1. Quitting when the going gets tough; abandoning the responsibility entrusted to you by your neighbors for book advances and to make money on the lecture circuit.
2. Bizarre move that will damn ambitions for higher office.
3. Responding to direct questions with a barrage of pithy cliches and folksy colloquialisms to avoid admitting that you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.

“I bet when people saw Jade they were convinced that David Caruso was pullin’ a Palin.”

Sounds about right to me.  Now I just have to figure out how to fit “pullin’ a Palin” into a conversation.

“That huge waste that we have seen with the countless, countless hours that state staff is spending on these frivolous ethics violations and the millions of dollars that Alaskans are spending, that money not going to things that are very important, like troopers and roads and teachers and fish research.”

I’m not even going to go into the details of how sketchy that $2 million figure is at this point.  Instead, I’m going to talk about all the ways that Palin herself has wasted State money since leaving the campaign trail last November.

• Palin used a non-State sanctioned Yahoo email address to conduct official State business in order to avoid many of her emails becoming a mater of State record.  State IT employees had to spend countless hours tracking down as many of these emails as possible that had been sent to or from the State’s email system in connection with the Troopergate investigation.  Of course, many of these emails could not be found because all of Palin’s staff were using private email accounts as well.  So much for the transparent Government that she claims to be such a fan of.
• Palin insisted on bringing her daughters along on the State’s dime to many of her appearances around the State, including to events where they were not invited, and later amended expense reports to justify their presence as official State business.
• Palin collected per diem while working from her home in Wasilla.  To be more specific, she collected $60 per diem for 312 nights spent at her home in Wasilla, for a total of $17,059 charged to the State.  Apparently her $125,000 salary wasn’t quite enough for her.
• And let’s not forget, Palin got the ball rolling on the ethics complaints by filing one against herself surrounding the dismissal of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan.

Johnston said that Palin “had talked about how nice it would be to take some of this money people have been offering us and just run with it, and saying forget everything else.”

It actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it.  We already know that Palin has a book deal in the works, which she has been reluctant to discuss.  We can only imagine what other offers have been coming her way since her unsuccessful Vice Presidential bid with John McCain last fall – speaking engagements, TV appearances, even a FOX News correspondent, perhaps?

Once she’s officially handed the Governor’s reigns over to Sean Parnell, she’ll be a private citizen again, free to accept as many of these (likely lucrative) offers as she likes, without the need to disclose a bit of it.

Not to say that this is a valid reason for her to leave the Governor’s office so suddenly; rather, it just further illustrates her willingness to put her own political and personal agenda ahead of everything else – including the state that she claims to love SOOOO much.

The other 2? Jim McGreevy and Eliot Spitzer.  For those keeping score at home, Jim McGreevy was the Governor of New Jersey from 2002-2004 before he resigned after having a homosexual affair with the man he had appointed homeland security adviser. Eliot Spitzer served as Governor of New York for just over a year before resigning in 2008 in the wake of his involvement in a high-priced prostitution ring.

Looks to me like Sarah Palin is in good company.

Read more about this crazy bunch of Alaskan folks.

Personally, this comes to me as quite a shock.  Even among Republicans, I would expect them to be able to see through Sarah Palin’s thin veneer of good looks and small town charm, and see her for who she truly is – a whiny, plotting, cut-throat politician who will do anything and everything to advance her own career.  We witnessed this first-hand here in Alaska while she was campaining with John McCain last fall, as she literally and figuratively threw Alaska under the bus in her attempt to secure a spot in the White House.