Even these individual stories, though, don’t do justice to Bloch’s strange four-year career at OSC. He first raised eyebrows by reportedly refusing to investigate whistleblower complaints by homosexuals and stocking the OSC staff with religious conservatives.

Bloch went three years without investigating reports that the White House’s political arm, led by Karl Rove, was manipulating the civil service for partisan ends. Finally, last year, he investigated Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Admin., and found that Doan violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits the politicization of federal agencies.

In nabbing Doan, who was perceived, fairly or not, as a prototypical Bush crony, Bloch seemed to have turned his career around. But then it turned out that Bloch had been actively stopping OSC employees from investigating other possible Hatch Act violations.

Lawmakers from both parties had long since called on Bloch to resign. Now five months after Doan resigned, the person who precipitated her downfall is leaving as well.

In 2005, the school made another plea for help to McCain, and this time his office “sprang into action,” writing three letters in as many months on Latch’s behalf.

What happened between 2003 and 2005?

According to the New York Daily News, the Latch School appointed Mark Voigt, an old friend, donor and associate of Charles H. Keating Jr., as the head of its board.

Voigt had been the vice president of Charles Keating’s holding company, the American Continental Corp., when Keating was breaking all those banking laws in the ’80s and his associates donated more than $100,000 to McCain.

In 2005, Voigt wrote McCain about the matter, and his office followed up with three letters in three months and finally got action.

Again, it appears to be a worthy cause and the kind of thing legislators do for constituents all the time, but to Democrats, it shows that McCain does do favors for people, in spite of claims from advisers like Charlie Black who said last February, “John McCain does favors for no one.” And in this case, it would be someone tied to a time McCain would like to forget, but which the Obama campaign now wants everybody to remember.

Sure, what McCain did was a legitimate service that any number of senators do for their constituents.

But when companies like, say, Freddie Mac, keep an old McCain friend like Rick Davis on the payroll for no other reason than his close ties to the man who may be president, would they be more likely to have the president’s ear in a McCain administration?

On the Sunday morning talk shows, Obama surrogates came out swinging against the Palin. But the real news came from a pair of articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

While the McCain campaign points to Palin’s six-year tenure as Wasilla mayor to demonstrate she has the executive experience to run the White House, if need be, The Post took the magnifying glass to the Wasilla mayor’s job description. The Post found that many of the traditional responsibilities of a small town mayor were managed by state and regional government, including: the fire department, schools, social services and environmental regulation.

According to the article, Palin did manage the town’s three-year-old (at the time she took office) police department, the public works department, parks and recreation department, a planning office, the library and a museum. However, Palin created a new staff position to assist with many of these responsibilities.

Palin limited her duties further by hiring a deputy administrator to handle much of the town’s day-to-day management. Her top achievement as mayor was the construction of an ice rink, a project that landed in the courts and cost the city more than expected.

Arriving in office, Palin herself played down the demands of the job in response to residents who worried that her move to oust veteran officials would leave the town in the lurch. “It’s not rocket science,” Palin said, according to the town newspaper, the Frontiersman. “It’s $6 million and 53 employees.”

The New York Times ran an eye-popping 3,000-word front page bombshell-fest characterizing Palin’s administrations as mayor and governor as Bush-esque bastions of secrecy and blatant cronyism, not to mention vindictiveness against personal and political foes. If you haven’t yet read it, I urge you to take a look.

Of course, none of this is too surprising to those of us here at TWI, as our own Laura McGann has been way out in front on Palin’s nepotism and what appear to be borderline-authoritarian tendencies since the days immediately following her selection as Sen. John McCain’s running mate.

What did surprise me, however, was this little nugget buried in a post in The Times’ The Caucus blog, about Palin’s reaction to Fey’s SNL spoof — which she apparently watched aboard her campaign plane.

At one point, her youngest daughter, Piper, ventured to the back with a campaign adviser, but Ms. Palin stayed put, leaving one television crew from “Entertainment Tonight” capturing an image of the plane’s curtain, then whispering and motioning to its viewers that the candidate was apparently just a few rows up, just past that curtain, up that way.

“Entertainment Tonight” aboard the Palin plane?!?

The McCain campaign continues to hammer Obama for being “the world’s biggest celebrity,” but I’ve yet to come across any reports that ET is following the Democratic presidential nominee around.

Just to make sure, I put in a call to the Obama press office to confirm, and I will update when I hear back.

Meanwhile, with McCain continuing to ride Palin’s celebrity coattails, that line of attack looks likely to lose some of its punch.

UPDATE: The Obama campaign informed me that the Illinois senator was, in fact, interviewed by Entertainment Tonight in February — so it does appear that Palin has achieved a similar level of political/pop culture stardom.