Sarah may have given Mr. Monegan a casuse of action for damages for wrongful termination. It is enough to make out a case for Monegan if the refusal to terminate the trooper was a "substantial" or "motivating factor" in her descision to terminate him. Methlin v. Bartholomew (Alaska 1998) 971 P.2d 151 at page 154. And there are lots of similar cases.

But I bet the Democrats won't use this against her, unlike the tact the Republicans have taken against Obama. Does anyone remember McCain saying back in 2000 that "if all you run is negative attack ads you don't have much of a vision for the future, or you're not ready to articulate it." Just sayin....

gave both sides something they can run with... and the decision is a "pulled punch". What a wimp.

How can an abuse of power not be illegal? Isn't an abuse of power illegal by definition? If it's not illegal, how can their be abuse? Are they saying there is an acceptable amount of abuse of power? WTF!?!?

McCain already spinning this one.

Everyone, even republicans, know she was a bad pick FROM THE BEGINNING but they had to carry the water anyway and when he evened out in the polls, they saw it as their chance to win.

I think McCain is already finished but this just blunts arguments of "who can you trust" and they can easily link her to Cheney. However, I hope Obama sparsely mentions this as it serves him no good to go after the story. Let the McCain camp spar with the pundits and Obama can just sit back and watch while he coasts to victory.

The McCain campaign was better off before they selected Palin. They got a big boost when the McCain/Palin ticket was announced but, since then, they have done very poorly. This latest revelation about Palin's misuse of power drives a stake into the McCain campaign.

With nothing but bad news in the financial sector, this is badly needed good news.

The best thing she could do now is to drop off the ticket. I'll bet the GOP has a backup candidate waiting in the wings.

Hey, Mitt, get your suit pressed and your hair done. You haven't thrown away that acceptance speech, have you?

when does McCain ask her to resign from the ticket?

The way I read the report, the illegal abuse of power and the legal firing are two different things. Palin did not act illegally in firing the commissioner, whatever her motivation may have been, but she did act illegally in trying to get the trooper fired for private reasons.

Wonder what kind of V.P. she would be?

Bad news, she is fit to be the GOP vice president after all.

She broke the law, but she seems to have some sort of executive privilege to do so. Gee, where have we heard that one before. She would slip right into the Bush White House, no problem.

But another report I read defended her action by saying that the firing was done for budgetary reasons. Did the position of public safety commissioner remain unfilled? Did she abolish having someone in charge of public safety? If not, then the "budgetary" argument wouldn't seem to mean much.

According to an NYT article, published yesterday, Mr Palin requested a meeting with Mr Monegan. When Monegan arrive at the meeting on Jan 4, 2007, Palin had a stack of personnel files. Mr Palin is not an elected official, he is not a state employee with supervisory duties or HR responsibility. Why would Palin have access to personnel files?

Abuse of power? Sure looks that way.

But they did find an abuse of power, no? Not in a partisan way, but just intellectually curious in a general way, what I want to know is whatever that abuse of power was, how could it be an abuse of her power, but not be illegal?

Do not get this confused: Palin MAY not have broken the law in firing Moneghan, but regardless of WHY he was fired, Palin did, according to the special investigator, abuse gubernatorial powers by pressuring Wooten to be fired. In other words, the abuse of power occurred even before Moneghan's firing. At least this is how I read it.

First, it was way more interesting than I expected it to be -- in part because it gives a detailed view of Todd Palin's obsession with the trooper in question -- as well as the fact that Sarah Palin quite knowingly allowed her husband to do illegal things.

To those who see the quick news report as a "split verdict" -- quite the contrary. It's a very damning report and it establishes very convincingly that Palin abused her power in a fairly substantial way.

People seem to be hung up on the fact that the report says that she did not fire Monegan illegally. That's not really the point. He served at the pleasure of the Governor so she could fire him whenever she wanted -- and there's at least some evidence that there were other reasons why she didn't approve of them.

The law broken was not the firing of Monegan but the pressuring of him to fire a trooper, and the abuse of confidentiality of the trooper's files. The political no-no above and beyond this is that Todd Palin has very clearly been WAY out of bounds. He's a private citizen acting as if he has an official capacity --and having access to personnel issues that are illegal for him to have.

The reason she's not being prosecuted, I'm assuming, is because the typical recourse for a chief executive breaking the law is impeachment.

Checks and balances. With all the elbows Palin has thrown since taking office, it will be interesting to see how this plays out in Alaska. Will legislators risk pissing off a potential president and vice president... or will they read the tea leaves and recognize that, especially after this, they are not going to be in national office?

Stay tuned....

Sarah is awash in legal issues, like the little problem of Sarah using her hacked Yahoo account to conduct government business out of the sunshine.

But the poor kid who hacked her is in deep sh*t. And she is Little Miss America.