Ventura may round out the list by at number 10, but his is one of only two quotes that Yale librarian and editor Fred R. Shapiro picked from the first half of the year. And Ventura demonstrated his ticket on the vanguard of the zeitgeist is still good. His somewhat dated reference to the Sharon Tate murders, which likely meant little to many who heard it, was made more current by the recent arrest of film director Roman Polanksi (in Europe, on a separate conviction), who was Tate’s husband at the time of her death.

Then again, fans of Palin’s husband Todd resurrected the name of Tate’s true murderer at a “Sportsmen for Coleman: rally in Northern Minnesota during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Hundreds of Minnesotans braved Alaskan temperatures outside the Mall of America before dawn Monday, waiting for Sarah Palin to sign copies of her book, “Going Rogue.” They warmed up when talking about Palin with the Minnesota Independent.

As at Palin’s appearance with running mate U.S. Sen. John McCain in Blaine last year, a good part of the crowd were women who said they admire her. Several indicated they hoped to vote for her again.

One fan at the Mall of America brought photographs of eagles he took along state Highway 36 as a gift for Palin. He showed off a couple favorites, including one showing other birds sniping at an eagle — analagous to the media sniping at Palin, he said.

It’s the second time MnIndy has encountered Palin fans bearing gifts of photographs of the natural world. In October 2008, a man told MnIndy he had nature photos to give to Sarah Palin’s husband, Todd, who was on a campaign swing across northern Minnesota.

Thanks for the memories. Now please go away. Yes, we’re talking about you, Rudy Giuliani. And you, Wolf Blitzer. We no longer wish to be a swing state. Henceforth the residents of the state of Minnesota promise to vote reliably Democratic. Or Republican. It doesn’t much matter which — just as long as you people promise to stop showing up in our little slice of the frozen tundra seeking to feel our pain. But to memorialize the horrors visited upon us during the (still ongoing) campaign season, we offer — in honor of our favorite member of the Statewide General Election Canvassing Board — the G. Barry Anderson Awards.

Betty McCollum

Personally we thought the Andy Rooney date-rape skit had potential: It’s tough to recall now, but back in June it looked as if Al Franken’s Senate campaign was going to run completely off the rails. Despite two years of suffering through fish fries and potluck suppers in East Jesus Nowhere, his campaign was beset by controversies over improperly paid taxes and past writings. But it wasn’t the inevitable frothing of Minnesota Democrats Exposed that put the Franken campaign at risk of losing the DFL endorsement to a little-known challenger from the Trotskyite wing of the party. Rather it was the attacks from Franken’s fellow Democrats, led by Rep. Betty McCollum, that nearly doomed his candidacy. Her sanctimonious outrage over a (rather dull) Playboy article triggered a cattle call of Democratic politicians expressing faux outrage over Franken’s past writings. The comedian’s possibly pending triumph, however, raises hope for a 2014 Diablo Cody campaign.

T-Paw

He even cut off his hockey mullet, dammit: We really, really thought Gov. Tim Pawlenty was a shoo-in. When GOP muckety-muck Ken Mehlman hosts a Georgetown cocktail-and-mini-wiener gathering in your honor and it’s revealed that First Lady Mary Pawlenty refers to you as “45″ behind closed doors, it’s time to start measuring the curtains for Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret bunker, no? Pawlenty couldn’t have telegraphed his desire for the post any more strongly if he’d offered to take on eBay’s Meg Whitman in a steel-cage match. But when it became clear that Sen. John McCain’s appeal was largely limited to (some) former guests of the Hanoi Hilton and beer-distributorship scions, the drab choice of Pawlenty got scuttled for a moose hunter with a unique ability to arouse the Republican base with just three words: “Drill, baby, drill.” Does M-Paw now cry out “46?”

Xcel Energy Center

Let’s play hockey, please: Barack Obama decided to pee on the ice first. On the night that he finally slew the Pantsuited Beast once and for all, Obama showed up in St. Paul to stir the masses with his magic happy talk. A photo that would become one of the iconic images of the campaign was snapped in an Xcel elevator by Time photographer Callie Shell. It shows Obama, surrounded by his wife and advisers, beaming as if he’d just discovered indoor plumbing. Even better: nobody had time to organize a protest or arm the police with $50 million worth of the latest riot attire.

