Alaska progressive bloggers are just participating in the general level of political incivility that is part of the general culture now.” [Ref #2]

The full context of that portion of the comment:

What about Devon cutting down Mike Doogan, over and over again, for identifying her?

I think that Doogan was wrong for outing her. I think the language Jeanne has used to cut him down is frequently insulting, but not as deeply so as Phil’s slut slur. I think that a lot of Alaska progressive bloggers are just participating in the general level of political incivility that is part of the general culture now. I think I’ve done so at times myself, & I’m trying to do better. But I also think the incivility & attack language is routinely far worse & more virulent on the right. I’m still appalled that Palin nominated to be attorney general someone like Wayne Anthony Ross, who has a long history of demeaning the personhood of people with whom he disagrees.

But that’s just the humble opinion of a “lima bean.” [Ref #6, comment at 6:24 PM]

Alaskans might remember that during a confirmation hearing before the Alaska House Judiciary Committee, Wayne Anthony Ross compared lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual/transgender Alaskans to “lima beans,” a vegetable he “hates” but would still “represent” if he was hired to be the advocate for “United Vegetable Growers.” [Ref #7] That’s on top of other slurs he’s used, not only against LGBT Alaskans [Ref #8] but also against victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, as I detailed in a letter I wrote to members of the Alaska Legislature last April. [Ref #9] But, gotta make sure that Palin supporters don’t see any of my criticism of Palin’s disastrous & embarrassing choice of WAR — embarrassing especially because the Alaska Legislature resoundingly rejected her poor choice for attorney general [Ref #10] — not exactly a high point for Palin’s record as governor of Alaska. Better not remind Palin fans of that, or anything else I said that might remind them of embarrassing truths about Palin — which may well be one reason that Mr. Crowther didn’t link to the post where my comments were originally made.

Y’think?

Mr. Crowther also chose to ignore my later comment, in which I retracted & corrected the error I made in describing Jeanne Devon’s posts about Alaska State Representative Mike Doogan:

On the other item — Jeanne Devon of the Mudflats coming down on Doogan for removing her anonymity — I’ve got to revise my earlier answer.

Earlier I wrote that “I think that Doogan was wrong for outing her. I think the language Jeanne has used to cut him down is frequently insulting, but not as deeply so as Phil’s slut slur.” Now, having gone through her blog for stuff she’s said about Doogan, I must correct myself to say that I only once found her actually “insulting” him, but not directly. To the extent she did so, it was in reporting on the fact that Doogan was among those legislators whose name was apprearing on little flags put in dog poo in Juneau, such that he had attained the nickname “Doo Doo Doogan.” I.e., she was reporting on an insult others had dreamed up, not originating it. Mudflats is actually one of my favorite blogs to read, because Jeanne is witty & creative in her writing; & seldom if ever lowers herself to engage in ad hominem attacks.

I’ve met her only a couple of times, once at the True Diversity Dinner where she took my picture with Brian the Moose. It hasn’t appeared on her blog though. [Ref #6, comment at 11:48 PM]

Jeanne wrote me privately to thank me for making the correction, & also told me where she had in fact posted the pic of me with Brian the Moose (about halfway down: I’m the one in orange between Republican Gomorrah author Max Blumenthal and Air America’s Richard Green).  Could Mr. Crowther’s ignoring this have anything to do maybe possibly perhaps maybe have something to do with the fact that Palin fans also don’t like Jeanne, whose blog The Mudflats is one of the principal blogs that brought the attention of non-Alaskans to what a dangerously unqualified candidate Palin was for vice president?  How nice to be able to coopt the comments of a liberal blogger like me to put her down!  How inconvenient that I later corrected my incorrect remarks!  How convenient for Mr. Crowther that all he had to do to keep most C4P readers ignorant of my correction was by simply not mentioning it!

Mr. Crowther next quoted from the very first comment I made that mentioned Gryphen:

“I do have a problem with personal attack & demeaning insult… On that basis too I have lots of problems with Immoral Minority. I have often felt that Gryphen is so caught up in his dislike of Palin that he goes overboard in seeking out things to criticize her about, even on slow Palin news days. I often feel he goes over the top & over the line.” [Ref #2]

My full comment:

Anonymous @ 3:40 PM asked,

I wonder if those who are complaining about Phil’s poll also take the same critical look at blogs such as The Immoral Minority where the criticism of Palin runs along the same lines and I see plenty of expletives and worse.

I don’t have a problem with expletives exactly (the f-word for example, which I occasionally use myself); I do have a problem with personal attack & demeaning insult — which is the main basis upon which I criticized of Phil’s poll. On that basis too I have lots of problems with Immoral Minority. I have often felt that Gryphen is so caught up in his dislike of Palin that he goes overboard in seeking out things to criticize her about, even on slow Palin news days. I often feel he goes over the top & over the line.

Your other examples (Keith Olbermann, Jesse Jackson, MLK, Kennedy) all involved personal private relationships that (1) I don’t know enough about to judge & (2) had nothing to do with any of those people’s presentations in public discourse. You’re comparing apples & oranges. I do look unfavorably on people abusing their power in sexual relationships & also when they violate their agreements (such as vows of fidelity) with their partners or spouses. But it’s up to the people they have those agreements with to hold them accountable, not me — since I don’t know exactly what their agreements were; nor do I know whether or not whatever Olbermann did actually violated the consent of any of his sexual partners.

Obviously Phil has no obligation to explain anything unless he really wants to. Seems like Phil wants to. Isn’t that what he just said in crossposting this? [Ref #6, comment at 4:12 PM]

In this case, Mr. Crowther’s selective quote served to leave out my the qualification of what I was criticizing Phil for, or the fact that I don’t really give that much of a shit about expletives.  (See? I just used one.)  But this wasn’t as bad a selective quotation as some of his others.

Mr. Crowther’s final quote of my words:

“Gryphen’s blog, to my eyes, is one of the biggest offenders in the ‘gratuitous insult’ & ‘criticize for the sake of criticism’ category that the Alaska lefty blogosphere has to offer.” [Ref #2]

What I said in that comment in full, in which I was replying to an anonymous conservative commenter who took exception to me saying that despite my criticisms of Gryphen’s blog, I still liked him & read his blog:

Anon @ 10:08 AM –

“Be it known that while I think he frequently goes over the top & over the line on his blog, I still like him & I still read his blog — I just wince a lot.”

Translation for non-leftists.” This guy says stuff I would find hateful and vile on right-wing sites but because he’s one of ours I’ll go along with it.”

For the Left, convictions mean nothing and the end always justifies the means.

I guess you haven’t been reading, Anon. I’ve been calling loudly & persistently ever since Phil posted his “slut” remarks & poll for progressive bloggers to refrain from demeaning insults, & to stop excusing their use of them by the hypocritical justification that “the right does it so we can too.”

Gryphen’s blog, to my eyes, is one of the biggest offenders in the “gratuitous insult” & “criticize for the sake of criticism” category that the Alaska lefty blogosphere has to offer.

But that doesn’t, nor has it ever, meant that I have tossed him on the garbage heap. He’s like a brother whose uglier language I abhor. But however much I abhor his language, that doesn’t’ mean he ceases from being my brother. Same for Phil.

But back to the question of hypocrisy: I have said a number of times that lefties are behind hypocritical when they justify their incivility & ugly language against righties because “the right does it to us.”

Unsurprisingly, almost all of the right wing commenters who have commented on this issue on Phil’s blog over the past few days, including you, are using the same hypocritical strategy: you continually show up, usually in anonymous guise, to gripe at lefties for being uncivil & using “hateful and vile” language, while never once condemning the hateful & vile language from your own side.

So rail as much as you like, but your arguments will continue to have no merit until you stop behaving with such hypocrisy. [Ref #6, comment on February 11 at 10:37 AM]

Better not let C4P readers know that I was also criticizing rightwingers for their “hateful and vile” language — which, in fact, occurs with some frequency in comments at C4P.

In fact, the post Mr. Crowther linked to when he borrowed Steve Aufrecht’s term “Blogger Tourettes” without so much as mentioning Steve was to his own February 6 post critical of Phil’s first post where he referred to Palin as a “slut.”  Comments on that post were rife with “hateful and vile” language.  And also a commenter called Kjanlady suggesting,

Kjanlady: Can we get his address and post it on the web….along with a picture of him, his house, and the car he drives? ) [Ref #5, comment 02/08/2010, 09:26:54]

Though I credit two other commenters, the first a couple of hours after the suggestion was made, the other by Rich Crowther himself the following day, for saying no to this idea –

section9: No. We don’t do that crap. Much as we’d like to, Philip Munger is a pathetic assclown who, despite his efforts to destroy Sarah Palin, is a private citizen. [Ref #5, comment 02/08/2010, 11:20:51]

Rich : I have the impression that Kjan. is probably making a sarcastic reference to the way in which Palingates published personal information about two former C4P contributors recently.

For the record, Mr Munger is a private citizen whose privacy must be respected.

My post sought to challenge his use of language as a blogger. Implicit in that is the hope that he might re-think his approach to blog posting, and be less deliberately inflammatory when he next writes critically about Governor Palin. [Ref #5, comment 02/09/2010, 01:26:31; emphasis added)

But, for the record, not before someone apparently decided to take Kjanlady up on her suggestion, as reported by Phil shortly after she made it.  (Though of course no one has actual proof that the men taking photos of Phil's house & car were C4P readers, because they skedaddled on out of there as soon as they realized Phil had seen them.)

None of this is to say that Rich Crowther or anyone else at C4P is wrong for calling upon Phil or Gryphen on anyone else to be less inflammatory when they write about Palin, or about anyone else.  But notice how seldom they call upon their own side to use less inflammatory language.  Same hypocrisy I was decrying throughout the discussion of civility.  As, for example, when I wrote last week,

It’s clear that just as much on the left as on the right, too many people are willing to excuse their “own side” for employing the same tactics that they condemn the “other side” for. [Ref #3]

Same hypocrisy I was decrying when I wrote — in that last comment Mr. Crowther selectively quoted from –

But back to the question of hypocrisy: I have said a number of times that lefties are behind hypocritical when they justify their incivility & ugly language against righties because “the right does it to us.”

Unsurprisingly, almost all of the right wing commenters who have commented on this issue on Phil’s blog over the past few days, including you, are using the same hypocritical strategy: you continually show up, usually in anonymous guise, to gripe at lefties for being uncivil & using “hateful and vile” language, while never once condemning the hateful & vile language from your own side.

So rail as much as you like, but your arguments will continue to have no merit until you stop behaving with such hypocrisy. [Ref #6, comment on February 11 at 10:37 AM]

That, in particular, is a message that Mr. Crowther’s selective quoting of my comments left out.

Now, since I don’t typically read C4P, it’s possible that I have missed such condemnation from Mr. Crowther or other conservative bloggers there of the hateful & vile language that so often comes out of the mouths or keyboards of C4P readers and other conservatives & Palin fans.  If so, please point them out to me in comments, & I will stand corrected.  I ask that you please refrain from namecalling as you do so.

Meantime, I’ve got to say that it turns out there’s a whole lot of work to restore fairness & balance to the record when C4P writes about one in laudatory terms.  I wonder if Rich Crowther will still think I have “courage” after he’s read this post.  It’s nice to be called courageous, sure, but even better is to be coopted represented honestly and in context.

References

1. 7/7/2009. “The 2 million dollar meme” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
2. 2/14/2010.  “Skinny White Sunday: Alaska Palm Pilot Rocks!” by Rich Crowther (Conservatives for Palin).
3. 2/8/2010. “Progressive bloggers on Palin: Civility versus namecalling” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
4. 2/10/2010. “Blogger Tourettes” by Steve Aufrecht (What Do I Know?); crossposted as “PA’s Palin Poll – Another Critical View by Another Close Friend” at Progressive Alaska.
5. 2/6/2010. “Foul Mouthed Alaska Democrat In New Low” by Rich Crowther (Conservatives for Palin).
6. 2/10/2010. “PA’s Palin Poll – Another Critical View by Another Close Friend” — crosspost at Progressive Alaska of Steve Aufrecht’s post “Blogger Tourettes”.
7. 4/14/2009. “Anti-WAR letter: Opposing Wayne Anthony Ross” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
8. 4/15/2009. “WAR’s antigay letter to the Alaska Bar Association, 1993″ by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
9. 4/16/2009. “WAR goes down! 23 yeas, 35 nays!” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
10. 2/8/2010. “Midwinter Snow Pictures – and a Comment on C4P Meddling – Updated” by Phil Munger (Progressive Alaska).

