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The Real Sarah Palin Scandal
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huffington_post:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-silvers/the-real-sarah-palin-scan_b_123113.html
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Posted September 2, 2008
| 03:28 AM (EST)
Read More:
Alaska, Bridge To Nowhere,
Earmarks, Governor Of Alaska, John McCain, Palin Bridge To Nowhere, Pork, Pork
Barrel, Pork Barrel Spending, Sarah Palin,
Off The Bus News
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Labor
Day brought us an ugly media feeding frenzy when it surfaced that Sarah
Palin's teenage daughter is pregnant. But the real scandal for John
McCain's V.P.-to-be is the flurry of stories that as a politician in
Alaska, Palin had a voracious appetite for the very congressional
earmarks and pork barrel spending that John McCain has made a signature
issue of trying to stamp out.
As mayor of Wasilla, a suburb of Anchorage, Palin hired one of
Alaska's most connected lobbying firms to secure almost $27 million in
federal appropriations for her constituents, according to the Washington Post.
Wasilla benefited mightily from Palin's decision: federal earmarks for
$900,000 in municipal sewer repairs, $1.9 million for a local
transportation hub, and $15 million for a rail link, among other pet
projects. For a town of just 6,700 people, this amounted to thousands
of dollars per resident in federal largess. And the lobbying firm,
Robertson, Monagle, & Eastaugh, wasn't just any band of wannabe
legislators. The firm is closely linked to Alaska's two most notorious
pork barrel Republicans, Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don
Young (Stevens was indicted
this summer for accepting and failing to report hundreds of thousands
of dollars in gifts from VECO, a now-defunct oil services firm).
It gets worse. The McCain camp has made much of Palin's supposedly
principled decision as governor to decline federal money to build the
"Bridge to Nowhere," a national symbol of pork barrel spending run
amok. In her speech accepting the position as McCain's running mate,
Palin recalled: "I told Congress, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' on that
bridge to nowhere....'If our state wanted a bridge,' I said, 'we'd
build it ourselves.'"
Stirring stuff. But as USA Today
reports, Palin was actually for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was
against it. Campaigning for governor in 2006, Palin trumpeted her
support for the $233 million bridge to reach an island of just 50
inhabitants. And displaying an unnerving understanding of how the dirty
appropriations game is played, she even urged quick action to build the
bridge while Alaska's congressional delegation (i.e., Stevens and
Young) was well-positioned to secure the necessary federal tax dollars.
Only when the bridge became a public relations debacle did Palin flip
positions and declare that Alaska didn't need it after all.
We've been told by the McCain camp to overlook Palin's thin résumé
because she's an insurgent pork-busting reformer in the mold of John
McCain. We've been misled. Palin was looking for federal handouts just
like every other self-interested politician that John McCain
excoriates. Take that card away, and what does she really offer?
That's the real scandal about Sarah Palin.
