McCain's Earmark Lie
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| Mon, 09-15-2008 - 9:19pm |

McCain's Earmark Lie: Palin actually grubs $1 mil/day as Gov. by Kagro X
Mon Sep 15, 2008 at 03:00:11 PM PDT
Last week, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain said his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, hadn't sought earmarks or special-interest spending from Congress, presenting her as a fiscal conservative. But state records show Gov. Palin has asked U.S. taxpayers to fund $453 million in specific Alaska projects over the past two years.
It's been 652 days since Earmark Queen Sarah Palin took office as Governor of Alaska.
In that time, she's hustled for $453,000,000 in federal lipstick pork.
That's $694,785.28 a day. Six hundred ninetey-four thousand, seven hundred and eight five dollars and twenty-eight cents. Every day. Even Sundays!
Palin was grubbing six hundred ninetey-four thousand, seven hundred and eight five dollars and twenty-eight cents out of the federal trough on the very day when John McCain looked America in the eye and said she was taking zero.
And she took it again today, too.
And she took it on every one of the 312 nights she spent at home and billed the Alaskan taxpayers for it.
So why say it's a million dollars a day? Well, first, let me show you what Slick Sarah Palin is telling people:
On the campaign trail, Gov. Palin has repeatedly attacked Sen. Obama on earmarks. "Our opponent has requested nearly one billion dollars in earmarks in three years. That's about a million for every working day," she said at a rally in Albuquerque, N.M.
Ohhhh, this feels like it's going to get embarrassing in a second....
And, behold! Look what "The Math" says!
It is difficult to compare Sen. Obama's earmark record with Gov. Palin's -- their states differ in size, for instance, and the two candidates play different roles in the process. But using the same calculation that the McCain campaign uses, the total amount of earmarked dollars divided by the number of working days while each held office (assuming a five-day workweek, every week, for both), Gov. Palin sought $980,000 per workday, compared with roughly $893,000 for Sen. Obama.
Not only is Palin taking much more, but oh my word if the million dollar figure doesn't actually fit her sooooo much better than the person she's trying to use it against! What a surprise!
So that's almost a million dollars a day, whether she showed up at the office or not. A million bucks, plus $60 in her pocket for defrosting one of her own mooseburgers for lunch.
And really, Palin must be asking herself, why not chisel the Alaska state government a little bit? After all:
The state's earmark requests stand out in part because its state government is among the wealthiest in the U.S. Flush with oil and gas royalties, it doesn't impose income or sales taxes. In fact, money flows the other way: Every man, woman and child this year got a check for $3,200.
Gosh, but they're such rugged individualists up there! They're gonna launch themselves into orbit with those bootstraps, don'tcha know?
A million dollars a day. From you and me. Plus $3,200 in the bank for each one of 'em. And $60 in Sarah's pocket for every lunch at home. (Like every working mom, of course!)
It's the new fiscal responsibility, in John McCain's seven house-owning, $5 million middle class living world!

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<<< That’s fine with me…as long as she doesn’t hang out with racists, America-haters, terrorists and an “angry black woman.” LOL!
*** The you have a problem! She does hang out with racists, America haters and would be terrorists.
Really? I haven’t heard. Can you give us links?
*** Obama doesn't hang out with terrorists or America haters.
Um…except for Ayres, Wright and Plfeager…but who’s counting?
*** Michelle's comment has been twisted to mean something other than what she meant.
Are you suggesting that Michelle doesn’t say what she means to say? How absurd. “I’ve never been proud of my country” and “this is a downright mean country” pretty much speak for themselves…and it was a prepared speech…she MEANT what she said.
*** She is not an "angry black woman", the conservative spin is an act of desperation.
Or an act of observation. LOL!
*** Not all Alaskan's like Palin:http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/525008.html
Who cares? Do I really need to post the musings of the folks from Illinois who don’t like Oblahblah? Even his “friends” (if he has any) think Obama is a calculating, manipulative politician.
<<< "I think America does not understand how absolutely extreme her positions are - even to the right of George Bush and John McCain," Norton said. "She is frightening."
*** Anne Applegate-Scott, a 44-year-old attorney and stay-at-home mom, held a sign that said, "I don't vote for liars." Applegate-Scott said she actually voted for Palin for governor but won't vote for the McCain-Palin ticket. Palin, she thinks, has become a "product" of McCain handlers and they won't let her talk to the media.
LOL! Wait…let me see if I can find someone from Chicago who doesn’t support Obama…LOL!
*** When Palin does talk, Applegate-Scott accused her of lying about her record....
And (an early associate of Obama’s) Chicago Alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, says “I spent ten years of my adult life working to be alderman. I finally got elected. This is a job I love. And I’m perfectly happy with it. I’m not sure that’s the way that he approached his public life—that he was going to try for a job and stay there for one period of time. In retrospect, I think he saw the positions he held as stepping stones to other things and therefore approached his public life differently than other people might have.”