The Republican National Convention

What a gas: Did anyone other than St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, Gov. Pawlenty and a few other insecure, ambitious politicians have any desire to host this four-day excuse to beat on protesters, arrest reporters, scream epithets at cops and hire really high-priced hookers? Does anyone care about whether the world at large has any clue where St. Paul, Minn., is located on a map and whether people view it as a “first-class” city? Can we please go back to being a Cold Omaha that rich people visit only when their nasal passages can no longer reliably process coke? Nobody was impressed by forced exposure to Minnesota Nice Passive Aggression and the Land of 10,000 Cops in Riot Gear. Anderson Cooper will not be returning this winter to hang out at the St. Paul Curling Club. If “this is what democracy looks like,” as the protesters kept insisting, we don’t want any part of it. To quote Meir Kahane and Kelly Clarkson: “Never Again.”

Palin-tology

Let them eat moose: That damned Katie Couric. She ruined everything. Before Sarah Palin performed her excruciating media belly flop on the “CBS Evening News,” she brought the house down at the RNC in St. Paul. Winking her way through a speech notable for its withering contempt for the Democratic presidential nominee, she had pundits (particularly the male variety) swooning. But even after it became clear that she was about as prepared to take up residence at the White House as your typical TV sports reporter, the GOP faithful were positively loopy for Palin. When she returned to Minnesota for a rally in Blaine (along with the old guy at the top of the ticket) just two weeks later, the delirious Palin-ites nearly filled an airplane hanger. But after it became increasingly clear that McCain had no chance of winning Minnesota, we were stuck with the surrogates. And unfortunately it wasn’t Bristol Palin. Or Levi Johnston. Instead we got the first dude — a man (to put it kindly) not known for his rhetorical gifts. But Minnesotans apparently weren’t offended by this snub. Todd Palin’s whirlwind two-day tour of the state was the biggest thing to hit Grand Rapids since the annual Judy Garland Festival.

The Crazy McCain Lady

Now she would have been a bold VP pick: When McCain arrived in Lakeville for a town-hall meeting in October, we were concerned that Minnesota might not be living up to expectations as a swing state. After all, recent McCain-Palin rallies had featured party faithful so riled up by the red-meat rhetoric that they’d spewed death threats at Obama and gnawed the legs off of anti-war protesters (OK, not really the latter). Were nice Minnesotans psychologically equipped to live up to such demanding standards? But then 75-year-old Gail Quinnell wandered up to the stage and let everyone know that we’re just as loony as the rest of the country. The “Crazy McCain Lady” utilized her moment in the political spotlight to declare Obama an Arab, earning a rebuke from McCain and her own skit on “Saturday Night Live.”

Cullen Sheehan

In October Harper’s Magazine reported allegations that Norm Coleman’s close pal Nasser Kazeminy financed lavish shopping sprees for the senator at Nieman Marcus. The Republican’s campaign initially refused to answer any questions about the controversy, brushing off inquiries from both Harper’s and Pioneer Press reporter Dave Orrick. “There are very awful things that are said about people on the blogs,” Coleman revealed. But it was the senator’s campaign manager, Cullen Sheehan, who really transformed the story into Intertubes gold. At an excruciating state Capitol press conference, he repeatedly refused to disclose whether Coleman had received any free suits from Kazeminy. Instead Sheehan recited this mantra over and and over and over and over again: “The senator has reported every gift he’s ever received.” Of course Suit-gate was soon trumped by Donor-gate, after two lawsuits alleged that Kazeminy attempted to funnel $75,000 to the senator.