Related posts:

1. Conservatives for Palin: A rich field of study for anyone interested in the practical application of intellectual dishonesty & logical fallacy
2. Progressive bloggers on Palin: Civility versus namecalling
3. Progressives, civility, & Palin: Anatomy of an apology

And so I begin the new year by coming out of a period of silence.

A silence, to be sure, less profound than the one I inhabited this time last year.  And for different reasons.  In the last month or so, mainly I’ve just needed a break.

1. The cave

But on New Year’s Day 2009, I was living in a kind of emotional cave, with no desire or wherewithal to communicate with anyone outside my day-to-day life except immediate family.  Especially my dad, who I’d learned just a couple of weeks before had been diagnosed with a terminal lymphoma. That news came on top of stuff I’d already been struggling with for some months, after my then-partner, Rozz who is now Ptery, made the decision while in school in Seattle to transition as a female-to-male (FTM) transsexual, & made accompanying decisions that have essentially ended our partnership as-it-was.

Thus, the cave, about which I wrote on April 2, a few days after coming out of it,

I seem to be have come out of the cave now. Not just feeling better — I’ve felt better a number of times (only to then go back into the grey again) — but actually able & willing to communicate. Maybe it was that I’m finally accepting the inevitable with my partner. Maybe it was finally getting the plane tickets bought to fly down in late April to see my dad. Maybe it was taking enough 5-HTP to keep the serotonin cooking in my brain. Maybe it’s the light coming into the days after a looooooong winter. Maybe it’s all just been perimenopause. Anyway… seems I’m back in the world again.

Now, before I go on, let me explain: this post isn’t just about the history of what I did or experienced in 2009: it’s also about what it meant.  Or, better yet, the meanings I’ve made of it — because that’s what it’s all about, for me — the story, the stories each of us make of our lives.  And this is my blog, of course, so this is my damn story.

And the story of coming out of the cave also has these meanings attached to it:

(1) The cave itself became a new term, describing a new form, of that rather large aspect of my life popularly known as depression (or, sometimes, despair): along with the grey, along with the pit, along with limbo — all of which are described in my late 2006 post The grey — the newly-discovered environment of the cave can include any one of the first three, or exclude all of them; it is chiefly characterized by that deep inability & lack of motivation to communicate.  Big whooptie, a new term — but I do find the language useful in understanding myself around this stuff.  Since, hey, halfway through my life give-or-take, I don’t see the depression/despair gunk suddenly evaporating from my life.  It’s a part of who I am.  I’m just lots better at handling it than before, & part of that is in refining my understanding of how it works in me.

(2) If I were to mark the exact date the cave walls dissolved around me, it would probably be March 30, 2009, which coincided with some important phone calls with Ptery, & also with my brother Mark & I buying our tickets to Spokane to see our dad for what we both understood would probably be the last time this side of our own deaths.  And also on that day, I wrote a lengthy post in memorial to Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries biologist formerly at University of Alaska Fairbanks who had taken his own life the previous week.  I hadn’t known him, but he was the son of the poets Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, & Plath especially had been an significant figure in my life.  Not for the right reasons, initially — but the post explains that: it was my effort to honor Mr. Hughes not as mere adjunct to his famous parents’ biographies — as many of the news accounts of his death seemed to view him — but for who he himself was & for what he brought to all the people in his life, who were mourning him that day.

(3) My dad knew I’d been having a hard time. He was at peace with his own approaching death, & wanted us to be too.  But beyond that, he wanted our happiness.  He was so glad when he heard I’d come out of the cave.  That was one of the very best things about it.

2. Lima beans against WAR

Wow, after the Summer of Hate experienced by the Anchorage LGBT & allied community over Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64, one almost forgets its political prelude, when then-Gov. Sarah Palin named Wayne Anthony Ross — widely known by his license-plate acronym as WAR — to succeed the disgraced Talis Colberg as Alaska’s Attorney General.  Alaska’s top LGBT blog Bent Alaska informs us that its post about WAR, “Palin’s AG Pick Called Gays “Degenerates” (3/29/09), was one of its two 2009 posts to go viral — & that was even before he compared gays to lima beans, a vegetable that he “hates” but still claimed he could represent if he were, say, the lawyer for “United Vegetable Growers.”  We lima beans were, needless to say, not favorably impressed.

Ross also had a history of biased & even misogynistic attitudes in relation to domestic violence, sexual assault, & violence against women; hostility to Alaska Native sovereignty & subsistence rights; a mediocre reputation as a practitioner of law amongst his fellow members of the Alaska Bar Association; & a pretty shaky attitude about executive branch ethics.  Bad news all around: it motivated me to spend a considerable amount of time & energy researching him, listening to legislative confirmation hearings, & writing a very long letter to legislators, which I posted on my blog — thus embarking upon a part-time career as an occasional political blogger.  I wrote a few other posts about WAR, & commented on other sites’ coverage of him (especially Bent Alaska), & celebrated with most of the rest of Alaska when the Alaska Legislature rejected him by a vote of 23 yeas to 35 nays — an unprecedented rejection of a governor’s cabinet pick.

It took a day or two for the Alaska Department of Law to remove WAR from its website. This screenshot was taken on April 16. The red X is mine.

3. Dad

I flew to Spokane with my brother Mark in late April to visit Dad.  We also saw my sister Mer & brother-in-law Julius, with whom my Dad lived, and my brother Dave drove over from Montana.  Ptery hitchhiked up, at my request, so I got to see him too.

Dad was so happy to have all of us there. He had a lot of energy too, considering how ill he was; but near the end, as we began to return to our homes, he took a turn for the worse, as if he’d been holding to life so that he could see us all before he left us to be with Mom.  She had died in November 2005.

I took this picture during that trip: Dad telling one of his wonderful stories about growing up in the lumber camps of eastern Oregon in the 1920s where Grandpa Claude ran locomotives on the Sumpter Valley Railroad for the Oregon Lumber Company; or about the bootleg operation he & his pals in the Army Air Corps had in England during WWII; or about how he met my mom when he was looking for a job, & guy at Ellingson Lumber Company suggested he head to Izee because the camp cook there had two beautiful daughters. It was the younger of the two daughters, my Auntie Pat, who actually introduced my parents after Dad gave her a ride into John Day, where Mom was then working.

That photo on the wall behind Dad was his favorite picture of Mom, taken by a professional photographer shortly before they met. When I look at this photo, I feel his yearning to be with her again.

I last saw him on April 29.  He died not quite a month later, on May 27.  My sister was with him.

I’ve been at peace about Dad’s death almost from the beginning, partly because the peace he himself had about it put me at peace, & partly because of what for lack of better words I will call the messages that came, three of them — two of them to other family members, & the last one to me. My message was from my mother, in the form of sunflowers.  It told me that Dad was with her, & they are both okay.

On July 12, as many family members as could make it, including me & my sister & brothers, all gathered together in Spokane to remember Mom & Dad & to celebrate all that they gave us.

I love you, Mom & Dad.

4. Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64

The Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO 2009-64 was introduced in the Anchorage Assembly on May 12, & thus was my career as an occasional political blogger made much less occasional.

AO 64 would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of personal characteristics in Title 5, Anchorage’s equal rights code, which prohibits discrimination based on those characteristics in employment, housing, financial practices, education, and practices of the Municipality of Anchorage. The summer of 2009 in Anchorage featured a protracted period of public testimony at the Anchorage Assembly, with accompanying sign-waving and letter-writing both by ordinance supporters and those who opposed equal rights — led in particular by Jerry Prevo of the Anchorage Baptist Temple, who used “perverted” and other hate-terms to describe LGBT people, hence the name given the summer by commentator at the Anchorage Press: the Summer of Hate.

Identity Reports (1989) and One in 10 (1986)

From May to September, I wrote in the area of 60 posts about the ordinance, including a number that delved into the background & prevarications of its most vociferous opponent, Jerry Prevo.  I also testified in support of the ordinance on June 16 ( the second of five nights of public testimony). My testimony was based on two major research efforts in the 1980s for Identity, Inc. in which we documented the rampant discrimination in Anchorage & in Alaska based on sexual orientation. (Our research unfortunately did not cover discrimination on the basis of gender identity, which we knew little about at the time.)

The ordinance passed the Anchorage Assembly on August 11, 2009, but was vetoed the following week by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the third time in Anchorage history that equal protection for at least some LGBTQ people in Anchorage was first granted, & then stripped away again.

We weren’t real happy.

5. Friends & allies

The Summer of Hate wasn’t all hate & horror.  There was also some really cool stuff.

Cool stuff was people like Vic Fischer, Jane Angvik, & Arliss Sturgulewski testifying for the ordinance — people with just a teensy bit more credibility than, say, self-declared homophobic Bible-thumping Nazi “rascist” Eddie Burke.

Cool stuff was the huge number of people who turned out on the lawn of the Loussac Library to dance, blow bubbles, & hold signs upholding equal rights for all. The second week of public testimony, on which testimony was heard on two successive nights (June 16-17), was also the run-up to PrideFest, & every time I stepped out of the Assembly chambers for a breather, I felt like PrideFest was already in progress (once, that is, I got past the ABT redshirts & their hot dog tables).

I remember going out there one day & seeing how everyone — members of the LGBT community, & lots of non-LGBT folks including my nephew Miles & some of his friends — was celebrating equality & love for their fellow human beings, as sour-faced, red-shirted opponents stood nearby with their preprinted “Truth is Not Hate” signs agitating against equality.  I thought to myself, I’m so proud of my people — & I found myself for the first time consciously including in my people not just other LGBT people, but all the numerous non-LGBT allies who took it for granted that equality meant all of us.  And were as dumbfounded as we were at the “Truth is Not Hate” hate speech dropping out of the mouths of red-shirts both inside & outside the Assembly chambers.

On a personal level, I was lucky to make some new friendships.  John & Heather Aronno, both now of Alaska Commons, who I met a few days before the first public hearing, became my favorite folks to sit next to at Assembly public hearings: three bloggers, all in a row.

One of my other favorite new people was (& is) Janson Jones, whose fantastic photography at Floridana Alaskiana v2.5 (including of the ordinance battle) first drew my attention. He’s also an all-around cool guy who also became a new dad over the summer — & his photos of his precious daughter Aurelia are pretty wonderful too.

Thanks to the ordinance battle, I also got reaquainted with a friend from way back, Linda Kellen Biegel of Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis, who I hadn’t seen in years. I’d known Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska through email, but not until this summer did I meet him in person. I’ve known M.E. Rider of Grrlzlist, E. Ross of Bent Alaska, & longtime activist (& maker of Equality Works buttons) Stef Gingrich for years, though it was only through the summer that we saw much of each other, since normally — yes, true story — I’m pretty much a hermit.

It was the ordinance that brought me out, for ill & for good. Despite the ordinance’s eventual fate — for me personally, thanks to people like these, it was mostly for good.

6. Palinesque

Somewhere in the middle of this was Sarah Palin’s announcement on July 3 that she would be resigning her position as Governor of Alaska.  I don’t blog that much about Palin — there are other Alaska bloggers who cover her quite thoroughly (thank goodness!) — but within a few days after her announcement, I got fed up with how the national mainstream media was uncritically passing along what I dubbed the 2 million dollar meme: Palin’s claim that $2,000,000 taxpayer (or rather, oil revenue dollars — this is Alaska, after all) had been spent on responding to ethical complaints against her. So I started taking it apart, & continued to do so over at total of six blog posts.

Wow did that raise traffic on my blog. I got nearly 1,800 hits on the first post of the series the first day after it was published; to date it’s gotten 5,530 hits, making it the most read post on my blog.  The pie chart I created for that post also proved to be pretty popular.

