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Gov. Palin Fired Top Lawman in Alaska Now She’s Being Investigated

  • Posted on January 22, 2010 at 4:08 am

By Michael Webster: Investigative Reporter Sept 1, 2008 3:00 PM PDT

 


Gov. Sarah Palin

 Gov. Sarah Palin. Get complete past and current coverage of Alaska’s Governor as she battles to become the next vice president.

 

The serious claims against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin asserts that the Governor ordered the head of the Alaska State Troopers Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to fire her brother in law State Trooper Michael Wooten which is being reported by the Anchorage newspapers to have roots in the governors family feud. This scandal erupted into public view with the July 11 firing of the state’s top public safety official.
Even though the John McCain camp says they were aware of this legal action pending it’s not resolved even now as she becomes U.S. Sen. John McCain’s running mate.

The papers are calling it “Troopergate” and reporting Palin’s abrupt dismissal of Monegan on July 11 is being investigated by a special counsel hired by the Alaska Legislature.

The Laguna Journal has learned that the Governor has now hired her own lawyer to defend and help unravel this potenuelly embarrassing circumstance.

 

Lisa  Demera reported in the Anchorage daily news that the issue is whether Palin, her administration or family improperly pressured state Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to fire a state trooper — the ex-husband of Palin’s sister — and whether Palin fired Monegan when that didn’t happen. Trooper Michael Wooten and Palin’s sister, Molly McCann, are divorced but still battling in court over custody and visitation rights.
The McCain campaign says Palin “was never directly involved” and blamed the controversy on the campaign of the Democratic nominee, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama.
“The Governor did nothing wrong and has nothing to hide. It’s outrageous that the Obama campaign is trying to attack her over a family issue. As a reformer and a leader on ethics reform, she has been happy to help out in the investigation of this matter, because she was never directly involved,” the campaign said in a statement. When the Obama people were contacted by the Journal we were told that the Obama campaign was not the source of the story.

 

Palin has repeatedly said she did not pressure Monegan and did not know until recently that anyone on her staff might have done so.

 

This trooper controversy is not new according to locals James Wright of Anchorage who said,” this family trooper thing has been talked about by Alaskans for weeks, long before Palin was picked for the Vice Presidency. It has been brought to light and being thrust into the bright lights of the national campaign because of her appointment to the national stage.”
Trooper Michael Wooten claims Gov Palin was directly involved and was attempting to help her sister by using her powerful office to intervene and tried to have me fired, Wooten said. The governor twice brought up Wooten to him — once on the phone soon after she took office, and once in person not long after that, Monegan said.
Plus, the governor’s husband, Todd, talked to him several times about Wooten, three top officials in her administration contacted him, and another Palin aide contacted a trooper lieutenant, Monegan said.

 

Palin recently acknowledged, based on an internal inquiry, that a half dozen people in her administration had initiated contacts with the Department of Public Safety about Wooten.
Monegan also disclosed for the first time Friday that Palin sent him two or three e-mails that referenced her ex-brother-in-law and his status with troopers but he wouldn’t provide them because of the ongoing investigation.
Monegan said he believes his firing was directly related to the fact Wooten stayed on the job.
“It was a significant factor if not the factor,” Monegan said.
No one from the McCain campaign ever contacted him to vet Palin as a candidate, Monegan said.
Who did they contact?
“We don’t talk about the vetting process,” said Maria Comella, Palin’s vice president campaign press secretary.

Demera went on to say the Legislature is spending up to $100,000 “to investigate the circumstances and events surrounding the termination of former Public Safety Commissioner Monegan, and potential abuses of power and/or improper actions by members of the executive branch.”
The investigation is supposed to wrap up by Oct. 31, just days before the general election.
Palin will be deposed along with others in the governor’s office and former administration officials, said state Sen. Hollis French, a Democrat and former state prosecutor from Anchorage who is serving as the project director for the investigation. The special counsel just this week was trying to arrange Palin’s deposition, French said.

 

The investigation will continue, French said.
“I think it raises the profile but it doesn’t really change the mission or the work,” the senator said.
Before she was governor, Palin pushed for a trooper investigation of Wooten over a number of matters, including using a Taser on his stepson, illegally shooting a moose, and accusations of driving drunk. At one point, Palin and her husband hired a private investigator.
Troopers did investigate, and Wooten was suspended for 10 days, later reduced to five. That took care of it, Monegan said. But the Palin administration and Todd Palin wouldn’t let go, he said.
Palin initially said that, after she took office in December 2006, she broached the subject of Wooten with Monegan just once, when they discussed her security detail. She said that she told Monegan that Wooten “had threatened to kill my dad and bring me down.” She said she thought that was the end of it.
Monegan said Palin called him on his cell phone one night in January 2007 about Wooten, but it wasn’t related to her security detail. He said he had already met with Todd Palin about Wooten, whom he hadn’t heard of before, and had looked into the family’s complaints only to learn they already had been investigated. Palin seemed frustrated that nothing more could be done, he said.
“For the record, no one ever said fire Wooten. Not the governor. Not Todd. Not any of the other staff,” Monegan said Friday from Portland. “What they said directly was more along the lines of ‘this isn’t a person that we would want to be representing our state troopers.’”
Palin again brought up Wooten in February 2007 as they were walking together to wish a state senator a happy birthday, Monegan said. He said he told Palin he had to keep her at arm’s distance on the matter and she agreed.

