Pete Rouse is now Barack Obama’s acting White House Chief of Staff, replacing Rahm Emanuel, who is leaving to run for Mayor of Chicago.

If you have been following Sarah Palin on Twitter, you’ll know that she has been most concerned with the fact the media doesn’t seem all too interested in the fact that Rouse, the ultimate D.C. insider, who hasn’t lived in Alaska since Reagan was in office, still votes absentee in the state.

As Stacy Drake points out in this great piece on Rouse, ABC’s Jake Tapper, one of the very few actual journalists in the lamestream media, had questions for the White House about Rouse. Tapper not only asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about Rouse’s voting problems, but about the fact Rouse was part of the efforts to destroy Sarah Palin. As is his usual reaction to any question that requires the truth, Gibbs blew Tapper off, giving no real answer at all.

Let’s learn a bit more about Rouse, the man some call the 101st Senator, through what his fellow travelers say about him.

But these days, Pete Rouse works in the White House, two doors from his close friend, President Barack Obama.

For 25 years as the consummate Democratic insider in the U.S. Senate, Rouse played a quiet role as the backdoor connection for Alaska’s all-Republican delegation to the other side of the aisle in Congress. He was the longtime chief of staff for Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., the one-time Senate majority leader, and starting in 2004 Rouse took on the same job for a promising young freshman senator from Illinois.

Today, as special adviser to Obama, Rouse is in the innermost circle of the West Wing. His office sits between chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and communications director David Axelrod (for fans of “The West Wing” television series, that would be Josh Lyman’s office).

His Alaska roots run deeper than those of almost anyone reading these words. His mother, the daughter of Japanese immigrants, grew up in Anchorage starting in World War I, when it was a railroad construction town. His cousin was the longtime municipal attorney for the City of Palmer.

But Rouse himself was born on the East Coast and had never been west of Denver when he flew to Alaska in late 1978 to visit a friend, Alaska’s newly elected Republican lieutenant governor, Terry Miller.

Rouse ended up working as Miller’s chief of staff for the final four years of Gov. Jay Hammond’s administration. It was a great experience, Rouse said, a time when Juneau was filled with young idealists eager to grapple with the state’s new oil money, infrastructure need and unformed social policies.

“Juneau at the time was 19,000 people, but it was really a town on the move in terms of young, well-educated people excited by these policy issues,” he recalled.

Rouse also brought a team of political veterans, many from the Daschle camp, into the Obama campaign.

“When Pete went to work for Barack, what Barack got — and I don’t think he realized it — was the only network in Democratic circles that from both a policy and political perspective came close to the Clinton network,” political consultant Anita Dunn told the Post recently.

By last August, Rouse had shifted to working full-time for the campaign. An Obama campaign trip to Alaska was almost a certainty, he said, until Gov. Sarah Palin was tapped for the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Pre-Palin, he said, the campaign felt it had a chance to win the heavily Republican state, based on the enthusiasm shown in caucuses for Obama.

One of Rouse’s best friends in Alaska is state Sen. Kim Elton, D-Juneau. Rouse was the one who recruited Elton, a former journalist, into politics to work for Miller. Elton said Rouse is always eager for e-mailed photos of Romeo, the black wolf often photographed around Juneau.

A lot has been written, and as we all know, the so-called Branchflower Report, which claimed Sarah had broken no laws, but “overstepped her authority” was completely and totally discredited, by independent investigator, Timothy Petumenos, who was working on behalf of the Alaska State Personnel Board.

Not only did he find that Sarah had done nothing wrong in firing Walt Monegan, an “at will” employee who served at the pleasure of the Governor, and could be fired for any reason, or none at all, he also noted that the Obama smear crew, Elton, French, and the rest, had actually cited the wrong statute in their shameless attacks.

Didn’t matter though. What Obama was looking for was an “October surprise” and he got it, as the bogus Branchflower Report was released just three days before the election. The damage was done.

For a “job well done” Barack Obama appointed Rouse’s buddy Senator Kim Elton to a make work job at the U.S. Department of the Interior. As we now know, this was the first of many such pay-play-deals the Obama regime would attempt. Think Blagojevich, Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff just to name a few.

Now our buddy Pete Rouse wasn’t done though. Again, Rouse is connected in Alaska. Good old Pete was charged with creating what we call Obama’s Alaska Mafia. This is a group of hate bloggers, thugs, nerdowells, and Marxist-democrat party operatives.

Pete Rouse, along with fellow “Alaskan” Anita Dunn, who helped former Alaska Governor Tony Knowles in his failed attempt to defeat Sarah Palin is her run for Governor, will likely play a key roles in the 2012 presidential election when Sarah Palin, the likely Republican nominee faces off with their boss, Barack Obama for the White House.

Americans need to keep an eye on Pete Rouse, Obama’s dirty tricks master, from now until the end of the Obama regime. He’s proven he is capable of almost anything, and his network of Alaskan Marxists, and hate bloggers will be cranking it up to eleven the second Sarah Palin officially announces her campaign.

Speaking of that morally bankrupt bunch of losers, Naked Emperor News put together a great video that ties all of this together. Though Jeanne Devon fought, with some success, to have this thing banned, it’s back on You Tube. This kinda says it all: