More Thoughts on Alaskan Bloggers' Impacts

Since I wrote about this hastily last week in response to Erik Boehlert's post on the contribution of Alaskan bloggers, I've had more time to think about it.

It seems I left out the biggest contribution of the so-called progressive blogs.

Bloggers have given Alaska liberals a media presence, a sense of identity and of political efficacy. The blogs have become a place where local Alaskans can see a more progressive view of the world than has been available from any other regular public source, ever. The Anchorage Democratic caucus that brought together masses of Alaskans to vote for Obama in February 2008 was a physical event that energized Alaskan liberals like nothing we'd ever seen. The energy and spirit of hope there took everyone by surprise. People looked around and said, "I didn't know there were so many of us."

The blogs documented that event faster, more thoroughly, and more graphically than other media did and kept that spirit going. Every day the blogs posted critical progressive interpretations of local Alaska events. For years 'liberal' was an Alaskan epithet and it seemed that liberals needed to be added to the the anti-discrimination ordinance. When the red/blue state concept emerged, no one had any doubt what color Alaska was. Having places to go to find like-minded thinkers, to get documentation for what one suspected, to learn about events of interest was an awakening for liberals in Alaska. And people who didn't identify themselves as liberals could find blogs that debunked the myth that all liberals had horns. (They could find a few horned liberal blogs too.)

I doubt we'll ever find out if Palin really was spooked out of office by bloggers or whether she just thought that we were a believable scapegoat. There may be some truth, though, what some have said about no local politician being so closely fact-checked by watchdogs.

But my response is that this sort of scrutiny should be applied to all politicians. Certainly the conservatives had mastered the art of coordinated spin with their daily talking points with which to go after national Democrats - but that was different. The talking points came from the Republican Party and were repeated in various media from newspapers to talk shows to tv news. At their most blatant they took some fact out of context and made up false and maligning stories - swift boats, palling with terrorists - to create non-existent scandals. No wonder some Republican critics of Alaskan bloggers assumed the bloggers were fed from the White House.

But the Alaska bloggers I know are a loose group of independents who occasionally share ideas with each other to see if others know something they are looking for
Basically they use the internet or personal contacts to fact check and analyze the public announcements of the Palin administration and other Alaskan issues. Sometimes they cover events live. If Palin's speeches and press releases hadn't been so full of holes, the bloggers wouldn't have been nearly so busy.

And there are no deep-pocketed tax-exempt think-tanks sending money to support Alaskan bloggers. From what I can tell, the Alaskan bloggers have done whatever it is they've done, on their own time and dime. Though some have successfully explored an alternative to salaried journalism. They've found that through Pay-Pal they can raise some needed cash, from their readers, to cover unusual costs of their blogging addiction. Linda's paid her public records request bill this way and Dennis got some of his transportation to rural Alaska paid for this way. But no one's making a living of this.


Bias Charges Probably Have Some Merit

But there is something in the Palin supporters' charges about how she was treated differently than a man would be. I think male officials do generally get more respect than female officials. Men look like the definition of American success. They can buy a few sets of the same suit, a few blue and a few white shirts, and basic striped ties, and they are set. You could take a homeless guy with a 'work for food' sign off the corner, clean him up, put him in a dress-for-success suit, get him to stand up straight, and people would treat him with respect. Because he would look like the image of American success - the model set by every president we've ever had.

Women officials always get comments on what they wear. And what their hair looks like. Always. They can't buy ten of the same dress or suit. They have to change their look every day.

So people like Gov. Sanford or Sen. John Ensign or Sen. Ted Stevens just have to look the look and not say anything obviously stupid and they get a pass. There was very, very little official media scrutiny of Stevens until they found out the FBI was on his case. He was a US Senator in a suit. (He also knew his facts and how to put sentences together. No reporter had nearly the knowledge of Stevens on issues nor the access to information that might raise questions. And he had a temper. All that made it much harder to challenge anything he did.) But right off the bat, a man (especially if he's white) wearing a power suit gets respect from people in authority and from people in general. It's sad, but true.


A woman walks on the stage or into the studio and she's already 'marked,' Deborah Tannen's term, as different from the norm. She can't be invisible in a dark pinstriped suit - because even if she wears one, she's a woman in men's clothing. And if she wears a dress she's not in the standard, invisible cloak of success. We see her legs and red shoes. Alaskan bloggers played this game too.

Even if the commentators like what she's wearing or how she does her hair, the fact that they mention it trivializes her already. They're talking about what she looks like, not about what she's thinking. (Sure, men's looks get commented on too, but only when they stray from the norm. So Edwards' $400 haircut got press because men aren't supposed to be so vain about their looks, the way we expect women to be.)

So, on that point, the criticisms of Palin being treated differently because she's a woman have merit. (But to be fair, she also contributed to the attention every time she opened her mouth.) But the answer isn't to back off on her.

Instead male politicians should all have a swarm of bloggers parsing their speeches and press releases to see if they make sense. (See this example of Leonard Pitts parsing Mitt Romney's words, which - because it's so unusual - also suggests men's empty words generally get less scrutiny than Palin's.) They should have the public record regularly scrutinized to find discrepancies between what they say and what they do. They should all have people checking and posting the connections between their earmarks and their campaign financing, and asking questions about their first class travel and speaking fees from people with public policy issues the official is deciding.

With bloggers posting more of this information I suspect a lot more sham public servants - not just those who shoot themselves in the foot on some non-policy issue by flying off to Argentina to see their soul mates -will find that incumbency loses its some of its glow.

So, in addition to giving Alaskan liberals a media presence, a sense of identity and of political efficacy, maybe Alaskan bloggers will give other bloggers a model of how to track their local politicians.

Trojan War Reenactment in Garden

[We got our first, much needed, July rain last night!]

Phil continues to embarrasses me with beautiful pictures of all his flower beds (though I know that Judy has a major role in their success). And now Linda has a post of her vegie cage and other garden delights.

My gardening bible is called no work garden. Our lot has a natural mini-woods and then I discovered the joy of perennials. (They come back up year after year.) And we don't have much sun. So aside from the rock garden out front, I follow the book title pretty faithfully.

So I have to show close ups of my flowers to compensate for the lack of profusion.

Until I did a little research for this post, I didn't realize that I was reliving the Trojan wars in my garden. First there's the Achilles flower.

