As Gourevitch rightly noted, Palin on the one hand seemed to be saying he was released for "performance reasons", while on the other hand was strenuously arguing the reasons that firing has been said to occur.

Yeah, vote for a Dame that doesn't know right from wrong. Vote for a Dame who lies about lies. It disgusts me to see this Dame getting air time.

Is it about time to bring out all the claims from the Taser manufacturer and the police departments which make frequent use of Tasers in minor incidents? An argument can be made that Tasering a child is safer than spanking him. Supporting research on the supposed harms of spanking is easy to find. Supporting research on the safety of Tasering is also readily available. The contrary claims about Tasering are mostly about the threat for those prone to heart attacks - not much of a factor in children.

Does Gov. Palin support spanking children? The Alaska State Police obviously believe in the safety of Tasers. I'm sure they've instructed their officers they're safe. Also, when raising kids is the "meth capital of Alaska," might not physical discipline be a sometimes necessary thing to keep them straight?

Did you see the interview with the father? He said the kid asked him to after he (the dad) gave training courses on tasering to the police force. He did taser him, but he had it on a minimal setting that they used for training that sounded like a very mild shock. I'm not saying that tasering his kid was a brilliant thing to do, but according to him, he didn't do it in anger or as a punishment.

I am really confused here. I have read that the kid who was tasered was Wooten's step son, and that he asked Wooten to do it to show him what tasering was like. Here Palin says the kid was her nephew. Does that mean that her sister had the child with another man before she married Wooten? Is there a family tree around to keep these people straight?

Go deeper into the tasering the nephew on the record. When you say tasering a child, most people get the picture of the TV show "Cops" in their head. They probably picture an abusive, angry husband punishing a child with a taser. This is not the fact.
The child was curious and asked to be tasered. The trooper set the taser on the lowest setting and let the child hold the taser leads. Stupid? Yes. But it sounds about as dangerous as licking a nine volt battery. The nephew bragged about it at school the next day. Who is to say the trooper was trying to satisfy the childs curiosity, so the child would not get the taser later and play with it and get hurt.
Zero child abuse charges were filed at the time, even though Palin's sister was home and knew what was going on. It was only later, during the divorce, that this "egregious" act was mentioned.
Also, the reason the "facts" are available is that the trooper had the union representative release the information for all the public to read. The trooper has been open and transparent. He's paid a price for it, but he released the facts for everyone to read, discuss and decide on. Something that Palin and her administration have refused to do.

Gotta love Governor Palin.

Coming from a law student, she opens up a ton of cans of worms here. First, her citing of situations that had already been handled by the administrative body shows a complete lack of understanding in the process and is a major red flag for the abuse of power claim. Citing displeasure with the outcome of a case/situation as justification for any further action is a blatant, blatant example of this.

What's more, her continually changing story brings credibility into account, especially when at least one of the argued justifications brings legal problems and a few others bring major moral ones.

The biggest part of this that no one is talking about is that Palin has shifted from what could have been one of her strongest arguments: her more open discussion in the context of Mr. Monegan being fired (as opposed to resigning) takes a major bullet out of her chamber.

Apply this kind of exceptional thinking to a bigger office and you have the Bush Administration. Saddam was a Bad Man, therefore our military should invade and take him out of power. Stovepipe the intel so that only your side is heard. Demonize and obstruct any attempts to question.
Palin would be dangerous as VP, even more dangerous if she became President.

So those recorded phone calls where your aide explains to Monegan that it would be nice if Wooten wasn't a trooper anymore has nothing to do with your willingness to admit that you don't like your ex brother in law named Wooten who's still a trooper?

Partisanship? Please explain why the Republican majority first initiated the investigation and explain to us why you first advocated transparency and now, with the help of McCain you're stonewalling every aspect of transparency. Explain to us, how that isn't any different of the last 8 years of bush.

Palin's complaints in the form of interviews with troopers have also been published in Alaska papers. The mainstreeam and tabloid press have published accounts of this and other aspects of her family life. All of it points to a pretty unusual family beyond the union of her sister to Trooper Wooten. That's why I asked for the family tree.

Here's what I have gathered thus far. Her parents are from Idaho but moved to Wasilla to teach. Her husband is from Wasilla. He has a native Alaskan grandmother. His step mother ran to succeed Palin as Mayor, but she supported someone else. She has a sister in Anchorage
whom she sent her daughter to live with around the time she had her baby and the daughter got pregnant. She has a sister who was married to Wooten, who himself has been married multiple times. Tabloids allege wildness among her oldest offspring in a small town where both sets of grandparents seem to be present but both parents have jobs elsewhere (North Slope, fishing, governing.) I know I am missing a lot.
Sounds like good American family values to me.

Her hubris is absolutely astonishing. Even more astonishing is the degree to which she and the McPalin campaign have allowed absolutely incorrect information to permeate the public sphere. Nearly everyone I've spoken with about this issue believes that she fired the trooper -- not the public safety commissioner.