Neiman Marcus

We’re pretty sure that was Rod Blagojevich trying on a houndstooth jacket over in aisle three: What other clothing store in the country can claim a place at the center of two different scandals during this election season? Coleman may have been responsible for the first free Neiman Marcus advertisement, but it took Sarah Palin to truly put the retailer in the national spotlight. After she was tapped as the VP nominee, the GOP brass were apparently fearful she might show up at the convention in camo waders and a blaze orange overcoat. So they tapped local Republican pooh-bah Jeff Larson to lead the Alaska governor on a $75,000, donor-financed shopping spree at Neiman Marcus. No word on whether she ran into Norm (or Nasser) while at the Nicollet Mall store.

Sixth Congressional District Voters

They’re not anti-American, but they’re definitely pro-Scandinavia: After the best-dressed homophobe ever to represent Minnesota in Congress spread her magic to the whole wide world via “Hardball,” it looked as though her congressional career might be over after just one term. Money poured in from across the country to support the underdog campaign of Elwyn Tinklenberg, and polls showed the race deadlocked. But the nice, racist Scandinavian voters of the Sixth Congressional District had an election day surprise for the pollsters. They gave Bob Anderson — a candidate who wasn’t endorsed by any political party, wasn’t invited to most debates, and hardly campaigned — 10 percent of the vote, thus ensuring that Michele Bachmann would return to Washington. We can vividly imagine the thought process of Ole and Sven while hovering over the ballot: “Bachmann? Isn’t she the one who wants to start gulags for everyone with un-American thoughts? Tinklenberg? I do kinda have to use the bathroom now that I think about it. Anderson? Well, I betcha he’s an awful nice gentleman. I’m sure he’d do a wonderful job in Washington, just like Coya Knutson.”

The Recount

This is dedicated to Eric Magnuson’s goatee: The fifth pile. The third pile. Wrongly rejected absentee ballots. Allegedly double-counted ballots. The 133 missing ballots. G. Barry Anderson. Marc Elias. Tony Trimble. The Lizard People. Flying Spaghetti Monster. G. Barry Anderson. Minnesotans have been forced to learn an entirely new lexicon and nomenclature to fully follow the U.S. Senate Contest That Refuses to Die. And now it’s clear that no matter how much we repeat the totemic words “G. Barry Anderson” over and over and over again, the recount is destined to drag on well into 2009. Even if we don’t end up in the swamps of south Florida with hanging chads and Cruella Harris haunting our dreams, it’s still been a rather gruesome process to behold. But here’s a simple proposal to bring this mess to an end: a lutefisk-eating contest on the state Capitol steps. The Uptake will carry a live feed. G. Barry Anderson will officiate. Whichever candidate can cram the most lutefisk down his throat in 15 minutes goes to Washington. With one caveat: He can never come back.

The highlight, though, was this cryptic exchange about President-elect Barack Obama:

NYT: Are you going to send him a little note congratulating him?
Rove: I already have. I sent it to his office. I sent him a handwritten note with funny stamps on the outside.
NYT: What kind of funny stamps?
Rove: Stamps.

That called to mind one of the more cryptic MnIndy interviews of the campaign season. It took place last month, outside a Todd Palin rally in Moorhead, Minn. Prompted by the Minnesota Independent’s Paul Demko, Moorhead resident Greg Rhodes, a McCain-Palin supporter, revealed that he’d just handed Alaska’s “first dude” some photographs. What kind of photographs?  Watch a less-than-a-minute MnIndy video clip after the jump to find out.

One aide estimated that [Palin] spent “tens of thousands” more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband.

[R]eports from the Secret Service show[ed] a sharp and disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October, at the same time that many crowds at Palin rallies became more frenzied.

Palin launched her attack on Obama’s association with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber, before the campaign had finalized a plan to raise the issue.

At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, [McCain aides] Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. “I’ll be just a minute,” she said.

This is only an edited sample from the trove of treasures, to which Newsweek says it will add more items to its Web site in coming days. Palin’s shopping spree appears to be a particularly rich vein to mine.

But his most pointed words were about Obama’s ethnicity. Stating that he served with a “real African American” in the military, Leiseth said Obama is “an Arab who is a little tiny bit African American… His father was an Arab… He was a Muslim and he was also an Arabian, not an African from both sides. You can look it up and decide for yourself.”