"It doesn't sound like all those earmarks are needed."
ITA. Why was Palin out there grabbing all the earmarks she could, despite her false claim she keeps repeating that she is against earmarks and killed the bridge to nowhere?
And somehow Palin managed to take her town, which was fully solvent with no debt, and plunge it into 22 million worth of debt over mismanaged misguided projects (the infamous hockey rink). Sound familiar?
The right wing keeps trying to belittle Obama's career, both as a community organizer and politician.
Here are the facts:
"After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side. During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_obama
Seems pretty good to me - this is exactly the kind of faith-based work that the right praises except when the left does it. Obama stopped organizing because he got the chance to go to the most prestigious law school in America, after which he went back to helping people and into politics. Again, seems pretty good to me.
As for Obama's supposed inexperience as a politician, again here are the facrs. As the clear underdog, he won a hard fought primary with over 17.5 million votes against one of the preeminent politicians of our time. Obama won his Senate election in Illinois, our 5th largest state - where he again started as an underdog - in a landslide with over 3.5 million votes. That's over 21 million votes, not to mention all his other votes in the state legislature.
So the right-wing is trying to diminish Obama's experience comparing him to Palin, who has received well under a million votes her entire career which consists mostly of mayor of a small town and a short term as governor of one of our smallest states. For every vote Palin has received during her career, Obama has received over 20 more. And the right-wing is claiming Palin is more experienced.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Does Obama Really Want to Talk About Earmarks?
If Barack Obama wants to rail against Sarah Palin's record on earmarks he'd better be prepared to defend why he allocated hundreds of millions of tax dollars for his own pet-projects.
As Governor, Palin went on to veto $231 million worth of pork from the proposed state budget her first year in office. The next year, state legislators reinserted many of those same earmarks into the budget and asked the Governor to okay $58 billion to pay them. She vetoed them again.
The Democrats are also trying to blame Palin for all of Alaska's earmarks, but only U.S. senators and members of Congress are responsible for snagging their pork. And as U.S. Senator Obama requested more than $740 million for his pet-projects in the last three years, including a $1 million earmark for the hospital his wife was working at and a $750,000 earmark to pay for the renovation of a space center named after top Obama donor James S. Crown's grandfather, Henry Crown.
And since Obama is bringing it up, why doesn't he explain why he sought more than $3.4 million earmarks for his VP Joe Biden's lobbyist son, Hunter? I thought Obama detested lobbyists and those kind of cozy, Senate relationships.
List of some of Obama's other earmarks from a previous edition of Townhall magazine:
-$8.5 million to prevent Asian Carp fish from entering the Great Lakes through the Chicago waterways
-More than $6.9 million for Chicago museums
-$5 million for the Young Men’s Christian Association to combat chronic diseases and obesity
-$3 million for the Adler Planetarium
-$3 million for a new Chicago park to honor Jean Bapstiste Point DuSable.
-$2 million for ethanol research
-$2 million for soybean research
-$200,000 for the construction of a theater company “using green construction standards”
So, again, does Barack Obama really want to have this conversation? Does he want to defend his vote for the $400 million Bridge to Nowhere and his earmarks for Joe Biden's lobbyist son, Asian Carp, museums, planetariums and green construction?
Interested readers can also peruse Obama's earmarks requests on Lynn Sweet's blog HERE that she posted after he finally decided to release all his requests. He refused to disclose them to Sweet, the Chicago-Sun Times reporter whose been covering Obama, for almost a year.
http://townhall.com/blog/g/3987f806-e398-4968-828b-68e129120082?trackbacks=true#commentAnchor
*** I don't believe I ever said that you had!
Sorry, I must have misinterpreted your comment...
Sounds to me most (NOT ALL) posters have their nails dug so deeply into one side or another that they are losing sight of something that I, personally, find extremely important: objectivity in judgments.
...it sounded like you were suggesting my arguments lacked "objectivity." ; )
One of Obama's Earmark Requests Was for the Hospital That Employs Michelle Obama
Dan Riehl notes, via Amanda Carpenter, that in the list of earmarks he requested, $1 million was requested for the construction of a new hospital pavilion at the University Of Chicago. The request was put in in 2006.
You know who works for the University of Chicago Hospital?
Michelle Obama. She's vice president of community affairs.
As Byron noted, "In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office."
Looks like that raise was worth it.
*** I am not comfortable with Palin either, mostly because of her associations,
Obama associates with racists, anti-Americans, terrorists and felons...this makes you comfortable?
*** her personal-life,
A loving wife...a loving mother...a successful politician...a woman with values and morals...what is it about her "personal life" that makes you uncomfortable?
*** and her lack of experience.
She has more practical and executive experience than Obama has...and she's only running for VICE President. It sounds absurd to reject a VP candidate with more experience than the Dem Presidential candidate because she "doesn't have enough experience."
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