In the New York Times, Monica Davey reports that Palin scotched her husband’s stepmother’s chances of succeeding her as Wasilla’s mayor:
In 2002, when Ms. Palin was completing her second and final term as mayor, her husband’s stepmother, Faye Palin, began campaigning to succeed her. Faye Palin, though, favored abortion rights, people who recalled the race said, and Ms. Palin sided instead with Dianne M. Keller, a City Council member who won the race and remains mayor there today.
“I said, ‘Faye, my God, what is Thanksgiving going to be like at your house?’ ” said Michelle Church, a member of the borough government that includes Wasilla. “She was just like, ‘Well, I just won’t say anything.’ ”
Faye Palin declined a request for an interview.
Add the crushing of her mother-in-law’s political ambition to her recruitment of her teenage son as co-eavesdropper on her sister’s dissolving marriage and to her vindictive and hypocritical campaign against her ex-brother-in-law: Palin family values meltdown.
Also in the Times, Elizabeth Bumiller gives a round-up of the weekend’s Palin revelations, and David Brooks disapproves of Palin as a vice presidential candidate. Trying to soften the blow with a compliment, Brooks writes that Palin “made mortal enemies of the two people McCain has always held up as the carriers of the pork-barrel disease: Young and Stevens.”
Nope. According to Paul Kane of the Washington Post, while Palin was mayor of Wasilla, she won $26.9 million in federal funds for the town of 6,700 people by hiring the law firm of
Robertson, Monagle & Eastaugh, an Anchorage-based law firm with close ties to Alaska’s most senior Republicans: Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens, who was indicted in July on charges of accepting illegal gifts. The Wasilla account was handled by the former chief of staff to Stevens, Steven W. Silver, who is a partner in the firm.
So much for Palin’s claim to be a foe of earmarks. Last, Greg of Hermits Rock, who manages to be more dispassionate than I am, has a nice summary of how useless Palin will be to McCain the day after the election and how wretched her environmental policy is.
you know, i think the environmental issue is an important one, politically as well as ethically. I think there's a lot of emphasis right now on the babygate business because people are wondering what the effect will be on the evangelical vote.
But this is really a case in point re: your earlier column about how babygate is distracting us from the more powerful issues. Environmentalism, it seems, is one of the major issues fracturing the evangelical movement, and emphasizing that aspect of Palin's record will be important if the dems want to attract progressive evangelicals, who will NOT support ANWR drilling, etc. They will, however, support her decision to support her daughter. So let's not beat that drum overly loud.
Caleb, I just posted this at HR, but I suspect your readers would be interested too: Curtis Brainard at the _Columbia Journalism Review_ has an excellent summary of current reporting on Palin's environmental record. Especially informative are the connections between Palin's policies compare and coming midnight regulations changes the Bush administration will be seeking.