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A bipartisan Alaska legislative panel has found that Sarah Palin Abuses her authority as governor in firing the state’s public safety commissioner. The report finds that she violated the public trust. We can now close the book on the Sarah Palin gamble. Palin now has no credibility, and has likely destroyed her own ticket.

The most damning quote from the report is,”Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda … to get Trooper Michael Wooten fired.”

I think it was clear that something was up with this report, after it took so long to release. If it didn’t contain anything bad for Palin you can believe that the McCain campaign would have been rushing to get it out into the news cycle today, but as the evening went on, the release of the report started to look more like a Friday night news dump. To say this news is devastating, is an understatement. It could be the final nail in the coffin for the McCain campaign.

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The question is what does McCain do now? She has been a drag on the ticket for a month, and before this report was released some conservatives were calling for her removal. It is likely that the McCain campaign is going to call this investigation partisan, and try to move on, but if McCain wants to, this would be the perfect time to dump Palin. She is now toxic, and in no position to question the honesty and ethics of Barack Obama.

Sarah Palin has already demonstrated that she can’t be trusted to do news interviews alone. She survived the vice presidential debate with charm and talking points. Her lack of knowledge is embarrassing. Because of this, her popularity has plummeted to the point where she now has a negative approval rating, and she is a national joke. With the release of this report, she is such a huge liability to the campaign that it is difficult to see why they would keep her around.

McCain knew about this investigation before he chose her, so why did he do it? This development calls into question McCain’s judgment. Remember, that the committee that ruled that Sarah Palin violated an ethics law consisted of 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats. Maybe McCain thought that this little investigation would go away, but instead it has doomed his campaign. McCain can now no longer question Obama’s honesty when his running mate lied to the people of Alaska. The GOP will try to dismiss this, but in the end, the McCain campaign is now on the defensive, and trying to play catch up, with an ethically challenged running mate, and no issues to run on.

Read the Full Report in PDF