Curiously, the meeting was not listed on the vice president’s schedule. But Arpaio told the Phoenix Business Journal that he’d said to Biden in their meeting that he needs more deputies and resources for his law enforcement unit.

Arpaio’s law enforcement actions, however, have not always gone over well with the Obama administration. The Arizona sheriff is under official investigation for civil rights violations, and just recently, the Department of Homeland Security revoked some of his powers to enforce federal immigration laws under the 287(g) program.

Arpaio has insisted that he has all the powers he needs to arrest illegal immigrants anyway, and vowed not to let up on his much-publicized efforts to crack down on them.

Culvahouse also detailed which stumper questions the top VP choices were asked, including whether they were ready to use nuclear weapons and whether they would take a shot at Osama bin Laden even if it meant the death of civilians. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin “hit them out of the park,” said Culvahouse, without saying what the correct answers were.

He said, mysteriously, that other candidates had not performed as well: that means at least one possible 2012 candidate like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty might have lost out at this stage of the process.

Culvahouse was blunt about Palin’s ability to serve as president: “I don’t think she would have been ready on Jan. 20, but few people would.” At the end of his interview, he informed McCain that Palin would be a “high risk, high reward” pick for the job. McCain’s response?

You shouldn’t have told me that. I’ve been a risk-taker all my life.

–

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Following yesterday’s revelation that cap-and-trade legislation would not be included in the fiscal year 2010 budget, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Vice President Joe Biden today rolled out a $3.2 billion program to improve efficiency at the state and local level.

The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) Program commits $1.9 billion to cities and counties and $770 million to states and territories for “energy audits and energy efficiency retrofits in residential and commercial buildings, the development and implementation of advanced building codes and inspections, and the creation of financial incentive programs for energy efficiency improvements,” according to a White House press release. An additional $456 million will be available for local efficiency project bids at a later date.

These measures come on the heels of an even larger $8 billion weatherization program, announced exactly two weeks ago.

Energy efficiency is being enacted much more quickly than the administration’s other environmental goals, in large part because it costs comparatively little and is simpler to implement.

“The funding will be used for the cheapest, cleanest and most reliable energy technologies we have – energy efficiency and conservation – which can be deployed immediately,” Chu explained.

A full description of the EECBG program can be found on the Department of Energy Website.

With the records still unreleased this week, and no indication from the McCain campaign that they would be forthcoming, several media outlets began to wonder aloud if the campaign would make good on this promise.

The campaign finally released a letter (PDF) from Palin’s physician, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, late last night briefly summarizing the GOP vice presidential nominee’s medical history.

There’s not much to report. According to the letter, Palin “is in excellent health and has no known health problems that would interfere with her ability to carry out the duties and obligations of the Vice President of the United States of America.”

Baldwin-Johnson reports that Palin has no major medical problems, takes no medications and has been hospitalized recently only for childbirth.

While the letter is certainly not the detailed medical history that Palin said she would release, it does appear to indicate that, should Sen. John McCain win the election, she would be physically capable of assuming the presidency if needed.

However, the release of the letter by the McCain campaign late on the eve of Election Day did not allow voters much of an opportunity to evaluate the information before casting their votes. But considering that McCain — a 72-year-old four-time cancer survivor — allowed a few reporters only three hours to review his records without allowing photocopies, Palin’s release is probably what we should have expected.

During an interview with National Public Radio in which he was supposed to be making the case for McCain, Lawrence Eagleburger, a former secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, was frank in his response to whether Palin was ready to assume the presidency, if need be.

From The Huffington Post:

“It is a very good question,” he said, pausing a few seconds, then adding with a chuckle: “I’m being facetious here. Look, of course not.”

Eagleburger explained: “I don’t think at the moment she is prepared to take over the reins of the presidency. I can name for you any number of other vice presidents who were not particularly up to it either. So the question, I think, is can she learn and would she be tough enough under the circumstances if she were asked to become president, heaven forbid that that ever takes place?

“Give her some time in the office and I think the answer would be, she will be [pause] adequate. I can’t say that she would be a genius in the job. But I think she would be enough to get us through a four year… well I hope not… get us through whatever period of time was necessary. And I devoutly hope that it would never be tested.”