Killerplants.com explains why this plant is named after Achilles, quoting from The Illiad:

"There is no more hope for the Greeks. They will fall among the ships....But save me. Take me to the ship, cut this arrow out of my leg, wash the blood from it...and put the right things on it—the plants they say you have learned about from Achilles who learned about them from Cheiron, the best of the Centaurs....

"...Patroclus took a knife and cut the sharp arrowhead from his leg and washed the black blood away....Then he crushed a bitter root...and put it on the wound. The root took away all the pain. The blood stopped and the wound dried." (Homer, The Iliad, xi, 800 BCE, trans. I.A. Richards).

A common name today is Yarrow, which killerplants (strange name for a site that has healing plants) says is derived from an Anglo-Saxon word through Old High German and Old English words for healer.

Then there is the Trolius.


Wikipedia tells us that

In classical Greek mythology, Troilus is a young Trojan prince, one of the sons of King Priam (or sometimes Apollo) and Hecuba. Prophecies link Troilus' fate to that of Troy and so he is ambushed and murdered by Achilles. Sophocles was one of the writers to tell this tale. It was also a popular theme among artists of the time. Ancient writers treated Troilus as the epitome of a dead child mourned by his parents. He was also regarded as a paragon of youthful male beauty.

The Lady's Mantle, while more gentle sounding, also is related to wounds and blood.

From Garden Guides we learn that

The [Lady's Mantle] root is edible, as are the leaves, which sheep and cattle are said to relish. The entire plant is normally harvested in midsummer and can be used medicinally for bruises and wound healing. Lady's Mantle tea is said to be helpful for excessive menstruation.

The flower expert tells us

The origin of the word Daisy is Anglo Saxon “daes eage” literally meaning “day’s eye”. It was called this because daisies open at dawn as the day is just beginning. . .

A Daisy is made up of two types of flowers - disk florets and petal-like white ray florets. The Disk florets are at the center and the ray florets are at the periphery. But these are arranged to give the impression of being a single flower. This arrangement on Daisies is a type of inflorescence known as a capitulum.





And this blue bee magnet's name eludes me. Burnet comes to mind but I can't find anything that confirms that. There is a book called The Land of the Blue Flower by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It begins:

The Land of the Blue Flower was not called by that name until the tall, strong, beautiful King Amor came down from his castle on the mountain crag and began to reign. Before that time it was called King Mordreth’s Land, and as the first King Mordreth had been a fierce and cruel king this seemed a gloomy name.

This doesn't entice me to read more, but you can read it all at the link above. And if you know the flower, please send me the name. [A friend I consulted who knows these things says it's Campanula rotundifolia[glomerata].]


Finally, from a Lake Country Point of View we learn something about the name of Veronica spicata - or Spiked Speedwell.

"Spicata" means spiked - so that's straight forward enough. But "Veronica" is a different story altogether. "Veronica" comes from the Latin Vero Icone , or true image, and is associated with Saint Veronica.

According to the Acta Sanctorum published by the Bollandists, Berenice was a pious woman of Jerusalem, who was moved with pity as Jesus carried his cross to Golgotha. She gave Jesus her kerchief that he might wipe this forehead and Jesus accepted the offering. After using it, he handed it back to her, creating the image of His face miraculously impressed upon it. After this, Berenice became Saint Veronica.

I recall we've discussed icons here not long ago, in a very different context.

Midnight Soapscum Climaxes with Year 2 Episode 5

Everything worked tonight as all the loose plot ends were tied up and lots of people and even an alien got married in the final scene. (There were so many loose plot ends, I could have missed a few. It was only tonight, my third of this year's five episodes, that I noticed a major historical juxtaposition - Obama is already the president in the runup to the 2008 election. Poetic license I guess. Too good a character to leave out just because he hadn't yet been elected.) The cast had as good a time as the audience which whooped it up every now and then. I'll just post some pictures and let you make up your own story. It can't be as bizarre as the one at Out North. (Can you spot Caribou Barbie and Todd, and Obama?) I suspect this five week production will be remembered in Anchorage theater history. A lot of outstanding - much of it young - local talent got to do some way out stuff. Five different episodes - same characters mostly - in five weeks. But you could tell that the cast and crew had bonded early on and I think a lot of future theater greats in Anchorage (and beyond) will be connected forever because they 'worked' together in this production. There were no duds in the cast and most played their roles so well, I can't imagine them as anyone else. Mama Rose Mary is only 18 years old and was the narrator whose huge presence pulled everything - including the audience - together. Tonight she even sang as part of the play. I didn't get a program again tonight and I'm not sure I can find the one from Episode 3. But this is an actor we're going to hear more about. And you can catch a bit of her persona in the bit of video at the bottom.











(It's only 30 seconds.)

Click for posts on previous episodes and other soapscummy things.

What Do I Know? 3rd Anniversary and I Missed It

I knew the anniversary was this month, but I didn't look until just now. The first post was July 9, 2006 - on Spittle Bugs. The second post was two days later - on using Turn Indicators. That was it - two posts for July.

August 6 was on going digital as I got my first digital camera and posted my first picture - a bull moose at Kincaid. There were only seven posts in August, but I think that regulars can already see in those original posts hints of what has come since.

It was a while before I discovered counters and installed sitemeter. I noted with a post when I had visitor 1500. I was reminded of that when I recently had a couple people get here googling "The number 1500." (Does anyone know why they were googling that?) I looked to see what they got. It was May 6, 2007. Ten months.

So I decided to have a contest to reward visitor number 10,000. That took until December 20, 2007 - seven more months. Things were speeding up. And now, probably around the time of the 3rd Anniversary ten days ago, we got to 100,000.

That's pretty modest compared to other blogs, but it's plenty for me. I was going to have another contest, but kept putting it off. I also decided that in the spirit of doing things a little differently, I would not pick a number that ends in lots of zeroes this time. But 99,999 passed before I noticed. Then I thought of 111,111, but that passed by too.

So let's go for 123,456. I'll come up with a prize for the identified visitor closest to that number. I'll post warnings to pay attention when we get closer. While sitemeter gives us lots of data on each visitor, it doesn't give names, or email addresses. (Though I did get a file name last week as the "Entry Page" and it included the person's name. I found three people with that name and emailed one to warn him he was sending his name out. But I suppose I would have assumed such an email was spam. Maybe I'll try again.) So visitors will have to claim their prize. I'll check their claim against the sitemeter profile for the closest claim to 123,456.

