Henkimaa » Things I did instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour

Announcing the Alaska LGBT Community Survey

Mel Green — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 14:29:41 +0000

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

In the 1980s, the nonprofit organization Identity, Inc. conducted two major research efforts to profile Alaska’s lesbian/gay/bisexual community and to document sexual orientation bias in Alaska.

One in Ten: A Profile of Alaska’s Lesbian & Gay Community (1986) provided the first statewide portrait of Alaska’s lesbian and gay (and to some extent bisexual) population, describing our experiences of coming out, of discrimination, our physical and emotional health, religious and political affiliations, demographic characteristics, and a general needs assessment. Identity Reports: Sexual Orientation Bias in Alaska (1989) focused on discrimination and bias, documenting 84 actual instances of antigay bias, discrimination, harassment, or violence (including three murders) around the state, as well as the positive willingness of 20% of landlords and 31% of employers in the Anchorage area to discriminate against persons who were — or were perceived to be — gay or lesbian.

A lot has changed in the two-and-a-half decades since. There’s a lot more live-and-let-live, a lot more acceptance of lesbians and gays. Yet the continuing legacy of antigay prejudice and discrimination persists. Arguably, prejudice against transfolk is even more virulent — often even within our own community.

One of the chief arguments used by opponents of last year’s Anchorage Ordinance 64 — which would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the Municipality of Anchorage’s equal rights code — was that there was no evidence of discrimination against LGBT people. This claim was made in spite of the weight of evidence provided in One in Ten and Identity Reports. But of course, that evidence was two decades old, so ordinance opponents found it easy to ignore; and they found it just as easy to close their ears to the public testimony of Anchorage LGBT residents who stepped forward to testify to very recent experiences of discrimination and bias — even as one opponent openly told the Assembly that he’d once beaten a gay man so badly that he put him in the hospital.

And so — we’ve decided to bring One in Ten up-to-date by conducting a new statewide survey — the Alaska LGBT Community Survey. Like its predecessor, the Alaska LGBT Community Survey aims to create a profile of our community in all its diversity and with all its diverse concerns; and as we did in 1985-86, we’ll use the survey as vehicle to solicit case histories to document our community’s continuing experiences with discrimination, harassment, and violence. Unlike One in Ten, the Alaska LGBT Community Survey will include transfolk as well as gay, lesbian, and bisexual folk, in the design of the survey questionnaire as well as in filling it out.

We’re in a very early stage right now. We just made the firm commitment to do this last week! But we wanted to tell you about it right away.

We aim to have at least initial results of our survey by April 2011. For more and continuing information as we go along:

subscribe to our blog at alaskacommunity.org;
“like” our Facebook page;
follow @alaskacommunity on Twitter; or
do all three!

We’ll also doing our best to keep you updated through our regular LGBT news channels such as Bent Alaska, TransAlaska Pipeline, Grrlzlist, the Alaska GLBT News maillist, and — well, yeah, my own blog, Henkimaa.

Stay tuned!

— Melissa S. (Mel) Green

Learn more about Identity Reports and One in Ten.

The Daily Tweets, 2010-04-19: “Riverworld” livesnark

Mel Green — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 03:45:54 +0000

Late on the evening of April 18, I turned on the TV for company while I finished up my previous blog post, & discovered SyFy’s new production of “Riverworld” was playing. This is an adaptation of the “Riverworld” series by Philip José Farmer, which began with his Hugo-winning novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971).

SyFy had made a previous attempt at adapting it when it was still the SciFi Channel, & it sucked. I thought this one might be better. But it wasn’t. And next thing you know I was embarked upon a spontaneous livesnark. (Intermixed with a few comments on that night’s action at the Alaska Legislature — the last night of this year’s session — which some of my more politically attuned friends were attuned to at the time.)

(Last time I’d done a livesnark was with my friend Janson — we snarked the Schwarzenegger movie “The Running Man” one day last October. Too bad he wasn’t around for this one!)

I was snarking away until 2:00 AM. Dumb on a night before work, but there you have it. My advice: read the books.

Livesnark

I like Tahmoh Penikett, Alessandro Juliani, Thea Gill, & Alan Cumming, but this is as sucky an adaptation of “Riverworld” as the last one. #
SyFy adaptation of “Riverworld”: Thea Gill is a smurf. I liked her better as a lesbo in Queer as Folk. #
How did Richard Burton become bad guy? In original “Riverworld” by Philip Jose Farmer, he was a good guy – the famous English explorer. #
Now here’s Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) w/ his “Riverworld” riverboat. This one has a horrible fake southern accent. #
I think this adaptation of “Riverworld” would be a whole lot cooler if it had Xena and Gabrielle. #
The really sad thing about this adaptation of “Riverworld” is that I didn’t have @jansonjones hereabouts to livesnark it with me. #
There’s smurf Alan Cumming again…. #
See, further proof Xena should be in this adaptation of “Riverworld.” She says “Kill them – kill them all” much better than Pizzaro does. #
Huh oh, smurf Alan Cumming doing something meanie to Tahmoh. Sorry, Tahmoh, you’da been better off as a Cylon. You’da had better writing too. #
Only reason I can think they’d make Sir Richard Burton a bad guy when he was orig. a good guy is b/c SyFy likes its baddies w/ Brit accents. #
But it all goes to show SyFy original movies are just as sucky as SciFi original movies. #
Smurf Alan Cumming is a phrenologist? #
[While I livesnark "Riverworld," I'm reading my friends livesnark... er... livetweet -- the end of AK legislative session. Thanks friends!] #
[Specifically: thanks to @shannynmoore @celticdiva @alaskacommons for giving us sane commentary on AK legislature] #
RT: @celticdiva: YES WE HAVE A CRIME LAB!! NOW eat it, teabaggers! // Very good news! #
Looks like the samurai woman has found Smurf Central of “Riverworld.” #
Evil Smurf Alan Cumming chewed way too much of Willy Wonka’s blueberry chewing gum. He’s been squeezed, but lost all sense of humor. #
RT: @shannynmoore: Adjorned Sine Die…. // congrats AK Leg on passing a budget with crime lab. #
Between Thea Gill & Alan Cumming, looks like “Riverworld” is gonna have a smurf civil war. #
okay add a stereotyped German to all the other stereoptypes in this ridiculous adaptation. #
Ludwig’s German accent is even worse than Samuel Clemens’ southern accent. Philip Jose Farmer rolling in his grave. #
In this “Riverworld” Earth prob attacked & destroyed by Smurfs. But if Yellow Submarine instead of a zeppelin, it wd be the Blue Meanies. #
So where did the evil Sir Richard Burton get ground-to-air missiles for his riverboat? #
& now it turns out the fate of “Riverworld” rests upon results of a stupid love triangle. How completely plotfail… #
… as well as actfail, writefail, & directfail. #
Female samurai much more worthy love interest than love triangle g/f. But even better: don’t make this into a series. #Riverworldfail #
“A sequence of events leads to a consequence.” Duh. Hope my writing never gets that shitty. #
Sad to say Tahmoh Penikett shows not much range of acting between BSG, Dollhouse, & this. Too bad. But now tonight’s travesty is over: bed. #

My plea to Tahmoh Penikett (Helo of “Battlestar Galactica” & Paul Ballard of “Dollhouse”), who I quite like: find some projects that allow you to really use your acting chops. Please. It was really nice to see Thea Gill (Lindsay Peterson in “Queer as Folk”), but she wasn’t given much to work with here. Alessandro Juliani (Felix Gaeta of “Battlestar Galactica”): also not given much to work with — his role seemed mainly to smile a lot and then get killed by Pizzaro. I like Alan Cumming a lot, but again — not much to work with here. His Evil Smurf’s real character name was apparently “Judas Caretaker.” It’s been a long time since I read the books, but I’m pretty sure they had no such character. Those are the actors I was familiar with.

I’ve seen the the guy who played evil Sir Richard Francis Burton in something else, but can’t think of what.

It was the most appalling thing about this adaptation that Burton was turned into a one-dimensional evil bad guy. In real life, he was a richly fascinating person. Wikipedia:

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS (19 March 1821 – 20 October 1890) was an English explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist, linguist, poet, hypnotist, fencer and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explorations within Asia and Africa as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. According to one count, he spoke 29 European, Asian, and African languages.

