The U.S. Secret Service is investigating a massive leak of data on donors and others — including credit card numbers — from Coleman’s campaign Web site in January.

A court ruling yesterday made Coleman’s legal challenge to Al Franken’s recount victory less likely to succeed.

In an item titled “Trouble’s Home Address,” The New York Times reviews notable (and alleged) scandals involving public figures and their homes. Except for former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, all are from New York, the latest being Adolfo Carrion Jr., a former Bronx Borough president who landed the top job at the new White House urban affairs office that Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak has gushed over. After the jump, the Minnesota edition of “Trouble’s Home Address.”

“What is it about home repairs and politicians that can lead to ethical trouble?” asks the Times. Partly it’s simply that, for pols as for ordinary mortals, homes are the biggest thing they own (or used to own). 

We knocked on this door last summer, when then-Sen. Norm Coleman’s low-rent tenancy in a GOP fundraiser’s basement apartment was raising eyebrows, in a post titled “Scandal sheets: Coleman not first Minnesota pol to make news in bed.”

Others on the list included state House candidate Sue Ek, St. Paul City Council candidate Kris Reiter, former St. Paul school board member Al Oertwig, former Gov. Jesse Ventura, former U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger and former Minneapolis City Councilor Lisa McDonald — several of whose scandals involved whether their homes were in the districts they represented.

Since then Coleman has earned a second and possibly third place on the Minnesota list. First came the revelation last December that a kitchen renovation at his St. Paul home went overbudget by $86,000 in 2007 — just as Nasser Kazeminy, a Coleman friend and benefactor is alleged to have been trying to funnel $100,000 to Coleman’s wife through a Texas company he owns and the insurance firm where she works.

Then in January came news that the Colemans had refinanced the house 12 times in 14 years. At that point shock over Coleman’s homes required raising a third eyebrow.

Alaska’s result has reverberations in Minnesota mostly because both states have yet-undecided races on which Democrats’ chances for a 60-vote filibuster-proof bloc in the Senate depend.

But another echo between Minnesota and Alaska has been sounding this year, as Stevens’ trial and conviction increased the likelihood that his colleagues might soon bounce him from his seat should he win it again. And that would leave Gov. Sarah Palin in a situation somewhat akin to Wendell Anderson’s when he was governor of Minnesota and U.S. Sen. Walter Mondale was elected vice president in 1976.

Anderson resigned and was appointed to replace Mondale in the Senate by his own replacement in the governor’s mansion, Rudy Perpich. Voters punished both men two years later, denying them re-election. Alaska law seems to allow Palin to appoint a temporary replacement but requires a special election within three months.

If Stevens is the winner after the last Alaska vote is counted tomorrow, what advice would Anderson have for Palin? Reached at his office today, Anderson asked to be reminded about the scenarios in the Far North, then demurred for the time being. “Let’s wait and see what happens,” he said.

More intriguing to Anderson at the moment is the possibility of a victory for Stevens’ Democratic rival, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, who is a relative of the politically active Begich clan of northern Minnesota. His uncle, Joe Begich, was mayor of his hometown of Eveleth, Minn., before nine terms representing District 6A in the Minnesota Legislature. (Joe continues to serve the area as a member of the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board.)

Gov. Wendell Anderson was on what became an iconic Time cover Aug. 13, 1973, illustrating the story, "Minnesota: A State That Works."

But the idea that Palin would be wise to study Anderson’s precedent has been rampant on the Internet at least since her star began its rapid rise in August — and to a surprising degree for what some might consider a significant footnote on the national political scene. And Palin has apparently done that homework, or has at least considered the choices that Providence might put before her: whether to appoint herself to the Senate (temporarily) or run in a special election. Last week she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer the latter option was a possibility, but not the former (video, Senate discussion at 6:00 mark).

The high cost Anderson paid for his two years in the Senate can’t be his favorite topic of discussion. But he agreed to talk again after the dust has settled in Alaska.

With Democrats now controlling 57 Senate seats — just shy of the veto-proof majority they’d gain with 60 — all eyes are on Minnesota’s race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken… as Huffington Post’s All-Al-All-the-Time dedicated page (see logo above) suggests. The margin has narrowed considerably between the two, but has held firm most of today at 239.

NBC’s Doug Adams takes a look at the Dems’ journey to 60. If Franken can squeak out a victory, the party will have 58 seats. And a D-column win in Alaska’s race between convicted felon Ted Stevens and Mark Begich would bump it to 59. (Begich trails Stevens by a 3,400 votes, but some 55,000 absentee ballots haven’t been tallied yet.) That leaves the 60th seat up in the air: in George, where neither Republican Saxby Chambliss nor Democrat Jim Martin won a majority vote on Tuesday, a December 2 runoff has been scheduled. John McCain — and possibly even Sarah Palin — will be heading there to campaign on Chambliss’ behalf. A request for a Georgia visit by President-Elect Barack Obama has already been requested by Martin’s campaign.

If John McCain manages to carry the 2008 presidential election, his victory will be due in no small part to his success in persuading a passel of independent voters that Sarah Palin was chosen for some reason other than her appeal to the variety of conservatives who continue to dominate the Republican party. In Palin’s selection, in fact, we can observe the distilled absurdity of McCain’s “maverick” pretensions. While claiming to have selected a consummate “outsider,” he actually selected someone who’d been promoted by William Kristol, whom history will forever recall as the intellectual godfather of the Iraq War; Larry Kudlow, the bog-standard free marketeer who yodeled gleefully when McCain rescinded his (hopelessly mild) approval for cap and trade carbon emissions policy; and fundamentalist elites like Richard Land and Dan Coats, who have consistently served as vital theological supporters and enablers of the Bush administration from its first days to the Last Days.

