Palin Billed Alaska for 319 Nights Spent at Home During First 19 Months in Office
ANCHORAGE, Sept. 8 -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a "per diem" allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.
The governor also has charged the state for travel expenses to take her children on official out-of-town missions. And her husband, Todd, has billed the state for expenses and a daily allowance for trips he makes on official business for his wife.
Palin, who earns $125,000 a year, claimed and received $16,951 as her allowance, which officials say was permitted because her official "duty station" is Juneau, according to an analysis of her travel documents by The Washington Post.
The governor's daughters and husband charged the state $43,490 to travel, and many of the trips were between their house in Wasilla and Juneau, the capital city 600 miles away, the documents show.
Gubernatorial spokeswoman Sharon Leighow said Monday that Palin's expenses are not unusual and that, under state policy, the first family could have claimed per diem expenses for each child taken on official business but has not done so.
Before she became the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee, Palin was little known outside Alaska. Now, with the campaign emphasizing her executive experience, her record as mayor of Wasilla, as a state oil-and-gas commissioner and as governor is receiving intense scrutiny.
During her speech at the Republican National Convention last week, Palin cast herself as a crusader for fiscal rectitude as Alaska's governor. She noted that she sold a state-owned plane used by the former governor. "While I was at it, I got rid of a few things in the governor's office that I didn't believe our citizens should have to pay for," she said to loud applause.
Speaking from Palin's Anchorage office, Leighow said Palin dealt with the plane and also trimmed other expenses, including forgoing a chef in the governor's mansion because she preferred to cook for her family. The first family's travel is an expected part of the job, she said.
"As a matter of protocol, the governor and the first family are expected to attend community events across the state," she said. "It's absolutely reasonable that the first family participates in community events."
The state finance director, Kim Garnero, said Alaska law exempts the governor's office from elaborate travel regulations. Said Leighow: "The governor is entitled to a per diem, and she claims it."
The popular governor collected the per diem allowance from April 22, four days after the birth of her fifth child, until June 3, when she flew to Juneau for two days. Palin moved her family to the capital during the legislative session last year, but prefers to stay in Wasilla and drive 45 miles to Anchorage to a state office building where she conducts most of her business, aides have said.
Palin rarely sought reimbursement for meals while staying in Anchorage or Wasilla, the reports show.
She wrote some form of "Lodging -- own residence" or "Lodging -- Wasilla residence" more than 30 times at the same time she took a per diem, according to the reports. In two dozen undated amendments to the reports, the governor deleted the reference to staying in her home but still charged the per diem.
Palin charged the state a per diem for working on Nov. 22, 2007 -- Thanksgiving Day. The reason given, according to the expense report, was the Great Alaska Shootout, an annual NCAA college basketball tournament held in Anchorage.
In separate filings, the state was billed about $25,000 for Palin's daughters' expenses and $19,000 for her husband's.
Flights topped the list for the most expensive items, and the daughter whose bill was the highest was Piper, 7, whose flights cost nearly $11,000, while Willow, 14, claimed about $6,000 and Bristol, 17, accounted for about $3,400.
One event was in New York City in October 2007, when Bristol accompanied the governor to Newsweek's third annual Women and Leadership Conference, toured the New York Stock Exchange and met local officials and business executives. The state paid for three nights in a $707-a-day hotel room. Garnero said the governor's office has the authority to approve hotel stays above $300.
Asked Monday about the official policy on charging for children's travel expenses, Garnero said: "We cover the expenses of anyone who's conducting state business. I can't imagine kids could be doing that."
But Leighow said many of the hundreds of invitations Palin receives include requests for her to bring her family, placing the definition of "state business" with the party extending the invitation.
One such invitation came in October 2007, when Willow flew to Juneau to join the Palin family on a tour of the Hub Juneau Christian Teen Center, where Palin and her family worship when they are in Juneau. The state gave the center $25,000, according to a May 2008 memo.
Leighow noted that under state policy, all of the governor's children are entitled to per diem expenses, even her infant son. "The first family declined the per diem [for] the children," Leighow said. "The amount that they had declined was $4,461, as of August 5."
The family also charged for flights around the state, including trips to Alaska events such as the start of the Iditarod dog-sled race and the Iron Dog snowmobile race, a contest that Todd Palin won.
Meanwhile, Todd Palin spent $725 to fly to Edmonton, Alberta, for "information gathering and planning meeting with Northern Alberta Institute of Technology," according to an expense report. During the three-day trip, he charged the state $291 for his per diem. A notation said "costs paid by Dept. of Labor." He also billed the state $1,371 for a flight to Washington to attend a National Governors Association meeting with his wife.
Gov. Palin has spent far less on her personal travel than her predecessor: $93,000 on airfare in 2007, compared with $463,000 spent the year before by her predecessor, Frank Murkowski. He traveled often in an executive jet that Palin called an extravagance during her campaign. She sold it after she was sworn into office.
"She flies coach and encourages her cabinet to fly coach as well," said Garnero, whose job is equivalent to state controller. "Some do, some don't."
Leighow said that the governor's staff has tallied the travel expenses charged by Murkowski's wife: $35,675 in 2006, $43,659 in 2005, $13,607 in 2004 and $29,608 in 2003. Associates of Murkowski said the former governor was moose hunting and could not be reached to comment.