He was the protagonist of Farmer’s books, and as I recall was pretty interesting in them too. A far more interesting protagonist than the one-dimensional generic good guy Matt Ellman played by Tahmoh Penikett, who differed from the one-dimensional generic good guy Jeff Hale played by Brad Johnson in the 2003 SciFi Channel version only in profession (2003: American astronaut; 2010: American war reporter).

Like SciFi Channel’s “Earthsea” miniseries in 2004, which completely screwed over Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, both this and the prior adaptation of “Riverworld” are fine examples of good science/fiction fantasy made into bad by writers and producers who just can’t seem to give a sh*t.

After “Riverworld” I went to bed. The rest of the day’s tweets are from the workaday day.

RT: @jansonjones: the semester begins to end http://bit.ly/bkPU3C // Yay! #
@jansonjones Hey, I missed you during my spontaneous livesnark of SyFy’s Bad Adaptation #2 of “Riverworld” last night. #
@jansonjones You’ll have to check out my “Daily Tweets” post when it posts tonight. I hope I did justice to its wretchedness! in reply to jansonjones #
Fifth homeless death this spring, per @adndotcom “Woman dead in SUV may have been homeless” http://bit.ly/amgwL3 #
RT: @berickcook: My frustration was compounded by seeing the huge Foucault Pendulum at the UAA library./ I work just upstairs from that. #
RT: @SistersTalk: Dan Choi & Right Wingers Agree: Obama’s Gay Hospital Visitation Decree An Abomination – http://bit.ly/cB4zql / wrong, Dan #
@berickcook I have a growing curiosity about what, specifically, the life-defining struggle you’re facing is about. Can you explicate? in reply to berickcook #
@berickcook Ah, sounds v. interesting. Power that doesn’t create toxic waste products? (which I hope factors in your def. of “sustainable”) in reply to berickcook #

A Sullygate timeline: 1982-2010

Mel Green — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:17:59 +0000

For other news stories & posts on this topic, see my bibliography on all things Sullygate.

Sullygate is the nickname that’s been coined (possibly by me — I’m not really sure) for all the stuff surrounding former Anchorage Mayor George M. Sullivan’s “life insurance policy” through the Municipality of Anchorage, which culminated in a February 16 vote by the Anchorage Assembly to pay out $193,000 from public monies to a trust headed up by Sullivan’s son, current Mayor Dan Sullivan.

This is a very heavily annotated timeline of the Sullivan “life insurance” issue based on sources that have so far been made public. A big thanks to Sean Cockerham and David Hulen of the Anchorage Daily News, who made public records requests in the process of preparing Sean’s really fine investigative piece, and posted the documents at the ADN website for the benefit of concerned Anchorage citizens like me.

This is a really long post; I was happy to learn that WordPress (my blogging software) supports internal navigational links: these will help you get around.

1967 | 1982 | 1984 | 1987 | 1992 | 1994 | 1995 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007 | 2009 | 2010 | References

Please comment, especially if you find errors or can clarify some of my own questions. This sentence is the very last sentence I’m writing in this post: it is to say that I’ve been at this a very long time and my mind’s too muddled by tiredness now to even proofread — so really, please let me know if you find errors so I can fix ‘em. — Mel

A later note, 3/22/2010: Corrections from this date on (mostly thanks to corrections made by readers) are marked with strikeout for deleted text & underline for added text. Thanks for your corrections, readers!

1967

George Sullivan elected mayor of the city of Anchorage. He continued as mayor through January 1982, including during unification of the Anchorage city and Greater Anchorage Area Borough governments into the unified Municipality of Anchorage (which took place in 1975).

1982

January 2, 1982. George Sullivan ends his last term; Tony Knowles inaugurated as mayor. [Ref #1]

Tony Knowles administration 1982—1987

Manager of Records and Benefits: Susan Lindemuth

January 19, 1982

Per an article by Sean Cockerham in the Anchorage Daily News,

The minutes from the Jan. 19, 1982, Assembly meeting show that Assembly member Gerry O’Connor, who died in 2005, proposed that the city provide life insurance for the retiring Sullivan. O’Connor, according to the minutes, said he felt Sullivan’s insurance should be continued because he had triple bypass surgery and “was probably unable to pass the physical to qualify for private insurance.” [Ref #2]

The Anchorage Assembly, in AR 82-30, resolved:

That the Commission on Salaries and Emoluments be requested to consider directing that life insurance coverage be provided to former Mayor George M. Sullivan for the remainder of his life at the same rate and with the same coverage as in existence on January 1, 1982. [Ref #3, p. 1]

February 18, 1982

Susan Lindemuth, Manager of Records and Benefits, wrote in a memo to Ruby Smith, Municipal Clerk,

When he left office, Mr. Sullivan’s life was insured for $193,000. The figures I am quoting are based on a continuation of that level of insurance.

If the Municipality continues Mr. Sullivan’s coverage as a member of the group, it will cost the Municipality $86.85 per month or $1,042.20 per year…. This premium could be paid either by the Municipality or Mr. Sullivan.

Mr. Sullivan is eligible to convert his insurance to an individual policy. At his age, continued coverage would cost Mr. Sullivan $961.00 per month…. [Ref #3, page 2; emphasis added]

Note the emphasized words: Lindemuth was talking about the MOA’s group insurance plan.

February 24, 1982

The Salary and Emoluments Commission met. Its minutes show that the Commission was concerned whether Sullivan was eligible for inclusion under the Muni’s group insurance plan with Aetna.

There was still concern by the Commission whether the insurance company would allow someone who was no longer employed by the Municipality to remain part of the group plan and pay the month premiums out-of-pocket. [Ref #3, page 6 (page 2 of minutes)]

Susan Lindemuth, Manager of Records and Benefits, told them that the insurance company would cover him:

In response to questions by Mr. Lounsbury, Ms. Lindemuth stated there is no problem as far as the insurance company is concerned in continuing George Sullivan in the insurance program after his completion of service with the Municipality and has drawn his last paycheck. She further stated that the Municipality would just add an amendment to the policy saying George Sullivan is eligible to continue participation. [Ref #3, page 6 (page 2 of minutes)]

Thus reassured, the Commission passed Resolution 82-1, which provided:

Section 1. That the Municipality shall provide life insurance coverage to former Anchorage Mayor George M. Sullivan at the remainder of his life at the same rate and with the same coverage as in existence on January 1, 1982.

Section 2. That the cost of providing said life insurance coverage shall be borne in full by Mayor George M. Sullivan.

Section 3. This resolution takes effect at the beginning of the next fiscal year of the Municipality. [Ref #3, page 9]

Nothing in the Commission’s minutes indicate that the Commission at any time contemplated providing coverage for the former mayor in any way other than via the Muni’s group insurance plan.

July 12, 1982

In January 2007 (during the Begich administration), Joanne Hanscom, health care plan administrator/privacy officer, put together a timeline of things she found in the file regarding Sullivan’s life insurance, including this item:

July 12, 1982 – Handwritten note to Barb (Municipal Manager’s office – last name unknown) from Susan Lindemuth stating she doesn’t see any problem with self paying, but she did have a problem with the same rate. Barb responded agreeing with her. [Ref #4, page 2]

August 4, 1982

In January 2007, Joanne Hanscom found the following in the file:

August 4, 1982 – Letter to Mr. Sullivan from Susan Lindemuth telling him how much he is entitled to ($193,000) and that the annual cost was $1,042.20. [Ref #4, page 2]

October 31, 1982

George Sullivan’s accrued leave ran out, thereby ending his employment by the Municipality. [Ref #1; Ref #2, page 14]

November 10, 1982

In a memorandum to the Commission, Susan Lindemuth reported on the status of Sullivan’s insurance,

The provisions of Resolution 82-1 of the Salary and Emoluments Commission state that George Sullivan will be allowed to continue his life insurance coverage under the Municipality’s group plan at his expense for the remainder of his life. The amount of coverage will be that in effect on January 1, 1982 ($193,000) and the premium rate will also be that in effect on January 1, 1982 ($77.20). The resolution is to take effect January 1, 1983. [Ref #2, page 14; emphasis added]

This is further confirmation of Lindemuth’s clear understanding of the Commission’s intent: that Sullivan’s insurance coverage was to be under the Municipality’s group insurance plan, not as some kind of separate contract or individual insurance plan covered in some other way (as would eventually be contended in 2010 by George Sullivan’s son, Mayor Dan Sullivan, and his city attorney Dennis Wheeler). But note that here, Lindemuth gives a different premium rate for what was in effect on January 1, 1982 — $77.20/month, which calculates to $926.40 annually – than she gave the Commission on February 18, 1982 — $86.85 per month, or $1,042.20 per year — and that she also gave to George Sullivan in her August 4 letter to him. No explanation for this discrepancy was offered.