While unexpected in nearly all quarters, McCain’s choice was based on a cynical calculation that Palin would rally moribund social conservatives to the party flag. Indeed, to her supporters, Palin’s religion, family narrative and anti-liberal policy preferences are an essential part of her appeal. The social conservative base of the Republican party correctly reads Palin as a true believer, and their enthusiastic response, so far, has engorged McCain’s polling numbers in traditionally Republican hives while narrowing or eliminating Barack Obama’s advantage in swing states like New Mexico and Ohio.

Sarah Palin, in other words, has drawn the instantaneous and rapturous support of the very people who a mere four years ago steadfastly insisted that George W. Bush ranked among the most indispensable presidents in the history of republic. It is a remarkable feat that Sarah Palin has been transformed in the space of a few weeks into the second coming of George W. Bush, a man who would be creamed by most conceivable foes were he able to pursue a third term. Political scientists will spend careers figuring out how all of this became possible.

But Palin’s selection was also based on an apparently earnest — and thinly supported — argument that Sarah Palin represents a new kind of Republican who might reinforce McCain’s self-flattering “maverick” image. Here, Palin has been enlisted to help McCain court undecided voters and recover party defectors recoiling from the flagrant incompetence of the Bush administration and the “culture of corruption” that capsized the Republican party in the 2006 mid-term elections.

On its own merits, the narrative of Palin herself as a mini-maverick is implausible, a fact that only underscores how little most Americans know about Alaskan politics and how little the McCain campaign cared to investigate the governor’s own mythology before selecting her. All local and state politics have a ring of provincialism about them, and Sarah Palin has done nothing to break the mold. As mayor of Wasilla, she hired Steven Silver — a former Ted Stevens staffer and a federal lobbyist with ties to Jack Abramoff — to secure tens of millions in federal earmarks for her town.

When she ran for governor in 2006, she openly promised to favor her own borough, a commitment that she has effectively fulfilled in office by sparing her home region from the line-item vetoes that have disgruntled other areas of the state. During the last budget session, for example, Palin cut grants for more than three dozen youth sports facilities around Alaska. As it turns out, one of the budget items that survived was a $630,000 appropriation to the Wasilla Sports Complex, a facility whose construction and subsequent legal troubles Palin facilitated as the city’s mayor less than a decade ago. And throughout her first 18 months in office, the governor — a longtime advocate for moving the capital to south central Alaska — presided over the continuation of “capital creep,” a baleful process that has drawn government jobs away from Juneau and toward the Anchorage area.

In addition to her widely perceived regional biases, Palin has larded her administration with under-qualified friends from home, including a real estate agent and high school classmate whose professed love for cows helped land her a position as head of the state’s agriculture division. One supposes that if Sarah Palin were acquainted with someone with a background in Arabian horses, he or she would be heading the disaster planning section of the state’s Behavioral Health division.

The malignant inversion of this cronyism can be seen in the case of Walt Monegan, the public safety commissioner whose July firing has prompted a legislative investigation and has given Sarah Palin and John McCain to decry the entire interrogation as a partisan hit. After initially promising full cooperation with the investigation, Palin’s office has taken a Cheneyan turn in recent weeks — a comparison that is actually unfair to Dick Cheney, who has never promised “transparent and accountable government.”

Most surprising, however, has been the campaign’s straight-faced efforts to portray Palin as a rebellious fiscal conservative. Though she proposed reducing the operating budget by $150 million and lopped more than $200 million in spending via line-item veto, she has signed into law the two largest budgets in the state’s history. Even so, over the past two weeks, Palin’s self-aggrandizements as an “earmark reformer” have come under withering scrutiny. Everyone knows — though surprisingly few voters seem dismayed — that Palin has simply been lying about her position on the notorious Gravina Island Bridge to Nowhere, a project that the state of Alaska abandoned only when it became clear that federal money would not be forthcoming to pay for it.

Meantime, an even more expensive bridge project in the Anchorage region has been placed under review by the state for the same reasons. If Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens had been able to secure the federal dollars that Gov. Sarah Palin hoped they could, a bridge even larger and twice as expensive as the Bridge to Nowhere would be under construction across Knik Arm, securing easier access to Anchorage from the Matanuska-Susitna Valley.

In a broader sense, the McCain campaign’s focus on Palin as an opponent of federal earmarks would be strange and irrelevant even if it were true. Aside from requesting earmark submissions (or not) from their congressional delegations, state governors have minimal influence on the federal budgeting process. State and local officials are, of course, perfectly welcome to reject federal dollars — and some have — but the taboo against passing up free money remains the norm.

Were Sarah Palin a genuine earmark maverick, she would be actively supporting the Democratic opponents of Don Young and Ted Stevens, who will otherwise be riding their governor’s coattails back to the trough in January. More significantly, though, it deserves mention that the McCain-Palin campaign has sought to reinvent itself as the ticket of change by focusing on a legislative practice that consumes no more than 1 percent to 2 percent of federal outlays and less than $30 billion per year — roughly the cost of seven weeks of war in Iraq.

One would think that in a country that’s committed itself to a $3 trillion dollar mistake in the Middle East, or a country enduring a historic credit meltdown, or a country that’s witnessed an “economic expansion” that’s actually made people poorer, a campaign predicated on the evils of pork-barrel spending, would either be ignored or driven angrily into the sea. That would, of course, mean that we lived in a country where the word “maverick” was more than a cheap marketing trick designed to separate fools from their votes.

David Noon is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, the author of the great, sort-of-on-hiatus Axis of Evel Knievel blog, and a contributor to Lawyers, Guns and Money.