I'm a former Wasilla resident and know the family.

The Anchorage Daily News has a long audiotape of Palin's assistant urging the Alaska State Troopers to get rid of the guy. The fired Public Safety Commissioner has e-mails covering the pressure applied. Palin tried to unearth years-old complaints that had already been investigated, arbitrated and punished. They've done nothing but disparage the guy while he has studiously avoided any criticism of them at all.

Sarah has a deep streak of vindictiveness, best shown perhaps by a January audiotape of her visiting live on a shock jock's show in which the DJ makes fun of her adversary, the State Senate President who is from Sarah's own home town. He rags on the senator about her kids, her cancer survival, her weight and repeatedly calls her a bitch, while Sarah sits there giggling. On air, Sarah claims the woman "hates" her.

An investigation of the alleged illegal pressure to perform an illegal act, the firing of a guy on ancient, resolved charges, was commissioned by the legislature is due on October 10th. I don't expect that the results will be pretty for Palin.

What did the trooper actually do? He shot a moose because Sarah's sister couldn't bring herself to do it, though she had a "tag" that allowed the kill. The trooper was out hunting with her and Sarah's dad. They took the moose to Sarah's dad's garage to butcher it and Sarah ate it all winter. Two years later they turned the trooper in despite their being co-conspirators to violate the game laws.

The ex only used a Taser on its "test" setting, attached with clips. The stepkid had been urging him to show him what it felt like. That gave a very mild shock to the kid who was lying on the floor on cushions. He asked the trooper to do it again, but he refused. The mom was right there. Years later the Palins and her sister brought it up in the divorce.

All of this is in the public record, but the McSame-Palinocchio spin machine grinds on.

from cnn.com friday:

Speaking Thursday to CNN's Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston, Wooten gave his account of the Taser incident but denied ever drinking while driving.

He said that he was a new Taser instructor, and his stepson was asking him about the equipment. "I didn't shoot him with live, you know, actual live cartridge," Wooten said.

Instead, he said, he hooked his stepson up to a training aid "with little clips. And, you know, the Taser was activated for less than a second, which would be less than what you would get if you touched an electric fence. ... It was as safe as I could possibly make it."

He said his stepson was on the living room floor surrounded by pillows, that he "was bragging about it," and that the family laughed about it.

Asked whether it was a dumb decision, Wooten told CNN, "absolutely."

---

he got suspended for five days; case closed. the fact that palin went after him even after the divorce -- and AT ALL -- is abuse of power, period.

Sarah Palin running over the frozen Tundra while wolves and Mooses shoot at her from airplanes.

She's attractive window dressing for a toxic waste dump of a personality. Put a geiger counter near her and it would go insane.

As soon as she opened her mouth, I never wanted to hear her voice again. The more I read and research her scandals, the more I realize that she is a seriously corrupt official, willing to break the law to settle personal scores. She sounds like a very dangerous person, completely unfit for any kind of command authority. She has committed adultery with a guy that was her husband's friend and business partner. They got that guy out of town in a hurry. She also had 2 couples that were friends and when one husband left his wife for the wife of the other couple, they attempted to try to destroy them. We are only about a week into the vetting process that John McCain didn't have time for. I am sure that there will be a whole lot more of these scandals that will come out demonstrating that these people are more of the same Republican Culture Of Corruption. Within a couple more weeks, it will be clear that Johnny boy made a monumental fuckup.

On September 4th, the Washington Post reported that Monegan had shown them emails from Sarah Palin. On the topic of a legislative proprosal that would keep guns away from the mentally ill, she wrote that her first thoughts went to her brother-in-law (although he is not mentally ill). Her brother-in-law had allegedly threatened her father with gun violence. He denies making the the threat and he was never officially or unofficially charged with communicating a threat.

What kind of professional objectivity do you have if your first impulse is to consider how a law would affect you personally? Answer: none. How much clarity of mind do you have if you can't distinguish between a person that you believe made an angry threat and a person who makes threats after having been diagnosed and documented as mentally ill? Answer: not much.

Quoted from Palin's email

"No one's above the law. If the law needs to be changed to not allow access to guns for people threatening to kill someone, it must apply to everyone."

Are you telling me that a documented schizophrenic should have the same access to hunting rifles as a person with no record of mental problems? The law can and does distinguish between these two people. And it is entirely possible and just to tighten the existing restrictions on schizophrenic access without restricting the access of sane people. So it's perfectly acceptable to extend privileges to a a sane person and to not extend those same privileges to an insane person; doing so, is not putting the sane person "above the law".

Palin advocates either A) not doing anything more to keep guns away from the mentally ill or B) taking gun access away from every sane person who has ever threatened to kill someone (regardless of whether the threat was serious, documented, or simply alleged). How many NRA bubbas are in that B category? Would they vote for Palin if they knew her impulses on this?