Skeletons on the Zahara

It's been taking me a long time to finish books lately, and I've got three or four started. But I got invited to a book club and I had three days to find and read Skeletons of the Zahara, by Dean King. It's one of those unexpected adventure tales - a US commercial ship wrecks off the coast of Africa and everyone gets captured and enslaved. The author had found the original account - a best seller in the early 1800s, mentioned as a favorite by Abraham Lincoln - while researching something else. He's taken that account and the account of a second survivor and tried to mesh the two tales together.

The ship The Commerce set sail May 2, 1815 with 11 men and after stops in New Orleans and Gibralter (where a 12th hitched a ride) wrecked on the coast of North Africa on August 28. After a brief time on shore, they escaped capture by swimming back out to the grounded ship and continued in one of the ships longboats in hopes of being rescued by a passing ship. Instead they beached 200 miles south sometime between September 5 and 7. The men who survived with Captain Riley made it to safety of the Amerian Consul in Swearah on November 7, 1815. They'd been captives for two months. Four of the men left for Gibralter on January 4, 1816. Captain Riley followed sometime later and made it to New York City on March 19, 1816.

I thought maybe it was just me, but others in the group although thought the writing was pretty uninspired and it took everyone a while to get into the story. We know from the start that the captain, who wrote this, survives, since we have the book. But eventually you want to know how.

I don't think I ever considered that American sailors were taken as slaves by Arabic speakers in Africa. Their lives were pretty basic on the camel treks through the desert, but so were the lives of their new masters. I learned that you CAN survive on salt water if you mix it with fresh water; human urine is better than dying of thirst, and you can drink liquid stored inside a camel.

They placed the small intestines, with their contents still inside, in the kettle, along with the liver and lungs. One man slit open the camel's rumen - its first and largest stomach, where it partly digests its food before regurgitating it as cud - reached inside with a bowl, and scooped out some of the chunky green liquid. . .

Riley saw a teenage boy plunge his head into the camel's gaping rumen and drink. Hamet [the captor], seeing Riley's [the captured captain] interest, told him to remove the boy and take his place.

Riley scooped the nauseating cavity with a bowl and poured the ropy green fluid down his throat. What he swallowed could not have been more refreshing . . . [pp. 152-3]

That they survived was a combination of sheer luck, wit, and determination. The captain strove hard to have as many of his men saved as possible and talked his master into taking all four of the crew still with him, rather than save his own life without them. It appears that this loyalty to his men, in fact, impressed the master who eventually arranged to get him to an American consul in exchange for a sizeable ransom.

And while this characterization is based on what the Captain himself wrote, there was confirmation in the other account, written by a survivor who was separated from the captain's group and stayed captive an extra year. Furthermore, the captain also gave accounts where his behavior was not laudable - as when he escaped the first encounter with Africans by leaving the older, Gibraltar hitchhiker on the beach in his place. He rationalized that the man was not as critical to the survival of the rest as he himself.

The captain also had an ability to see the world through the eyes of others which I think also helped in their survival. You can see it in this passage where they were taunted by a black African slave. The slave, Boireck, had worked all day and came back to find the emaciated Americans, who had rested the day, in a tent. He tried to chase them out, but the master said no.

That evening [Boirek] amused the family and some visitors by taunting the Christians. He pointed at their slack genitals and laughingly compared them with his own. His sneering references to the gaunt Riley as "el rais" [the captain] brought howls of laughter. He poked their wounds with a sharp stick and made fun of their skin, which died and turned foul beneath the very image of Allah, the sun. What further proof was needed that these miserable white heathens were worthy only of slavery and scorn?

Clark fumed. "It's bad enough to be stripped, skinned alive, and mangled," he whispered to Riley, "without being obliged to bear the scoffs of a damned negro slave."

"It's good to know you're still alive, Jim, " Riley responded with a nod. The [camel] milk and water they had consumed that day, the rest, the shade had boosted his spirits. He would not let Boireck's buffoonery beat him down just now. "You feel the need to revenge an insult, but let the poor negro laugh if he can take pleasure in it," he told Clark. "God knows there's little enough here to provide that. He's only trying to gain favor with his masters and mistresses. I'm willing he should have it, even at our expense."[p. 136]

While author King only has Riley's word for what happened, the fact that he could even think like this - even if he didn't really say it - says a lot for him.

Of the seven who made it back from Africa, two died within seven years of their return at ages 29 and 44. Another died in 1831 at age 36. Captain Riley made it to age 62 dying at sea in 1840. Another died in 1847 at age 63. The other sailor to write an account of the trip upon which the book is based, Robbins, died in 1860 at 69. The youngest crew member who was only 15 when The Commerce set sail, died in 1882 at age 82. So, while the near starvation and severe physical strain affected them all, a couple still managed to live to a reasonable old age.

Bikes versus Buses

Cut outs for buses at bus stops are good. It means the bus can stop and pick up/drop off passengers without blocking traffic. But at some points, like the southwest corner of Lake Otis and 36th, the cutout meant that the sidewalk/bikepath was cut down to about 3 feet wide. That may sound like a lot, but if someone was waiting for the bus there, a bike rider pretty much had to go out into the street, unless the bus waiters moved down to the wider part of the path. And there have been times when the bush - which is visually much nicer than just the chain link fence - wasn't trimmed back, that you had to push against the bush or go into the street.



They are working on the sidewalk here. Although I live nearby, I don't recall any notices. It would be nice if they gave local folks a chance to give some input in case there are a good ideas about the improvement that could be incorporated for little or no extra cost.

But the good news is that, according to one of the workers I talked to, when they finish the path, the narrowest part will be 60 inches. That would be a significant improvement. I'm not sure how they will do that. We'll see it when it's finished. They've been at it for almost two weeks already.

Wednesday Night's Readings - Rogow Gets Racy

Zack Rogow's book, The Number Before Infinity, recounts a love affair, through poetry. Along with the erotic poems to his lover (I used racy in the title because of the alliteration, but erotic seems more apt) the narrator also tells of the impact on his marriage. In the video, Rogow reads one very sexy poem to the lover and one about the daughter's displeasure with the father breaking up the family.