My stuff didn’t stop Palin from repeating her lie; but then, who expected that it would?  I’m no fool.  I just hoped the damn mainstream media would wake up & do the job they’re paid to do — so that bloggers like me wouldn’t have to do it for free. I am proud to say that my efforts, which Anchorage Daily News reporter Sean Cockerham picked up on, contributed to Linda Perez of the Governor’s Office being forced to admit there were errors in the hokey spreadsheet the Governor’s Office had cooked up in an incompetent attempt to back up Gov. Palinocchio’s claim.  Cockerham’s story (posted, as far as I know, only on the ADN’s Politics blog, but not as a full-fledged ADN story) said that Perez was going to follow up on further questions he’d brought up — I’ve seen no sign that she ever did, or that ADN itself cared.  I didn’t follow up further myself because by time Perez ‘fessed up as much as she did, I was in Spokane with my family remembering my mom & dad.  I have a feeling everyone who had actual responsibility (because, of course, they were more than mere “community organizers”) decided to drop it.  Gee. I wonder why.

7. I got a new couch

More properly, it’s a futon loveseat. Whatever.  I got it in August, & I’ve been vegging more happily (when I vege) ever since.  My cat loves it too.

8. An effort to up-end the Alaska Judicial Council

Other things were going on in my life too, of course.  But the political stuff stands out, because political blogging is not my great purpose in life — writing my own stuff is. And yet, I kept doing it.

And so it happens that in late August I learned of a lawsuit by which certain Alaska conservatives, most if not all of whom have ties to the so-called right-to-life movement, had filed suit nearly two months before — a fact not covered at all by Alaska’s mainstream media in spite of all of them having received the press release when the suit was filed — which would, if successful, overturn major provisions of the Alaska Constitution with regard to the selection & retention of state court judges. The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, James Bopp, Jr., is a big name: he has litigated similar issues elsewhere.  My own feeling is that this guy is more likely to have shopped around for the Alaskans who could be named as plaintiffs in this case, than that the plaintiffs shopped around for him.  His agenda appears to be a nationwide effort to politicize judicial selection, so that candidates can be selected through popular vote based on litmus test questions on hot-button issues (“What is your opinion on abortion?” — “What is your opinion on same-sex marriage?”), instead of being selected for their judicial integrity & knowledge of the law.

Through my job on staff of the Justice Center at University of Alaska Anchorage, which I’ve held since 1990, I’d become very familiar with Alaska’s judicial merit selection process, & have a lot of respect for it too, & for the quality of judges we have in this state.  Not perfect — but a helluva lot better than in states that have the politicized & often politically corrupt types of selection processes that Bopp seems to prefer.

So, I read about Miller v. Carpeneti, & I wrote about it, & I even took a day off work to attend the hearing before Judge John W. Sedwick in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska on September 11.   I’m not a lawyer, but I read through most of the briefings, & it didn’t seem to me that Bopp’s arguments held much water.  Judge Sedwick apparently agreed: he heard arguments from both sides & then dismissed the case. His opinion was published on September 15.

But we haven’t heard the last from Mr. Bopp: he’s appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, last I heard, the last briefs in the case must be filed no later than February 10, 2010. Oral arguments might then follow.  If Bopp fails at the Ninth Circuit, there’s every possibility he might appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court — he’s argued before them before, & won.

Meanwhile, I continue to wonder what in hell is wrong with the Alaska mainstream media, including our supposed paper-of-record, the Anchorage Daily News. First they all failed to follow up any further on Palin’s spreadsheet-of-hooey in support of her 2 million dollar meme-of-hooey; now it turns out they sat for nearly two months on a press release issued in early July about a lawsuit that could theoretically undermine our state constitution with regard to judicial selection.  Phil Munger at Progressive Alaska has drawn attention to numerous other instances in which the press has sat on its duff instead of investigating & reporting stuff that in some cases is right in front of their faces — for instance, the numerous lies propounded throughout Palin’s putative “memoir,” which the ADN has yet to write any review on.  What else are they sitting on?  How are we to have democracy that way, if the MSM isn’t doing its job?

Oh yeah, I remember now.  Bloggers like me are supposed to do that job nowadays.  In our spare time.  For free.

(All due respect to those reporters who as far as I can tell are doing their best to do their job — but are being shut down by management. I know you guys are out there.)

9. True Diversity Dinner

In the aftermath of Sullivan’s veto of AO 64, several of us bloggers who had been heavily involved in writing about it started talking about what we might do keep the flame alive.  Several of us met at lunchtime one day, & out of someone’s suggestion — I don’t remember whose — next thing you know, the True Diversity Dinner was born.  Its immediate impetus was that the upcoming Mayor’s Diversity Dinner, an event originally created during the administration of Mayor, now Senator, Mark Begich, had been renamed Mayor’s Unity Dinner by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the same guy who had just vetoed equal rights for Anchorage’s lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transfolk.

Instead of protesting, we decided to celebrate the rich diversity that the Mayor’s renaming of the dinner seemed designed to whitewash away. The True Diversity Dinner was our alternative, with the motto, “Because we all deserve a seat at the table.”  It was organized by the bloggers of Alaska Commons, Anchorage Won’t Discriminate, Bent Alaska, Floridana Alaskiana v2.5, Grrlzlist Alaska, Henkimaa, and SOSanchorage.net — but especially by John & Heather Aronno (Alaska Commons & SOSAnchorage.net), who I fear fell far behind in their studies thanks to the dinner.

But it was well worth it, right guys?  It was a tremendous event, with great speakers including my Assembly person Elvi Gray-Jackson, former Congressional candidate & longtime activist for Alaska Native rights Diane Benson, Rev. Marquita Pierre of the Center for Spiritual Healing, & radio host & blogger Shannyn Moore.

On top of that, I was honored to be the recipient of a True Diversity Award for Excellence in Online Media for coverage on my blog of the battle for the Anchorage equal rights ordinance.  Booyah!

10. Hilton workers

And more occasional politics.

When the True Diversity Dinner was first thought up, I hadn’t known that Mayor Sullivan’s Unity Dinner was booked for the Hilton Anchorage Hotel — which was (& still is) under boycott by its workers due to the bad faith practices of its management on orders of the Hilton’s owners, Kentucky-based Columbia Sussex Corporation.  A blog post by Shannyn Moore brought my attention to the fact that the Mayor’s Unity Dinner was also a union-busting dinner. I spent some time researching & writing about the labor dispute, & also attended the Hotel Workers Rising March from the Sheraton (which is now also under boycott due to similar management abuses of workers) to the Hilton two days after the True Diversity Dinner was held.

11. But I’m really about writing my own stuff, & that’s what I need to do now

I’d like to follow up on the hotel workers struggle, both at the Hilton & now the Sheraton.  I hope someone will.  But I can’t.  Here’s the deal.  There are people on this planet, there are people in this state, who thrive on political blogging, & what’s more excel at it.  I think I’m pretty damn good at it when I’m doing it — but I don’t thrive on it.  I start with enthusiasm, but over time… I wear down, my spirit flags, & pretty soon it winds right back into what I started this post with: depression & despair.

Midyear, in the post in which I claimed to be an occasional political blogger, I wrote,

The main reason I set up this site & blog was to help me get back into the flow of writing, of living my life as a writer.  And while writing about politics is writing — well, it’s not my writing, the stuff close to my heart.  Besides, I also work a full-time job.

Besides, sometimes the political stuff can really whack me out….

Another factor about how I handle political posts is that my style isn’t really amenable to fast-response writing, which is a feature of a lot of the best political bloggers I read.  But me, I like to think a lot about what I’m writing.  I like to go deep.  I like to be thorough & as comprehensive as I can.  I like to source all my references thoroughly.  I like — apparently — to write term papers.  (I sure never thought so when I was in college).  And that takes a long time.  Especially since, as previously mentioned, I work a full-time job.  And I also need a certain amount of down time or I am liable to put myself into a depression.

Sometimes, writing my own stuff actually feels like down time.  Reason: I said it above, it’s stuff that close to my heart.

So October saw me returning to writing — at that time, mostly background stuff or responses to stuff that I was reading in preparation for National Novel Writing Month 2009 (NaNoWriMo).  In looking back, I remember that True Diversity Dinner month — that is, September — also saw a bit of focus on writing: a couple of politically-oriented pieces about homophobia in science fiction, including one involving a publication I was writing a story for.  As it happened, I wasn’t far enough along on that story to meet the submission deadline of September 30 — so I picked up & polished an older thing instead.

And whaddaya know! in early October, I was told they wanted to publish it!  Which did much to make me feel like a writer again.

“Cold” was published on October 31, 2009 in Crossed Genres Issue #12, the LGBT issue, & you can still read it online there.  (When it’s no longer live there, & my contract with Crossed Genres permits, I will republish it right here at Henkimaa.com.)  “Cold” was also selected for inclusion in Crossed Genres‘ first-year anthology, which will include one story from each of the magazines first 12 issues.  I think it’s still on schedule for publication in February.

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

November for me was the headlong hurry of NaNoWriMo.  As a result, as anyone who knows this blog saw, I didn’t do much blogging at all.  Such blog posts as got posted were mostly automatically generated “Daily Tweets” posts from my Twitter feed.  And I haven’t done much blogging since NaNoWriMo ended, either.

But whoa! I did a lot of writing — 51,607 words worth of it in November, making me a NaNoWriMo winner this year…. er… I mean, last year.  I was writing in the same story universe as “Cold,” which is about two young women on an extrasolar planet (that is, in another solar system) in the late stages of terraformation, which I’ve finally named Oikos — but my NaNovember 2009 writing was mostly about three centuries earlier in the timeline, before & around the time the ships that will eventually arrive at Oikos leave our solar system.  I called it Long Dark.

And a lot of it was background writing, rather than the story itself.  Because there is so damn much science that I need to have at least some kind of grasp on before I can do the story for real.

Though I came up with at least four stories over the course of the month that I know I can shape into good damn stuff.  And I also discovered that a character of mine from a supposedly completely unrelated project is, whaddaya know, an important historical figure for the society in Long Dark and Cold.  And since that character is very closely based on me… whoa, it’s an awful lot like, well, writing myself into history.  How cool is that?

(Or how egotistical?)

12. Since then…

… that is, during December — what have I been doing?  Not blogging, clearly. Except for one extensive rant about the leakage in various portions of my ceiling.  (Now cured, but the holes in the ceiling still need patching.)  Other than that, lots of vegging out, some writing, lots of reading — my latest topics have included atmospheric pressure, altitude sickness, & spacesuit design (background research for a story in the Cold universe) & how people with strabismus or amblyopia (the latter being the case for me), most of whom grow up stereoblind, might be able to develop stereo (binocular) vision.  Even at 50 years old. Which is what I am now.

50 years old, soon to be 51. And now I reflect on where I was at when I turned 50, early in 2009.  I was still in the cave.  But there were inklings of possibility.  I was still in the cave, for instance, when a confluence of ideas led me to decide how to go about my writing life, which included blogging & other forms of social media to get my stuff out there, instead of just through the old “send out craploads of query letters & get a shitload of rejection letters back before someone finally decides your stuff is good enough to publish” method that has been standard for a very bloody long time.  I knew I’d feel a lot more at ease finding my own audience through social media than going through the query letter drudgery.  It was still pretty remarkable that I made such a decision at such a time, though: social media? for someone who, at that point, was incapable & unmotivated to communicate at all?  But then, I knew the cave walls would dissolve sooner or later.  And they did.

I was also deciding, back in February of 2009 that age 50 was a good time to reach the milestone that I had apparently reached in the sorrows of that time.  The boy that I & Rozz-now-Ptery raised from age 9 was now 21 (& now, some months later, is actually 22), & is setting out on his own course in the world.  He’s in a residential job training program; I seem him some weekends when he comes into town.  Ptery is embarked on another course, living a nomadic life mostly off-the-grid in the Lower 48; we are no longer partners, however much we still love each other. So, I am single &, except for my cat & the boy’s dog, essentially alone.