So, riddle me this, First Runner-Up Reformer Barbie: you obviously feel that the Alaska civil service employment laws, pursuant to which Col. Julia Grimes of the Alaska State Police reviewed you and your family's twenty-five seperate allegations of misconduct were reviewed, concluded that only five of the allegations were credible, and, based on that conclusion, issued a ten-day suspension (and then later reduced that suspension to five days after the troopers' union protested) provided insufficient punishment for your ex-brother-in-law. Why, then, did you not try to REFORM THEM as opposed to simply declaring yourself above them?

Can we expect the Rough Reform Riders of the McPalin administration to act similarly? To cry "Reform!" to the rooftops and then simply circumvent the laws when they impede the exercise of personal vendettas?

need to look at the time line and ask yourselves when she became aware of the tasering and when she decided to do something about it. You might find an unreasonably long amount of time.

Shirley you jest!

Sounds like she still feels she had a legitimate beef.

True, but that shouldn't be the focus and TPM doesn't need to reiterate it. Instead, continue to bring up the fact her administration exerted pressure on and eventually fired a man for not acting on these impulses, then lied about it, got caught (recorded even!), and now is actively stone-walling the formal investigation brought on by Alaska's Republican-controlled legislature.

Whether she felt like she was 'justified' or not matters little. We can't let her gloss over the fact she's lied about her involvement (and is now actively covering it up) from the start. So much for the 'transparency' she said she's deliver.

Did anyone else catch Hannity's "30 investigators" throw-away? Yet another zombie lie...

This Wooten should file a civil suit.

Threats against the first family? Little pretentious?

So when was that interview recorded? She was lauding the investigation by the state personnel board, but it has been reported by last Monday (9/15), her people were asking the personnel board to dismiss the complaint she had filed against herself. This from Alaska Rep. Les Gavara:

"To put icing on the cake, on Monday the Governor’s attorneys moved to dismiss the Governor’s case against herself. They said, and I loosely paraphrase again - that they tried really hard and just couldn’t find any evidence that the Governor did anything wrong. OK. I can’t believe I just wrote that. And I wish it weren’t true"

See mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/new-mccain-stall-of-troopergate-investigation-part-karl-rove-part-laurel-hardy/

So is this just more evidence that she is an inveterate liar or that she is simply an idiot? Does the answer to the question matter?

Just put her on Springer or something... let them sort it all out.

One obvious fact about Sarah that all of this has brought to light, and which is getting no air time at all, is that she is very intellectually challenged. One could accurately say she is flat out stupid.

For Republicans this means she is highly qualified to supercede Bush. McCain? Who is that?

When is the MSM going to pick up on this? If it were Obama, it'd be all over the place!

The point to me is, if what she is saying is a matter of record, and that is why she fired the guy, as a matter of record, than there's no reason whatever not to cooperate with the investigation. If what she says is true it would, frankly, help her image.

If shooting the moose was illegal and such a big deal why did Palin's father butcher the animal and the Palin family, Sarah included eat it? Why did they wait 5 months after they made their initial allegations to bring up this incident in the divorce proceedings?

Why did Wooten's stepson asked to be tazed? Why did he brag about it to his friends and asked to be tazed again? While that's a stupid thing for a cop to do it doesn't sound like the boy was hurt and it certainly wasn't done out of malice.

No officer should drink in his or any vehicle.

The State Police investigated all these allegations and suspended Wooten for 10 days which his union then negotiated down to 5 days. That's probably an appropriate punishment seeing as Palin cut the SP budget making it harder to recruit new officers.

Wooten may be a drunk and a philanderer but then Palin's sister was what, his fifth wife? Shouldn't there have been clues to his behavior back in 2000 when Sarah wrote a glowing letter of recommendation for him when he was looking for work in law enforcement in the first place?

From incidents like this and the number of subordinates, friends and business partners she and Todd have fired or abandoned over secret affairs and broken marriages it sounds to me like Mrs. Palin isn't any better judge of character than John McCain.

While the Alaska state constitution gives the Guv
authority to hire and fire her appointees there are limits. Palin clearly overstepped her bounds putting her personal vendetta above the interests of Alaskans. And now McCain and she are making it worse trying to cover it up. If they're trying to prove they really are just like Bush and Cheney this is the perfect way to do it.

I really don't understand what's going on with this investigation. Reading some Alaska coverage, it's clear that the Commissioner was "an at will" employee that could be fired for any reason. So how is it even conceptually possible that the governor somehow "abused" her power?

Here's a quote from a newspaper article:

The Legislative Council, made up of four Democrats and eight Republican, voted unanimously to investigate the circumstances of Monegan's dismissal. Although Monegan was an at-will employee who could be fired for almost any reason, lawmakers wanted to see whether Palin tried to use her office to settle a personal score with Wooten.

