Another Palin firing, another Palin scandal

Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin is already facing ethical questions over her firing of the state's public safety commissioner, and now she faces questions over the firing of a longtime local police chief.
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This is from ABC News:

Gov. Sarah Palin is already facing ethical questions over her firing of the Alaska public safety commissioner, and now she faces questions over the firing of a longtime local police chief.

After taking over as Mayor of the small town of Wasilla, Palin fired the longtime local police chief. The former police chief, Irl Stambaugh says he was fired because he stepped on the toes of Palin's campaign contributors, including bar owners and the National Rifle Association.

Stambaugh's lawyer, William Jermain, says the chief tried to move up the closing hours of local bars from 5 a.m. to two a.m. after a spurt of drunk driving accidents and arrests.

"His crackdown on that practice by the bars was not appreciated by her and that was one reason she terminated Irl," said Jermain.

In his 1997 lawsuit, Stambaugh also alleged that his stand on restricting concealed weapons upset the NRA.

"Mayor Palin has stated on several occasions that the National Rifle Association encouraged her to fire Chief Stambaugh because of his stance against the concealed weapons legislation," the lawsuit claimed.

Palin says she was up against entrenched insiders when she was elected mayor of Wasilla in 1996.

"We had a lot of people that were kind of dead wood," said Colleen Sullivan Leonard, a staff member in Palin's office. "We needed people with new energy and a new vision."

A federal judge later ruled the mayor, under city law, had the right to fire the police chief for any reason she wanted.

I don't know about you, but I'm detecting a little pattern here regarding Governor Palin's firings. She fired public safety commissioner Walter Monegan, for failing to fire an Alaskan state police officer involved in a divorce of Palin's sister. Now the story is coming out that Palin fired former police chief Irl Stambaugh because he wanted to close down the bars and pissed the NRA off due to his support for restricting concealed weapons. It seems that Palin is firing officials who become her political enemies when they refuse to bow to her unethical demands. I wonder how many other officials she fired for her personal reasons?

Update: It appears that Palin tried to fire the town librarian for refusing to remove books that Palin wanted to ban. From Time Magazine:

[Former Wasilla mayor John] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

This lady is not qualified to be vice president.