When I was in college & took a class on Hinduism, I learned that the traditional life path for very pious Brahmin males was supposed to consist of several stages — four of them, I think — with the third stage being that of husband, father, & householder.  When the householding stage was over, these guys were apparently supposed to just up & lickety-split out to the forest to become religious ascetics.  Or something like that.

And when I turned 50, I thought: that’s it, I’m no longer a householder.  Well, I still have my apartment.  And I don’t plan to go live in the woods as an ascetic.  (Ptery’s path is a little closer to that, really.)  But I no longer have the responsibilities of a spouse/partner or of a parent to a minor child.  I can do what I want.  And what I need.

Which is to write.  But dang, it sure takes me a long time to get the politics out of my way to do it.

But I got to that point, & now I plan to continue.

That’s my story.

I’m such a cathead.

Related posts:

1. True Diversity Dinner 1 & 2: Video by Janson Jones
2. True Diversity Dinner video, part 3: Hotel workers, & Elvi's speech
3. True Diversity Dinner: September 25, 2009

The administrative director in the governor’s office, Linda Perez, conceded that some costs were counted twice and said “the total cost is overstated by $26,849.” She said she missed that the Department of Law’s updated numbers included costs that were already counted.

“It was my error…mea culpa,” said Perez, who has worked for governors of both parties since the 1980s. [Ref #1]

There are bunch of other problems that are also noted in Sean’s report, which Perez is going to look into. But read the full story — which I’m happy to report also acknowledges the work I’ve been doing on this. (Along with that of Mako Yamakura, a blogger with the Detroit News, who I’m unfamiliar with.)

Okay, Mel: bed!

Related posts

There’s several of them: follow the tag Palin ethics complaints.

References

1. 7/10/09. “It doesn’t all add up to $1.9 million” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Politics blog)

Related posts:

1. Count me once, count me twice: Creative accounting on Palin's spreadsheet
2. More on Palin's spreadsheet
3. The nearly 2 million dollar spreadsheet

Throughout the last week’s hullabaloo about Palin’s resignation as governor and her insistent repetition of the narrative about $2 million and ethics and public records, etc., and the late nights I’ve spent doing my part to debunk this b.s. — during this same week in the daytime, I was working on production of the latest issue of the Alaska Justice Forum, the quarterly research publication put out by my employer, the Justice Center at University of Alaska Anchorage.  One of the articles this issue is on Alaska justice system operating expenses [Ref #1] — about the fourth such article we’ve done over the past few years.  The issue is at the printer’s now, & haven’t got it online yet, but see the last article we did on the topic in the Winter 2007 issue [Ref #2] — you’ll see that the figures we were dealing with there, involving the operating budgets of the major Alaska justice agencies, including the Departments of Corrections, Public Safety, and Law, are in the hundreds of millions, and the total state operating budget in the billions.  And Palin quit her job, so she claims, for figures that actually only reach $1.9 million, and only by padding and inflating the figures  through various artificial means?  Puts it somewhat into context, really.

But note how I phrased that above: her insistent repetition of the narrative about $2 million and ethics and public records, etc.

Narrative.  Yes.  It’s just a story she’s telling us.

Okay, so then I get to Spokane after a brief flight, sitting behind some young guy who even at that early time of morning had the smell of booze coming out the pores of his skin and wafting back at me as I tried to sleep… and then my sister picks me up at the airport, takes me home and makes me a tasty breakfast burrito and visits with me a bit before going to work, and then I look at some of the photos of our dad and mom that we are gathering here to remember this weekend, and then I think, I’ll do a quick check of my email and news and then go crash for some real sleep.

And saw an article that I absolutely had to read at Alaska Dispatch.  And I read it.

Now I’m asking you to go read it too, because it really put Palin’s 2 million dollar meme into context: not just as a comparison of budget figures, but as a story, one of the competing narratives about why Palin really quit.  It’s called “Palin: How she gained control and then lost it” by Donald Craig Mitchell [Ref #3], an Anchorage attorney who is also the author of two fundamental books on the political and legal history of Alaska Natives and their land (Sold American: The Story of Alaska Natives and Their Land and Take My Land Take My Life: The Story of Congress’s Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims).  Mitchell’s article about Palin is also a history, in this case of Palin’s political career since her first run for statewide office.  It’s only by understanding the info Mitchell presents here that one can really understand what Palin’s narrative about why she quit is all about. Her $2 million dollar ethics complaints meme is really simply the excuse she was looking for to get out of a job she already wanted to get out of.

I’m not going to comment a lot here — because I still badly need to get some real sleep — but just pull out some relevant quotes.  Read them, then go read the full story.

First:

In the interest of full disclosure, I represent Andree McLeod, a citizen-activist who, to hear Sarah tell it, has been one of Governor Palin’s principal tormentors, in two lawsuits. The first concerns Sarah and her senior staff’s intentional use of their private email accounts to conduct state business. The second concerns the question of whether the Governor’s Office waived the “deliberative process privilege” in the Alaska Public Records Act when Sarah decided to share confidential emails with her husband, Todd Palin, knowing when she did so that Todd, who works for British Petroleum, is not a state employee. [Ref #3]

Second:

What during the run-up to the 2012 presidential election Sarah will be is a Republican celebrity the way that Bill Clinton is a Democratic celebrity. Giving speeches in convention halls packed with true-believing party faithful and being fawned over by the network paparazzi will be a whole lot more fun, and way more profitable, than being a candidate. And it certainly will be more fun and way more profitable than being the Governor of a backwater state that is an hour’s drive from Wasilla to the Anchorage airport and then three-plus more hours of flight time from anywhere important.

Once Sarah made the easy decision that she would not run for reelection in 2010 so that during the two years prior to the 2012 presidential election she can be a full-time celebrity, the decision to become one immediately, rather than waiting another year and a half for her term as Governor to expire, was a no-brainer. [Ref #3]

Third:

Sarah Palin is a smart woman. So she knows that she is no more qualified to be Governor of Alaska than she was qualified to serve on the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. So even if she still needed the governorship, which she doesn’t, my bet is that, as she did when she was a member of the Commission, she would be looking for a way out.

For Commissioner Palin, the way out was to use her professed abhorrence of Randy Ruedrich’s ethical transgression as her excuse to leave a job she couldn’t handle. For Governor Palin, the way out is to use her professed abhorrence of the public’s purported misuse of the Alaska Ethics Act as her excuse to leave a job she can’t handle. [Ref #3]

Fourth:

During her news conference last Friday, Sarah called the ethics complaints that Andree McLeod and other Alaskans have filed against her over the past year “silly accusations” and she then bragged that “every one – all 15 (actually 18) of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We’ve won!”

But neither of those assertions is true.

Some of the complaints were frivolous. But many others were not, including the complaint that a senior member of her staff unlawfully manipulated the state civil service system to obtain a job for a Palin campaign supporter, the complaint that Sarah used state money to transport her children to events they had no official reason to be at, the complaint that two members of her staff spent time during their work day in the Governor’s Office attending to Sarah’s political interests, the complaint that Sarah has been unlawfully collecting per diem for living at home in Wasilla using the ruse that she lives in the Governor’s Mansion in Juneau when everyone – including all of Juneau – knows that she never really has, and, most importantly, the ethics complaint that Sarah filed last September against herself as part of the Troopergate scandal in order to have the Attorney General investigate whether she had ordered Walt Monegan, her Commissioner of Public Safety, to fire her former brother-in-law from his job as a state trooper. [Ref #3]

Okay, that’s enough.  Go read the rest of Mitchell’s article.  And I’ll go catch some shuteye.

Related posts

There’s several of them: follow the tag Palin ethics complaints.

References

1. Spring 2009 (forthcoming). “Justice System Operating Expenses” by Justice Center, University of Alaska Anchorage. Alaska Justice Forum 26(1): 2–3.
2. Winter 2007. “Justice System Operating Expenditures” by Justice Center, University of Alaska Anchorage. Alaska Justice Forum 23(4): 1, 10-11.
3. 7/9/09. “Palin: How she gained control and then lost it” by Donald Craig Mitchell (Alaska Dispatch).

Related posts:

1. Count me once, count me twice: Creative accounting on Palin's spreadsheet
2. The nearly 2 million dollar spreadsheet
3. Questions about the Palins' tax returns

Well, it’s all rather difficult to explain without being able to show you.  So this evening, I took the original document and set it up to show you exactly what “Me” and I discovered.

Click through to this document, which I’ve titled “Count me once, count me twice” [Ref #4] — it’s a PDF with a summary of the problem, and a bunch of color-coded sticky notes that you can click on to get more detailed explanations.  You can also refer to the original document [Ref #5] if only to verify that the only changes I made to the document was to get both the Office of the Governor’s & the Department of Law’s spreadsheets side by side so I could show the relationships between them.

This is only one example of problems with the Office of the Governor’s spreadsheet, including other methods of padding it. For information about other problems, see the other references in the reference list below. [Refs #1, 2, 3]

That’s all.  Can you believe it?  You’ve gotta be wondering why I’m not staying up all night, eh?  No, I did that last night.  Tonight I’m gonna hang out with my friend until it comes time for her to take me to the airport, then I’m gonna climb onto that red-eye flight & sleep my way to Seattle.  (In Seattle, for my three-hour layover, I shall, of course, be sleepless. Heh.) I’ll be lots quieter over the weekend; I’ll be spending it with my family in Spokane, where we are gathering to remember a most wonderful man, my dad, who died on May 27.

G’night.

Related posts

There’s several of them: follow the tag Palin ethics complaints.

References

1. 7/8/09. “The nearly 2 million dollar spreadsheet” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
2. 7/9/09. “More on Palin’s spreadsheet by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
3. 7/7/09. “The 2 million dollar meme” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
4. 7/9/09. “Count me once, count me twice” prepared by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa) based upon spreadsheets prepared by the Office of the Governor, State of Alaska on or about July 7, 2009 in an attempt to prove Governor Palin’s $2 million claim; see Ref #2. Illustrates how the Palin spreadsheet padded figures through use of double entry of figures from the Department of Law.
5. Undated, circa 7/7/09. Untitled spreadsheet detailing estimated expenses to the State of Alaska for public records requests and ethics complaints in 2008-2009 (Alaska Office of the Governor; available on Henkimaa.com).

Related posts:

1. Governor's office admits errors on Palin spreadsheet
2. The nearly 2 million dollar spreadsheet
3. More on Palin's spreadsheet

Trust? When it comes to financial claims, maybe I'll trust that queen on the back of a Canadian coin, but not the beauty queen who's shortly to leave Alaska government

Gee, I seem to be staying up late again, as I did for the first of this series of posts on Sarah Palin’s 2 million dollar meme [Ref #1]. I should sleep really nicely on the red-eye flight I’ll be on this time to morrow morning.

Why am I up? Because after getting home very late from watching “Caprica” at my friend Sylvia’s place — which I had arrived at very late due to having first spent time writing the 2nd in this series, on the Office of the Governor’s nearly 2 million dollar spreadsheet [Ref #2] – I had the poor judgment to check out my Google Reader, & discovered that Sean Cockerham had filed a story on the spreadsheet [Ref #3] at 9:34 PM last night:

The story addresses some of the problem issues with the spreadsheet, especially those that come with Cockerham’s capabilities as a journalist who actually interviews people (unlike me, I mainly just read documents), so he was able to fill in some of the blanks about what some of the line items in the Office of the Governor’s spreadsheet actually represented.  I tend to have greater trust in Cockerham’s reporting than in the reports of certain other ADN journalists, so I was disappointed that he failed to  catch some of the errors that I and a commenter or two earlier discovered on the spreadsheet itself.  Because of filing deadlines on deadlines, perhaps? Maybe he’ll do a followup — I hope so.  Meanwhile, as of this writing, the ADN website doesn’t have a copy of the spreadsheet posted, so ADN readers can’t examine it for themselves. Helpful I’ve got it here, eh? [Ref #4]

But, the story still leads to further deterioration of Palin’s 2 million dollar claim.  This post is mainly just to walk you through it.