This is not a big book, but one that I think most couples would benefit from reading aloud to each other. It raises issues - passionate love, passionate love of someone outside the marriage, the impacts on the family - that couples shoud talk about, but I suspect don't, until it's too late. And since he's such a good poet, he captures in a few, well chosen words, what academics can't say in long volumes.



The UAA Readings go on tonight (Thursday) in the UAA Pub. David Grimes is doing a concert. There've been around 60 folks each night. A good chunk are people taking the workshops, but also strays like us. Dark Friday night, then back in Rasmuson Hall 101 at 8pm Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. The detailed schedule with bios is here. For all the other posts on the Summer Reading Series.

For an interesting Saturday night double header - go to the UAA Readings at 8pm and then to Out North for the final episode of Midnight Soapscum.

Dog Cabins For Sale

Passed this place on my run yesterday.
(for those of you outside of Anchorage, add area code 907.)

Linda McCarriston Amazes with Word Tricks

You have to work hard to hear the words - the sound on the video is not good. But such magnificent words describing the boys becoming men, growing, spreading, from green to ripe like tropical fruit on the trip to Iraq.

It was the third night of the Reading Series. Linda and I were once faculty members together at UAA and I know how brilliantly she illustrates ideas with words. But I was still surprised.

And I thought, perhaps poetry's time is once again here. Sure, I know there are poetry slams and there's been a revival of sorts. But that's still only the fringe. Given people's short attention spans, poetry is the perfect medium. Poets can now sell their poems one at a time on iTunes. Download a new poem each week onto your iPod. Each time it flows through the earbuds it tickles new brain cells.

Though good poetry doesn't come artificially sweetened in familiar flavors. It lays traps for your stereotypes and startles you with previously unseen glimpses of the heart. The common sparkles. Linda's "Green" does all that. Watch her on the video. Less than two minutes. But look her in the eye as she reads to you. It's magic.





Josip Novakovich read from one of his books, April Fool's Day I think. I really don't have the energy at this point to do him justice, so I just want to note that he was there and his reading was dark and funny. Finally he looked up to check on the time and saw he was just past 9:30pm and said, "It goes on, but it doesn't any get better."

Wednesday night Zack Rogow will read his work. I was impressed enough last year to buy one of his books and bought another one the other night. His poems tell difficult stories so easily. You can come hear him and others read.



8pm - Rasmuson Hall at UAA - Room 101. Free.

Click here for a complete schedule with bios.

Alaska Political Bloggers Credited

Phil at Progressive Alaska just alerted me about this post at Media Matters by Erik Boehlert Saradise Lost: How Alaska bloggers dethroned Sarah Palin (another case where the title goes well beyond what the article actually says.)

I'm not suggesting that homegrown bloggers alone were responsible for Palin's "no más" moment, but there's no question that the online activists played a key role. That with their shit-kicking brand of frontier citizen journalism, they drove Palin to distraction and changed the way voters nationwide thought about the governor. So if conservative bloggers get credit for driving Dan Rather out of the anchor chair in 2004 following their Memogate campaign-season tale, then the band of scrappy liberal bloggers in Alaska ought to be allowed to bask in a bit of glory, because they made their own history when Palin announced her exit.

Now, Palin has already credited bloggers in her resignation speech. But I guess we saw that as being made scapegoats. Boehlert's comments feel different.

Even What Do I Know? is listed in the story (thanks to Phil's den mother-like devotion to his digital-campers.) While it's true I have written way more Palin posts than I think is good for my mental health, the real bulldogs in this story are (stand up and take a bow as your name is called):

Alaska Progressive
Mudflats
Celtic Diva's Blue Oasis
Just a Girl From Homer
Immoral Minority

along with

AndrewHalcro.com

who's written some critical posts - such as the stuff on Troopergate which began before the VP nomination. (There are lots of other Alaska bloggers who regularly touch on matters political, but the listed blogs were almost all-Palin, all-the-time.)


I take some pride in being, I'm sure, the first website to link to Progressive Alaska, even before it actually went public, having met Phil at the Kohring (or maybe it was the Kott) trial. From the beginning he had ideas of finding a way organize bloggers into a force to post the important stories that the local newspapers were missing. But, as others have mentioned, the pivotal event for Alaska political bloggers was McCain's announcement of his VP running mate.

While some of this pack of self-taught journalists have been more shrill and less polite than is my preference, I have no doubt that those qualities were critical to their success. We get the vacuous news the MSM gives us because that's what most people want. I used to dispute that, but I can see how many hits I get for different posts, and Palin sells, big!

And this isn't good. Other difficult stories aren't being adequately covered - like what's happening in the fishing wars of the North Pacific. We should be unraveling of the complex legal and financial web, including Uncle Ted's role, of what some say is the North Pacific's version of the destruction of the North Atlantic fisheries.

Alaskan bloggers, though, have had a special duty to cover Palin, not simply as a local politician, but because of her national aspirations.

But I would like to debunk some of the conspiracy theories that had Alaskan bloggers as agents with direct links to the White House. While there is a loose email connection among the larger group, and individual bloggers see each other more or less frequently, this is a pretty rag-tag group, united in their dedication to be Alaska's crap detectors.

To give you a sense of how 'loose' this group is, I remember first meeting Linda of Celtic Diva at the Alaska Democratic Convention last May. Then again at a hastily arranged dinner last September out at Phil's place to meet with journalists from Outside who were here to find out about Palin. . That's when I also briefly met Mudflats and Gryphen (from Immoral Minority). And there was a barbecue at Phil's place too. And that's the last time I think I've seen most of them. I'd met Shannyn Moore already at one of the political trials. I've bumped into some of them at events we were all covering - like the Alaska women against Palin demonstration - but other than that, I've had no contact. When I was taking the computer art class last fall, I sometimes ran into Phil while I was locking my bike and he'd come out from his office (music is in the same building as art) for a cigarette break. (He's quit since then.) And the odd email now and then. I realize some of the others have gotten together more often, but this is not a highly polished get-Sarah machine. It is individuals with computers at home who get too little sleep and drink too much coffee, so they can share what they find out about what is behind the facade.

And there were others who offered us encouragement and inspiration along the way, like Matt Browner Hamlin who was in Alaska working on the Begich campaign and had done political blogging in the East (Massachusetts if I recall right[It's Connecticut.]) He raised our sights about what bloggers could do.