Andrew Halcro, was the first to publicly mention the Wooten matter in connection with Monegan. He titled his blog post: “Why Walt Monegan got fired: Palin’s abuse of power.”
“This is a governor who really built her name by stepping on the back of sinners — Randy Ruedrich, Greg Renkes, Frank Murkowski,” Halcro said in an interview Friday, referring to the Republican Party chairman, the former attorney general and the former governor. “And now her administration seems to be taking the same approach as the people that she criticized.”
More of the story came out on July 17, when the Public Safety Employees Association, with Wooten’s permission, released the investigative file concerning the complaints brought against the trooper by the Palin family and others.
The personnel investigation began in April 2005, long before Palin became governor and months before her October 2005 announcement that she was running. The investigation into Wooten wrapped up in March 2006, before she was elected.
Troopers found four instances in which Wooten violated policy, broke the law, or both:
- Wooten used a Taser on his stepson, to show him how it worked.
- He shot a moose without a permit. At the time he was married to McCann, who won a highly coveted permit in a drawing but never intended to use it herself.
- He drank beer in his patrol car on one occasion.
- He told others that his father-in-law — Palin’s father, Chuck Heath — would “eat an f’ing lead bullet” if he helped his daughter get an attorney for the divorce.

On July 28, the state Legislative Council, a bipartisan panel of senators and representatives, approved hiring an independent investigator to look into Monegan’s firing and any abuse of power. Retired prosecutor Steve Branchflower was named special counsel.
“I’ve said all along you could come up with dust, you come up with no evidence of wrongdoing, or you could come up with clear evidence of wrongdoing. And it might be by the governor, it might be somebody else,” French, the state senator, said Friday.
Meanwhile, Palin also faces an ethics complaint filed by Andree McLeod, a former state employee and political activist. McLeod has accused the governor’s office of using its influence to get a Palin supporter a job. Complaints against the governor go before a three-person state personnel board. McLeod based her complaint on e-mails between members of the governor’s staff that are among four boxes of papers she got through a recent public records request.
This month, as Palin’s administration gathered materials for the legislative investigation, the governor released a recording of a phone call in which one of her aides pressured a trooper lieutenant to fire Wooten.
That contradicted her earlier claims that there had been no pressure. She said she was unaware of the conversation until then.
In the Feb. 29 phone call, which was recorded by troopers as they do routinely, aide Frank Bailey told the trooper lieutenant that Palin and her husband wanted to know why Wooten still had a job.
“Todd and Sarah are scratching their heads, ‘Why on earth hasn’t this, why is this guy still representing the department?’ He’s a horrible recruiting tool, you know,” Bailey told Lt. Rodney Dial.
Palin has put Bailey on paid administrative leave during the investigation. She said she never asked Bailey to make that call.
After Monegan’s dismissal, Palin’s pick for his replacement backfired. Charles Kopp, who had been police chief in Kenai, lasted just two weeks in the job, stepping down as public safety commissioner in July over revelations of sexual harassment while police chief.
At a press conference to announce Kopp’s resignation, both Palin and Kopp read brief statements then, in an unusual move for Palin, dashed off without answering questions.
Regarding Monegan, Palin has maintained that her decision to fire him had nothing to do with his refusal to dump Wooten. She said she wanted a “new direction” for the department.
Palin has formed a committee to help her pick a new public safety commissioner.

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Trigger Point Therapy

  • Posted on January 22, 2010 at 2:20 am

There’s nothing quite like sitting down on a crisp fall Sunday morning to write about my wife’s uterus. I suppose I could have written something generic about the topic of uterine fibroids, but I prefer to write personal stories about true-life experiences that have the potential to inspire and motivate readers.

It all started about a year after we got married. During our first year of marriage, like most couples, our focus was on starting a family, which meant we did our best to make that happen. So far, so good.

But after almost a year of trying without success, we began to wonder if something might be wrong. Off we went to see the fertility specialist, who first asked how old my wife was, then took a blood sample to measure her level of follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), which is the main hormone involved in producing mature eggs. Then he did an ultrasound test to check out her uterus.

When they gave us the results, it would have felt better if they had used a shotgun. At age 39, my wife had an FSH score of 12 (the odds of conception at anything over 10 is virtually zero). Not only that, but they also found three uterine fibroids in three different areas, or levels, in the lining of her uterus.