Related: MnIndy video: Palin fans saw a subdued ‘first dude’ in Minnesota

Blip TV version

Todd Palin’s five-city, two-day campaign across northern Minnesota ended in the city of Moorhead in the northwestern part of the state, just across the Red River of the North from the bigger city of Fargo, N.D. There, Minnesota Independent reporter Paul Demko took in one last T-Pal stump speech at Scheel’s sporting goods store before interviewing people outside the store, some of whom had traveled two hours or more for the short, five-minute speech. Here are highlights, in a seven-minute video clip that touches on Abraham Lincoln, Saul Alinsky and Pythagoras.

Click To Play

Later, Obama came to the long table where Fanning and other members of a local First Presbyterian church were gathered. He held out his hand to her and asked, “How are you, ma’am?” but she declined to shake his hand.

Fanning asked Obama about a North American union, and Obama responded: “Well, you know, I am opposed to it if it were happening. But it doesn’t seem to be actually be happening. The truth of the matter is there is no plans. I’ve talked to a lot of people, including folks down in Texas. There’s no plan to create a common government between Mexico, U.S. and Canada. That’s just not … that’s just not happening. I know some people have been hearing rumors about it. But as far as I can tell, that’s just not something that’s happening. We would never give up our sovereignty in that way. Any other questions?”

In an interview, Fanning said, “I still think he’s a closet Muslim.”

I heard the socialist meme repeated many times last week while tracking Todd Palin across the state. But NBC’s First Read blog doesn’t believe the charge “will pass the smell test” beyond the GOP base.

I really had just one pressing question to ask the “first dude”: Does he think Alaska should secede from the United States of America? (Well, maybe two: Where did he intend to ride his snow machine upon taking up residence in Washington, D.C.?) Palin had, after all, been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party — which has at times advocated becoming an autonomous republic — up until 2002. In fact it wasn’t until after his wife was picked as the party’s VP nominee that he actually registered as a Republican.

But actually asking Palin that question — or any question for that matter — looked like a fairly formidable task. Suffice it to say that the highly orchestrated five-stop caravan through Minnesota was not set up to allow him to pontificate on policy matters and potentially become an embarrassing liability for John McCain’s presidential campaign. Rather Palin’s whistlestop tour was designed to fire up a very targeted niche of the GOP base, namely hunters and snowmobilers.

Arriving at the Arctic Cat factory in Thief River Falls shortly before the Iron Dog champ’s scheduled 9:30 appearance, there were a few hundred people lined up waiting for the show. A handful of local reporters were cordoned off at the front of the room so that they could get unobstructed footage of Palin shaking hands and signing autographs for the GOP faithful.

I attempted to enter this exclusive realm, but was rebuffed by a Secret Service agent who explained that it was up to the McCain campaign who was granted access. I soon was joined by the editor of the Warroad Pioneer, who was also seeking entry to the press area. Eventually Tom Steward, director of communications for McCain’s Minnesota campaign, came over to us. The reporter from Warroad was let through. I was not.

“I don’t think you should be up there,” Steward told me. “Why not?” I queried. “I think you know,” he replied. He then said that it was up to Arctic Cat to decide which reporters were permitted into the inner realm (clearly not true) and said he’d check with the company and get back to me.

But shortly thereafter Palin (accompanied by racing partner Scott Davis) took to the podium and it became clear that Steward had no intention of returning. I got the impression that he didn’t particularly appreciate my efforts to cover the T-Pal Caravan.

In brief remarks to the crowd, Palin emphasized their shared interest in hunting, snowmobiling and other outdoors activities. “If Sarah Palin and John McCain get elected you’ll have advocates in the White House for the stuff that you love to do, that I love to do, that she loves to do,” he said. Palin then made a half-hearted effort at rallying the base for the looming election. “I encourage your support and tell people to get involved,” he told the crowd. “It’s easy to throw stones, but if you go out and vote at least you’ll have a say in something.”