Lindemuth’s memorandum continued,

Mr. Sullivan retired from the Municipality on October 31, 1982. So that there would be no break in his insurance coverage, he was allowed to make the premium payments for November and December. Mr. Sullivan has already provided for monthly payment of the premium amount to the Municipality. To the extent that the premium amount exceed that paid by Mr. Sullivan, the Mayor’s Office benefits account will be charged for the difference. [Ref #2, page 14; emphasis added]

At its meeting on that date, the Commission discussed Lindemuth’s report:

Chairman Millsap stated that attached to the Agenda was a status report on the life insurance coverage for Mr. Sullivan. He stated the letter was very self-explanatory and that everything had been taken care of. [Ref #2, page 12; emphasis added]

This acceptance of Lindemuth’s report is yet another confirmation that the Commission’s intent was for Sullivan to be covered by the MOA’s group plan. However, there was a problem:

Ms. [sic] Lounsbury stated he was questioning the last sentence — “to the extent that the premium amount exceeds that paid by Mr. Sullivan, the mayor’s office benefits account will be charged for the difference.”

Ms. Gotham stated that is not what this commission said.

Mr. Lounsbury continued by saying that Mr. Sullivan is to pay what the premium is. The commission didn’t set any certain amount, they just said you pay the premium.

Chairman Millsap requested the Recording Secretary obtain clarification from Susan Lindemuth. [Ref #2, page 12; emphasis in original]

In other words, there was a conflict between Section 1 of the Commission’s Resolution 82-1, which provided that Sullivan’s insurance would continue at “the same rate” (same premium), and Section 2, which provided that Sullivan would bear the cost of the premiums in full.

November 17, 1982

In another memo to the Commission, Susan Lindemuth explained the rationale for the questioned sentence:

Judy Flitter has asked that I clarify the last sentence in paragraph two of my November 10 memo.

When planning for the implementation of Resolution 82-1, the meaning of “at the rate in effect as of January 1, 1982″ was questioned. Municipal Attorney Jerry Wertzbaugher interpreted it to mean that Mr. Sullivan would not be required to pay for increases in life insurance premium payments subsequent to January 1, 1982. To the extent that those rates will increase… the Municipality will have to pick up the difference. [Ref #2, page 15]

November 22, 1982

At the Commission’s direction, Judy Flitter, wrote a memo to Lindemuth clarifying the Commission’s intent:

The decision from the Salary and Emoluments Commission was to allow former Mayor George Sullivan to retain the policy but to pay any premiums himself. They did not intent [sic] for any monies to be taken from the current Mayor’s budget. The statement from the commission is: The bill is to be sent to Mr. Sullivan for the difference per thousand per month. [Ref #9, page 16]

So problem solved: in spite of the “at the same rate” provision in Section 1 of Resolution 82-1, Sullivan was required to pay the full premiums himself even if they went over the premium rate that had been in effect on January 1, 1982. (The Commission said nothing explicitly about whether Sullivan would pay less than that rate in the unlikely event that the premiums somehow happened to go down.)

This memo was later (in January 2007, during the administration of Mark Begich) summed up by Joanne Hanscom as follows:

November 22, 1982 – Memo from Judy Flitter (Clerk’s Office) to Susan Lindemuth reiterating the fact that Mr. Sullivan would need to pay the premiums himself, not the Mayor’s office. [Ref #4, page 2]

Thus the record makes clear that as of November 1982, the Commission on Salaries & Emoluments, which had acted at the behest of the Assembly, both intended & understood that George Sullivan’s life insurance would continue through the MOA’s group plan with the MOA’s insurance provider; and that the Commission had made this intention clear to the Muni’s Manager of Records and Benefits, Susan Lindemuth.

It’s also clear that as of November 1982, the Commission believed — as Chairman Millsap stated at the November 10 meeting — that “everything had been taken care of.” [Ref #2, page 12] But in January 2007, Joanne Hanscom would write,

There has been no life insurance policy in place since he [George Sullivan] left municipal employment. [Ref #4, page 2]

If there was no life insurance policy in place, that would be contrary to the Commission’s Resolution 82-1, and also contrary to the Susan Lindemuth’s November report to the Commission indicating that everything was in place.

But why did Hanscom believe that no life insurance policy was in place? For the answer to that, see the next item.

1984

January 8 or 9, 1984

The next known item in our chronology is again provided by the January 2007 timeline put together by Joanne Hanscom, accompanied by her speculation (in bold):

January 9, 1984 – Letter to Susan Lindemuth from James Hickey (Aetna) regarding the group policy number 392680 and George Sullivan. I do not think anyone at MOA informed Aetna that Mr. Sullivan was no longer employed by the municipality. However, he was kept on the census and Mr. Sullivan kept making the annual premium payments. [Ref #4, page 2; emphasis added]

If Hanscom’s 2007 speculation is correct, it seems that despite what Susan Lindemuth had assured the Commission during its February 24, 1984 1982 meeting about amending the group insurance policy to include Sullivan as an ex-employee, that MOA did not in fact amend the policy or inform Aetna. It’d be nice if this letter was made public, so we could see exactly what Aetna understood at the time about George Sullivan’s eligibility, and therefore what led Hanscom to make this speculation.

But wait a minute. According to an email on January 30, 2002 (during the Wuerth Wuerch administration) from Karen Moore to Lynda Gable,

I see a letter in the file from Aetna (James Hickey) regarding “Assignment of Group Coverage” that set up a trustee for his [George Sullivan's] irrevocable trust and dated 1/8/84. [Ref #5, page 7]

There’s a discrepancy in the dates here (January 8 or January 9?), but that is undoubtedly the same latter from James Hickey. And it appears that this is when the George M. Sullivan Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust was set up.

It should go without saying that as Manager of Records and Benefits, it was Lindemuth’s responsibility to ensure that Aetna was properly informed that Sullivan was not, in fact, any longer a municipal employee; and if it turned out that there was a problem after all in covering him under the group plan, it was her responsibility to ensure that the Commission on Salaries and Emoluments and the Anchorage Assembly were also informed. Did Lindemuth believe she had informed Aetna? Did she believe in good faith that Sullivan was in fact covered by the group insurance policy? Did all this mess arise out of a mistaken belief that everything really was set up properly in the way the Commission understood it to be at the end of 1982?

1987

Tom Fink became mayor.

Tom Fink administration 1987—1994

City manager: Larry Crawford
Manager of Records and Benefits: Susan Lindemuth

1992

The timeline put together in January 2007 by Joanne Hanscom again gives us our next item:

January 7, 1992 – Letter to Mr. Sullivan from Christine Kendrick, MOA Records and Benefits employee, informing him that his new premium was $833.76 per year. [Ref #4, page 2]

If Joanne Hanscom’s speculations are correct, Sullivan was not covered by the MOA’s group insurance policy with Aetna, and in fact was completely uninsured. It’s therefore not accurate that this was even a “premium.” Who, then, set the “premium” amount? As an employee of Records and benefits, Christine Kendrick would have been under the supervision of Susan Lindemuth. Did the so-called premium change on Lindemuth’s authority? If not her authority, then whose? Did MOA Records and Benefits believe in good faith that Sullivan was covered by the Muni’s group policy, with the “premium” set by Aetna? What were the real group insurance premiums set by Aetna at that time?

But see January 2002, where it becomes apparent that Aetna could not have calculated premiums for George Sullivan. As Lynda Gable of Aetna would write in 2002,

The insurance fund was the reserves that Muni held and those funds were never submitted to Aetna nor included in any of our premium calculations from a risk standpoint to the best of my knowledge. [Ref #5, page 4; emphasis added]

1994

Tom Fink’s term as mayor ended, and Rick Mystrom became mayor.