Let’s begin where Cockerham begins: with a reiteration of what Palin’s claim is:

“That huge waste that we have seen with the countless, countless hours that state staff is spending on these frivolous ethics violations and the millions of dollars that Alaskans are spending, that money not going to things that are very important, like troopers and roads and teachers and fish research,” Palin said this week. [Ref #3]

Cockerham goes on to explain that the Palin administration had provided the ADN with a breakdown of the $1.9 million that they are claiming the State of Alaska has spent on these allegedly “frivolous” ethics complaints; the breakdown is primarily an account of the hours state employees, including Department of Law attorneys, have worked on the the legislative Troopergate investigation last year, on public records requests, and on lawsuits and ethics complaints.  Palin spokeswoman Sharon Leighow acknowledged that the state employees would have been paid regardless of what exactly they were working on, but, she said,

“Important legal issues involving the state’s interests were delayed in order to respond to these complaints. That means lost value to the state, which is measurable in dollars,” she said. “There were also hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on equipment and outside legal counsel — dollars that could have been used to benefit the state.” [Ref #3]

What Leighow does not acknowledge, of course, is that public accountability of elected officials — themselves state employees, who are supposed to be working for us — is itself a benefit to the state, and that the statutory right to access to public records and to make complaints when ethical violations are suspected are two of the fundamental ways that citizens have available to keep their employees honest.

In the posted-while-waiting-for-the-bus addendum to my earlier spreadsheet post, I wrote:

Who’s to say if all the public records requests listed on p. 1 have anything to do with ethics complaints against Palin? or even, indeed, with Palin at all? Might some of them relate to other functions and officces of Alaska government? Give us a breakdown, please. Also give us a comparison with public records requests made in the prior year of Palin’s administration before she was tapped by McCain, and with a typical year of the Murkowski & Knowles administrations. Be sure as well to include information on the fees charged for public records requests under all three administrations, and how much income the State of Alaska derived from these fees to offset the costs. By all accounts, fees charged by the Palin administration are vastly exhorbitant and seem calculated to discourage citizens from being able to hold government accountable to the people. Does Parnell intend to follow these usurious policies too? [Ref #2; emphasis added]

Cockerham answers the portion that I’ve bolded.  He writes:

The Palin administration has experienced a volume of information requests and public ethics complaints beyond those of any previous Alaska governor. Most came after Aug. 29 of last year, the day that John McCain chose Palin to be the Republican party’s vice presidential nominee.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s unprecedented,” said Linda Perez, who handles the requests as Palin’s administrative director and has been in state government since the Sheffield administration in the 1980s.

She said the Palin administration in its two and a half years has received 238 public records requests — 189 of them coming since McCain chose her as his running mate last August. The previous governor, Frank Murkowski, had 109 in four years. [Ref #3]

Let me make another observation and another request, then.  Observation: public records requests also play a crucial role in the process of evaluating candidates for office, & it would seem entirely appropriate for a candidate for national office — in fact a national office, if the candidate was successful, which would put her one heartbeat away from the most powerful post in the country &, arguably, the world — to be scrutinized with extraspecial diligence.  It shouldn’t be any big surprise at all that Palin’s candidacy for U.S. vice president would lead to an unprecedented number of public records requests.  I recall that the City of Wasilla also experienced a deluge of requests about Palin last fall, in its case into Palin’s record as mayor of Wasilla.

So now my new request: give us a rundown of how Alaska’s experience with Palin before and after her candidacy as VP compares with the experience of other state governments when one of their public officials was tapped for the same position.  Extra credit if you can find a comparison with a state that has never before fielded a VP candidate.  Extra extra credit if that VP candidate had, just a month or two before s/he was tapped, become a central figure in an ethics-related investigation like our own Troopergate, which gave both state and nation every good reason to want to have clear answers about whether Palin had, as was alleged, abused her power and violated Alaska’s executive ethics statute.

Make sense?  Yes, I kinda thought so myself.

Back to Cockerham’s story:

The public records requests to Palin are largely from members of the Alaska and national press, although some are from people who have filed ethics complaints against the governor. A large portion of the money Palin talks about as she explains reasons for her resignation is state employee time on public records requests. [Ref #3]

In other words, only some of the public records requests Palin & co. are complaining about comes from “frivolous” ethics complaints.  Turns out that some of it was just — what, O students of American civics? — the state and national press playing the role that it’s supposed to play in a representative democracy: helping the entire nation to evaluate the qualifications and record of the person they are being asked to vote into power. How utterly appalling!  Why, if we lived in the Soviet Union, or even Putin’s Russian Federation, surely we would never have to watch our candidate suffer such indignity!  Surely there wouldn’t even be a press corps of “opposition researchers” (Palin’s oft-repeated catchphrase) who could even attempt such incredible evil: they’d all be doing work that benefited the state in some labor camp or gulag instead!

Fact is, the press was doing what it should be doing.  And if some of that press was, as Palin alleges, “opposition” — please: a healthy opposition is also fundamental to the balance of forces necessary to keep democracy safe. Hello?

Onward.  A couple of days ago, Steve at What Do I Know? wrote in response to my meme post,

Palin’s counterclaim is that she’s counting the cost of all the time others besides the Personnel Review Board spent. One line from a new ADN article from Sean Cockerham Mel quoted caught my eye:

It is a per-hour calculation that the Palin administration put together, involving time spent by state lawyers deciding which public information to release as a result of all public records requests, time spent by governor’s office staffers responding to media inquiries about ethics complaints, and time technicians spend on retrieving requested e-mail, among other things.This isn’t in quotes in the article, so I’m not sure Palin actually said this or Sean has worded it this way, but as I understand it, no one should be deciding which public information to release. ALL public information should be released. [Ref #5, citing Ref #6]

At the time, I agreed with Steve’s criticism, commenting,

I’ve been thinking about that “deciding which public info to release” thing too: what in fact is behind that? Is that why searching state servers for emails between, say, Eddie Burke & certain Palin admin officials is taking so long: because it’s not just searching, but also deciding which posts to actually pass on to Celtic Diva in response to her public records request? If so, then sure, I could see where it could get overwhelming, b/c that’s a lot of extra decisionmaking to do, to figure out what is or what is not politically advantageous — b/c the job of govt. has been handed over completely to politics & ideologies, no longer to the good of all the people. [Ref #5, comments]

Steve replied:

Well, first, we have to remember it wasn’t in quotes, so we don’t know if Palin actually said that or Sean paraphrased her that way.

Second, some information is NOT public because it has personnel or other confidential information, so some deciding may be in order. But NOT for public information. And unlike the Feds, the state shouldn’t have any national security issues to deal with.

$2 million is a lot of hours. Either they are totally incompetent, billing fraudulently, or just making the number up. [Ref #5, comments; emphasis added]

Cockerham’s story follows the explanation offered by Steve that I’ve bolded above.  Cockerham writes,

The biggest chunk of [state employee time spent on public records requests], more than $600,000, represents hours state lawyers spent reviewing requested information. They decide how much to release. Records can be withheld for reasons like an individual’s privacy or for “deliberative process” — an executive privilege generally limited to the governor and close advisers, covering internal deliberations before a decision is made. [Ref #3]

Which is a reasonable explanation overall; someone other than me will have to rule on whether the state employee hours represented by that “more than $60,000″ were exaggerated.  But whether or not, remember again: (1) all those hours were hours the state employees would have gotten paid regardless of whether it was in examining public records, or fulfilling some other task demanded of their jobs; and (2) the biggest chunk of those hours were not related to putatively “frivolous” ethics claims, but to public records requests by the Alaska and national media who — yep, I’m going to say it again — made those requests in fulfillment of the press’ role in informing the public about the qualifications and performance of a candidate for high office.  And I’m just going to have to hope that Department of Law lawyers were fulfilling their own roles properly and ethically, and perhaps even with a fulfilling sense of their own importance in the protection of democracy as well as the constitutionally mandated right to individual privacy.  Nothing happened here that is worth any more gripes or moans from Palin and her camp.

Just because it’s late, and even if I go to bed right this second I’ll only have one hour to sleep, I’m going to skip over some of Cockerham’s article right now to some other stuff that I found ludicrous about the claims behind Palin’s spreadsheet.

On the Alaska Personnel Board’s work on ethics complaints:

A large part of the Palin administration’s $1.9 million cost breakdown is $560,800 for state personnel board work on ethics complaints. But the board itself recently gave a much smaller figure — $300,000 — for hiring outside investigators for the complaints, nearly all of which have been dismissed. Perez said the difference is the larger number represents contracts for services not yet billed. [Ref #3]

To believe this, one would have to believe that just what has not yet been billed from the 13 ethics complaints the Alaska Personnel Board has already reported on, plus whatever may come out of the one or two FY08-09 cases still pending, will nearly double the Personnel Board’s figures.  Cockerham rounded their total up to $300,000; it was actually $296,043, whic means that — according to Perez — what’s not been billed yet is over a quarter of a million dollars: $264,757.  Way?

No way.

And remember again that of the $296,043 (or use Cockerham’s rounded up figure) reported by the Alaska Personnel board already, nearly 2/3 of it came from Palin’s ethics complaint against herself — a complaint that she admitted herself at the time was “without merit.” [Ref #7]

As I wrote in my “meme” post,

Without merit, huh? Do I hear the word frivolous?

Well, not exactly frivolous.  Palin had serious reason to file an ethics complaint against herself: it was her attempt to forestall, & ultimately to negate the “guilty of ethics violations” verdict of, the legislative Troopergate investigation conducted by investigator Stephen Branchflower. [Ref #1]

This time I’ll let Cockerham remind us how that worked:

Around two-thirds of the $300,000 that has been spent was in addressing the “Troopergate” issue last fall. Palin herself initiated the personnel board investigation on “Troopergate,” saying that the state Legislature’s investigation of the matter was politicized and she was seeking the appropriate venue to deal with it. The Palin administration cost breakdown also includes what’s calculated as more than $100,000 worth of per-hour state lawyer time related to the Legislature’s investigation of the “Troopergate” affair. The Legislature’s report found Palin abused her power, while the personnel board’s investigator disagreed. [Ref #3]

This seems like a good time to show off the nifty little pie chart I constructed for the “meme” post which shows exactly what Palin’s nearly 2/3 of the pie looks like:

(Click through on the photo to get to my Flickr photostream, where you can view this chart full-size.)

As AKMuckraker wrote yesterday,

I’m a sucker for a pie chart, and what this one says is that between the Troopergate probe that she herself initiated, the other Troopergate probe that found her guilty of ethics violations, the investigation that resulted in reimbursing the state for her children’s travel expenses, and the one that suggested ethics training for a top member of the administration… the biggest chunk of that pie is the governor’s doing and belongs right on the governor’s plate. [Ref #8]

Now, finally, we come to my very most favoritest of all the claims made by Palin’s staff in Cockerham’s article:

Another significant chunk of the $1.9 million that Palin talks about is what her administration says is over $415,000 worth of staff time in the governor’s office.

Perez said that represents an estimated 5,773 hours of staff time doing tasks related to public records requests and ethics complaints, whether it be Palin’s spokeswoman answering questions about complaints, staffers making copies, or time the head of the governor’s Anchorage office, Kris Perry, spends reviewing documents.

“Kris Perry, at least half of her time is spent dealing with ethics complaints and public records requests,” said the governor’s spokeswoman, Leighow. [Ref #3]

Let’s do a little math:

5,773 hours of staff time divided by 40 hours per typical work week = 144.325 weeks
144.325 weeks divided by 52 weeks in a year = 2.775 years of staff time

2.775 years of staff time — without even any holiday or annual leave! — to address these public records requests?

Do you believe that?  I sure don’t.

(Do you think it was worth losing any sleep over?  At least I have time before work for a shower.)

Addendum

Phil Munger at Progressive Alaska — who provided me a copy of the Palin spreadsheet in the first place — has a post at his blog in which he’s collecting other spreadsheet & $2 million meme stories.  Check it out:

• 7/8/09. “Saradise Lost – Book 3 – Chapter 14 — WTF Spreadsheet . Will the AK MSM Buy It? Phil Munger (Progressive Alaska).

Related posts

There’s several of them: follow the tag Palin ethics complaints.

