Sarah Palin’s Bridge to Pork

Sarah Palin stumps that she returns pork, but she seems to be a pork professional.

In fact, Palin has always been a pork-crazed maniac, the kind of straw man McCain loves to bash on the stump.

This year Alaska received nearly $100 million more in pork than any other state ($379,669,715). According to the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Database, Palin employs the lobbying firm Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates to seek earmarks for the state of Alaska.

You think the vetters missed that when they were looking into her past? If so they also missed this:

According to that same Senate Lobbying Disclosure Database, Palin paid the lobbying firm of Hoffman Silver Gilman & Blasco to lobby on behalf of the City of Wasilla while she was mayor – an office she won in 1996 by collecting 617 votes – and according to Citizens Against Government Waste, in 2000 the City of Wasilla received

  1. a $1 million transportation earmark for the Wasilla Intermodal Facility for bus and bus related facilities while
  2. Wasilla’s Life Quest Community Mental Health Center gobbled up a $500,000 earmark, same amount as the town’s emergency shelter, although less than
  3. the $600,000 earmark for the Wasilla city bus facility. Meanwhile Wasilla received
  4. a $1 million earmark for the Wasilla Regional Dispatch Center,
  5. a $1.5 million earmark for water and sewer improvements, and
  6. a $2.6 million transportation earmark for an alternative route project.

And back then only 5,000 people lived there.

Now that’s pork.


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