Rick Mystrom administration 1994–2000

City manager: Larry Crawford through June 1998; George Vakalis thereafter
Manager of Records and Benefits: Susan Lindemuth

January 8, 1994

In an article explaining how Tom Fink and other Anchorage mayors often continued to draw paychecks after their terms had ended (due to unused annual leave), Peter Blumberg of the Anchorage Daily News wrote,

Tony Knowles, Fink’s immediate predecessor and also a candidate for governor, stayed on the payroll for five months following his departure from the mayor’s office and he still buys health insurance from the city. George Sullivan, who preceded Knowles as mayor, stayed on the payroll 10 months beyond his last day in office and he still buys life insurance from the city, according to Lindemuth. [Ref #6; emphasis added]

But the Municipality was not then (nor is it now) a life insurance company. Was Lindemuth knowingly mischaracterizing what Sullivan was “buying” from the Muni? Or, in line with my “this was just a mistake” theory, did Lindemuth simply not understand the true situation regarding Sullivan’s eligibility under the Muni’s group plan with Aetna? Or is there some third alternative that I’m missing?

Note that Knowles’ health insurance was a very different matter from the life insurance that Sullivan was putatively buying from the Muni.

1995

November 29, 1995

Again from the timeline prepared by Joanne Hanscom in January 2007:

November 29, 1995 – Letter to Mr. Sullivan from Pamela Barbeau, MOA Records and Benefits employee, informing him that his new premium amount is $555.84 per year. [Ref #4, page 2]

Here we have the same questions that we have with the change in the so-called “premium” in 1992. Rather than repeating them here, I refer you back to that year. It remains a question as to how Sullivan’s so-called “premium” was calculated.

2000

Rick Mystrom’s term ended and George Wuerch became mayor.

George Wuerch administration 2000–2003

City manager: Harry Kieling
Manager of Records and Benefits: Susan Lindemuth through October 2000;
Karen Moore by y January 2002

October 2000

Susan Lindemuth was Manager of Records and Benefits until October 2000, at which time she retired from municipal employment and went to work at the Alaska Railroad as Director of Human Resources. [Ref #7]

2002

January 2002

George Sullivan’s son Dan, then a member of the Anchorage Assembly, came to the city to pay the annual “premium.” Deputy Employee Relations Director Karen Moore (also identified in one email as Manager of Records and Benefits) had no knowledge of the life insurance arrangement and initiated a flurry of emails to figure everything out.

January 30, 2002

Karen Moore to Lynda C. Gable of Aetna:

Do you recall or know of anything in file regarding life insurance on former Mayor Sullivan. Diane Pain is no longer working for us and all I find in the file is a resolution providing for Mayor Sullivan to have continued coverage. The premium is paid annually.

Any clues for me? [Ref #5, page 1]

Lynda C. Gable replied:

I have no idea. Is he possibly covered as an elected official or something currently? Given he potentially is not an active employee, I don’t know how they were classifying him to be eligible — and also might be concerned about the contract actually recognizing him as eligible….

My concern is if we imply to him there is coverage but if there is no contractual basis — his claim could actually be denied if he passes away. So, I think some digging is in order to make sure everyone is on the same page. [Ref #5, page 1]

Note the concern here with a contract. If there was such a contract, it would have to have been around November 1982, when per Susan Lindemuth November 10, 1982 memo to the Commission on Salaries and Emoluments which seemed to indicate that everything was a go. But there was no reference in that memo to any communication actually made between the Muni and Aetna indicating an actual contract to continue Sullivan on the group plan; and in fact the first communication between Aetna and the Muni that we’re so far aware of is that of January 8 or 9, 1984, when James Hickey sent his letter regarding “Assignment of Group Coverage” — the same letter that would later lead Joanne Hanscom to speculate, “I do not think anyone at MOA informed Aetna that Mr. Sullivan was no longer employed by the municipality” [Ref #4, page 2]

Karen Moore also wrote to Susan Lindemuth:

Can you shed some light on the continued life insurance for George Sullivan? His son Dan wants to pay the premium, but I can’t find anything in file that says who is covering the risk, only that the Salary and Emolument Commission passed this resolution saying the MOA must continue to provide life insurance. [Ref #5, page 2]

Susan Lindemuth replied,

George has been paying for it. A check for the annual premium was sent to the MOA and deposited in the insurance fund. I wouldn’t think it matters who (from the Sullivan family) pays for it…but it isn’t an MOA expense. [Ref #5, page 2]

Moore then wrote back,

Yes, that makes sense. Who was on the risk? There is nothing int he file to indicate who to pay the premium to… [Ref #5, page 4; ellipsis in original]

Lindemuth replied,

He was covered as part of the MOA group and therefore, part of that “risk”. There was no separate policy with Aetna or any other insurance carrier for him…and no separate “premium” was paid to any outside party. As the life insurance rates changed over the years, he was informed and paid the appropriate premium amount…or the kids paid on his behalf.

We had a split funded agreement with Aetna…so we paid the “retention” monthly and funded the life insurance claims when incurred. His coverage amount ($93,000 [sic]) was included in the volume reported to Aetna. [Ref #5, page 4; all ellipses in original; emphases added]

Now, I don’t understand insurance practices that well, so I don’t exactly know what “split funded agreement” means, or what a “retention” is. And — “funded the life insurance claims when incurred” — does that mean that the Muni only sent the monies to the insurance company when the policy holder actually died, and the claim was made? Could someone who understands insurance better than I do clue me in by writing an explanatory comment?

(But see that second bolded sentence: “His coverage amount ($93,000 [sic]) was included in the volume reported to Aetna.” That’s not what Lynda Gable of Aetna will write just two blockquotes below.)

In any case, Karen Moore forwarded Lindemuth’s explanation to Lynda Gable at Aetna with the following introduction:

Here’s what Susan Lindemuth is saying.l Under the minimum premium arrangement, MOA apparently deposited his premium into the insurance fund. Since we have changed coverage arrangement to fully insured, how would this affect his coverage? [Ref #5, page 4]

Lynda Gable replied,

This means Muni kept those dollars on hand in the claims funds. I don’t know if intent was to have them handle a death claim directly, but Aetna never received any premiums. The insurance fund was the reserves that Muni held and those funds were never submitted to Aetna nor included in any of our premium calculations from a risk standpoint to the best of my knowledge. How much life insurance is he supposed to have??? [Ref #5, page 4; emphasis added]

Based on this, it seems that (1) the Muni never passed Sullivan’s “premiums” to Aetna; (2) Aetna didn’t know Sullivan was thought by anyone at MOA to be on the Muni’s group plan; (3) even if Sullivan had legitimately been on the group plan, since his premiums were never sent or apparently reported to Aetna, Aetna could not make an accurate calculation of his insurance risk — and so, I’m guessing, the changes in his “premiums” in 1992 and 1995 were based on something other than what his risk really was. And am I correct that this contradicts Lindemuth’s assertion that “His coverage amount ($93,000 [sic]) was included in the volume reported to Aetna”? Are there any insurance whizzes out there who can confirm or correct my reading on this? Even in 1982, when the continuation of the life insurance was supposedly set up, George Sullivan was 59 and had recently had triple bypass surgery — which had to have had an impact on his risk.

The email conversation continued with Karen Moore answering Lynda Gable’s question about the amount of coverage Sullivan was supposed to have:

Amount was $193,000. I see a letter in the file from Aetna (James Hickey) regarding “Assignment of Group Coverage” that set up a trustee for his irrevocable trust and dated 1/8/84. I also found a memo from Susan Lindemuth to the MOA Clerk’s office that gave the premium under Aetna group coverage and the cost of converting coverage at his then age. I can see why he wouldn’t have wanted to convert it. [Ref #5, page 7]

Here again (because I’ve already quoted that part of this message) is a reference to the setting up of the George M. Sullivan Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust in January 1984. (And again, recall something about the letter from James Hickey led Joanne Hanscom in 2007 to believe that the MOA had never informed Aetna that Sullivan was no longer a muncipal employee.) The memo from Susan Lindemuth to the MOA Clerk’s office that Moore mentions appears to be the memo of February 18, 1982, which I quoted near the beginning of this chronology.