References

1. 7/7/09. “The 2 million dollar meme” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
2. 7/8/09. “The nearly 2 million dollar spreadsheet” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa). A first look at the spreadsheet released by the Office of Governor that attempts to justify Palin’s $2 million claim.  Some legit costs, but lots & lots of padding.
3. 7/8/09. “Palin says inquiries wasted ‘millions’ — TALLY: Record requests, ethics complaints, lawsuits, troopergate given price tag” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
4. Undated, circa 7/7/09. Untitled spreadsheet detailing estimated expenses to the State of Alaska for public records requests and ethics complaints in 2008-2009 (Alaska Office of the Governor; available on Henkimaa.com).
5. 7/7/09. “Deciding Which Public Information to Release” by Steve (What Do I Know?).
6. 7/6/09. “Palin says ethics inquiries were paralyzing — INTERVIEW: Governor says she resigned because of frivolous complaints” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
7. 7/1/09. “State spent nearly $300K investigating Palin ethics complaints: Most expensive investigation may have been driven by Palin herself” by Patrick Forgey (Juneau Empire).
8. 7/8/09. “Palin’s Milllllions of Dollars!” by AKMuckraker (The Mudflats).

Related posts:

1. Count me once, count me twice: Creative accounting on Palin's spreadsheet
2. The nearly 2 million dollar spreadsheet
3. Governor's office admits errors on Palin spreadsheet

Palin’s office details complaint costs

The Associated Press

Published: July 7th, 2009 05:23 PM
Last Modified: July 7th, 2009 05:23 PM

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Sarah Palin’s office has released a nearly $2 million cost breakdown detailing what the resigning Alaska governor says the state has paid tackling ethics complaints against her.

The spreadsheet compiled by the governor’s office totals more than $1.9 million reportedly spent by various state agencies to handle the complaints as well as public records requests.

Palin, who steps down July 26, has racked up more than $500,000 in personal legal debts on top of that.

According to the cost breakdown, expenditures by the state Department of Law added up to more than $850,000.

The governor’s office says its expenditures totaled more than $425,000 in nearly 6,000 hours of staff hours.

Palin’s staff released the numbers to back up her contention the onslaught of “frivolous” ethics complaints have cost the state millions of dollars and thousands staff hours. [Ref #1]

Ever since the story Sean Cockerham filed Monday night [Ref #2]— the one I quoted from in the “Addendum” portion of my two million dollar meme post [Ref #3]— I’ve felt that Palin’s story about the $2 million being attributable to staff work across several state agencies was just her shifting to a new explanation when Cockerham (and others) interviewed her. Because Cockerham of course had also been the ADN reporter who reported on July 1 about the Alaska Personnel Board figures for the ethics complaints against Palin, & knew that the real figure was not $2 million but $296,000. I reckoned he might have mentioned those figures to her during her interview, & so she simply shifted ground to a new explanation.

So after I read the AP story above, I found myself speculating that the Office of the Governor’s office had been working overtime to try to back up her shifting explanation ever since, & the spreadsheet would full of all kinds of weird padding to try to justify her claim.

Now I have a copy of it — which I’ve uploaded to my site so that you too can take a look at it too.  I’ve retained the file name I received it under: records-costs-attachment-2.pdf. Tip o’ the nib to P for providing me with a copy.

On first glance I think my speculations were partly right, partly wrong.

The document is two pages; it looks like they may have come from two different sources.   The first page has no title or date.  Looks to me like it’s probably from the Governor’s office, & the 2nd page — which does have a title and date — is an itemization of just the Department of Law portion.  Page 1 figures from other offices — the Office of the Governor itself, for example, as well as the Personnel Review Board (i.e., the Alaska Personnel Board)— are not for the most part itemized.  Which means that limited conclusions can be drawn from them.

The second page is dated June 26, 2009, comes from the Office of the Attorney General, Department of Law, & bears the title “Governor’s Office Legal Support FY09: Itemized Costs by Matter.”  Given that Sean Cockerham’s interview of Palin, referenced above, took place just a couple days ago, whereas this document is dated a couple of weeks ago, this indicates that I might be wrong that Palin was merely shifting ground in her explanation of where her $2 million figure came from.

It also seems that some of the costs in the spreadsheets are legitimately non-Personnel Board costs related to ethics complaints & public records requests.  But it also seems that I was right about there being a lot of padding here.

For example, the figure given on page 1 for the Personnel Review Board is $560,800, whereas the figures released on July 1 by the Personnel Board itself states that its costs for the ethics complaints against Palin & her staff were no more than $296,043 — just a little over half of this new figure.  Where did the extra amount come from?

One of the page 2 (Department of Law) line items was “Governor’s Staff Advice re Campaign” and gave a figure of $4586.45, representing 37.6 hours of DOL attorney Bockman’s time to, as a note explains, to give “Advice to Gov Ofc: VP Campaign.”  Now, that makes sense: one could expect that Palin’s staff should of course be getting some legal advice about how to handle things once Palin became a VP candidate.  That is an ethical matter (& was identified as such by DOL), but it doesn’t actually have anything to do with ethics complaints or public records requests — looks, in fact, more like general advice of the “don’t do this on state time because it has to do with the vice presidential campaign; but that other thing, yeah, you can do that because it’s legitimate state business” variety.  I.e., helping the governor’s staff maintain proper boundaries between Palin’s new double-role as both governor & political candidate.

But that didn’t stop the Office of the Governor from transferring that exact same amount of $4586.45 to a line on page 1 under the subtitle “Ethic complaints.”  Presto change-o! a non-complaint related matter suddenly become an complaint-related matter, simply by through the application of copy & paste! One didn’t even have to wiggle one’s nose!

It’s hard to tell much of anything about some of the other non-itemized costs.  $315,000 for the Office of the Governor: how many people’s salaries does that represent?  How is it that 818.2 hours of DOL attorney time (mentioned on page 1 but not page 2) was taken up in the Legislative ethics investigation? — at 40 hours a week, that over five months of full-time work.  (Tip o’ the nib to D.S. for pointing this out.)

Public records requests were totaled out at $528,336.  But nothing is said here about whatever fees might have been charged for those public records requests.  To report all of that as costing the State, without reporting any income to the State from related fees, would be like griping about how much I had to pay out of my very own pocket to feed myself poor me poor me poor me without bothering to inform you that I also have income from a 40-hour-a-week job that makes me perfectly capable of supporting not only my addiction to not starving to death, but also to keep a roof over my head.  The (non-itemized) item “Dept. of Aministration – IT,” totaling at $125,413, might fall in the same category: at least some of that amount is likely to relate to electronic records searches of state servers to answer public records requests, with related fees.  (Other IT costs could, of course, be searches conducted in order to satisfy information needs of investigators in the various ethics complaints).

That’s all I have right now on a first look at this — and me no expert on budgets or the legal processes involved.  Possibly I’ve made errors in my speculations & conclusions.  In the meantime, we’ll probably see lots of reporting on this by other bloggers & the mainstream press.  So be on the lookout for other people’s take on this, many of whom will be more knowledgeable than me.

I’ve just taken a look at one blog post which offers some helpful info from another tack:

But David Murrow, a spokesperson for the Governor, said in an interview that much of this money was budgeted to the lawyers in advance and would have gone to them anyway, even if state lawyers hadn’t been defending against these ethics complaints.

In response to our questions, the Governor’s office provided us with a detailed breakdown of the millions Palin has claimed has gone to defending against ethics complaints. It does list roughly $1.9 million in expenditures.

But Murrow, the spokesperson, acknowledged to our reporter, Amanda Erickson, that this total was arrived at by adding up attorney hours spent on fending off complaints — based on the fixed salaries of lawyers in the governor’s office and the Department of Law. The money would have gone to the lawyers no matter what they were doing. The complaints are “just distracting them from other duties,” Murrow said.

In other words, while these lawyers might have been free to do other legal work for the state, the ethics complaints have apparently not had the real world impact Palin has claimed, and didn’t drain money away from cops, teachers, roads and other things. [Ref #4]

Okay.  Gotta run.

Addendum

filed via iPod Touch from the bus stop where I’m waiting for my bus [7:29 PM AST]:

Who’s to say if all the public records requests listed on p. 1 have anything to do with ethics complaints against Palin? or even, indeed, with Palin at all? Might some of them relate to other functions and officces of Alaska government? Give us a breakdown, please. Also give us a comparison with public records requests made in the prior year of Palin’s administration before she was tapped by McCain, and with a typical year of the Murkowski & Knowles administrations. Be sure as well to include information on the fees charged for public records requests under all three administrations, and how much income the State of Alaska derived from these fees to offset the costs. By all accounts, fees charged by the Palin administration are vastly exhorbitant and seem calculated to discourage citizens from being able to hold government accountable to the people. Does Parnell intend to follow these usurious policies too?

Note: this addendum was originally added as a comment, since I couldn’t figure out how to get it into the actual blog w/ my iPod.  But I rolled it into the post where I wanted it to be once I got home.

I will furthermore add that I highly recommend the track “Storming New Caprica” by Bear McCreary from the season 3 soundtrack of Battlestar Galactica as excellent music for meditating while walking upon the neverending battle to combat Palin’s Palincchioisms.

Related posts

There’s several of them: follow the tag Palin ethics complaints.

References

1. 7/7/09. “Palin’s office details complaint costs” by the Associated Press (Anchorage Daily News).
2. 7/6/09. “Palin says ethics inquiries were paralyzing — INTERVIEW: Governor says she resigned because of frivolous complaints” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
3. 7/7/09. “The 2 million dollar meme” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
4. 7/8/09. “Key Reason Palin Gave For Quitting May Be False” by Greg Sargent (The Plum Line).

Related posts:

1. Count me once, count me twice: Creative accounting on Palin's spreadsheet
2. Governor's office admits errors on Palin spreadsheet
3. More on Palin's spreadsheet

meme. n.  A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. [Ref #1]

That’s the definition given in the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition.  The topmost collection of definitions, posted at the Urban Dictionary in 2003 by a user called Emme, provide some additional help in understanding the term, which was coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene:

1 :  an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)
2 :  a pervasive thought or thought pattern that replicates itself via cultural means; a parasitic code, a virus of the mind especially contagious to children and the impressionable
3 :  the fundamental unit of information, analogous to the gene in emerging evolutionary theory of culture….
4 :  in blogspeak, an idea that is spread from blog to blog
5 :  an internet information generator, especially of random or contentless information [Ref #2]

One might add this definition: an idea that is fed by a less than truthful politician to a lazy mainstream media, which is uncritically transmitted to the public when the true facts are readily available & have even been reported on already — sometimes even by the same media source as the one now  passing on the prevaricating politician’s false information.

Case in point: from Sarah Palin’s July 3 resignation speech:

Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations – such as holding a fish in a photograph, wearing a jacket with a logo on it, and answering reporters’ questions.

Every one – all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We’ve won! But it hasn’t been cheap – the State has wasted THOUSANDS of hours of YOUR time and shelled out some two million of YOUR dollars to respond to “opposition research” – that’s money NOT going to fund teachers or troopers – or safer roads. And this political absurdity, the “politics of personal destruction” … Todd and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills in order to set the record straight. And what about the people who offer up these silly accusations? It doesn’t cost them a dime so they’re not going to stop draining public resources – spending other peoples’ money in their game. [Ref #3]

There’s actually a number of errors of fact in this brief passage of Palin’s speech, but this post will be long enough if I focus  on the one I’ve emphasized: Palin’s claim that $2,000,000 taxpayer (or rather, oil revenue dollars — this is Alaska, after all) have been spent on responding to ethical complaints against Palin.

Problem?  Just two days before, on July 1, the Anchorage Daily News, the Juneau Empire, and the Associated Press all reported on figures released by the Alaska Personnel Board about the actual costs of its investigations into ethical complaints against Palin & members of her administration. The costs were considerably less than what Palin claims: $296,042.58. [Ref #4, 5, 6, 7] Big difference.  Here’s what that difference looks like:

What’s more, nearly two-thirds of that amount was attributable in no small part to an ethics case Palin filed against herself.  As explained by Patrick Forey in his Juneau Empire story,

[T]he timing, scope and other factors of the single largest expense appear to fit the case Palin filed against herself that cost $187,797 to investigate. That’s almost two-thirds of the total $296,042 of all Personnel Board investigations in the last two years.