Isn't this some sort of legislative intrusion into executive perogatives? If not, why not?

Point of order: You don't "taser" someone; you "tase" him. (As in, "[d]on't tase me, bro!")

If Wooten was such a bad guy why didn't his wife file a police complaint against him?
Wooten was disciplined before Palin was elected governor. So she dug up an already dealt with issue and proceeded to harass the head of the state trooper to fire him after the fact.

All on the record, some 36 contacts to the Alaska Department of Public Safety from the Palin, through her staff and her husband. That's called stalking or vendetta.

The 'threats' accusation was dismissed, the taser was on 'test' and was reported almost one year after it occurred. The trooper was censured for some minor offenses.

It was clearly a family vendetta and it cost Monegan, who has an excellent reputation, his job.

Vindictive Sarah, I can't imagine her in the White House wielding her power, against enemies, against opponents, against wildlife, against the environment.

Go back to Alaska Miss Sarah, it's huntin' season up thar.

Any and everything about Palin, trooper-gate, Wooten, and Monegan is a minor barroom scuffle.

The McCain campaign has pretty much taken control over the sovereign state of Alaska. Any question ask about what is happening within the state is first run thru the campaign. Regardless! If I were an Alaskan, I'd be hunting a McCain staffer instead of a bear, moose, or wolf.

What frightens me about this issue is that it shows that Sarah Palin can not drop an issue once it has been settled appropriately. She seems pathologically vindictive. What will happen if she takes a dislike to a leader of another country? She seems unstable and this is dangerous. Why can't people see that? Her sister has been divorced from the guy for three years. That's a hell of a long time to hold a grudge and actively pursue a campaign of destruction of the trooper's life.

My point is that this case makes Palin seems dangerously unstable.

Also, Alaska has the highest number of sexual assaults of any state in the nation. Sounds like Monegan was doing his job. He should be fired for this? Wonder if he has exhausted his appeal options?

You attack, she defends, then you attack that she defends. This is really just a mind game played by political operatives.

She may be playing her part in it, but answering questions about the context of past events doesn't a vendetta make.

If one aspect of the past is game, so is her view from the past. The past involved her actions related to the trooper's actions. You can't exclude the latter but major in the former.

It is highly inappropriate for her to be commenting in such a manner on an ongoing investigation. She should know this. Or she does, and doesn't care. Either way, she is a reckless pick.

TheraP:

In regards to referring to Palin as a "Dame", I both agree and disagree with you depending on the context.

In common usage here a "Dame" is often thought of as negative, similar to how being a "Broad."

In old english a "Dame" was a female rank equivalent to a "Knight" which some would argue as also being a "Lady." It is apparently used today to grant royal recognition to females just as "Knight" has been used for males.

I hope this not taken as any kind of criticism, I just thought it is a kinda fun fact.

The site I am referencing - I just took the first to pop up - is http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Knight.htm. It has additional information on the history of the term for those as nutty as me who might be interested.

The primary quote is:

In former times, a knight was a warrior or nobleman; today a knight is a person who has been given a royal recognition. In the United Kingdom the knight is styled Sir. The female styling is usually Dame.

A lot of the questions in this thread are answered in the wikipedia article. Google troopergate.

Here's a key point that's consistently overlooked. Palin repeatedly complains about 'threats against her family.' But in 2005 she admitted to police that Wooten's alleged threat against her 'family' was a political threat, rather than a threat of violence.

Extensive details in the wiki article.

She makes me feel like a polar bear. If she's elected we'll all become an endangered species.

I was particularly disgusted by her line "it's all on the record".

In fact, none of the news reports I have seen have given any details on the two dozen or so allegations the Palins made against Wooten that the state troopers considered too unfounded or too inconsequential to even investigate.

Nor have they given any details of the eight charges that the investigated but didn't well-founded enough to discipline him for.

And as noted above, the ones they did discipline him for don't make him look like a very nice guy but were either not criminal in nature or were not reported until long after they happened.

Alaskans do not use the term "first family". It is part of the Palin fantasy...her mission from God to aspire to the highest position in the land.

What she and others miss is that the investigation had already concluded. You can't go back and re-open an investigation on the same issues previously addressed and look for a different result (and get a guy fired and presumably render him un-hireable) just because you're governor. Obviously, the very young Sarah Palin never saw the Watergate hearings, or she'd know it's not the crime but the cover-up that kills you.

And, yes, I love the hypocrisy of the "I didn't consider Wooten when I fired Monegan but don't you think it would have been justified because he wouldn't can Wooten?" It's right up there with: "I never saw this girl before in my life, and, besides, she told me she was 18!"

He was a bad man; and the ends justifies the means.

That appears to be Palin's REAL defense of her actual abuse of power.

Innocent people want that to be found out.