Palin then began signing autographs and shaking hands with the long line of well-wishers. After shooting video footage of the meet-and-greet for a few minutes, I went out to the front of the factory to interview people as they exited the event.

Kathy Marvin had driven down from Warroad, on the Canadian border, to witness the occasion. “I was very excited when John McCain chose her as his running mate,” Marvin said of Sarah Palin. “She is very much like we are here in Minnesota, and even Todd Palin mentioned that today.”

Marvin acknowledged that Palin would have a steep learning curve if she suddenly found herself in the role of president, but believes she would be a quick study. “She’d have to learn a lot, but I think she’s very capable of becoming a president,” she said. “I think she has the strength, she has the intelligence. She does not fit the ‘elitist’ view, which I think is good.”

Allen DuPont also sees his own life reflected in the Palin family. “He’s one of us,” he said of Todd, “a down-to-earth human being.” DuPont’s supporting the GOP ticket “because I don’t want to go socialist.” The Red Lake Falls resident was less forthcoming regarding his thoughts on Obama. “We’re on camera? Not gonna say,” he laughed. “Oh, I think he’s a bright man, but he’s not for me.”

No sleep ’til Moorhead

Then it was off to the final destination, 110 miles to the southwest, on the T-Pal Caravan: Scheel’s Sporting Goods in Moorhead. Concentrating on not getting lost as I took off from Thief River Falls, I forgot to stop and purchase gas. Roughly 30 minutes into the drive, I finally noticed that the gas tank needle was sitting solidly on empty.

This was no way to end the T-Pal Caravan: stranded on the side of Highway 32 with nothing for sustenance but three remaining Cliff bars, one Fiber One chewy bar, six bottles of water and a quarter-full box of J.P. Chenet Syrah-Cabernet wine. Fortunately this scenario did not play out. I eased the speedometer down to 55 mph and within 10 minutes had pulled up to a gas station ($2.59 a gallon!) in Red Lake Falls.

By the time I arrived at Scheel’s Sporting Goods in downtown Moorhead, the place was packed with McCain-Palin supporters. The p.a. was playing a revamped version of the Hank Williams Jr.’s classic “Family Tradition.” Now awkwardly re-dubbed “McCain-Palin Tradition,” the tribute to drinking and drugging is a strange choice to be transformed into a GOP anthem. A local conservative talk radio host, Scott Hennen, further revved up the crowd with some red meat. “Barack Obama wants to take your guns,” he declared to jeers. “This guy’s got the most radical anti-gun record.” This was easily the most boisterous crowd since Duluth.

Palin hit the podium shortly after 2 p.m. Once again stuck in the back of the room, unable to see a thing, I climbed on a shelf and attempted to shoot some video of his stump speech. By leaning precariously to my left I managed to get a few seconds of footage that included Palin’s head. His remarks were once again brief (about six minutes), but he did offer up some rare criticism of the Democratic ticket. “I know that John and Sarah will get government back into the people’s hands,” he said to cheers. “They’re the only reformers that can point to their records.”

As people lined up to shake Palin’s hand and get autographs, I retreated outside to interview folks as they departed. Joined by MnIndy colleague Chris Steller, we videotaped a half-dozen or so interviews that will be posted on the site in the coming days.

But while Chris filmed a pair of verbally dueling McCain and Obama backers, I interviewed Robert Leiseth. He was at the rally with three of his grandchildren and is a strong McCain backer. “The other candidate is steering us into socialism,” he said, a sentiment that I’d heard repeatedly in the last 24 hours.

So he’s not a fan of Obama? “I have no respect for anybody who just plays the game and goes out and gets a free lunch,” he said. “How do you get to Harvard? Or Yale? Or any of those places where he went to school? And had no parents and nobody supporting him? Who supported him through college?”

I thought at first that Leiseth was criticizing affirmative action, but it turned out that he held a more conspiratorial view regarding Obama’s college years. “Somebody paid his way,” he said. “And why don’t he admit who helped him through college? I think that’s cheap. If I were the one that paid his way and he refused to admit that I paid his way, hey, that’s not much of a thank you.”