Following former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s cross-party endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama, McCain has repeatedly pointed to his own endorsements from five other former secretaries of state, including Eagleburger, each of whom he said he admires enormously.

However, if Eagleburger is correct in his assertion that in time, Palin could become “adequate,” it would seem to call into question McCain’s sincerity when he said, “the Oval Office in wartime is no place for on-the-job training.”

Having observed the McCain campaign for almost two years, I’m inclined to believe Palin’s less-scripted moments are, in fact, less a result of active disobedience than in the governor’s own somewhat McCain-like unwillingness to stick to a script.  Here, in Toledo, where she just gave a speech on energy independence, Palin’s own independence took a literal turn: If there is any one place she has gone rogue, it is against her teleprompter.

Visible over the shoulder of the press corps, the monitor that displayed Palin’s speech shifted occasionally, as its operator struggled to pick back up after she drifted off in tangents, dropping in folksy-isms like urging some “tappin’ into new ideas” and noting “special interests” –  “I’ve had to take on some of that,” she said, “especially up there in Alaska, where they didn’t want any shakin’ up.”

Her ad-libs are short on “g’s.”

Following along in the prepared remarks, another theme developed in the lines Palin delivered: herself.

To the statement, “So, we introduced the big oil companies and their lobbyists to a concept some of them had forgotten — free-market competition,” she inserted, a “when I got elected,” as in, “So, we introduced — when I got elected — the big oil companies.”

And when the remarks had her warning “energy security…demands of us that we shake off old ways, negotiate new hazards and make hard choices long deferred,” she made the plea personal: “I do not want to hand this problem off onto my children or to your children.”

Though the speech was mostly a recitation of energy-policy proposals that Sen. John McCain has been offering for months — nuclear power, limited offshore drilling, “clean coal” — Palin’s flourishes made the speech hers. The line, “Americans need to produce more of our own oil and gas” could be said by either the top or the bottom of the ticket.  But, “God has so richly blessed our land with the supplies that we need”? You would pretty much have to write God into a McCain speech to get him to say it. Palin adds it on her own.

The media traveling with Palin say that none of these flourishes are particularly new. They are artifacts of her stump speech, and, obviously, part of being a compelling public speaker is to make speeches written by other people sound like you. Unless you’re Joe Biden, in which case you simply claim all your speeches to have been written by you.

Obama is deeply involved with crafting his speeches before they’re delivered, and so doesn’t tend to improvise. McCain has the advantage of having worked with the same speechwriter — Mark Salter — for 20 years, achieving a sort of mind-meld that allows Salter to anticipate even where a “my friends” or three should be added.

If Palin’s speechwriter wants to keep his or her job beyond next Tuesday — like, say, through 2012 — I’d take note of what Palin’s verbal crutches are as well. McCain’s “my friends” tic is both a way of giving a speech his own stamp and, often, a sign of emotional investment — he’s telling listeners to really pay attention this time. He means it.

To judge by the difference between her speech as written and as delivered, Palin’s version of “my friends” is simply “Alaska.” The speech writer directed Palin to mention it eight times. Palin went to the “Alaska” well almost twice as many times. Drill, baby, drill, indeed.

It would probably be unfair to read too much into Palin’s freelance speech writing, though it does offer some insight into a candidate who otherwise has been hesitant to speak off the cuff.

When she went out of her way, though, to heap praise on McCain at the end of her speech, it probably was out of genuine enthusiasm. And when she changed a line from “our children” living in a “more peaceful” world to a “safer” one, maybe it was because she thinks the terms are synonymous.

At least I hope so.

Laura traces Palin’s history of opposition to abortion and ties it to what has become one of her central messages on the stump: her understanding of children with disabilities, embodied at many of her rallies by her infant son, Trig, who has Down syndrome.

It’s a strong piece on an under-reported topic. Get the rundown here.

***In convo with Playbook, a top McCain adviser one-ups the priceless “diva” description, calling her “a whack job.”

Now, I’m not a political strategist, but I’m pretty sure calling your own vice presidential candidate a “whack job” is a bit too mavericky even for the McCain campaign. Something tells me this won’t be particularly helpful in convincing people to put Palin one heartbeat away from the presidency.

