"The Cap and Tax Dead End", a Washington Post opinion piece written by soon-to-be-former Alaskan governor and frequent media critic Sarah Palin.
posted by zardoz on Jul 14, 2009 - 150 comments

Vanity Fair recently published "It Came From Wasilla", Todd Purdum's lengthy profile piece about Sarah Palin, her involvement with and the inside workings of the McCain campaign, and her political future. [more inside]
posted by Weebot on Jun 30, 2009 - 232 comments

Prominent blogger Andrew Sullivan develops an unhealthy obsession over the (lack of) details surrounding the birth of Sarah Palin's youngest child. Sullivan really, really won't let it go. Persistent rumors lead the editor of the Alaska Daily News to, "finally decide, after watching this go on unabated for months, to let a reporter try to do a story about the 'conspiracy theory that would not die' and, possibly, report the facts of Trig's birth thoroughly enough to kill the nonsense once and for all." Palin releases press release slamming the paper. Editor of paper publishes email from Palin's office along with his response. Palin complains about "bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie," says episode is, "more indication of continued problems in the world of journalism." She also thinks Katie Couric is bad at journalism, not the center of everybody's universe, and is exploiting Palin. Mike Huckabee disagrees, says Couric was "extraordinarily gentle" with Palin. Political pundits and journalists are left scratching their heads - is she crazy? Or a crazy genius? 2012 is just around the corner.
posted by billysumday on Jan 13, 2009 - 188 comments

An independent investigator hired by the Alaska Personnel Board has cleared Governor Sarah Palin of wrongdoing in the Troopergate controversy. (Executive summary and recommendations of the report). As previously covered in MeFi, the Alaskan legislature had conducted its own investigation and had concluded that Governor Palin had indeed abused her power in dismissing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, but the independent investigator concluded that the Legislature's special counsel used the wrong state law as the basis for his conclusions and also misconstrued the evidence in the investigation.
posted by gyc on Nov 3, 2008 - 96 comments

The 'Dirty Thirties' saw farmers hit with the double-whammy of the Great Depression and the ecological disaster of the Dust bowl years. "In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered 203 families from the hardest-hit areas of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan the chance to start fresh in a new land, in a fertile Alaskan valley with the melodic name Matanuska." "It was heady, fine-sounding stuff on paper. Picked from relief rolls in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, the prospective colonists knew their Promised Land was a wilderness, but the Government was going to turn the wilderness overnight into an Eden with running water, radios, a cinema. It was going to set each family up on fine 40-acre farms with every necessity, many a luxury, 30 years to pay." It didn't quite work out as well as they'd hoped.thirties' saw many farmers in the United States [more inside]
posted by merelyglib on Sep 10, 2008 - 33 comments