How bad news spurred us into action

I’ll spare you the grief and heartache we went through that day—the day we were told we would never have a child. I can tell you that when I get bad news, I feel the same emotions of hopelessness, grief, and frustration as anyone else would in the same circumstances. I also have to admit that I expressed my rage in a torrent of choice words (mostly R-rated). For me, it was the release I needed, and it was the first step on our road to recovery.

For as quickly as the bad news had created a sense of hopelessness, my wife and I were somehow able to put aside the negative and begin to focus on what we could do rather than what we couldn’t. Within 12 months of that terrible day, we finalized the adoption of our daughter, Jessica Taylor.

In fact, from the first day we signed any paperwork to the time we were standing in front of a judge, it took only 10 months—a land speed record in the world of domestic infant adoption. Jessica will be 5 next month, and if my wife and I had simply sat by and gotten negative and depressed, she surely would not be in our lives today.

What you need to know

While not truly understanding what a uterine fibroid tumor was at the time and only hearing the word “tumor,” I immediately went to work to learn everything I could about them. And, like anything else, the answer is out there—you just have to ask the right questions, find the right people, and knock on the right doors.

Of course, the doctor we had only wanted to sell us a $20,000 Egg donor fertility package. He could not have cared one bit about the fibroids and the emotions my wife was experiencing when she learned she had them—let alone offer us a solution.

The first bit of good news I found was that fibroids are rarely cancerous. In fact, some are even asymptomatic, meaning they don’t have any symptoms. Many women, however, will experience symptoms such as abnormal bleeding, pelvic pain, bowel and bladder irregularity, and painful or uncomfortable intercourse. In some case, fibroids can cause a distended abdomen.

What exactly are fibroids?

Uterine fibroid tumors are small, solid collections of smooth muscle cells and fibrous connective tissue that can develop in various parts of the uterus.

What causes them?

No one really knows why they develop, but there is a well-established correlation between fibroids and hormonal imbalances—specifically, higher estrogen levels and lower progesterone levels.

Being in an estrogen-dominant state should not come as a surprise to women these days—even up to premenopausal ages—because of the widespread use of birth control pills and even the large amounts of soy we all eat. Yes, I said soy.

The best way to overcome a challenge is to overwhelm it

If you suspect (or know) that you have a uterine fibroid, please seek proper medical attention. In our case, we were not offered any treatment, which is common. The typical recommendation is to do nothing but wait and see what happens.

Well, we weren’t going to wait until these fibroids got to be the size of bowling balls before we took any action. (Personal observation: sometimes when we are faced with a medical situation that is not life-threatening, we tend sit back and hope that things will get better on their own. Seldom do we decide to attack the problem from as many different angles as possible—all at once, in an effort to overwhelm it, stop it, or at least control it as quickly as possible.)

My wife found her solution in enzymes

My wife had been off any birth control for a while before she found out she had fibroids. But the hormonal imbalances were already evident. We did look into hormone replacement therapy (HRT), but this was right around the time when this approach was getting bad press and some of these products were even being pulled from the market. She did try some natural progesterone cream for a while, until she discovered something called “proteolytic enzymes.”

Can Proteolytic enzymes reverse fibroids?

Proteolytic enzymes are a remarkable substance, and they are responsible for a host of bodily functions. When it comes to uterine fibroids, proteolytic enzymes help break down and remove excess fibrous tissue, which is what fibroids are mostly made of. That’s why these enzymes work so well.

Let me tell you what happened in our case. We both started to take them. Why both of us? Well, for one thing, my wife had never heard of these enzymes, and she felt that it was something we should do together. In less than a week, we both started to feel better—and I’m talking all over. Simple aches and pains began to disappear, and we found we had greater flexibility in our hands (We were both massage therapists at the time and our hands are everything to us).

By week two, my wife started to have what the scientists and the developers of the enzymes call a “side activity.” Why they can’t just call it a side benefit is beyond me. Anyway, she started to get this vaginal discharge that she called “the goo.” I called it “money” because it was a signal that remnants of the fibroids were passing through her.

This continued over the next four to six weeks. My wife did not complain of any vaginal pain during this period. She simply said, “Things just worked better if you know what I mean.”

The one interesting thing about enzymes is that they work at several different dosing levels, in the beginning there is an Activation dose, the Activation dose is different for everyone so you will need to experiment with your dose by incrementally adding one or two capsule per day.

The Activation dose can be continued as long as your are experiencing the side activity, once the side activity starts to subside you can start on what is called a maintenance dose.

That was five years ago. Today, we still take the enzymes for the numerous health benefits they provide, including cardiovascular support not to mention helping to control the levels of systemic inflammation in our bodies the root cause of virtually every disease known to man. It goes without saying that when your enzyme levels drop or stay too low for too long, you will eventually find yourself planted on the other side of the grass.

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