Clearly convicted felon Ted Stevens is more than just a guy from Sarah Palin’s political neighborhood. What is the full extent of their relationship?

It goes back at least six years, with the two pairing up for a whirlwind, two-week campaign to get Frank Murkowski elected governor…

Anchorage Daily News
October 20, 2002 Sunday

…[Frank] Murkowski has called in the Republicans’ old guard and a new star to give his campaign a lift in the final weeks.

U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens and Sarah Palin, the Wasilla mayor and former Republican lieutenant governor candidate, will begin two weeks of campaigning for Murkowski this weekend.

The pair’s first stop in the Southcentral area is scheduled for Monday at Anchorage’s annual City of Lights ceremony downtown. Tuesday they will be in Palmer and Girdwood. Wednesday they are scheduled to travel to Homer and Cordova. Thursday they will travel to Fairbanks and then to Kodiak.

Palin, who is at the end of her final term as Wasilla’s mayor, narrowly lost the Republican primary race for lieutenant governor to Loren Leman on Aug. 27….

This Ted Stevens fiasco is baggage of the McCain camp’s own choosing. Before they added Sarah Palin to the ticket, Alaska was anything but Main Street America. Under the old rules, Steven’s corruption scandal could well have blown over as a parochial scandal of the great, oily North.

But since picking Palin, McCain & Co. have staked out Alaska as the living, beating heart of American authenticity. And so, today, Ted Steven’s felonious betrayal of the public trust is going to allow Democrats to campaign like it’s 2006 — against the Republican “culture of corruption” that proved so electorally toxic to the GOP two years ago.

Let’s remember that the McCain camp knew in late July that Stevens was under indictment and demanding a speedy trial that would put Alaska’s frontier ethics front-and-center in the days before the election.

And yet, thanks to a vetting free Veepstakes, in August the campaign chose Palin, who not only owes her governorship to Stevens’ throaty endorsement, but as recently as 2005 served as the director of “Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service” 527 group.

As usual, the intrepid Anchorage Daily News offers the go-to coverage of the Stevens/Palin entanglements. This adn.com video offers a glimpse of their buddy-buddy relationship:

At minute 1:13 you can see the last-minute 2006 campaign commercial in which Stevens passes the baton to Palin’s “new generation” of leadership, asking his fellow Alaskans to “help Sarah become governor, which we all want to see.”

Half way through, we see Palin and Stevens joshing around together at a press conference from this past July — post the FBI raid of Stevens’ home, but just prior to his indictment. Stevens chummily calls it “The Sarah and Ted Show.”

Minute 3:39

Stevens: Hell, I don’t know if you know it but when Frank Murkowski was first elected this lady and I … traveled around the state for two weeks. We’ve known each other a long time. Worked together a long time.

Minute 4:12

Palin: I have great respect for the senator…. His voice, his experience, his passion needs to be heard across America. So that Alaska can contribute more. So that we can be producers. So that we can help lead the rest of the U.S. I, again, have great respect for him. There’s a big difference between reality and perception regarding our relationship.

So here’s my question: If Sarah Palin was such an all-American maverick, what was she doing palling around with a suspected felon like Ted Stevens?

The Associated Press: Ted Stevens found guilty.

Jack Abramoff – #27593-112

Bob Ney – #28882-016

Duke Cunningham – #94405-198

David Safavian – #28247-016

Steven Griles doesn’t look like he has a number yet, but then he was only convicted last week.

To make sense of the burgeoning U.S. Attorneys scandal — in which the Department of Justice under the direction of Alberto Gonzales fired eight U.S. Attorneys for what appear to be purely political reasons — National Affairs Daily interviewed former U.S. Attorney Bob Barr, a Reagan appointee who went on to serve as a member of the House from 1995 to 2003. Barr said the conduct of the attorney general had undermined the rule of law and that Gonzales should step down.

Rolling Stone: Should Attorney General Gonzales be forced out?

Bob Barr: He should resign. This is the last straw in a whole series of — what was the name of the Lemony Snicket movie? — “Unfortunate Events” that have raised serious questions about the lack of leadership at the Department of Justice and there being too-cozy a relationship between an attorney general and the president.

RS: From what you’ve seen has there been criminal wrongdoing?

Barr: I think it’s highly improper. Not unlawful. A president can remove a U.S. Attorney for whatever reason. They serve at the pleasure of the president. But what’s happening here it’s extremely troubling because it errodes the public’s confidence in the integrity and impartiality of our federal justice system — which is perhaps the most important component of upholding the rule of law. People have to have confidence in that system that it is fair and impartial. The public has a right to know if U.S. Attorneys are in fact being fired for partisan, political reasons.

RS: Did you experience political pressures as a U.S. Attorney?

Barr: I was facing a lot of pressure when I was prosecuting a sitting member of Congress in the Atlanta area. But the Department of Justice under both Ed Meese and then Dick Thornburg made it very clear to people who were calling for my scalp that as long as the U.S. attorney is proceeding with a legitimate prosecution, we’re not going to stop it, or speed it up, or slow it down depending on political considerations or political pressures.

RS: What do you make of this talking point that “Clinton did this too.”

Barr: I and a number of others were critical of president Clinton when he first came into office and almost immediately removed all U.S. Attorneys. But that’s not the same thing as what’s happening now.

We’re seeing a president in his second term go after U.S. attorneys of his own party for reasons that are clearly political: not moving fast enough against targets on the other side of the aisle, succumbing to pressure from Senators for example. That is very, very corrosive, both to morale for U.S. Attorneys as well as in terms of reducing the confidence that the public has that the system is fair and impartial and non-partisan.

“Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that’s exactly what our government did.”

–Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), grilling former Iraq viceroy J. Paul Bremer about the unaccountable disbursement of $12 billion in cold hard cash, some of which is suspected of helping fund the insurgency. Watch checks and balances in action here.

It’s hardly just begun, but let’s review for a second the rather stunning impact of the Democratic congressional takeover. Not all of these advances have been won through legislation, but it’s safe to say none of them would have happened without the ballance provided by a Democratic House and Senate.

• Rumsfeld’s gone.
• Bush has backtracked on his warantless domestic spying, placing the extra-legal NSA program under the watchful eye of the FISA courts.
• You can now apply to be removed from the government’s No-Fly list.
• Chuck Hagel is openly clashing with Condi Rice on the war, in Senate hearings demanded by Democrats.
• Legislation to address the climate crisis is on the docket.
• The House has increased the Minimum Wage, decreased costs of Rx drugs bought by the government, sliced the interest on student loans, beefed up air-cargo security, implemented new ethics rules, and is about to revoke corporate welfare to the oil companies.

Not bad for three months after election day.

What else am I overlooking?

CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) kicked the media’s butt on the Mark Foley scandal, the Curt Weldon story, and now becomes the first to publish a snapshot of Bush and the man he never met, corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff:

Bush and Abramoff have met.