Lynda Gable replied,

Unfortunately this is one piece of history I don’t have. Conversion is definitely expensive and really intended for those individuals who can’t get replacement life insurance if they needed to pass a physical. If you sent us copies of any documents you have, we can have some research done. At this time, I can’t really promise an outcome — not having the historical knowledge or [sic] what would have continued to make him eligible after he left office. We’ll look forward to the documents to continue our review. [Ref #5, page 7]

That’s all the emails we’ve seen between Karen Moore and Lynda Gable on January 30, but there must’ve been at least one more based on what Karen Moore wrote to Employee Relations Director David Otto that afternoon at 3:38 PM:

At your direction, I have researched Mayor Sullivan’s life insurance situation with the MOA. Here is what I have found out.

On February 24, 1982, by resolution of the Salary and Emoluments Commission (Resolution 82-1), Mayor Sullivan was granted life insurance for the “remainder of his life at the same rate and at the same coverage as in existence on January 1, 1982.” A memo dated August 4, 1982 from Susan Lindemuth set out that the coverage amount was $193,000 and that the monthly premium was $77.20. [That would add up to $926.40 annually; but according to Joanne Hanscom in 2007, the August 4, 1982 item was not a memorandum but a letter to George Sullivan giving an annual premium rate of $1,042.20; Ref #4, page 2.] Another memo from the Clerk’s office in support of the Salary and Emoluments Commission clarified that Mayor Sullivan was to pay the premium himself. Other than assigning the proceeds to an irrevocable trust and identifying a trustee, that is the only documentation in the file.

For clarification on who was on the risk, I emailed Susan Lindemuth. Susan indicated that under the former “split premium” agreement with Aetna, MOA paid retention monthly and funded the life claims as they incurred. Susan included Mayor Sullivan in the group. When we went fully insured in March of last year, we no longer fund or pay life claims as they incurred. that risk belongs to Aetna. Our agreement (contract) with Aetna was and is to cover active lives. In email conversations with Lynda Gable, long time account executive for Aetna’s MOA coverage, Aetna is not aware of Mayor Sullivan’s continued participation in the active group insurance. Lynda tells me they would have denied payment when it became evident that he was not an active employee. Susan indicated that premiums received from Mayor Sullivan were deposited in to the insurance fund. I suspect she intended to have the MOA pay any death claim from the 603 account, rather than have Aetna pay the claim and then reimbursing Aetna. [Ref #5, page 11]

This is another paragraph it’d really help if someone who understands insurance could explain to me — I understand some parts, but others are fuzzy to me. What is clear is that Aetna had no knowledge of Sullivan, and could not have calculated his “premiums” because of that.

Bottom line is that Aetna does not have a policy for Mayor Sullivan, nor would they cover him under our group plan since it is limited to active employees. We can rectify this by any one of the following:

1. Set up a sub-fund in 603 in the amount of $193,000 to be paid out upon Mayor Sullivan’s death

2. Don’t fund the $193,000 and pay it when he dies from some source to be identified at that time, upon Assembly approval.

3. Set-up sub fund in 603, credit past premiums and continue to add yearly premiums as paid. MOA to fund difference upon his death and with Assembly approval.

The family premium payments should go into an account that would then reduce the overall liability to the MOA as yearly premiums are paid. For example, the family has paid nearly $18,000 since 1982. Therefore, the actual MOA liability is $175,000, since $18,000 has been received and deposited into the 603 fund.

Once we decide how to proceed, I will document the file to make sure that future employees will know how to handle this situation when it comes time to pay out. [Ref #5, page 11]

February 4, 2002

Karen Moore wrote to Glenn Smith, city risk manager:

Harry [presumably city manager Harry Kieling] suggested I forward this onto you to see if you had any creative ideas on how to fund this. Read my email — it’s pretty self explanatory. Bottom line, he can’t be on the active group insurance because he isn’t actively employed anymore…. [Ref #5, page 12]

The email she forwarded was a February 1 email from David Otto which probably included her lengthy January 30 email to him as an attachment. This email and its attachments became part of a thread of emails that ultimately included the Municipality’s chief financial officer Kate Giard, city manager Harry Kieling, Office of Management and Budget Director Cheryl Frasca (who is also Mayor Dan Sullivan’s budget director), city attorney William Greene, and city risk manager Glenn Smith.

February 4 or 5, 2002 (date header missing from email, but probably Feb. 5)

Chief financial officer Kate Giard wrote a email (with a long chain of attached emails, as mentioned above) whose recipients included Harry Kieling, Cheryl Frasca, William Greene, and Glenn Smith:

Folks,

We had better get together on this issue. We just can’t make payments of this nature from the self insurance or any fund without assembly approval. Mr. Sullivan had an insurance policy, apparently, for the last several years for which he paid premiums. The policy in effect was an illegal commitment unless the Assembly approves it. I would recommend we get together with legal to see what we have here. [Ref #5, page 12; underline in original; bold emphasis added]

February 5, 2002

From Glenn Smith to the same recipient list:

Kate; they were not recommending to use our SIF [I believe this stands for self-insurance fund]. Depending on what action ER [employee relations] has to take will determine what route to take with the Assembly. I would like to see [Commission on Salaries & Emoluments] resolution 82-1 if there is a meeting on this.— One thing for sure this must be worked out and we must be positive this is the only former employee that is in this situation. [Ref #5, page 13]

There is then a lapse of over a month in the emails that have been made publicly available.

March 9, 2002

This is in the same email stream as above, from city attorney William Greene to Kate Giard and David Otto, with a cc: to Kathie Meyer. I don’t know who she is, but she is otherwise unrepresented in the 2002 emails. In any case, here’s Greene’s email:

WHERE ARE WE ON THIS???? IS LAW TO DO SOMETHING??? We will obtain AR 82-1 and provide [Ref #5, page 13]

AR is the prefix for Assembly resolutions; Greene was apparently confusing Resolution 82-1 of the Commission on Salaries & Emoluments with an Assembly resolution. (The Assembly resolution which asked the Commission in 1982 to see if the life insurance benefit could be provided to Sullivan was AR 82-30. [Ref #3, page 1])

March 12, 2002

Greene followed up himself three days later with an email address to Cheryl Frasca, Kete Giard, and David Otto:

Be glad to meet, but don’t think its necessary. Karen Moore’s three options are it and number three seems the most reasonable. There is no option not to provide the coverage. I’m copying the underlying documentation to you all. via internal snail mail. [Ref #5, page 13; emphasis added]

Greene gave no explanation for his opinion that “there is no option to provide the coverage” — the first time, in the record so far made public, that this claim was made after it became crystal clear that Sullivan was not covered by the MOA’s group plan. It’s unknown from the emails whether a meeting in fact took place, or which specific documents Greene had examined to lead him to this opinion.

The option he deemed the “most reasonable” was the third option described in Karen Moore’s long email to David Otto on January 30, 2002:

3. Set-up sub fund in 603, credit past premiums and continue to add yearly premiums as paid. MOA to fund difference upon his death and with Assembly approval. [Ref #5, page 11]

March 13, 2002

The following day, Kate Giard replied to William Greene’s “there is no option to not provide” email with another, addressed to the same recipient list (William Greene, Cheryl Frasca, David Otto):

Cool. I’m all for not meeting if Otto’s shop has the ball and the matter is concluded. Do we have to budget for it each year til th eold gentleman passes on? [Ref #5, page 11]

William Green replied,

You need to read the optional solutions mentioned in the preceding e-mail. The answer to your question depends on which alternative is chosen, but I suggest that something be done soon or MOA will have to come up with nearly $200K all of a sudden. (I trust this is life and not double indemnity.) I’m outa here unless someone needs legal help. [Ref #5, page 11]

March 21, 2002

Melissa Deitrick of Aetna sent an email to Karen Moore (cc’ing to two other people who I believe were with Aetna) with an attached file “Sullivan Letter.doc.” The text of the letter is not included in the materials made publicly available, but the text of the email gives the gist:

Karen, I have mailed you the signed, hard-copy of this letter today. As you probably suspected, Aetna does not have the former mayor on the group insurance policy due to lack of eligibility. I did confirm with Ann Wells that premium for the basic and supplemental life insurance is only paid for active employees who meet current group eligibility guidelines.

Though I did not include this in my letter to you, it may be that there is an individual life insurance policy for the former mayor currently in place. However, it is not through Aetna.

