Favorite Files

No favorite files added yet

Recent Posts

1. Comment - Where does Sarah Palin stand on technology issues?

   (Sep 7, 2008 - 8:40 AM)

   This is an interesting review.
   
   One correction: Gov. Palin's political record also includes a year (early 2003-early 2004) as the chair and ethics officer of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, which regulates the state's energy industry (which in turn provides the largest part of the state's budget). During that year, she acquired a better grounding in the intersection of government and energy. It was also from this job that she began taking on the ethically challenged GOP good-old-boy network: First she forced the resignation of her fellow commissioner, Rudy Ruedrich, who was (and is, unfortunately) the state GOP chairman. After he left, she enlisted technical help to search the government-owned computer he'd left behind, and was able to retrieve files he thought he'd deleted which proved that he'd used the computer for party business and, far worse, that he had a variety of close connections to various companies the Commission was supposed to be regulating. He ended up pleading no contest and accepting a $12k fine.
   
   When her complaints about Ruedrich and other ethical problems continued to be ignored by state attorney general Greg Renkes and incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski (who'd appointed her and who, along with Don Young and Ted Stephens, formed the ruling troika of Alaska politics), Sarah Palin resigned from the Commission and took them on in the press, despite being threatened with prosecution by Renkes. She forced Renkes' resignation. Then she ran against, and soundly whipped, Murkowski in the 2006 GOP primary, after which she went on to beat both popular former Gov. Tony Knowles and an independent candidate, Andrew Halcro, in the general election. (It's Halcro who's been the driving force in making up the non-scandal known as "Troopergate" a/k/a "Tasergate," by the way.)
   
   Gov. Palin's personal use of technology is suggested by recent press accounts of interviews in which she's had to set down one or the other of her two Blackberrys for a moment to begin breast-feeding her infant son Trig. Their family also owns (and has parked in their backyard, which is on a lake) a Piper Cub float-plane; I'm not sure whether both she and Todd are pilots, or only one is, but in my experience, pilots tend to be pretty technology-savvy.