Eric Boehlert has already tipped his hat to this group of bloggers in a chapter in his recent book The Bloggers on the Bus.


So what has this group done?

Followed up on every rumor they heard. They didn't always post what they heard, but they looked through the evidence and

• after getting it from several sources, but without confirmation, reported it as a rumor
• got more information and confirmed or rejected it
• analyzed the data available and offered possible explanations and their reasoning
• sometimes taken too much glee in Palin missteps
• kept a constant vigil on everything Palin said, giving her no lattitude when she stretched the truth, and she kept them very busy
  

They've (I'm not sure what it means that I'm using 'they' instead of 'we' but I'll not worry about it and go on that way) posted lots of videos and pictures, of varying levels of good taste, that related to Palin, and had links to local and national stories on Palin.

They've also been sources of information for Outside journalists. Overall, while some of the group have been louder than necessary and sometimes a little fast with declarative sentences, most of the bloggers have qualified their claims based on how much they actually knew or how solid the evidence was.

One critical contribution was the group's early awareness of what Don Mitchell said last week, that Palin is a celebrity, not a serious politician. But unlike Paris Hilton, Sarah Palin held an elected political office, so she was accountable in a way that celebrities aren't. Now that she's almost out of office, she can take advantage of that celebrity without getting flak for not doing a competent job as governor. However, if she plans to continue trying to influence public policy and democratic elections, there will continue to be an open season on Sarah Palin.

[Update July 20, 2009: As I've had time to think more about this, I believe the biggest contribution the so-called progressive blogs was to give Alaska liberals a media presence, a sense of identity and of political efficacy. I've posted an addition to this post today explaining why.]

Bangkok Closing Schools in Fight Against H1N1

ThaiVisa has this quote from the Bangkok Post up:

The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration has ordered closed all of its 435 schools, 200 nurseries and 13 occupational training centres for five days from July 15 to 19 to prevent the spread of the A/H1N1 flu.

M.R. Sukhumbhand Paribatra, the BMA governor, said after a meeting of the city administrators on Tuesday that the BMA will concentrate on campaigning for the people to wear a protective mask, especially at a crowded place.

The BMA will distribute 2 million masks to the people at various crowded locations such as at the BTS electric train stations and Hua Lampong railway station. Bangkok MPs and city councillors will be asked to distribute 10,000 masks each to the people in their constituencies, he said.

Billboards to campaign for the peple to wear a mask and wash their hands will be put up at various corners of the city starting Tuesday. All community radios will also be asked to join the campaign.

The BMA also plans to close all of its school on Aug 10-11 to allow officials concerned to conduct a major clean up of the schools five days from August 8 to 12. However, this can be changed if the cabinet makes a resolution for schools to close for a clean up before this period.

Eva Salutis Reads a Beautiful Piece

It was the second night of the Reading Series at UAA. There are writing workshops/classes going on this week, which is why all these writers are here. In the evenings the students share their teachers with the rest of us.




The evening began with Derick Burleson who teaches at UAF. (I posted all the bios in the previous post.) I'm afraid I didn't connect with him tonight - we were in different places.





But Eva Saulitis' piece worked for me in various ways. (And they even brought in a lamp tonight which really improved the lighting.)





First and foremost was how she wrote this. She took 13 stabs at starting her story about her trip to her ancestral home in Latvia. While she used a professional conference as the impetus for the trip, it was really to visit long lost family. Each time she started over, she covered a bit of the ground she'd hit in the previous takes, but from a slightly different angle. Blogging has highlighted the futility of telling any story and I appreciated her multi-story approach. There's so much to tell sometimes, so many layers of the same topic, each requiring its own telling. There isn't just one story. And through Saulutis' 13 little stories, she painted 13 layers, each revealing nuances that the others hadn't. And the stories, particularly the disparity between when her father signed up to fight for the Germans in WW II (1941) and when his brother was drafted (1944) was rich and poignant. And like much of her visit, many things were left unsaid.

The video has parts 12 and 13. (I was a little unsure of posting any of the video, but since they announced tonight that they are recording the whole series for podcasting later I figured it would be ok.)

John Keeble Starts UAA Summer Reading Series

UAA has over a week of readings by the authors every night (except Friday) starting last night and going through Tuesday, July 21. They're at 8pm which gives you time to eat and settled.

Last night we heard John Keeble - no we'd never heard of him before, but that is part of the fun, discovering new (for us) writers - reading from his new book Nocturnal America. We got excerpts from a longish (80 pages) short story, I think it was called Freeing the Fish. There's no one way to convey the story, you should have been there, as they say, but there were negotiations with Pakistani rebels, an uncomfortable scene where his wife is packing up the marriage, crosses on the lawn, and a budding relationship with the new neighbor.



When Keeble was done, there was a long pause as the audience waited to see if there was more. Then applause. Then it looked like Keeble and the audience waited in vain for someone to come up and say the normal thank you's and allow for questions from the audience. (To be fair, we were late because I didn't look carefully and we first went to the Art building where this event was last year, so I'm not sure what was all said in the introduction. We got there as Keeble came to the podium.)

I really don't understand why so many stages in Anchorage - Rasmuson Hall 101 and 110, the Arts Building rooms at UAA, Loussac's Marston Auditorium, the Museum's auditorium - all have such bad lighting for speakers/performers. The picture at the top is what it was like. I messed with the brightness on this second picture.

Then Keeble walked down from the stage and sat down. Only then did the faculty member stand up and wave the red program for the Series and invite people to come to the other sessions. And to buy books in the lobby.


People who complain about the cost of entertainment or the lack of entertainment in Anchorage,(neither of which is a valid complaint in most cases) well, here's over a week of live authors reading from their works, FREE!! It's at Rasmuson Hall at UAA (the 3 story green building connected to the sports center on the west end of campus) and after 7pm parking should be free. Better yet bike over in these great summer days we're having.

The website has a link to a pdf file with info on each night and all the speakers. That's way too much work for people, so I've just posted it all below. Most are people I don't know, but Willie Hensley will be presenting on Saturday night. Also, the website says through July 22, but the pdf file says July 21 is the last night.

Anyway, take advantage of having a university in town that does stuff like this.


From the UAA website on this:

Northern Renaissance Arts & Science Series
Summer 2009 MFA Evening Author Readings

All readings are FREE and open to the public and are organized and sponsored by UAA’s Creative Writing & Literary Arts Department, Low-Residency MFA Program.

