Holy Republican establishment, Batman, RINOs try to rig Alaska for the Independent Candidate

I didn't think that Alaska really had a RINO establishment until I saw the following.  Read the whole ding dang dong thing.  RINO thuggery:  Reason 77 that we need a Tea Party.  H/T James Ta

They're Corrupt Bastards, but They're Our Corrupt Bastards 
The U.S. Senate campaign in Alaska was supposed to be a dull affair, with Republican incumbent Lola Palooza easily winning re-election. Instead, it has turned out to be the wildest race in a wild year. First, Palooza--opposed by Sarah Palin, who had beaten the senator's father, Francisco Franco, in the 2006 primary for governor--lost her primary to Joe Miller.

The loser then announced that she would stay in the race as a write-in candidate, notwithstanding the difficulty of spelling "Mikolajczyk." Result, as the New York Times reports: The Democrat, Scott McAdams, now has a better chance of winning this seat--albeit still a slim one--than any other one currently held by a Republican.

Then things got really interesting. As the Alaska Dispatch reports, the state's Division of Elections decided to give Misdirectski a boost by changing its regulations to provide for the distribution of lists of registered write-in candidates at polling places.

Dan Fagan, a conservative talk-show host, responded, the Dispatch reports: "About halfway through Fagan's show Thursday afternoon a caller phoned in to say he had just registered as a write-in candidate in the Senate race." Fagan urged his listeners to do the same, and, according to the Anchorage Daily News, "more than 150 people are now listed."

Meanwhile, the Dispatch notes, Fagan "has been yanked off the air." A spokesman for the Wakowski campaign "said they didn't have anything to do with it," but Palin, on her Facebook page, isn't buying it. She says the incumbent's lawyers threatened to sue Fagan's station "for allegedly illegal 'electioneering.' The station, unlike Blutarsky, who is flush with millions of dollars from vested corporate interests, does not have a budget for a legal defense. So it did what any small market station would do when threatened by Beltway lawyers charging $500 to $1000 an hour--they pulled Dan Fagan off the air."

Yesterday on "Fox News Sunday," Palin alleged that "corrupt bastards" at KTVA, the Anchorage CBS affiliate, had been caught on tape "saying let's find a child molester in the crowd as a supporter for Joe Miller, let's blast that. Let's concoct a [Rand] Paul moment there, let's find any kind of chaos so that we can tweet an alert saying "ooh, there's chaos. Joe Miller got punched, or vice [versa]."

Breitbart.tv has the tape and transcript (parts of which are noted as "inaudible"):

Female reporter: That's up to you because you're the expert, but that's what I would do. . . . I'd wait until you see who showed up because that indicates we already know something. . . .

[Laughter]

Female reporter: Child molesters . . .

Male reporter: Oh yeah . . . can you repeat Joe Miller's . . . uh . . . list of people, campaign workers, which one's the molester?

Female reporter: We know that out of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender.

[Laughter]

Male reporter: You have to find that one person . . .

Female reporter: And the one thing we can do is . . . we won't know....we won't know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a twitter/facebook alert: saying what the. . . . "Hey Joe Miller punched at rally."

Female reporter: Kinda like Rand Paul . . . I like that.

[Laughter]

Female reporter: That's a good one.

"The recording is real," the station acknowledged in a statement, reprinted by Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. "The recording was the result of a cell phone not being hung up." Incredibly, though, the statement was not an apology. It began:

It's unfortunate that this recording has happened. It's unfortunate because it does not accurately reflect the journalistic standards of our newsroom and the garbled context will no doubt leave more questions than answers. The Miller campaign's analysis of the recording is incorrect in many material ways ranging from personnel involved in the conversation, the interpretation of conversation snippets and the reported transcript of the perceived garbled conversation. . . .

The perception that this garbled, out of context recording may leave is unfortunate, but to allege that our staff was discussing or planning to create or fabricate stories regarding candidate Miller is absurd. The complete conversation was about what others might be able to do to cause disruption within the Miller campaign, not what KTVA could do.

KTVA's denial of the conspiracy charge seems to us plausible. But the station does not even attempt to claim that its staffers conducted themselves in a professional or unbiased fashion.

Nate Silver's forecast still rates Miller the favorite, with a 68.5% chance of winning. Mancowski is at 26.1%, McAdams a distant underdog at 5.5%. If we were McAdams, we'd campaign on a promise to restore a shred of Alaska's dignity--but perhaps that's a lost cause not worth fighting for.