Please nominate this woman in 2012

Oh, Sarah Palin. Don't ever change. I don't know what I would do without your constant stream of Grade A blogging material.

The kerfuffle regarding her grandson, her daughter and her daughter's erstwhile fiance is unseemly, and not the kind of thing that merits much attention. On the other hand, her choice for the attorney general for her state is fair game.

The charming Wayne Anthony Ross was, perhaps, the wrong choice. I first became aware of him thanks to Andrew Sullivan, and there's a lot of basis for concern. Some of the allegations against him (such as his purported scoffing about marital rape) are a little too close to hearsay to keelhaul his nomination on their own. Other issues, on the other hand, deserve our scrutiny:

But as pro-Palin forces attempted to push back against Ross’s critics, dozens of op-eds Ross authored during the 1980s and 1990s surfaced as key exhibits in the case against his confirmation. Among them is a 1993 piece entitled, “KKK ‘art’ project gets ‘A’ for courage,” in which Ross defended a local college student who had offended an African-American classmate by creating a statue of a Klansman with a cross in one hand and a flag in the other. “It might have been fun to see [the African-American student] try to remove the display,” Ross wrote. “Then she could have been arrested and her future as a student of the university could have been resolved through the university disciplinary proceedings.”

[snip]

A glance at Ross’s published archive shows he never limited his resentment to minorities. He taunted environmentalists (“It is time we quit crying over the oil spill” was the title of an editorial he wrote in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster); he denounced homosexuals as “degenerates” during a 1993 legal fight over a local gay-rights ordinance; and announced that his final wish before dying was to overturn Roe v. Wade. While rising through the ranks of the NRA’s national leadership in the 1980s, Ross published a piece in the mercenary magazine Soldier of Fortune, defending the right to form antigovernment militias.

The KKK thing is appalling. That he doesn't like gays, and wants to overturn Roe is (considering who nominated him) no huge surprise. But what the holy hell is Sarah Palin thinking by nominating as the chief law enforcement officer of her state a man that publishes a defense of anti-government militias in Soldier of Fortune magazine?

Hooray for sanity:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin suffered a defeat in her own legislature today, as her nominee for state attorney general went down in 35-23 vote of the state legislature.

Wayne Anthony Ross quickly lost support after a stream of reports surfaced regarding his past comments about gays and women.

I can hardly wait to see what Gov. Palin has in store for us next!