NEW Location: UAA, Rasmuson Hall 101.

Time: 8:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

The UAA Campus Bookstore will showcase and sell books authored by MFA faculty, special guest writers, and suggested coursebooks during each of the (9) evening writer programs.

For more information, contact Kathleen Tarr, MFA Program Coordinator at 907-786-4394, or at afkt1@uaa.alaska.edu.

Monday, July 13 Derick Burleson
Derick Burleson is the author of two books of poems: Never Night (Marick Press, 2007) and Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-94 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). His poems
have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry, among other journals. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Burleson teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska—Fairbanks and lives in Two Rivers. He’s also an associate faculty member in the Low-Residency MFA Program at UAA.


Eva Saulitis
Eva Saulitis has taught English and creative writing at the Kachemak Bay branch of Kenai Peninsula College, in Homer, Alaska, since 1999 and is also on the faculty of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. Trained initially as a marine biologist, she received her M.S. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1993. Since 1986, she has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Kenai Fjords and the Aleutian Islands and is the author and co-author of numerous scientific publications. Dissatisfied with the objective language and rigid methodology of science, she turned to creative writing – poetry and the essay – to develop another language with which to address the natural world, receiving her MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1996.

Her essay collection, Leaving Resurrection, was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Non-Fiction Prize, and was published by Boreal Books/Red Hen Press in 2008. Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Northwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Carnet de Route, Seattle Review, Ice-Floe, Connotations and Kalliope. They have also appeared in several anthologies, including Homeground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez; she has read essays she contributed to that volume on the PBS radio series Living on Earth. She’s been a recipient of fellowships from the Island Institute, the Alaska State Council on the Arts (Connie Boochever Fellowship) and the Rasumuson Foundation. In 2007, with the help of grants from Rasmuson Foundation and Ventspils House, an international center for writers and translators, she spent a month in Latvia, her parents’ birthplace, where she began a new book of lyric essays and completed a poetry collection entitled Many Ways to Say It.


Tuesday, July 14 Linda McCarriston
Linda McCarriston is the senior core faculty member and Professor of Poetry in UAA's Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. Linda McCarriston has received two literature fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two from the Vermont State Council on the arts. A winner of the Grolier Prize and the Consuelo Ford Prize from Poetry, she was awarded the poetry fellowship at the Bunting Institute (now the Radcliffe Institute) at Harvard for 1992-1993, after which she was named Jenny McKean Moore Visiting Writer in Washington at the George Washington University.

Her poetry books include: Little River New & Selected Poems; Eva-Mary; and Talking Soft Dutch.

Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Ohio Review, the Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner ( where she has work forthcoming), New England Review (which also solicited her oft-reprinted essay "The Grace of Form: Class Un consciousness and an American Writer" for a special issue on Class and American Writers), ICE-FLOE: An International Journal of Poetry of the Far North, Calyx, Kalliope, Sojourner, Sojouners, TriQuarterly, Poetry Ireland, and many others. She has read at Berkeley, Poets' House in NYC, The Library of Congress, and countless other sites around the country, is a featured poet in Bill Moyers' latest PBS Poetry Series, The Language of Life (her tape, with Sandra McPherson: "The Field of Time"), and has been twice interviewed by Terry Gross for Public Radio's Fresh Air.

In addition to poetry readings "on the circuit," she's read and spoken in prisons, public schools, family shelters, women's centers, and such gatherings as the Alaska Governor's Summit on the Neglect and Abuse of Children, as well as been invited to represent the United States and the English Language at the 2004 Festival de las Lenguas, in Mexico City. One of fourteen poets from the Americas, she was honored for her expression of solidarity and compassion for Native American women in the poem "Indian Girls," which caused great controversy in Alaska. Other poems, including "Le Coursier de Jeanne D'Arc" and "God the Synecdoche in His Holy Land," have also generated political controversy. McCarriston has been invited to contribute to panels and speaking series on subjects including women's history, American education, censorship and self-censorship, and her poems and prose are anthologized across a wide range of subject areas.

She lives in Rockport, Massachusetts.


Josip Novokovich
Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He wrote the Fiction Writers Workshop, and has published a novel, April Fool's Day (translated into ten languages), three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters) and two collections of narrative essays. His work was anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, and he has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library. He has taught at the University of Cincinnati, Bard, Penn State, and now Concordia University in Montreal. He lives in Warriors Mark, Pennsylvania.


Wednesday, July 15 Anne Caston
Anne Caston's first book, Flying Out With The Wounded, won the 1996 New York University Press Prize in Poetry. Her second collection, Judah's Lion, is now available in a second edition from Toad Hall Press (2009). Anne is currently at work on a third collection of poems, The Empress Of Longing, and a memoir, Deep Dixie: A Southern Woman's Take on Life, Love, Friendship, Romance, Faith, and Coming-of-Age Among Southern Baptists. Anne is core faculty in poetry in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage and divides her time between Alaska And Central Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and two miscreant cats in Central Pennsylvania.


Rich Chiappone
Richard Chiappone received a BA in English at the university of Alaska Anchorage in 1991, and an MFA in creative writing there in 1994. He has published dozens of stories and essays in both commercial and literary magazines including Playboy, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Alaska Magazine, Missouri Review, Crescent Review, Sou’wester, New Virginia Review, ZYZZYVA and others. His collection of short stories “Water of an Undetermined Depth” was published in 2003. One of the stories in the collection, “Raccoon” was made into an award winning short film featured at international film festivals including Aspen, Montreal, Palm Springs and others. Chiappone lives in Anchor Point, Alaska, where he writes a newspaper column, teaches creative writing, and serves on the faculty of the annual Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. He has won writing awards including an Alaska Press Club award, and the John W. Voelker Award for short fiction. Chiappone is also an associate faculty member in the Low-Residency MFA Program at UAA.


Zack Rogow
Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of eighteen books or plays. His sixth book of poems, The Number before Infinity, was published by Scarlet Tanager Books in 2008. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, from American Poetry Review to Zyzzyva. He is the editor of an anthology of U.S. poetry, The Face of Poetry, published by University of California Press in 2005. Currently he teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the California College of the Arts and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.


