The McCain campaign has now responded to the report of the investigation into Troopergate. The scandal arose from Sarah Palin’s firing of Walt Monegan, her state’s public safety commissioner, and a question of whether that move was related to Monegan’s refusal to fire State Trooper Mike Wooten, Palin’s former brother-in-law.

Naturally, the McCain camp is not exactly taking the more negative conclusions of the report lying down.

Spokeswoman Meg Stapleton released this statement:

Today’s report shows that the Governor acted within her proper and lawful authority in the reassignment of Walt Monegan. The report also illustrates what we’ve known all along: this was a partisan led inquiry run by Obama supporters and the Palins were completely justified in their concern regarding Trooper Wooten given his violent and rogue behavior. Lacking evidence to support the original Monegan allegation, the Legislative Council seriously overreached, making a tortured argument to find fault without basis in law or fact. The Governor is looking forward to cooperating with the Personnel Board and continuing her conversation with the American people regarding the important issues facing the country.

Palin herself addressed the matter in a conversation with reporters. Asked if she abused her power — the report concludes that she did — she responded simply, “No,” then said, “And if you read the report, you’ll see that there was nothing unlawful or unethical about replacing a cabinet member. You got to read the report, sir.”

She is right that the report also concludes she acted within her power in firing the commissioner. However, the report also seriously damages one of her key claims about what happened — namely, that she and other members of her family feared Wooten. Lead investigator Steven Branchflower, a former prosecutor, writes:

Governor Palin has stated publically that she and her family feared Trooper Wooten. Yet the evidence presented has been inconsistent with such claims of fear… I conclude that such claims of fear were not bona fide and were offered to provide cover for the Palin’s real motivation: to get Trooper Wooten fired for personal family related reasons.

Steven Branchflower, the prosecutor who led the investigation into Sarah Palin’s firing of Alaska’s public safety commissioner, concludes in his final report that she abused her power. However, another of Branchflower’s findings makes the report something less than a complete disaster for Palin.

The investigation stemmed from Palin’s firing of Walt Monegan, allegedly at least in part because he refused to fire Michael Wooten, a state trooper who also happens to be Palin’s former brother-in-law.

Branchflower includes a list of findings in the report. The first reads:

Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act. Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) provides

“The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.”

The second reads:

I find that, although Walt Monegan’s refusal to fire Trooper Michael Wooten was not the sole reason he was fired by Governor Sarah Palin, it was likely a contributing factor to his termination as Commissioner of Public Safety. In spite of that, Governor Palin’s firing of Commissioner Monegan was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and statutory authority to hire and fire executive branch department heads.

After hours of deliberations, on Friday Alaska’s legislative council voted 12-0 to release the report of the investigation into Sarah Palin’s firing of the state’s public safety commissioner.

The full 263-page report can be downloaded in PDF form here.

Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to have Sarah Palin drop the puck at a Philadelphia Flyers game? (Of course, there’s also the question of why she’s spending so much time in Philadelphia, but that’s an issue for another day.)

Philadelphia sports fans are legendary, and not in a good way. They booed — and threw snowballs at — Santa Claus, for God’s sake. Santa Claus. They celebrated when Dallas Cowboys star Michael Irvin was injured. Their own mascot couldn’t escape fans’ wrath when he dropped a foul ball recently.

So it seemed sort of inevitable that something would happen to make this photo op less than perfect. And now one Web site, PuckYouPalin.com, has stepped in to try to make sure that happens — they’re encouraging fans to chant the name of the site when she gets on the ice.

She just better hope fans don’t remember that she almost jogged around their city recently while wearing New York Rangers gear.

One might expect Republicans to have a little more shame about bringing up Bill Ayers to tarnish Barack Obama, in light of the fact that John McCain himself has hardly let a public appearance go by without effusive praise for a man who lately called American soldiers “thugs.”

Of course, it helps McCain’s case considerably that the person who said this was an American soldier himself. And not just any American soldier, but Gen. David Petraeus, who made the crack Wednesday in a speech he gave to the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Petraeus, naturally, was sort of joking, and he was talking about the Revolutionary War. But the point is still significant. The headline after Petraeus’ talk was that, intentionally or not, he seemed to echo Obama on the necessity of negotiating with hostile nations.

“You have to talk to the enemy,” the general said, and pointed out that the British “sat down with thugs throughout their history, including us, I suspect.” While the notion that one country’s thug is another’s revolutionary isn’t exactly new, it’s difficult to imagine who else could say such a thing to the Heritage crowd and avoid being crucified for cowardice and moral relativism. If an associate of Obama had said the “thugs” line, I imagine we’d be hearing about it from Sarah Palin right about now.

If you live in Rensselaer County, N.Y., and you’re looking to mark your absentee ballot for Barack Obama, you may be out of luck, at least for now.

Officials mailed out approximately 300 absentee ballots that list not Obama but “Barack Osama,” the Albany Times Union reports. The paper also says that officials on both sides say it was just a mistake.

