Governor Palin picks a new Alaska Supreme Court Justice. And confuses the hell out of me.

So a new position opens up in he Alaska Supreme Court and Governor Sarah is given the golden opportunity to put yet another conservative judge in there to help push through the conservative agenda. The state Supreme Courts have been the focus of the conservative agenda for over twenty years now, and Governor Palin is, by many accounts, the future of the conservative movement, so surely she will put some buttoned down, Sunday school teaching, anti-abortion whack job in there keep the liberal agenda from infesting the Alaska court system.

To prepare for this task Palin takes an unprecedented (for her) interest in the biographies of the two candidates.

Last week, without explaining why, Palin took the unusual step of asking the Judicial Council to send her all information it had on the two finalists, Christen and Palmer Superior Court Judge Eric Smith.

Extensive information about the two finalists was sent to the governor with the nominations on Feb. 5. It included, among other things, references, Alaska Bar Association survey details and record of community service.

Last week, the governor's office asked the Judicial Council for everything it knew about the nominees, including the "application for this or any other judicial appointment, for retention election, or for any other purpose."

While governors sometimes have questions about nominees, none had ever made such a sweeping request, Larry Cohn, Judicial Council executive director, said.

The council staff delivered packets of additional information to Palin's Anchorage office on Wednesday, excluding only internal work memos and comments where confidentiality was promised.

Aides to the governor wouldn't answer questions about specific concerns that might have prompted the governor's request. However, both Christen and Smith have been involved in organizations that might give Palin pause.

And just in case this information did not give her a clear enough choice she also got a little nudge from the right wing activists.
The head of the Alaska Family Council -- a Christian pro-family, anti-abortion group -- on Wednesday sent an e-mail to thousands of people asking them to urge Palin to pick Smith, not Christen.

The family council plea, from group president Jim Minnery, said Smith was "more conservative" and that Christen would be "another activist on the Court." In an interview, Minnery said that was the "general consensus" but he had no specifics.

So there you go. The choice is clear and Governor Palin has her marching orders.

And this is where the confusion come in.

Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday picked an Anchorage judge to fill the latest vacancy on the Alaska Supreme Court despite efforts by a conservative Christian group to convince her to do otherwise.

"Alaska's Supreme Court bears the awesome responsibility of ensuring that our court system administers justice in firm accordance with the principles laid down in our state Constitution," Palin said in a written statement. "I have every confidence that Judge Christen has the experience, intellect, wisdom and character to be an outstanding Supreme Court justice."

I'm sorry, what? She chose the liberal FEMALE! Ow, ow, ow, my head hurts now.

So since I am pretty familiar with Sarah Palin, and have learned that if things look too good then you just have not heard the whole story, I figured this new judge must be some sort of closet anti-abortion activist that perhaps nobody really knows about.

Christen's application included her membership in several charitable groups, including some from her past, but did not mention that she was on the board of Planned Parenthood in the mid-1990s. The organization, which didn't provide abortions in Alaska until 2003, is now on the opposite side of a Palin-supported bill to require girls under 17 to get parental consent for an abortion.

Ow, ow, ow, again! WTF?

So this Judge Christen is an old pro-choice warrior from the nineties? How did Palin not catch that? Didn't she read the research she asked for? Did she not do a background check as thorough as Lisa Demer's? Is she just fucking with me?

Okay, okay, let's take a deep breath here. What are the possibilities?

Could she be moving more toward the middle politically in anticipation of her big Presidential bid in 2012? No that can't be it. If she loses her fundamentalist base she will be dead in the water politically.

Did she just decide that based on the merit of the two judges that Christen was the better choice? Ha, ha, ha, oh I cracked myself up with that one!

Okay I am going to admit that I cannot figure this one out at all. I know that Palin is not all that bright, so I am having trouble believing that she has somehow outsmarted all of us. In which case I have no choice but to assume that she simply screwed it up! You have to admit that sounds much more like Sarah Palin then that she has made some shrewed political choice that is so tricky it is indiscernible by the public at large.

I mean she is no Rod Blagojevich, am I right?