Tons of information on Sarah Palin

Cokie Roberts was just on NPR talking about the contrast between the selection of Sarah Palin and the selection of J. Danforth Quayle twenty years ago. As she put it, Palin is an unknown, whereas when Bush 41 picked Quayle, the entire Washington press corps already knew he was a lightweight.

This time around, we don't know much, so there's a lot to learn, and I've been doing a lot of checking.

First off, we already know she tried to interfere with the procedures of a state agency to get her former brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper, and she's now being investigated for that.

I've also found a bunch of progressive blogs up in Alaska that know enough to take a critical look at her.

Alaskan Abroad, quoting Republican state rep. Michael Doogan:
The long and short of it is this: We're not sure she's a competent governor of Alaska. And yet McCain, who is no spring chicken, has decided she's the best choice to replace him as president if he should win and then fall afoul of the Grim Reaper.

Sarah Palin?

Really?

Mudflats, with a lot of information about her:

Alaska State Senate President Lyda Green (R): “She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?” (Green is from Palin’s home town of Wasilla.)

Alaska House Speaker John Harris (R): “She’s old enough. She’s a U.S. citizen.”

Progressive Alaska:

Reporters from around the country are interviewing Rick Steiner, the UAA professor whose battle against the Palin administration last year over state correspondence on the status of Polar bears, the Anchorage Daily News consigned to the Alaska Ear column. A reporter is flying here from the UK to - among other things - interview John Stein, the Wasilla Mayor who built the city government structure Palin got credit for. A blogger named Jane Hamsher is getting into more details about Palin's past vindictiveness than our local reporters have yet scratched since the Monegan fiasco began. Sam Stein, a Huffington Post columnist, was able to determine from a few hours of basic research, that the McCain team had not investigated Palin's Wasilla administration's history in the Frontiersman. I was thinking of checking on that Tuesday, but Stein had it figured out by Friday!


The Immoral Minority:

I don't think that John McCain has ever appeared so old to me. He looks like Palin's great-grandfather!

As you can see Todd Palin has deep ties to the oil companies and a vested interest in seeing oil exploration continue in Alaska.

Sarah may seem like a breath of fresh air to people who are tired of seeing the same old white haired men leading the GOP. But make no mistake, she is simply bait to bring some of those disenfranchised women who are still angry that they cannot vote for Hillary Clinton over to the dark side. You can bet it is no accident that Palin sums up her speech by mentioning Hillary Clinton and her 18 million supporters.

But she is adamantly against a woman's right to choose, has advocated for Creationism to be taught alongside Evolution in our public schools, and fought to keep the Polar Bears from being added to the endangered species list so that it did not interfere with the Republicans crazed desire to drill all over Alaska's pristine wilderness.

That's without even getting into the weirder stuff, like the persistent rumor that she was either incredibly irresponsible in traveling from Texas back to Alaska after her water broke with her last baby, or that the baby is really her daughter's and she's raising it as her own to cover up her daughter's pregnancy. I was dismissive when I first read about it, but apparently the rumor's been active in Alaska for months.

If I were picking a vice president I would have tried to find out some of this stuff in advance, but apparently McCain's people didn't.

It will be interesting to see how things develop.