Our legal department advised the Muni return the premium money paid for the mayor’s $193,000 life insurance coverage. This would only apply for the period after the mayor was ineligible for the Aetna coverage. Of course, this would not be appropriate if the premium money is used for payment on a non-Aetna policy.

The bottom line situation from Aetna’s perspective is that Anchorage’s former mayor is not eligible for the current life insurance coverage, and does not have $193,000 life insurance policy underwritten by Aetna. If there were a death claim filed for this benefit, Aetna is not financially liable.

Please understand that this determination was made based on available information and on our insurance coverage records. If you find records which indicated otherwise, please provide them to me for review.

If you have additional questions or need to discuss this issue in detail, you are welcome to call me at the number listed below. [Ref #5, pages 14-15; emphases added]

As we know from Susan Lindemuth’s January 30 email to Karen Moore, Sullivan had no separate policy with any other carrier. [Ref #5, page 4] His life insurance was with Aetna, or nothing. And since it was not with Aetna — it was nothing.

Karen Moore subsequently forwarded Melissa Deitrick’s email to David Otto with the following introduction:

Aetna has researched their files and cannot find a policy for Mayor Sullivan. As indicated below, he cannot be covered under our active group plan. The best solution seems to be to create an account within 603 (where his premiums have been deposited over the years), credit that account the amount of premiums received and then fund the difference between premiums collected and the $193,000 amount set forth by the salary and emoluments commission resolution at the time of death.

What I need is some direction on how to set this up, and then document it so future Benefits Managers don’t have to guess what’s happening when Dan Sullivan comes in and pays the premium.

Perhaps we should set up a meeting with Kate Giard and someone from legal to be sure this is done according to hoyle??? [Ref #5, page 14]

March 22, 2002

David Otto forwarded Karen Moore’s email (complete with a copy of the email from Melissa Deitrick which advised the Municipality to refund the “premiums” — to muncipal attorney William Greene and chief financial officer Kate Giard. His intro said, simply,

For our discussion [Ref #5, page 16]

William Greene replied to Otto and Giard,

Dave: My eyes aren’t that good even with glasses. Someday it will be your turn. I’d be glad to participate, but I don’t know what I might add. Your solution seems appears to make sense to me. Kate can tell how to do it. The only thing that’s left is to document, get the $, and put a notice somewhere where it won’t be forgotten. If there’s something else I can do, please let me know. [Ref #5, page 16]

The record doesn’t indicate if there actually was any face-to-face discussion in which Greene participated.

What’s striking to me here is that Aetna’s legal advice to return the premiums was not only ignored, but didn’t even rate a mention. There is no evidence that anyone, much less William Greene himself, gave any consideration to legal advice that contradicted Greene’s assertion in his email of March 13, based on legal (or some sort of) reasoning that was never explained to anyone, that “There is no option not to provide the coverage.” [Ref #5, page 13]

Nor, damningly, did anyone appear to take note of the statement made by Aetna’s Lynda Gable in her January 30 email that “The insurance fund was the reserves that Muni held and those funds were never submitted to Aetna nor included in any of our premium calculations from a risk standpoint ….” [Ref #5, page 4; emphasis added] That’s a pretty big problem there, because it indicates that the reductions in Sullivan’s so-called “premiums” in 1992 and again in 1994 were absolutely based on something other than what Sullivan’s real risk from an insurance standpoint was. Not to mention his “premiums” were lower by over $400 than what the Commission on Salaries and Emoluments had authorized in 1982 — which again, per Resolution 82-1, was supposed to be “the same rate… as in existence on January 1, 1982.” [Ref #3, page 9]

Furthermore, in spite of CFO Kate Giard’s statement on February 4 or 5 that “The policy in effect was an illegal commitment unless the Assembly approves it” [Ref #5, page 12], no one informed the Assembly, much less asked the Assembly to approve it. Was it not, then, still an illegal commitment?

March 27, 2002

OMB director Cheryl Frasca — who, again, holds the same position in the current administration) — wrote to Kate Giard,

My assumption is that this issue is getting addressed outside of the budget process. If that’s incorrect, I need to know. [Ref #5, page 18]

Kate Giard replied, copying her email to David Otto, city manager Harry Kieling, William Greene, and Karen Moore:

Cheryl, et. al.

My recommendation is that the potential payout amount goes into your fund balance “reserve” account and leave it at that. If you put it in the budget, it’s just going to lapse every year. Its not so much money, thank god, that when the unfortunate event occurs, we simply take the money out of the reserve and get assembly approval for payment. (My recollection is that the total is somewhere in the $150,000 range. If it is much higher than that, my recommendation may change.)

As long as ER has all of the documentation showing that a prior Assembly intended to provide this benefit and can also show that in the past there was, in fact, no insurance policy acquired with the proceeds paid to us by the Sullivan family, then we do have an obligation to pay, as required by prior assembly action. [Ref #5, page 18]

Again, the problem here is that neither the 1982 Assembly nor the Commission on Salaries and Emoluments had contemplated paying the benefit out of public funds. The intended Sullivan to go on the group insurance with Aetna. The Commission in 1982 was in fact told (by then-Manager of Records and Benefits Susan Lindemuth) that he was on the group insurance with Aetna. But this was untrue. Appparently he never was. And by taking these actions without attending to the 1982 Assembly’s intent re: group insurance, and without informing the 2002 Assembly of the problems that had been discovered, Wuerch’s officials usurped authority that did not in fact belong to them.

Back to Giard’s email –

We could terminate this obligation by simply telling the Sullivan family we will no longer provide this insurance….I would not recommend that course of action, however, it is an option the Administration may consider. [Ref #5, page 18]

Why would she not recommend that course of action? And why was it up to the Administration? — how about the Assembly, which was the body that had actual authority in the matter?

Giard again –

We could also try to acquire a life insurance policy for the former Mayor, but the cost would very likely be prohibitive, given his age. [Ref #5, page 18]

Instead, it would continue to be dirt cheap, at the rate established through unknown means in 1995 of $555.84 per year. [Ref #4, page 2]

And finally, the end of Giard’s email:

In summary, I would recommend that you put aside the payout amount as part of the reserve of fund balance and when Mayor Sullivan dies, we will obtain assembly approval and pay out the proceeds. [Ref #5, page 18]

April 2, 2002

There are a few more emails in the 2002 record which mostly have to do with the technicalities of where to deposit the “premiums” when they were paid. The final email in the record was a long string of such emails, with the last page — a forwarded copy of Kate Giard’s March 27 email — marked in the margin with handwritten notes:

How to handle Sullivan Life Insurance

Collect premium annually in Jan (Dan usually comes in & pays)

Deposit to 603 Fund

When proceeds need to be paid out — pay out of 603 fund

Needs Assembly approval when payout is made. [Ref #5, page 23]

2003

George Wuerch’s term ended and Mark Begich became mayor.

Mark Begich administration 2003–2009

City manager: Dennis LeBlanc

2007

January 3, 2007

Three emails from this date from the Begich administration about the Sullivan “life insurance” have been made available to the public. The first is the most important, and has already been referenced, because it includes the timeline that Joanne Hanscom, health care plan administrator/privacy officer, put together. The timeline was an attachment to an email she wrote addressed to Begich’s city manager, Dennis LeBlanc; deputy city manager Mike Abbott; and chief finance officer Jeffrey Sinz, who had also served as Wuerch’s director of OMB after Cheryl Frasca joined the administration of Governor Frank Murkowski.

Joanne Hanscom’s email reads,

I am attaching information for an MOA liability on Mayor George Sullivan that I am not sure you know about. I would like to discuss this at our Thursday meeting if possible. I will be bringing the paperwork I have, but if you would like your copy sooner, please let me know. [Ref #4, page 1]

The timeline in the attachment has an introduction:

The MOA will have to payout $193,000 to the estate of Mayor George Sullivan upon his death. Mr. Sullivan has continued to pay the monthly premium costs. This cost was based on the amount of the premium at the time of his leaving office, and was to include any changes to that premium. This is according to Resolution 82-1 that was adopted on January 19, 1982. [Ref #4, page 2]

As I’ve written previously [Ref #9], this is incorrect: Resolution 82-1 did not in fact say anything about changes to the premium, but did say specifically that Sullivan was to pay the same rate that was in force on January 1, 1982. A later clarification in November 1982 said that if the premium went up, Sullivan still had to pay the full amount. The Commission said nothing about lowering the premiums.