The self-reported complaint was a means to have a legislative investigator’s findings in the “Troopergate” case reexamined by a Personnel Board investigator. She said publicly that her self-reported complaint was without merit. [Ref #6]

Without merit, huh? Do I hear the word frivolous?

Well, not exactly frivolous.  Palin had serious reason to file an ethics complaint against herself: it was her attempt to forestall, & ultimately to negate the “guilty of ethics violations” verdict of, the legislative Troopergate investigation conducted by investigator Stephen Branchflower. As Forey reports:

The Legislative Council, chaired by then-Sen. Kim Elton, D-Juneau, had budgeted $100,000 for its independent investigation of Troopergate. Legislative investigator Stephen Branchflower concluded Palin abused her authority when she waged a campaign against a state trooper with whom she had a family dispute, but found she had the legitimate power to fire former Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan who failed to take action against the trooper.

Branchflower’s report came out Oct. 10, 2008, in the heat of a bitter presidential campaign. Then, Palin filed her complaint against herself on Troopergate with the Personnel Board. Its report, done by the Personnel Board-hired counsel Tim Petumenos, cleared Palin and came out the evening before the election. [Ref #6]

This chronology is not entirely accurate: in fact Palin filed her self-complaint on September 1, 2008, more than a month before Branchflower’s report was released. (The Wikipedia article has a partial account of the Troopergate scandal — partial because it fails as of this writing to discuss reaction or consequences of the ethics investigations. [Ref #8]) A comparison of the Branchflower & Petumenos reports on Troopergate are beyond the scope of my energy or this post; suffice it to say that I’ve read both (follow the links & you can do so, too [Ref #9, 10]), & find Petumenos’ report to be weak & pitiable.  Andrew Halcro summed it up well at the time:

There appears to be a lot wrong with the report conducted by Personnel Board Investigator Tim Petumenos when compared to the Branchflower report and many questions remain unanswered.

* Conflicts in evidence that he missed or disregarded
* Misapprehension of the law
* Witnesses he never spoke with directly and whose credibility he could not have assessed
* Evidence he ignored
* An acceptance of statements by the Governor uncritically
* An unsupportable application of the legal standard of “probable cause”
* The failure to consider the evidence in the aggregate
* The failure to even acknowledge, let along evaluate, the circumstantial evidence (e.g., eight individuals all doing and saying the same thing, oftentimes in exactly the same words, 35 times over 18 months, permits a reasonable inference of direction and coordination) [Ref # 11]

The Anchorage Daily News has more on the differences between the two reports. [Ref #12]; editorially, the newspaper also found much to doubt in Petumenos’ version. [Ref #13] Be that as it may, Palin has consistently ignored the findings of the Branchflower report, & accepted the inadequate Petumenos report, released the day before the presidential election that saw the McCain/Palin ticket’s loss to Obama/Biden, as completely exonerating her.  Besides bad press, the principal results of the Troopergate investigations were that 10 witnesses, including Palin’s husband Todd, were found in contempt by the Alaska Senate in February 2009 for failing initially to respond to Branchflower’s subpoenas the previous September [Ref #14]; and a few days later Palin’s attorney general Talis Colberg was forced to resign for having counseled the 10 to ignore the subpoenas [Ref #15].

Back to the numbers: Petumenos’ investigation of Palin’s complaint against herself, with which two other Troopergate-related complaints were combined (one by the Public Safety Employees’ Association alleging improper access of Trooper Michael Wooten’s personnel & worker’s comp files and attempting to engineer his firing; a second by fired Commissioner of Public Safety Walt Monegan seeking a public hearing in order to clear his name & restore his reputation), took up nearly two-thirds of total expenditures made by the Alaska Personnel Board in responding to ethics complaints in FY 2008-2009 against Palin (note: the Alaska state fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30).  Here’s the complete breakdown:

And here’s what it looks like visually:

(Click through on any of these figures to get to my Flickr photostream, where they can also be viewed full-size.)

In other words, not only is Palin’s figure of $2 million for the ethics investigations a wild exaggeration, but turns out that nearly two-thirds of the “THOUSANDS OF HOURS” in “frivolous” ethics complaints were “wasted” by Palin’s complaint against herself. [Ref #5, 6]

Complaints by persons other than Palin against Palin cost only $108,294.66.  That’s a far cry from $2 million.

But why can’t we tell which costs went with which other cases?  Sean Cockerham explains why in his Anchorage Daily News story:

The newly released expense list doesn’t specify the nature of each case listed. It only provides internal case numbers followed by the total expenses incurred for each one of the cases. The board won’t say which case numbers correspond with which complaint, or provide a detailed breakdown of the expenses. Under state law, ethics complaints are secret unless the subject of the complaint waives privacy. [Ref #5]

However,

It is possible to deduce which expenses could correspond with some of the known ethics complaints filed against the governor.

The chronology of the expense list suggests that the second most expensive case, which cost $43,028, could be a complaint filed by Anchorage activist Andree McLeod. McLeod contended Palin and some of her staff members used their influence to get a Palin supporter a job in state government. [Ref #5]

That case, also investigated by Petumenos, found Palin innocent of any ethical wrongdoing, but Petumenos recommended that Palin aide Frank Bailey be given ethics training because of some questionable emails. [Ref #5] (This is the same Frank Bailey who was suspended with pay for two weeks for some questionable behavior in the Troopergate affair. [Ref #8])  Andree McLeod herself speculated that the cost of investigating her complaint might be attributable to the fact that Palin was on the vice presidential campaign trail at the time, resulting in high travel costs for Petumenos to interview her — something also affecting Petumenos’ Troopergate investigation.  As explained by Sean Cockerham,

McLeod said her complaint might not have been so costly to the state had Palin not been traveling around the country on the vice-presidential campaign trail.

Petumenos travelled to St. Louis to interview Palin at least about the Troopergate allegations. McLeod said she understood that Petumenos also raised her allegations in that same interview.

“They had to go down and follow her all over the ends of the Earth to get her deposed,” McLeod said. “Sarah Palin is costing the state a hell of a lot more than just this amount.” [Ref #5]

Cockerham went on to speculate:

The third most costly one, which was listed at $29,962, could be a complaint made against Palin for having the state pay for her children’s travel. Palin ended up settling that complaint by agreeing to reimburse the state about $8,000 for several trips. [Ref #5]

If Cockerham is correct in that speculation, that would mean that the state paid a net total of nearly $22,000 to “dismiss” an ethics complaint against Palin that never would have come up had Palin not inappropriately claimed her children’s travel expenses as “state business” and charged the state for them. The resolution of this particular complaint was not, in fact, a “dismissal”: it was a settlement agreement agreed upon between Palin and — guess who? — Timothy Petumenos.  As reported in the Anchorage Daily News by Lisa Demer,

So was she exonerated?

“To be exonerated suggests a hearing on the merits and a conclusion. That was not what happened here,” Petumenos said.

As Petumenos described it, the governor agreed not to contest certain charges. He agreed not to file a formal accusation or take the case to a hearing. [Ref #16]

Not exactly the “dismissal” Palin has claimed it to represent.

What about other ethics complaints? Of the known complaints compiled in an Associated Press checklist published on June 21, 2009, I’ve already discussed five (# 4, 5, & 6: the three Troopergate complaints; #2: Andree McLeod’s August 6, 2008 complaint; and #8: the Travelgate complaint). I’ve also discussed #1 on the list, the Troopergate investigation conducted by Stephen Branchflower which in fact found Palin guilty of ethical violations — but Palin, as always, ignores this one. #7 was a complaint to the Federal Elections Commission, which found no jurisdiction (& is certainly not a State of Alaska agency).  #3 was filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission. [Ref #17]

All the rest were filed with the Alaska Personnel Board.  There are one or two still pending; of the rest, all are claimed by Palin as “frivolous.”  Certainly one of them was:

12. Jan. 12: Complaint alleging interference in a job hiring was filed under the name of Edna Birch, a busybody character on the British soap opera Emmerdale. Palin’s attorney, Thomas Van Flein, said no one by that name could be found living in Alaska and the filer refused to use a real name, so the complaint was dismissed Feb. 20. [Ref #17]

But it’s hard to say with the others.  I wouldn’t be the first to notice that there’s something of a conflict of interest in a personnel board comprising three appointees who serve at the governor’s pleasure ruling on ethical complaints against that selfsame governor.  Nor are any of the facts or findings on those cases — other than the bare facts of them being dismissed — available to the public.  We have only Palin’s word — reliable or not — against that of whomever lodged the complaints that they were “frivolous.”  I don’t have time to look into them all for this post — but you can betcha I’m not going to trust Palin’s word alone.  Not after having found so many factual errors already in what she claims about the costs to the State of Alaska of these complaints; whether the Travelgate case fit her characterization as a “dismissal”; & whether Petumenos’ Troopergate report truly exonerated her of ethical violations, in contradiction to Branchflower’s findings.

One more matter about these costs: I’ve mostly been talking about the report of costs to the State of Alaska as found in the Alaska Personnel Board’s report of costs.  But there are still one or two Personnel Board cases pending, and two of the three completed cases were with state agencies other than the Personnel Board: the legislative Troopergate case (#1 on the Associated Press checklist) and the APOC case (#2).  Could those cases make up the difference between $296,000 and $2 million?  According to Pat Forgey ‘s Juneau Empire article, the Alaska Legislative Council budgeted $100,000 for the Branchflower investigation [Ref #6]: if used in full (sorry, no time to look up the final cost tonight), that would bring state costs to $396,000.  It’s very difficult to believe that the APOC case and the one or two remaining Personnel Board cases could cost $1,604,000.  It’s quite clear that Palin’s numbers are way out of whack.

Oh, and by the way — contrary to Palin’s speech of resignation, in which she claimed

Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice.” [Ref #3]

– every complainant identified in the Associated Press checklist who filed their complaint with an Alaska state agency, except for the obviously bogus Edna Birch, was an Alaska resident. [Ref #17]

So: where did Palin come up with the number $2 million?

I reckon she pulled it out of thin air, or an air thickened perhaps by the sense of persecution she seems to feel over these ethics complaints.  The furthest I’ve so far traced it back to is a Office of the Governor press release from June 23, 2009 (announcing the dismissal of case #14 in the Associated Press checklist), which asserts,

In the past two years, the state of Alaska has spent millions of dollars processing ethics complaints, public records requests, and related lawsuits. [Ref #18]

This claim was pretty quickly picked up by Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska:

I suspect that statement is complete bullshit. Millions of dollars means from $2,000,000.00 on up, if I am correct. [Ref #19]

A little more than a week later, on July 2 — the day before Palin announced her resignation, but also a day after the Alaska Personnel Board had released its figures — Steve of What Do I Know? picked up the story, pointing out that Sean Cockerham’s story — while helpfully explicating the figures — failed to mention the discrepancy between Palin’s “million of dollars” claim and the actual costs:

It seems to me that the most significant part of this story is the gap between the Palin allegation last week and the actual cost of the complaints. Deducting the Troopergate costs – which resulted from Palin filing a complaint against herself so that the friendlier Personnel Board would review it instead of a Legislative Committee – the cost of complaints was down almost to $100,000. [Ref #20]

But Steve also noted,

OK, the press release adds in public records searches, but the way they figure those charges is also grossly inflated and seems to be aimed at preventing people from gaining access to public records. At best it would still leave a huge magnitude of error. [Ref #20]

Steve’s link was to a prior post of his, in which he did the math on the Palin Administration’s bill of $65,000 for a public records request by Linda Kellen Biegel of Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis, & finds the Palin Administration to be arithmetically deficient. [Ref #21, 22] Linda, not having $65,000 lying around to gain the Palin Administration’s fabled “transparency,” modified her records request. The new price-tag: $5552.64 [Ref #23] — funds which Linda shortly began to raise. [Ref #24] An interesting fact about this particular records request: it relates to attacks by two local media luminaries — rightwing talk radio host Eddie Burke and Anchorage Daily News reporter Sheila Toomey, who authors the weekly political gossip column “Alaska Ear” — and their ties to the Palin Administration, specifically in relationship to what appear to be coordinated attacks by Burke & Toomey on Andree McLeod, who is responsible for a number of the ethics complaints against Palin.  As Linda writes,

[B]oth [Burke and Toomey] seemed to be participating in a coordinated smear campaign of citizen watchdog Andree McLeod. Both received inside information from the Administration that they discussed in their respective mediums. Both made claims that they were receiving/had received documents from requesting records of the State. Knowing how it works and knowing the timing required, that seemed highly unlikely if not impossible.