When asked about the role of race in the presidential campaign, Leiseth stated that he didn’t care about skin color and that his best friend when he served in the military was black. “And he was a real African-American,” Leiseth said. “Obama is an Arab, who’s a little tiny bit of African-American.”

When I questioned this assertion, pointing out that even McCain had declared it false, he was unswayed. “You can go anywhere and you can follow his lineage,” Leiseth said. “His father was an Arab. … You can look it up and decide for yourself.”

When I stepped back inside the sporting goods store to see if there might be one last opportunity to ask Palin a question, he’d already left the building. So apparently it was time to head back to St. Paul. I drove the final 240-mile leg at 80 mph, no longer enamored of Sean Hannity’s incessant yapping about Joe the Plumber and driven loopy by Minnesota Public Radio’s pledge drive. The only consolation was old-time country on the AM dial. Johnny Paycheck singing “Take this Job and Shove it” never sounded so good.

I arrived home roughly 34 hours after departing, 778 miles logged on the rental car. I’d failed in my mission. Some other more intrepid reporter will have to ask the first dude if he thinks Alaska should secede from the union (and where he intends to drive his snow machine in Washington).

Earlier in “Todd and Me”:

Todd (Palin) and me: Day one on the campaign trail with the ‘first dude‘
‘First dude’ and absent Sarah upstage Norm at Duluth Sportsmen for Coleman rally
Todd (Palin) and me: Tracking the ‘first dude’ through the wilds of Minnesota

Todd Palin pressing the flesh last night in Grand Rapids, Minnesota (photo: Paul Demko)

Last week, the release of the Branchflower Report added another ring to the Palin Family Circus. The investigation, commissioned in August by a bipartisan legislative council, concluded that while the Alaskan governor and Republican vice presidential candidate acted within the scope of her constitutional authority by firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan earlier this summer, she had violated the state’s ethics statutes by allowing state personnel and state resources to be used to settle a private grudge against Mike Wooten, a trooper who’d formerly been married to Sarah Palin’s sister.

The report devoted particular attention to the governor’s husband, Todd Palin, who repeatedly urged Monegan and other state officials to revisit a closed investigation into Wooten’s conduct. Given the acute national interest in the story, the results of the “Troopergate” probe obviously touched on, and further undermined, Sarah Palin’s image as a maverick reformer. But they also introduced non-Alaskans to questions that have long been raised about the so-called “First Dude” and the unusual role he’s played in his wife’s administration.

Shortly after the report’s release, as the governor’s supporters peddled the dubious claim that it had somehow vindicated Sarah Palin, McCain campaign spokesperson Taylor Griffin addressed the report’s strong criticism of Todd Palin’s efforts to have Wooten removed from his job. With a straight face, Griffin argued that Palin’s involvement in his wife’s work was, broadly speaking, comparable to Eleanor Roosevelt’s commitment to civil rights or Hillary Clinton’s work on health care reform. (There was no word on Palin’s resemblance to Mamie Eisenhower, who drew national praise in the mid-1950s for her “million dollar fudge” recipe.)

But Alaskan political observers have been pointing out for some time that no one can quite figure out what Todd Palin’s precise duties include. As Mike Madden wrote in a Salon profile last month, Todd Palin “lurks around the capitol if he doesn’t have anything better to do, which, since he works seasonal jobs in oil and fishing, is fairly often.” Business owner and blogger Andrew Halcro, who was the first to allege an unseemly motivation for Monegan’s firing, has been less charitable, describing Todd Palin as a “shadow governor.”

Though he is not officially a member of the executive branch, Palin is renowned for attending meetings with the governor and legislators or other public officials, many of whom have described his (almost totally silent) presence as odd or even discomfiting. Todd Palin, for example, has been copied on e-mails related to policy and personnel matters, and he’s taken numerous trips — with and without his wife — as a representative of the state.