The attachment continues,

There has been no life insurance policy in place since he left municipal employment. The total amount that Mr. Sullivan has paid is $17,995.32 per the receipts that I have found. The family has not yet paid the 2007 premium. [Ref #4, page 2]

I’m not going to repeat the full timeline here: it can be seen on page 2 of Reference #4, and I’ve already included most of what it says as quotes in the timeline I’m writing here. I’ll just include the last two items, because they render the understanding she had of the some of the 2002 material:

March 21, 2002 – Letter to Karen Moore from Melissa Deitrick (Aetna) informing the MOA that Aetna does not have an individual policy on Mr. Sullivan and that because of Mr. Sullivan’s age he is not eligible for an individual policy and is not eligible for the group policy because he is not an active employee. Aetna also recommended that the MOA return all of the premium payments paid to the MOA by Mr. Sullivan.

March 27, 2002 – E-Mail from Kate Giard (CFO) to Cheryl Frasca (OMB) on how the MOA needs to handle this situation. When the unfortunate happens the MOA should get assembly approval and then take the money out of reserves. [Ref #4, pages 2-3]

Mike Abbott replied to Hanscom’s email,

This is an interesting little nugget. do we need to set reserves aside at this time? Have we “booked” this liability? [Ref #4, page 4]

January 24, 2007

The following day, Hanscom replied,

At this time I am not aware of reserves being set aside or that the liability has been booked. It is on the agenda for tomorrow. [Ref #4, page 5]

And that’s it for what we have from the Begich administration. We have no information at the moment on what Begich administration officials other than that they did not inform the Assembly of their findings.

2009

Following Mark Begich’s election to the U.S. Senate, Matt Claman was Acting Mayor from January to July 2009 when Dan Sullivan’s term began.

Dan Sullivan administration 2009–present

City manager: George Vakalis

July 1, 2009

Dan Sullivan took office as mayor. He appointed as city manager George Vakalis, who had also been the second city manager during the Rick Mystrom administration; and Cheryl Frasca as budget director, a position she’d also held during the Wuerch administration. As chief of staff, Sullivan appointed Larry Crawford, who previously had been city manager under mayors George Sullivan, Tom Fink, and Rick Mystrom. I’ve written in a previous post about Crawford’s relationship with Susan Lindemuth, the Manager of Records and Benefits during most of the period covered by this timeline. [Ref #9]

September 23, 2009

George Sullivan died at home from complications of lung cancer at the age of 87. [Ref #1]

2010

February 2, 2010

Resolution No. AR 2010-33, entitled “A resolution of the Municipality of Anchorage appropriating $193,000.00 from the Areawide General Fund (Fund 101) Fund Balance to the Employee Relations Department BP 2009 Operating Budget (Fund 101) for disbursement under life insurance contract to the George M. Sullivan Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust” [Ref #10, page 3] was introduced as addendum on the agenda of the Anchorage Assembly.

It was accompanied by a memorandum, AM 76-2010, prepared by the Department of Law under the supervision of municipal attorney Dennis Wheeler with the concurrence of Nancy B. Usera, Employee Relations Directory, and city manager George Vakalis. Its purpose was to explain the resolution:

This resolution requests appropriation of One Hundred Ninety Three Thousand Dollars ($193,000.00) from the Areawide General Fund (Fund 101) to the Employee Relations Department 2009 Operating Budget Fund (Fund 101) for disbursement under a life insurance contract to the George M. Sullivan Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust. [Ref #10, page 1; emphasis added]

But to date, no one has produced a contract. Now that you’ve read through this timeline, you’re better prepared to notice the omissions in the history Wheeler provides in the memorandum:

In 1982, the Assembly approved Assembly Resolution 82-30, a resolution asking the Commission on Salaries & Emoluments to consider directing the Municipality to provide life insurance coverage for Mayor George M. Sullivan for life. (See AR 82-30, attached hereto.) Thereafter, the Commission directed the Municipality to provide life insurance to Sullivan, at his cost, for the remained of his life. (Commission Resolution 82-1, attached.) Mayor Sullivan left municipal employment in October 1982.

To meet the directive from the Salaries & Emoluments Commission, the Municipality added Mayor George M. Sullivan to the MOA group life insurance plan with Aetna. The amount of insurance purchased by Mayor George M. Sullivan was $193,000; the annual premium has varied, from a high of $1,042.20 in 1982 to $555.84 since November 1995. A total of $19,662.84 in premiums was received by the Municipality and deposited into Fund 603 prior to 2002, and then into the 735 Fund thereafter. [Ref #10, page 1; emphasis added]

In fact, as we now know, (1) despite the November 1982 indications made by Susan Lindemuth to the Commission, Sullivan was apparently not in fact added to the Muni’s group plan with Aetna; and (2) the “annual premium” amount varied for unknown reasons, because Aetna never received any premiums or information on Sullivan from which to calculate his risk and premiums; (3) as became absolutely clear in 2002, if not before, the Municipality never received any “premiums” from George Sullivan or his family, because Sullivan was not insured and was not part of any “risk.” Which isn’t to say that the Municipality didn’t receive money from the Sullivans — but the payments were not for “life insurance.” To continue to maintain the fiction that they were is — to be very polite — not accurate.

I am not a lawyer, but I can read these documents and see these facts. Dennis Wheeler is a lawyer. How can he not see?

In March 2002, Aetna informed the Municipality that Mayor George M. Sullivan was not eligible for group life insurance plan because he was no longer an employee; Aetna was not carrying an individual policy on Sullivan, nor would Sullivan qualify for an individual policy, due to his age. The Municipality was similarly unable to secure an individual policy on Sullivan. However, the Municipality continued to accept the annual premium payments, with payout to be appropriated in full following the passing of Mayor George M. Sullivan. The good mayor passed in October 2009, and this Resolution appropriates the funds to the trustee of the George M. Sullivan Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust, the appropriate legal entity for the disbursement, to meet the commitment of the Municipality…. [Ref #10, page 1; emphasis added]

As I wrote in my first post on the Sullivan “life insurance,” this is technically true: early 2002 was when the Wuerch administration was “informed” by Aetna. But the phrasing is ambigous, making it easy for readers (that is, the Assembly) to believe that up until then, Aetna had him covered. Or that Aetna wasn’t completely flummoxed when Karen Moore asked them about him. Or that the Muni itself wasn’t caught completely flatfooted when then-Assemblymember Dan Sullivan walked into City Hall in January 2002 to pay the “premium” because the person who knew anything about Sullivan’s so-called “life insurance policy” — Susan Lindemuth — was no longer a municipal employee.

Joanne Lindemuth Hanscom again:

There has been no life insurance policy in place since he [George Sullivan] left municipal employment. [Ref #4, page 2]

January 9, 1984 – Letter to Susan Lindemuth from James Hickey (Aetna) regarding the group policy number 392680 and George Sullivan. I do not think anyone at MOA informed Aetna that Mr. Sullivan was no longer employed by the municipality. However, he was kept on the census and Mr. Sullivan kept making the annual premium payments. [Ref #4, page 2; emphasis added]

Lynda Gable of Aetna in 2002,

The insurance fund was the reserves that Muni held and those funds were never submitted to Aetna nor included in any of our premium calculations from a risk standpoint to the best of my knowledge. How much life insurance is he supposed to have??? [Ref #5, page 4; emphasis added]

This is information that the Dennis Wheeler had on hand when he and the Department of Law prepared the memorandum. But this is not information that they included in the memorandum so that the Assembly would be fully informed. In fact, Assembly members didn’t even learn that Mayor Dan Sullivan was the trustee of the George M. Sullivan Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust until the first news stories began to come out two weeks after AR 2010-33 passed.

February 16, 2010

By a vote of 9-1, the Assembly appropriated $193,000 to the George M. Sullivan Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust. [Ref #1]. The only Assembly member who voted against the appropriation was Harriet Drummond. However, Mike Gutierrez was not present at the meeting.