“No question this is an honest mistake innocently done,” Edward McDonough, the Democratic commissioner, told the paper. “We catch almost everything.”

Thus far, three voters have reportedly called in to report the error — new ballots are being mailed to them.

Joining the steady drumbeat of conservative pundits giving up on John McCain today is Christopher Buckley. Unlike, say, David Brooks or Charles Krauthammer, Buckley doesn’t merely lament the nasty turn McCain’s campaign has taken, or predict a Republican defeat. Instead, he goes so far as actually promising to vote for Barack Obama and offering praise for the Democrat.

To demonstrate the magnitude of this heresy, a bit of background: The son of modern conservatism’s patron saint, the late William F. Buckley, Christopher remains a columnist for the National Review, his father’s magazine. He announced his endorsement in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast, however. Buckley wrote:

Having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him — I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric — the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Meanwhile, at the Corner, one of the National Review’s blogs, Andy McCarthy speculates on whether Obama’s sympathies are more Maoist or Stalinist. The American right truly is a many-splendored thing.

With the report on “Troopergate” — Sarah Palin’s firing of Alaska’s public safety commissioner — now complete, the McCain-Palin campaign will be eager to make the probe look like a partisan performance put on by supporters of Barack Obama. With the release of a new Web site, PalinTruthFiles.com, last week, the campaign all but announced its decision to stick with the twofold approach to the scandal that it has employed thus far: claiming that the investigation is an attempt by Obama proxies to influence the court of public opinion while, at the same time, sending its own proxies to various courts of law.

The site’s most prominent feature is a video titled “Big Top” that paints the scandal as a conspiracy theory dreamed up in the fever swamp of the blogosphere. The investigation, the video concludes, “is nothing more than a three-ring circus emceed by Obama partisans.”

Configured to look like the sort of notebook that might belong to a private eye or a roving member of the mainstream media, the site includes a page documenting the “Web of Connections” that attempts to portray the affair as partisan from its very beginnings. A blue line connects a large picture of Obama and a picture of Alaska state trooper Mike Wooten, Palin’s former brother-in-law and the man who puts the trooper in “Troopergate.” (Palin allegedly fired former public safety commissioner Walt Monegan when he wouldn’t do the same to Wooten.)

Accompanying text explains that the “Obama campaign has contacted the union representing Trooper Wooten.” True enough, but then again, not really — the call had nothing to do with Wooten. It was made regarding a potential endorsement.

But some big punches are saved for Kim Elton, who chairs Alaska’s Joint Legislative Council, which voted to authorize the investigation, and Hollis French, the project director of the inquiry.

The video accuses French of “colluding on the issuing of subpoenas” with Steven Branchflower, the former prosecutor who’s leading the investigation (and is, naturally, also targeted by the Web site). Not so much. In fact, French said last month that he decided not to subpoena Palin’s former chief of staff even though Branchflower wanted to question him.

Amid these attempts to attack the legitimacy of the investigation by portraying it as a partisan witch hunt, it’s important to remember one thing: At the time the inquiry was launched, Palin herself gave the council her blessing, saying, “Hold me accountable.”

Alaska legislators now have the report, and are expected to vote Friday on whether to release it. In the meantime, enjoy the pageantry. It may not be the best show on earth, but it’s still pretty good entertainment.

God, I love Betty White. Via Ben Smith, here’s a video of her recent appearance on the “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson,” where she cracked wise about the election.

Clearly, Cloris Leachman needs to step up her game. 

Remember when John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign was derailed by fallacious rumors that he had fathered a black child? You might think that would have caused McCain to avoid smear attacks.

Over the past few days, though, whether referencing Barack Obama’s association with Bill Ayers or using Obama’s middle name of “Hussein,” McCain, Sarah Palin and their campaign surrogates have been steadily turning to more and more vicious personal attacks against Obama.

Thursday came yet another example of this. While on conservative comedian Dennis Miller’s radio show, McCain campaign co-chairman and former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating brought up Obama’s admitted former drug use. Calling Obama’s record “very extreme,” Keating went on to say that Obama “ought to admit, ‘You know, I’ve got to be honest with you. I was a guy of the street. I was way to the left. I used cocaine. I voted liberally, but I’m back at the center …’ But he hasn’t done that.”

Keating’s claim that Obama has not been forthright about his drug use is absurd. The reason we know about it in the first place is because he admitted to it in his memoir “Dreams From My Father.”

To his credit, Miller pointed this out to Keating, saying, “Wait, I’ve got to jump in, Frank. He has copped to the blow use, right? I mean, he did so in his own book; he said he did blow.”

Keating replied, “Oh, yes, he did.”

Reached for comment by CNN about Keating’s comments, a McCain campaign aide said, ”We didn’t ask him to do it. He didn’t clear it with us, but obviously he’s read Senator Obama’s books.”