By his own account, Palin regards none of this as inappropriate. In his deposition with the legislative investigators, Palin insisted that he and his wife were being subjected to “double standards,” since few questions had ever been raised about the involvement of spouses in previous administrations. Though Palin’s objection bore a kernel of truth, he had nevertheless overlooked the fact that gubernatorial spouses traditionally did not involve themselves directly in budgetary decisions, nor did they lobby legislators — as Palin did — regarding tax policies.

Nor, it might be noted, did they devote countless hours lobbying public officials to override personnel decisions of which they or their spouses disapproved. During the first 18 months of his wife’s administration, Todd Palin initiated “hundreds” of conversations with state officials over what he described as the “violent” and “dangerous” behavior of Mike Wooten, a “ticking time bomb.” Though Wooten had been suspended briefly in 2006 for (among other things) using his taser on his stepson and drinking a beer in his car while on duty, Todd Palin and his wife remained adamant that only Wooten’s removal from the force would be sufficient. In addition to pestering Monegan about the original investigation, the First Dude periodically introduced new “evidence” of Wooten’s serial perfidy: a jaunt on a snow machine that seemed to contradict a worker’s compensation claim Wooten had filed, or rides Wooten had given his kids to school in his trooper’s vehicle.

When those specific accusations failed to hold any weight — Wooten had received permission from his doctor and his supervisor, respectively – Palin resorted to nourishing implausible conspiracy theories worthy of second-rate police dramas. As he revealed in his deposition, he told one Palin aide that he worried that Wooten might “possibly pull over one of my kids to frame them, like throwing a bag of dope in the back seat just to frame a Palin.” Commenting on the report the night of its release, Washington Monthly blogger Hilzoy summed up Todd Palin’s behavior best.

“It’s pretty strange,” she wrote.

Equally strange — though considerably less well-documented — are Todd Palin’s associations with the Alaskan Independence Party, a second-tier state political organization of which he was a registered member from 1995 through 2002. Almost nothing is known about the depth of Palin’s interest in or affection for the party’s agenda, although as Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert recently discovered, the Palins have enjoyed the support of — the technical phrase, I believe, is “palled around with” — AIP members in one respect or another since their political salad days in Wasilla.

It’s quite probable that more has been written about the Alaskan Independence Party in the past seven weeks than in the previous four decades of the group’s existence. In brief, the AIP are essentially hard core, right-wing libertarians whose animating principle is the belief that our statehood vote in 1958 was illegitimate because — contrary to Article 73 of the UN Charter — the “non-self-governing territory” of Alaska was not properly offered the option of independence prior to its admission as a state. (The AIP’s ponderous legal argument can be read in .pdf form here.)

The most hardcore AIP members genuinely want Alaska to be a separate nation; others would prefer to become a commonwealth; still others would seek to meld Alaska’s fortunes with Canadian separatists living in the western territories and provinces, where the bridle of colonialism chafes the hide in similar ways. The broader goals of the AIP have brought the party from time to time into the embrace of Southern neo-confederate organizations as well as the black helicopter caucus in the Pacific Northwest’s militia movement. In this year’s presidential election, the AIP has endorsed the nomination of Chuck Baldwin, Constitutional Party member and gurgling madman best known for thwarting Alan Keyes’ latest bid for the presidency.

At bottom, though, it’s difficult to assess the significance of the Todd Palin-AIP connection. The Palins’ link to the group is perhaps less important than their generally odd provincialism and their staggering lack of knowledge about and experience with national and global issues. Because of its geographic isolation, its one-dimensional economy, and a variety of other factors, Alaska is not a state that’s conducive to the development of a coherent sense of national identity. Alaskans — whether they belong to the AIP or not — generally regard themselves as “exceptional” compared to the rest of the country, and there’s a strong tendency to regard Alaskan interests as unique and separate. The Alaskan Independence Party is merely one manifestation of a much broader phenomenon.

The prominence of Todd Palin in his wife’s administration clearly makes these issues more relevant than they ordinarily would be. As John McCain would put it, his role tells the public something about the “judgment” of the vice presidential nominee. And now that Todd Palin is apparently “part of the [Republican] ticket,” the quality of his own judgment is worth pondering.