Palin running for cover...

As Cathie says, the excuses provided for Sarah Palin's sudden and unexpected departure from the governor's chair in Alaska stinks like a three-day-old Alaska King Crab.

Apparently Palin was simply bugged by "bloggers and activists".

Hmmm. What were they blogging about?

Ohhh! They went a little farther than calling her Cariboo Barbie. They might actually have some heavy duty dirt.

Alaska's Rat Island is Rat Free

From Reuters:

Alaska's Rat Island is finally rat-free, 229 years after a Japanese shipwreck spilled rampaging rodents onto the remote Aleutian island, decimating the local bird population.

After dropping poison onto the island from helicopter-hoisted buckets for a week and a half last autumn, there are no signs of living rats and some birds have returned, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Rats have ruled the island since 1780, when they jumped off a sinking Japanese ship and terrorized all but the largest birds on the island. The incident introduced the non-native Norway rat -- also known as the brown rat -- to Alaska.

The $2.5 million Rat Island eradication project, a joint effort between the U.S. federal government, the Nature Conservancy and Island Conservation, is one of the world's most ambitious attempts to remove destructive alien species from an island.

Read that last paragraph very carefully.

That's right... there's a CHOICE

No thanks to the group Sarah Palin addressed in Indiana on Thursday.

Palin unknowingly indicted the very group she was addressing by indicating she had one thing the fetus fetishist crowd that was listening would remove from all women - choice and the right to keep that choice between a woman and her doctor.

At minute 4:30 of the video note how Palin tells the approving audience that she considered her options, not once suggesting that she was obliged to anyone but to her own conscience.



She exercised an option. At least that's what she says. Whether it was said in an effort to elevate herself in diefic synergy or whether it was something that she actually considered, she must now acknowledge that she actually had one and nobody is criticizing her decision.

What drives this right off the white line is that after having supposedly considering a possible option, which exists, she and the group she was addressing would eliminate that choice completely forcing other women take her direction.

That's very convenient. Now that Palin sees no further need for that particular right to exercise an option in her life, remove it from everybody else.

Perhaps Palin should concentrate more on other options she exercised. While she was out of Alaska doing "Indiana Wants Me" to a crowd of anti-choicers, back in Juneau the Alaska Legislature threw her choice for Alaska State attorney-general under the bus in a historic first ever rejection of a governor-appointed head of an Alaskan state agency.

The US Senate policing its own

Cat sent this by email. Joe Conason details the strange double standard of the US Senate in dealing with two of its own.

For an object lesson in the distorted values of the United States Senate, consider how that august institution is handling the ethical embarrassments created by Republican Larry Craig of Idaho and Republican Ted Stevens of Alaska.

Yes, we have the US Senate coming down like a ton of bricks on Larry "Wide Stance" Craig and nary a whisper about Ted "Pork for Payola" Stevens.

As everyone in America knows by now, Craig pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for an indiscretion in an airport men's room. Stevens, along with his son Ben and a number of other Alaska politicians and businessmen, is the subject of a corruption investigation that resulted in an FBI raid on his home last summer. Every day, the pressure mounts on Craig from his colleagues to resign — and every day, those same colleagues treat Stevens as if he remains above suspicion.

OK. Let me explain.

It's OK to be a corrupt Republican senator. In fact, it's damned near an expectation. On the other hand, it's not OK to publicly expose the sexual tendencies of Republican senators.

Getting caught being a homosexual Republican senator, from the party of all those delicious family values, leaves the rest of the Republican camp open to charges of hypocrisy.

Getting caught being a corrupt Republican senator is not hypocrisy. Everyone expects it.

Now Craig's colleagues feel a special sense of outrage because he has violated his promise to resign by the end of September if he was unable to get his original guilty plea withdrawn. Clearly, the senator is given to rash gestures that he later regrets, whether tapping the toe of another man in a toilet stall, entering a plea or vowing to surrender his Senate seat.

"I wish he would stick to his word," complained Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, who chairs the National Republican Senate Committee and understandably does not relish the bad publicity that makes his task of re-electing Republicans much more challenging. Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, a freshman Republican up for re-election next year, told reporters that he hoped the Idahoan would step down and "respect the institution."

But the institution is not so easy to respect when its members show so little of it by ignoring the stench that surrounds Stevens.

The 83-year-old Alaskan, a powerhouse of patronage and seniority, has operated both his state and the Senate Appropriations Committee as fiefdoms that he can use and misuse at will. When his sponsorship of the infamous "bridge to nowhere" drew condemnation from conservatives and liberals alike as an example of egregious pork spending, Stevens gave a furious floor speech in which he threatened to resign. He stopped a "sunlight" provision designed to reveal the sponsorship of every earmark. Such egotistical displays must be expected from a politician who has the largest airport in his state named after him.

A platoon of FBI agents has passed through that airport over the past several months as they probe bribery and corruption that appear to implicate dozens of figures, from the statehouse to the oil industry. (How bad is it? Bad enough that a group of Republican legislators, including the former speaker of the Alaskan House, smugly called themselves "the Corrupt Bastards Club.") These crooks transformed their state into an American version of a Third World petroleum kleptocracy.

Emphasis mine.

Heh.