All the oil money they bring in and they still turn to the lower 48 to pay for the AK communities. Nice little US-Iraq $et up you got there, Sarah.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/09/05/sarah-palin-the-earmark-queen-of-ak-left-wasilla-20-million-in-debt/In 2000, Sarah Palin, as mayor of the Alaskan town of Wasilla, hired a Washington lobbyist to secure federal earmarks for her community.
This is not totally atypical in her state. Alaska’s government receives more money per capita in federal earmark money than any other state, despite being the only state in the union with no income tax and no sales tax. They fund their government primarily with petroleum money, and recently distributed oil profits to its citizens in the form of rebate checks.
But even in her heavily earmarked state, Sarah Palin was the earmark queen.
From 2000 to 2003, she secured over $27 million in earmarks, averaging $6.7 million in federal money every year for her town of about 6,700 people. ...
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-earmarks3-2008sep03,0,2482434.storyThree times in recent years,
McCain's catalogs of "objectionable" spending have included earmarks for this small Alaska town, requested by its mayor at the time -- Sarah Palin(snip)
This year, Palin, who has been governor for nearly 22 months, defended earmarking as a vital part of the legislative system. "The federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship," she wrote in a newspaper column.
In 2001, McCain's list of spending that had been approved without the normal budget scrutiny included a $500,000 earmark for a public transportation project in Wasilla. The Arizona senator targeted $1 million in a 2002 spending bill for an emergency communications center in town -- one that local law enforcement has said is redundant and creates confusion.
McCain also criticized $450,000 set aside for an agricultural processing facility in Wasilla that was requested during Palin's tenure as mayor and cleared Congress soon after she left office in 2002. The funding was provided to help direct locally grown produce to schools, prisons and other government institutions, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-earmarks1-2008sep01,0,6108885.storyPalin relied on earmark system she now opposes
"Vice presidential candidate Palin is decrying a system that has been very lucrative for her state and that, at least to some degree, she participated in," he said.
The Arizona senator is an out and out opponent of the earmark system and for years has led efforts to end it, including reading the earmarks for defense contractors aloud on the Senate floor to embarrass those who sponsored them.
Yet Alaska has been the largest beneficiary of the earmark system through the years and its most senior legislators, including Stevens and Rep. Don Young, also a Republican, were among its most ardent defenders.
The money that the state of Alaska requested for 2009 includes $25 million for "Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery" and $3.2 million for seal and sea lion biological research, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-earmarks13-2008sep13,0,4231195.storyJohn McCain got it wrong Friday when he asserted that his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, had not requested any earmarks, the spending directives lawmakers insert in spending bills that McCain has vowed to eliminate.
Palin, in fact, requested $198 million in federal earmarks in February, including such expenses as $487,000 to fight obesity in Alaska and $4 million to develop recreational trails.By day's end, the McCain campaign backed down from the claim the GOP presidential candidate made on the ABC television show "The View."
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