Thursday, July 16 (FREE PUBLIC CONCERT!) David Lynn Grimes An evening with Alaskan singer/songwriter, David Grimes
David Lynn Grimes is a bardic trickster, songteller and wandering fool who has howled with wolves, run from bears and cavorted with killer whales. In the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, David has been one of the primary citizen artists and activists working to protect and praise wild habitat for critters and human communities in Alaska's Prince William Sound and Copper River ecosystems. David's adoptive Eyak name—given by Chief Marie Smith Jones, last speaker of the Eyak language—is YaxadiliSayaxinh, which means "The Thinker" or more literally, "He who causes his mind to involuntarily roam in an indeterminate direction."


Friday, July 17
NO READINGS.


Saturday, July 18 Nancy Lord
Nancy Lord, Alaska’s current Writer Laureate, holds a liberal arts degree from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Vermont College. In addition to being an independent writer based in Homer, she fished commercially for many years and has, more recently, worked as a naturalist and historian on adventure cruise ships.

She is the author of three short fiction collections (most recently The Man Who Swam with Beavers, Coffee House Press, 2001) and three books of literary nonfiction (most recently Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale’s Truths, Counterpoint Press, 2004.) A collection of essays/memoir, Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life, will be released by the University of Nebraska Press in September. She teaches part-time at the Kachemak Bay Branch of Kenai Peninsula College and in the low-residency graduate writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her awards include fellowships from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and residencies at a number of artist communities. See www.nancylord.alaskawriters.com.

Willie Hensley
Willie Hensley’s memoir, Fifty Years from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in December, 2008. In March of 2010, a Korean language version will be published in Korea.

In 1966, he spearheaded the formation of the Northwest Alaska Native Association which filed a claim to 40 million acres in that part of Alaska. He was instrumental in fighting for passage of the historic Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act of 1971, signed by President Richard Nixon. The act provided for payment of close to $1 billion to Alaska Natives and 44 million acres conveyed to corporations owned and controlled by Alaska Natives. He also spent eight years in the Alaska State Legislature, and has been in many top leadership positions in AFN. Though now retired, for 10 years, he represented the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company in Washington, D.C.

Willie Hensley received an honorary doctorate of law from University of Alaska in 1980. Hensley presently serves as Chairman of the First Alaskans Institute, providing leadership development, research and analysis to improve the Native community. He also serves as Chairman of the Alaska Manufacturing Extension Partnership; and sits on the Board of Trustees of Charter College. He and his wife Abbe have raised four children.

Sunday, July 19 Jo-Ann Mapson
Jo-Ann Mapson grew up in Southern California, attended Johnston College at the University of Redlands, and received her B.A. in English/Creative Writing at California State University Long Beach. In 1992, she received her MFA in Writing at Vermont College in Montpelier where she completed thesis projects in both poetry and fiction.

Her students include writers Joyce Weatherford (Heart of the Beast), Judith Ryan Hendricks (Bread Alone) and bestselling mystery and mainstream author Earlene Fowler (The Saddlemaker's Wife). Her awards include The California Short Story Award sponsored by Squaw Valley Community of Writers and she was a semi-finalist for the Barnes & Noble inaugural Discover Great New Writers Award. Two of her novels have been national bestsellers (The Wilder Sisters and Bad Girl Creek), and one was made into a movie for television (Blue Rodeo). Her stories, personal essays and poetry have been widely published and anthologized, most recently in Wild Moments: Adventures with Animals of the North. Several of her novels have been BookSense 76 picks. Her literary papers are being collected in Boston University's Twentieth Century Writers "The Jo-Ann Mapson Collection."

She is Assistant Professor on the core faculty of UAA’s Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. She currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she is completing a new novel.



Sunday, July 19 Ernestine Hayes
Ernestine Hayes is a member of the Wolf House of the Kaagwaantaan Clan of the Lingit [sic]. Her book, Blonde Indian, an Alaska Native Memoir, won a 2007 American book Award, was a HAIL (Honoring Alaska Indigenous Literature) recipient, and was a finalist for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize and the 2007 PEN Creative Non-Fiction Award. She is the author of other published work in fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction.

Ernestine's recent presentations include "Tlingit Literature" at the 2009 Tlingit Clan Conference, "The Negotiation of Identity in Alaska Native Transitional Generations" at the San Francisco American Anthropological Association Annual Conference, and "What Shall We Do with Our Histories?" at the International Polar Year in Nome. She was the 2009 featured writer for University of Alaska Southeast's journal, Tidal Echoes, where her poetry, nonfiction, and fiction appeared. She has recently had a short short published in BellaOnline Literary Review, and her creative essay "Winter in Lingit Aani Brings Magpies and Ravens" is scheduled for publication in Studies in American Literature in Fall 2009.

Grandmother of four, she is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alaska Southeast Juneau campus, and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program at UAA as an associate faculty member.


Monday, July 20 Judith Barrington
Judith Barrington is a memoirist and a poet. Her Lifesaving:A Memoir won the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Her best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art is enormously popular with writing groups, university programs, and individual memoirists. Her most recent poetry collection, Horses and the Human Soul was recently selected by the Oregon State Library for "150 Books for the Sesquicentennial" (from among books by Oregon writers, 1836 – 2009).

Her awards include the Andrés Berger Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dulwich Festival International Poetry Contest, and the Stewart H. Holbrook Award for outstanding contributions to Oregon's literary life. Judith grew up in England and moved to the United States in 1976. She has lived in Portland, Oregon since then, returning to Europe to give readings and workshops in England and Spain every year.

David Stevenson
David Stevenson is the director of the Creative Writing and Literary Arts Department and the Low-Residency MFA Program at UAA. He has been teaching creative writing for over twenty years at the University of Utah, University of California Davis, and at Western Illinois University where he was full professor and director of the Graduate Program in English. He first came to Alaska in 1977 on a ski mountaineering expedition to Mt. Kennedy, a remote peak near the Alaska-Yukon border in the St. Elias Range.

He was educated in the west at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington (BA ’78) and the University of Utah (Ph.D. ’94). He writes often about the mountaineering experience both in fiction and nonfiction prose and has published widely in journals such as Ascent, Alpinist, Isotope, and Weber Studies, as well as in The American Alpine Journal where he has been book review editor since 1996. In the late 1990s he spent several summers working for the US Forest Service in the Inyo National Forest (California). There, he was editor and lead writer for the “Eastern Sierra Scenic Byway,” a project that placed 23 interpretive kiosks along Highway 395; he also designed and wrote much of the “Restoration Ecology in the Mono Basin” exhibit for the Mono Lake Scenic Area Visitor Center. His short story, “Native,” won the Boulevard Award for Emerging Writers in 1999.

Recently he contributed to Contact: Mountain Climbing and Environmental Thinking, edited by Jeff McCarthy (University of Nevada Press 2008), edited a book length collection of student writing Practice: Twelve Stories and a Novella, and privately published a short folio of photographs of climbing in the Dolomites (Italy). His novel-in-progress, Forty Crows, is set in Mexico City in the early 1970s.

Sherry Simpson
Sherry Simpson is the author of two collections of essays, The Way Winter Comes, and The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Creative Nonfiction journal, Orion, Great Writers on the Great Outdoors, and In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction. She is the winner of the inaugural Chinook Prize and the Andres Berger award for nonfiction, and she was a Bakeless Scholar at Breadloaf Writers' Conference.

She is working on a book about people and bears for the University Press of Kansas. Simpson is the core faculty member in literary nonfiction in UAA's Low-Residency MFA Program. She also teaches for the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University


Tuesday, July 21 (final summer 2009 reading and art presentation) Margot Klass Frank Soos

Among Margo Klass’s influences are medieval altarpieces, and the work of constructionist Kurt Schwitters and architect Tadeo Ando. Her work has been exhibited by various galleries and museums in Maine and Alaska. In addition to work in private collections, she has work in the collections of the University of Alaska Museum of the North, the Anchorage Museum of Art and History, and Davistown Museum in Liberty, Maine. She is a 2008 recipient of a Rasmuson Foundation Artist Award.

Frank Soos has published two works of fiction: Early Yet, and Unified Field Theory, the 1997 winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and one book of essays, Bamboo Fly Rod Suite. His short essay responses to Margo Klass’s work represent a new and unexpected direction in his work.

Margo Klass and Frank Soos began their collaboration in 2002 and make their home in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Anchorage Bug Gunk Infestation

Aphid honeydew. Gunk. Particularly
under cottonwoods, there are large sticky wet spots.

If you stand under the true for a minute it feels like a very light drizzle. (One reason the close up picture below isn't better. I just couldn't stand under there for long. It wasn't just me, but my camera was getting dripped on.)

Here's a closer look of the sidewalk, gunking up. There are even bubbles.

And here are the culprits. (Double click any picture to enlarge it.) The best option I know (if you don't want to use poisons) is to wash the trees with a heavy spray of water everyday. The ones that are getting are deck sticky get sprayed. The others I leave alone.

Don Mitchell Revises the 'Palin-as-Public-Ethics-Champ' Story

With years as a politically active Alaskan and a week's worth of perspective on Palin's decision to resign, Don Mitchell offers a very plausible explanation the Governor's decision over at Alaska Dispatch.

There's a lot of interesting new story and interpretation here. Did you know that Palin was "reportedly livid" when Gov. Murkowski didn't appoint her to fill his vacant US Semate seat?

In December 2002 when Frank was sworn into office, Alaska's election law allowed Governor Murkowski to appoint Senator Murkowski's replacement. Sarah had enough juice to get on the long list of Republicans Frank interviewed. During her interview she came off as vapid and uninformed. But that's not how Sarah saw it. Several weeks later Frank astounded Alaskans by giving his Senate seat to his daughter, Lisa, who had never been publicly mentioned as a candidate for the seat and who had not been interviewed. Sarah, a 38-year-old former small town mayor who had never won a statewide election, reportedly was livid and reportedly never fully forgave Frank, because in her self-absorption she was certain that she should have been the obvious choice.

But most interesting to me was his rewriting of the story of Sarah Palin, ethicist for the people.

Mitchell talks about how she was appointed as the public member of the Oil and Gas Commission, even though she had no experience at all in oil and gas. He also points out how the position didn't require such expertise at the time, though that has since been changed.

Within weeks of her arrival at the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Sarah knew she was drowning. That she had no understanding of, and no interest in, the Commission's highly technical work. And not only that, but, like every state employee, she was expected to be at work five mornings a week. To get to the Commission's office in Anchorage required an hour commute from Wasilla that during the winter she had to make by driving in the pitch dark down an icy, moose-strewn highway. [Moose-strewn? A little color for the Outside readers?]

So according to people who knew her at the time, soon after she arrived at the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Sarah began searching for a face-saving excuse to quit a job she never should have been given.

She picked up on an issue raised by Ethan Burkowitz during the confirmation hearing of another Oil and Gas Commission member - Republican Party Chair Rudy Ruedrich. Berkowitz had asked how a party chair could ethically regulate people he would, as party chair, be asking money from?

For several months thereafter Oil and Gas Conservation Commissioner Palin, who also served as the Commission's ethics officer, had no ethical problem with Randy Ruedrich serving as a Commissioner. But then she suddenly had a huge, and very public, problem when the news leaked that during his workday Ruedrich had been using his office computer to conduct Alaska Republican Party business.

The year previous when she had been a candidate in the Republican primary election for the party's nomination for Lieutenant Governor, Sarah not only had used her computer in the Wasilla mayor's office for campaign purposes, she had used it to communicate about the progress of her campaign with Randy Ruedrich. But now she not only expressed outrage about Ruedrich's ethical lapse, she had the brazen temerity to file an ethics complaint against him. And then in a public fit of professed pique, in January 2004 she quit the Commission because, since the Attorney General's investigation of Ruedrich's violation of the Alaska Ethics Act was ongoing, she was precluded from publicly discussing what she knew about it. As Sarah went out of her way to tell the Anchorage Daily News, the state's largest newspaper: "I'm forced to withhold information from Alaskans, and that goes against what I believe in as a public servant."

There's a lot more in Mitchell's post. I can neither confirm nor dispute Mitchell's factual characterizations. But I think they add a lot more information to the public discussion of who Sarah Palin is. Eventually, with enough accounts, we will be able to sort through them, find which facts seem to stick and which seem to lack substance. Eventually we'll get a clearer picture of the phenomenon of Sarah Palin.

Mitchell's track record as, among other things, the most comprehensive chronicler of the history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (and volume 2) gives him more credibility than most.