This is perhaps one of the stupidest and most unprofessional things I’ve ever seen. Someone ought to remind the McCain campaign that the election is not officially over yet. There will be plenty of time for casting blame and writing tell-all books after Nov. 4.

In the meantime, the McCain team might want to pretend it still has a chance of winning this election — even if it doesn’t believe it.

Sen. Joe Biden (WDCpix)

Increasingly incensed at being shunted to the media sidelines while his Republican counterpart’s every utterance makes global news, Sen. Joe Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has clearly decided to fight fire with fire.

“The current world economic crisis has come about because people keep dropping quarters that roll away and fall over the edge of the earth,” Biden claimed today, in a speech before an group of astrophysicists. In the same address, the veteran Delaware senator called for a blue-ribbon federal commission to study why the same thermos that keeps cold liquids cold also keeps hot liquids hot.

Casting aside his usual carefully reasoned arguments on geopolitics, the national deficit and other key election issues, Biden — whose new plan for boosting a faltering economy is to transfer all the money in the nation’s millions of Monopoly sets to the federal Treasury -– seems instead to be aiming squarely at the lowest common intellectual denominator.

“He may never become a media darling like Gov. Palin,” admits one campaign insider, “but hey, Joe offered to appear on “Saturday Night Live” a month ago and they said he wasn’t interesting enough. He’s got to start playing catch-up.”

“Playing catch-up” would seem to include Biden’s assertion that Palin “pals around” with known witches; his call for an extension of the “Star Wars” space-weapon program to attack highway speeders, and a new plan to catch Osama bin Laden by calling his cell phone, pretending to be a pizza deliveryman and asking for directions.

“I think that threw a scare into the Palin camp,” one Biden aide confided. “It also threw a scare into the Obama camp,” he admitted, “but we can’t let them win the dimwit sweepstakes by default. From now until Nov. 4, Joe’s going to be fighting brainlessness with brainlessness.”

This may explain why Biden today charged that Palin is actually smarter than he is — stating that he doesn’t know the difference between a moose, an elk, a caribou and a musk ox , even if he can’t see France from the living room window of his Delaware home.

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of “All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall” and “Zany Afternoons.”

TWI’s Laura McGann reported yesterday about Palin’s tendency to reward her friends with cushy jobs.

The Los Angeles Times today provides some more details, illustrating that, in a state already legendary for rampant corruption and cronyism, the Palin administration stood out as a hotbed of patronage.

Palin often tells audiences that, as governor, she “took on the good ol’ boy network” in her home state. However, according to The Los Angeles Times, Palin replaced the old “good ol’ boy network” with one of her own. From the article:

* More than 100 appointments to state posts — nearly 1 in 4 — went to campaign contributors or their relatives, sometimes without apparent regard to qualifications.

* Palin filled 16 state offices with appointees from families that donated $2,000 to $5,600 and were among her top political patrons.

* Several of Palin’s leading campaign donors received state-subsidized industrial development loans of up to $3.6 million for business ventures of questionable public value.

* Palin picked a donor to replace the public safety commissioner she fired. But the new top cop had to resign days later under an ethics cloud. And Palin drew a formal ethics complaint still pending against her and several aides for allegedly helping another donor and fund-raiser land a state job.

The article quotes a University of Alaska historian who describes Palin as having a “penchant for placing supporters, many of them ill-prepared, in high posts”

According to article, “all five Palin selections for the powerful Natural Gas Development Authority, which oversees a proposed gas pipeline project were donors” — a fact that may cloud the McCain campaign’s praise for Palin’s work in negotiating a $40-billion natural gas pipeline. If you stack the government’s deck with your supporters, how tough can the negotiations with the energy industry really be?

Palin’s friends from Wasilla also received choice appointments to the office of attorney general and to the state agricultural division. In the latter case, the woman appointed was previously a real-estate agent who cited a “childhood love of cows” as a qualification.

The article contains many more examples.

With the Bush administration’s politicization of the Justice Dept., failed response to hurricane Katrina and corporate profiteering from the war in Iraq, the United States has seen what can happen when powerful politicians put personal loyalty and political connections ahead of actual qualifications for high-level government posts. Palin’s apparent record in Alaska could provide a window into what a Palin vice presidency might look like.