It's been a bad day for Governor Palin. The New York Times--on an roll (or at least, for the second day in a row)--ran a piece highlighting Palin's blatant cronyism in office. Here are some choice passages:
when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency. ...
Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.
The Times paints a picture of a woman who would fit right in with the current Bush administration. She fired people from historically apolitical positions for political or personal reasons. She works in secrecy, using private emails to try to avoid subpoenas. She relies on a small inner circle of advisers from the old days, maintaining an insular, cut-off worldview. She's Bush.
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