Does anyone remember the GOP Obama Clock that measured how long it had been since Barack Obama visited Iraq and Afghanistan? If memory serves, it was vitally important to Team McCain that they establish how unprepared the junior Illinois Senator was for high office, since he couldn’t make decisions about an area he hadn’t visited.
RNC Chair, Mike Duncan, is quoted thusly:
How would Obama make informed judgments in the future when he has not seen the situation in Iraq since the surge began?
While I have been patiently waiting, I’ve yet to hear similar protestations from Senator McCain on how the hockey mom who would be Queen has yet to set foot in Afghanistan and has, quite literally, only “set foot” for a moment inside the borders of Iraq, coming nowhere near the action “on the ground” in Baghdad. How will she be able to make informed judgements should she be called upon to take the reigns?
“But, Jazz,” I can hear you complaining, “she’s only been Governor for less than two years! You can’t possibly do everything you’d like in such a short period!” True enough. But in her sole trip outside of North America, she did, in fact, make it to Germany and Kuwait. (During the latter excursion she was right on the Iraq border.) Would a person so concerned about our troops really travel that far and not make the extra hops to stop by Kabul and the Green Zone in Baghdad? I mean, wouldn’t you want to at least stop by to see the troops and say, “Hi! Good job… God bless..” or something?
Instead, Palin did hit the road… to Carson City. There, she repeated the same stump speech from the teleprompter she’s been using since day one and took no questions from reporters. (Note to Rick Davis: you really need to get her some new material because the current routine has some gaping holes of mendacity in it and people are starting to notice.) There, she repeated her story about “thanks but no thanks” to that Bridge to Nowhere. What the pundits are largely failing to note is that not only was she “for it before she was against it,” but the project is NOT dead.
In a process begun this past winter, the state’s DOT is currently considering (PDF) a number of alternative solutions (five other possible bridges or three different ferry routes) to link Ketchikan and Gravina Island.
“AHA!” you say. “But she did say they would build it themselves, taking the whole pork thing off the table!” Ummm… not so fast, Skippy.
The DOT has not yet developed cost estimates for those proposals, Wetherell said, but $73 million of the approximately $223 million Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Rep. Don Young (R-AK) earmarked for the bridge in 2005 has been set aside for the Gravina Access Project.
Is there anything in these benchmark claims about Palin’s “maverick” style on wasteful spending that will turn out to be accurate? And she continues, unbelievably, to hector Barack Obama on his earmark requests. (A fair charge for any porkbusters in the audience, as Obama and Biden both requested around $300M for last year.) Of course, she raises these charges knowing full well that during her brief sojourn in the Alaska Governor’s mansion she presided over the largest per capita binge at the federal feed bag of any of the fifty states. Durning that same period, state spending in Alaska skyrocketed as state coffers swelled from oil boom profits. (In part from Palin’s state tax on oil companies and their “windfall profits” of 25 to 50 percent.)
She went on to claim that Alaska “provides 20% of U.S. energy.” While I doubt she and Todd are running an oil rig in their back yard personally, it’s still an impressive claim. If only it were true.
Palin claims Alaska “produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy.” That’s not true.
Alaska did produce 14 percent of all the oil from U.S. wells last year, but that’s a far cry from all the “energy” produced in the U.S.
Alaska’s share of domestic energy production was 3.5 percent, according to the official figures kept by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
And if by “supply” Palin meant all the energy consumed in the U.S., and not just produced here, then Alaska’s production accounted for only 2.4 percent.
All of this is stacking up on top of stories which already worried me about Palin’s apparent penchant for enemy lists and vendettas. This increased today with this story of how Ms. Palin seems to be quite comfortable with the idea of using her office to punish foes and reward friends.
So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.
Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.
“There’s an opening in Agriculture? Oh! I should get Franci for that! She looked so good at our high school reunion last year, and her mom used to make the best cookies! (And I still feel a little bad about beating her out for that spot on the cheerleading squad.)”
But this long collection of items, which are doubtless just the latest in my tiring list of baseless smears against Sarah Palin and her family, has distracted us from my original question. Will we see Rick Davis and his crew setting up a website with a “clock” to count how long it’s been since Sarah Palin visited Kabul or Baghdad? Lets see… we can start the clock at 44 years, eight months and three days.