So, I did my own records request(s) looking to see what kind of communication between the Palin Administration and these media figures was actually going on. [Ref #23]

The point of this is that public records requests don’t, in fact, cost the State of Alaska anything, because the State recovers the costs to provide those public records through fees. Pretty exorbitant fees, too.  Unless — if Linda’s speculations are correct — those public records are requested by certain media figures with close ties to the Palin Administration who perhaps just shoot a couple of emails Palin & co.’s way, & perhaps get copies of the requested public records — for free?  It’ll be interesting to see what Linda’s public records request turns up.

Meanwhile, so much for the Palin press release claim that some of the fabled $2 million in costs to the State come from public records requests.  Not at the rates the State, under Palin, is charging.  And thus, another untruth in Palin’s lakefront speech:

And what about the people who offer up these silly accusations? It doesn’t cost them a dime so they’re not going to stop draining public resources – spending other peoples’ money in their game. [Ref #3]

Seems to me that I took $20 out of my own pocket, & a whole lot of other people donated even more, to help Linda raise the funds for that public records request.  It costs us considerably more than a dime, Gov. Palin.

Having already read Steve’s and Phil’s blog posts on the matter, I was alert when Palin repeated her 2 million dollar fabrication during her lakefront resignation speech. I was alert when I began to see the 2 million dollar meme repeated uncritically, first on July 4 by reporter Don Hunter in the very same newspaper — the Anchorage Daily News — where Hunter’s colleague Sean Cockerham on July 1 had reported the true costs of the ethics complaints. [Ref #25] And then, more alarmingly, when I began to see the meme reported in national mainstream media sources like the New York Times [Ref #26] and the Wall Street Journal, which reported,

Over recent months, [Palin's] tenure has been marked by sparring with local bloggers and other citizen activists in the state, some of whom bombarded her office with public-records requests. In all, Gov. Palin has faced 16 ethics inquiries of one sort or another in Alaska since last year.

All but one have since been resolved. Still, they appear to have weighed on the Republican governor in the days before her decision, announced Friday, to hand over the reins to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell. Mr. Parnell said on “Fox News Sunday” that her decision was primarily prompted by her concern over $2 million a year the state has spent on records requests and the ethics inquiries.

“I think she used the word ‘insane’ in describing those costs,” he said. [Ref #27]

And so we come back to my addition to the definition of meme: an idea that is fed by a less than truthful politician to a lazy mainstream media, which is uncritically transmitted to the public when the true facts are readily available & have even been reported on already — sometimes even by the same media source as the one now  passing on the prevaricating politician’s false information.

But strange — the politician the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are acting as stenographers to is not, this time, Sarah Palin.  It’s Palin’s successor, the man who is supposed to take the oath of office as Governor of Alaska on July 26 in Fairbanks: Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell.  Both stories give as the source for their uncritical repetitions of the $2 million dollar lie a statement Parnell made on Fox News Sunday. As recounted with dismay by Phil Munger in Progressive Alaska on July 6:

The most distressing statement Parnell made in the FAUX News interview, was his repeat of this Palin lie: “… and the fact that it was, uh, costing just about $2,000,000.00 of the state taxpayers’ dollars just to fund the staff, uh, to deal with the records requests and the like, and that was, uh, just over-the-top, uh, and I think she used the word “insane” in her, in her, uh, remarks.” [Ref #28]

We’ve learned in the past few days that Parnell, when he assumes the office of governor, plans to continue the policies laid down by his predecessor.

Tell me, Mr. Parnell: does that include the policy of the lie?

Addendum

Just after posting this, I discovered that among the Anchorage Daily News stories posted late last night (well, tonight actually — but before midnight, whereas now it’s past 3:00 AM) was one by Sean Cockerham with new words from Palin about the ethics complaints.  I was glad it was by Sean Cockerham: I knew he wouldn’t forget the real cost of the complaints.  But turns out Palin has a new explanation for her $2 million figure. Worth a lengthy quote; empasis added:

The governor repeatedly returned to the subject of ethics complaints filed against her during her 10-minute interview with the Daily News, saying she spent “most of my day, and my staff, most of their day and the department of law, a lot of their day on the frivolity.”

There have been 18 known ethics complaints filed against her. The governor’s office said they’ve been dismissed so far with no finding of wrongdoing, although she did settle a complaint over state-paid travel for her children.

The state personnel board put its cost of dealing with the complaints at about $300,000 — around two-thirds of which was in addressing the “Troopergate” issue last fall. Palin herself initiated the personnel board investigation on “Troopergate,” saying that the state Legislature’s investigation of the matter was politicized and she was seeking the appropriate venue to deal with it.

Palin said Monday she didn’t view the cost as just the $300,000 for the personnel board — but rather $2 million for the state. It is a figure her administration now uses — not meant to be actual checks written by the state but to also reflect time of state employees.

It is a per-hour calculation that the Palin administration put together, involving time spent by state lawyers deciding which public information to release as a result of all public records requests, time spent by governor’s office staffers responding to media inquiries about ethics complaints, and time technicians spend on retrieving requested e-mail, among other things.

Palin, asked why she allowed the ethics complaints to consume her so much, said she did not take the complaints personally, and that for her it was about state resources being spent on attacks that followed her run last fall as the Republican vice presidential nominee.

“That huge waste that we have seen with the countless, countless hours that state staff is spending on these frivolous ethics violations and the millions of dollars that Alaskans are spending, that money not going to things that are very important, like troopers and roads and teachers and fish research,” Palin said. [Ref #29]

A hearty thank you to ADN reader WatchingU, who rebutted with the following comment at the ADN website this morning at 2:50:19 AM (on about page 4 of reader comments):

Two Million: It is a figure her administration now uses — not meant to be actual checks written by the state but to also reflect time of state employees.**

Liar liar pants on fire. The ethics complaints are dealt with by the personnel board who are not paid except per diem, they don’t have regular meetings and don’t work a normal schedule,l they have outside jobs, the lawyers hired to investigate are not state employees, and their fees are outlined in the personnel board costs, her lawyer is not a state employee, does not use state time and since the constant statement is that these are frivolous complaints they should not need excessive investigation to be so quickly dismissed as the Governor often brags.

Record requests and email requests have charges associated with them. It is not done for free, and the charges are outrageous. The time associated with doing these things is more than adequately compensated for by the fee’s charged. [Ref #29 reader comments]

Glad I included above the discussion of the hefty fees charged for public records requests, too.  Tip o’ the nib to you, WatchingU, for paying attention, & catching Palin out on this latest rationalization.

See also the related story by Richard Mauer discussing Palin critics’ defense of their use of public records requests & the Alaska ethics complaint system:

But two of Palin’s more prolific critics say that public records laws and the ethics complaint process were used by them as designed — as a way for citizens to watchdog their government and keep abuses in check. [Ref #30]

The “prolific critics” mentioned are Andree McLeod and Linda Kellen Biegel (Celtic Diva). Tip o’ the nib to both of you, too: thanks for all your work to keep Alaska government as honest as we can make it.

Related posts

There’s several of them: follow the tag Palin ethics complaints.

References

1. “meme.” The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. <Dictionary.com>. Accessed 6 Jul 2009.
2. “meme.” Urban Dictionary. Accessed 6 Jul 2009.
3. 7/3/09. “Transcript of Palin’s speech” by Sarah Palin (Anchorage Daily News). Sarah Palin’s July 3, 2009 speech of resignation as governor of Alaska.
4. 7/1/09. “Troopergate looks to have dominated state costs for ethics complaints” by Sean Cockerham (Alaska Politics blog at ADN.com, 8:43 am).
5. 7/1/09. “Ethics investigations cost state $296,000 — FEES: Troopergate cost almost two-thirds of the total” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
6. 7/1/09. “State spent nearly $300K investigating Palin ethics complaints: Most expensive investigation may have been driven by Palin herself” by Patrick Forgey (Juneau Empire).
7. 7/1/09. “State of Alaska logs $296,000 probing Palin complaints” by the Associated Press (Fairbanks Daily News-Miner).
8. 7/7/09. “Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal” (Wikipedia). Accessed 7/7/09.
9. 10/10/08. Report to the Legislative Council, Volume One: Public Report by Stephen Branchflower (Alaska Legislative Council).
10. 11/3/08. In re Ethics Complaint dated September 1, 2008: Report of Findings and Recommendations by Timothy Petumenos (Alaska Personnel Board).
11. 11/8/08. “Troopergate: The final words?” by Andrew Halcro (AndrewHalcro.com).
12. 11/8/2008. “Is this the end of troopergate? Opposing conclusions from investigators leave no clear path to resolution” by Megan Holland and Lisa Demer (Anchorage Daily News).
13. 11/7/08. “Our View: Taking Palin’s side — Petumenos’ report gives her strong benefit of the doubt” (Anchorage Daily News [editorial]).
14. 2/6/09. “Senate finds ten in contempt over Troopergate subpoenas — TODD PALIN, OTHERS: No punishment urged in troopergate matter” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
15. 2/10/09. “Colberg resigns amid legislative pressure over ‘Troopergate’: Palin cites ‘harsh political environment’ as reason for abrupt exit” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
16. 2/24/09. “Palin to reimburse state for family travel — $6,800: She admits no wrongdoing but will pay for a few of her kids’ trips” by Lisa Demer (Anchorage Daily News).
17. 6/21/09. “Ethics complaints filed against Palin” by the Associated Press (Anchorage Daily News).
18. 6/23/09. “Fifteenth Ethics Complaint Dismissed” (Office of the Governor, State of Alaska). Press release No. 19-155.
19. 6/23/09. “Saradise Lost – Book 2 – Chapter 68 — Palin’s Biggest Lie Yet?” by Philip Munger (Progressive Alaska).  Commenter LisanTX theorized, “She does seem to confuse amounts SHE spent with amounts the state spent and make references to them interchangeably.”
20. 7/2/09. “Catching Palin’s Numbers” by Steve (What Do I Know?).
21. 5/31/09. “How much is $54.84 * 16?” by Steve (What Do I Know?).
22. 5/22/09. “Palin’s transparency-for-sale: At what cost? For this Alaska resident, about $65,000…” by Linda Kellen Biegel (Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis).
23. 6/15/09. “And the final amount for getting the Palin Administration to cough up public documents is…” by Linda Kellen Biegel (Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis). The punchline: $5552.64.
24. 6/19/09. “Help shine a light on the Palin Administration–FAQs about this fundraiser” by Linda Kellen Biegel (Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis).
25. 7/4/09. “Palin’s career has been one surprise after another —’MAVERICK’: GOP’s bright light became target of complaints and allegations” by Don Hunter (Anchorage Daily News).
26. 7/5/09. “Legal Bills Swayed Palin, Official Says” (New York Times)
27. 7/6/09. “Growing Criticism at Home Took Toll on Palin” by Jim Carlton (Wall Street Journal).
28. 7/6/09. “Sean Parnell, the Suckup Buttercup, Disses Alaska’s Senior Senator, and Repeats Palin’s Biggest Whopper from Last Week – What a Way to Start, Sean!” by Philip Munger (Progressive Alaska).
29. 7/6/09. “Palin says ethics inquiries were paralyzing — INTERVIEW: Governor says she resigned because of frivolous complaints” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
30. 7/6/09. “Palin critics defend their actions — COMPLAINTS: Public records laws were used as designed, they say” by Richard Mauer (Anchorage Daily News).

Related posts:

1. The nearly 2 million dollar spreadsheet
2. Palin's $2 million ethics meme in context
3. The Palinocracy has spoken