One last item

When I was on Shannyn Moore’s radio show last Friday, she told me that the earliest posting of this issue was on December 30 or 31. Further, items for the Assembly’s agenda must be given to the clerk two weeks in advance; if you don’t get it in time your item goes on an addendum to the agenda. That’s where Resolution No. AR 2010-33 was located at the February 2 Assembly meeting: on the addendum. Why was it filed too late to get on the regular agenda, when the December 30/31 posting shows that people in Dan Sullivan’s administration were dealing with it as much as a month before? The appearance is of an item that was stealth-added to the agenda in order to minimize Assembly & public attention before it came up for a vote on Feb. 16.

I suppose with this timeline I could go into some of the stuff said after the news stories began to come out, but I’m pretty tired now and so are my hands. So this is it for now. But if you’ve made it this far, you are now a great deal more informed about this than you were before. I hope that people will write questions & comments, because even as long as I’ve been at this, I’ve probably missed some stuff.

References

3/3/2010. “George Sullivan timeline” (Anchorage Daily News).
3/3/2010. “City life insurance payout for former mayor raises eyebrows — $193,000: Assembly honors ‘82 deal that puts city money into George Sullivan’s trust” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
1982 Municipality of Anchorage documents relating to former Mayor George M. Sullivan’s life insurance. Contains the same documents provided in a PDF by the Anchorage Daily News, except that I’ve placed them in chronological order & provided bookmarks (table of contents).
2007 Begich administration emails. Contains the same documents provided in a PDF by the Anchorage Daily News, except slightly reordered & provided with bookmarks (table of contents).
2002 Wuerch administration emails relating to former Mayor George M. Sullivan’s life insurance. Contains the same documents provided in a PDF by the Anchorage Daily News, except that I’ve placed them in chronological order (as best I could) & provided bookmarks (table of contents).
1/8/1994. “Municipality still paying Fink’s salary” by Peter Blumberg (Anchorage Daily News).
Susan Lindemuth public profile at Linked-in.
3/10/2010. “Sullygate update 2: ‘Five administrations have been aware of this’” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa.com).
3/16/2020. “Sullygate & Chronos, god of time” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa.com).
2010 Assembly Resolution & memorandum relating to a payout of $193,000 to a trust in the name of former Mayor George M. Sullivan. Contains the same documents provided in a PDF by the Anchorage Daily News, except slightly reordered & provided with bookmarks (table of contents).
AR NO. 2010–91: Resolution submitted by Assemblymember Harriet Drummond on March 9, 2010 calling for an independent investigation of legal & ethical questions surrounding the $193,000 “insurance policy” and payout. Currently scheduled for discussion at the 23 March 2010 Anchorage Assembly meeting.

Conservatives for Palin & civility: Fairly unbalanced

Mel Green — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:05:28 +0000

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

7/7/2009. “The 2 million dollar meme” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
2/14/2010. “Skinny White Sunday: Alaska Palm Pilot Rocks!” by Rich Crowther (Conservatives for Palin).
2/8/2010. “Progressive bloggers on Palin: Civility versus namecalling” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
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.
2/6/2010. “Foul Mouthed Alaska Democrat In New Low” by Rich Crowther (Conservatives for Palin).
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”.
4/14/2009. “Anti-WAR letter: Opposing Wayne Anthony Ross” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
4/15/2009. “WAR’s antigay letter to the Alaska Bar Association, 1993″ by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
4/16/2009. “WAR goes down! 23 yeas, 35 nays!” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
2/8/2010. “Midwinter Snow Pictures – and a Comment on C4P Meddling – Updated” by Phil Munger (Progressive Alaska).

The Daily Tweets, 2010-01-06: I was up pretty late last night… er… this morning

Mel Green — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:52:00 +0000

The best thing about Texas: Tommy Lee Jones. Some beautiful country too — per 3 Burials of Melquiades Estrada. #fb #
Caller to my job saw accident 15 mins before she called me on another matter, glad to hear Sven Persson is OK. http://bit.ly/4KpoUz #fb #
RT: @cadaverousapple: I really hate doing laundry. // Are you retweeting something I tweeted on Sunday? My condolences! #
@shannynmoore Maybe it’s good I couldn’t make it, if it affects one’s ability to be a lesbo. I hope news from mtg not too bad, dammit. in reply to shannynmoore #
@shannynmoore Dammit. So sorry…. for the belugas, the wolves…. #
ADN belatedly (week & 1/2 after the fact) reports on Palibanning at Sarah’s Wasilla signing. http://bit.ly/6JZ3eC #fb #
See “valleytruth” reader comment comparing banned w/ pedophiles. Right abt 1 thing: Palin is as mature as a child. http://bit.ly/6JZ3eC #fb #
Listening to Alaska’s test of the national Emergency Alert System.It’s really … um… inspiring. Yeah. http://bit.ly/66pQdz #fb #

More on Palin's spreadsheet

Mel Green — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:19:29 +0000

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).

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

References

7/7/09. “The 2 million dollar meme” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
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.
7/8/09. “Palin says inquiries wasted ‘millions’ — TALLY: Record requests, ethics complaints, lawsuits, troopergate given price tag” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
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).
7/7/09. “Deciding Which Public Information to Release” by Steve (What Do I Know?).
7/6/09. “Palin says ethics inquiries were paralyzing — INTERVIEW: Governor says she resigned because of frivolous complaints” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
7/1/09. “State spent nearly $300K investigating Palin ethics complaints: Most expensive investigation may have been driven by Palin herself” by Patrick Forgey (Juneau Empire).
7/8/09. “Palin’s Milllllions of Dollars!” by AKMuckraker (The Mudflats).

The 2 million dollar meme

Mel Green — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:18:45 +0000

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.

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

References

“meme.” The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. . Accessed 6 Jul 2009.
“meme.” Urban Dictionary. Accessed 6 Jul 2009.
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.
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).
7/1/09. “Ethics investigations cost state $296,000 — FEES: Troopergate cost almost two-thirds of the total” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
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).
7/1/09. “State of Alaska logs $296,000 probing Palin complaints” by the Associated Press (Fairbanks Daily News-Miner).
7/7/09. “Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal” (Wikipedia). Accessed 7/7/09.
10/10/08. Report to the Legislative Council, Volume One: Public Report by Stephen Branchflower (Alaska Legislative Council).
11/3/08. In re Ethics Complaint dated September 1, 2008: Report of Findings and Recommendations by Timothy Petumenos (Alaska Personnel Board).
11/8/08. “Troopergate: The final words?” by Andrew Halcro (AndrewHalcro.com).
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).
11/7/08. “Our View: Taking Palin’s side — Petumenos’ report gives her strong benefit of the doubt” (Anchorage Daily News [editorial]).
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).
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).
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).
6/21/09. “Ethics complaints filed against Palin” by the Associated Press (Anchorage Daily News).
6/23/09. “Fifteenth Ethics Complaint Dismissed” (Office of the Governor, State of Alaska). Press release No. 19-155.
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.”
7/2/09. “Catching Palin’s Numbers” by Steve (What Do I Know?).
5/31/09. “How much is $54.84 * 16?” by Steve (What Do I Know?).
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).
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.
6/19/09. “Help shine a light on the Palin Administration–FAQs about this fundraiser” by Linda Kellen Biegel (Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis).
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).
7/5/09. “Legal Bills Swayed Palin, Official Says” (New York Times)
7/6/09. “Growing Criticism at Home Took Toll on Palin” by Jim Carlton (Wall Street Journal).
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).
7/6/09. “Palin says ethics inquiries were paralyzing — INTERVIEW: Governor says she resigned because of frivolous complaints” by Sean Cockerham (Anchorage Daily News).
7/6/09. “Palin critics defend their actions — COMPLAINTS: Public records laws were used as designed, they say” by Richard Mauer (Anchorage Daily News).

Henkimaa » Things I did instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour

Announcing the Alaska LGBT Community Survey

The Daily Tweets, 2010-04-19: “Riverworld” livesnark

Livesnark

A Sullygate timeline: 1982-2010

1967

1982

1984

1987

1992

1994

1995

2000

2002

2003

2007

2009

2010

One last item

References

Conservatives for Palin & civility: Fairly unbalanced

References

The Daily Tweets, 2010-01-06: I was up pretty late last night… er… this morning

More on Palin's spreadsheet

Addendum

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References

The 2 million dollar meme

Addendum

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References