In the past, per diem claims by Alaska state officials have carried political risks. In 1988, the head of the state Commerce Department was pilloried for collecting a per diem charge of $50 while staying in his Anchorage home, according to local news accounts. The commissioner, the late Tony Smith, resigned amid a series of controversies.
"It was quite the little scandal," said Tony Knowles, the Democratic governor from 1994 to 2000. "I gave a direction to all my commissioners if they were ever in their house, whether it was Juneau or elsewhere, they were not to get a per diem because, clearly, it is and it looks like a scam -- you pay yourself to live at home," he said.
Knowles, whose children were school-age at the start of his first term, said that his wife sometimes accompanied him to conferences overseas but that he could "count on one hand" the number of times his children accompanied him.
"And the policy was not to reimburse for family travel on commercial airlines, because there is no direct public benefit to schlepping kids around the state," he said. The rules were articulated by Mike Nizich, then director of administrative services in the governor's office, said Knowles and an aide to another former governor, Walter Hickel.
Nizich is now Palin's chief of staff. He did not return a phone call seeking comment. The rules governing family travel on state-owned aircraft appear less clear. Knowles said he operated under the understanding that immediate family could accompany the governor without charge.
But during the Murkowski years, that practice was questioned, and the state attorney general's office produced an opinion saying laws then in effect required reimbursement for spousal travel.
What a Community Organizer Does
By Joe Klein at Time's Swampland
Slowly, slowly, I am recovering from the extremely effective bilge festival staged by the Republicans last night. And while there is much to discuss, there was one item, in particular, that has to be considered infuriating: the attack on Barack Obama's service as a community organizer by the odious Rudy Giuliani--he's come to look like a villain in a Frank Capra movie, hasn't he?--and Sarah Palin.
This morning, I received a press release from a group called Catholic Democrats about the work--the mission, the witness--that Obama performed after he got out of college. Here's the first paragraph:
Catholic Democrats is expressing surprise and shock that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's acceptance speech tonight mocked her opponent's work in the 1980s for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. She belittled Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's experience as a community organizer in Catholic parishes on the South Side of Chicago, work he undertook instead of pursuing a lucrative career on Wall Street. In her acceptance speech, Ms. Palin said, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities." Community organizing is at the heart of Catholic Social Teaching to end poverty and promote social justice.
So here is what Giuliani and Palin didn't know: Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed--job training, help with housing and so forth--from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord's work--the sort of mission Jesus preached (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a "task from God.")
This is what Palin and Giuliani were mocking. They were making fun of a young man's decision "to serve a cause greater than himself," in the words of John McCain. They were, therefore, mocking one of their candidate's favorite messages. Obama served the poor for three years, then went to law school. To describe this service--the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other--as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme.
Perhaps La Pasionaria of the Northern Slope didn't know this when she read the words they gave her. But Giuliani--a profoundly lapsed Catholic, who must have met more than a few religious folk toiling in the inner cities--should have known. ("I don't even know what that is," he sneered.") What a shameful performance.
Bush: "McCain Wasn't 'Tortured'" - War Criminal Tries To Avoid Self Incrimination
Reposted from The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan.
I checked the transcript this morning and the biggest bombshell in this campaign so far, in my opinion, is the following section of Bush's speech:John McCain's life is a story of service above self. Forty years ago, in an enemy prison camp, Lieutenant Commander McCain was offered release ahead of others who had been held longer.
His wounds were so severe that anyone would have understood if he had accepted.
John refused. For that selfless decision, he suffered nearly five more years of beatings and isolation. When he was released, his arms had been broken, but not his honor.
Fellow citizens, if the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain's resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will.
Now have you ever heard someone recount what was done to John McCain in the Hanoi Hilton and not use the word "torture"? I haven't. "Beatings and isolation" is a bizarre phrase to use to describe the torture that was done to John McCain. I'm sure McCain thinks so.
Am I being persnickety? As with the Trig story, there's a very easy way to find out - if the press will simply do its job. A White House reporter needs to ask the president, quite simply, if he believes that John McCain was tortured in Vietnam. Just ask. Use that specific word. See if he can answer.
The reason he put it this way, I infer, is that if he describes what was done to McCain as torture, he has incriminated himself for war crimes.
I repeat: The reason he put it this way is that if he describes what was done to McCain as torture, he has incriminated himself for war crimes.
The Palin Story is Helping Corporate Media Grow A Backbone
There is a huge change in the coverage of the Palin story from the perspective of the corporate media on various main stream cable news channels. It seems various reporters are actually growing a backbone and questioning the Repubtard talking points and now letting them pass by at face value unquestioned.
The first sign things were crumbling was an interview Monday on CNN with McCain aide Tucker Bounds and reporter Campbell Brown who asked Bounds what international experience Palin has. Bounds kept trying to change the subject to Obama, falling back on his robot-like talking points making him sound like a broken record. This has been working for the Republicans when dealing with these reporters for years.
As a result, McCain threw a tantrum and pulled out of Larry King that night, but CNN stood its ground.
Then Wolf Blitzer of all people pressed Rudy Giuiani on the same subject and wouldn't let up. Rudy is the best skater out there, but Wolf cornered him.
I just saw former Republican governor of NY George Pataki try to bullshit Nora O'Donnell on MSNBC and she (smiling all the way) wasn't having any of it.
I don't know what happened to give these reporters a backbone, finally -- but whatever it is -- please don't stop! This is how you do it. Let's push these guys until they start talking sense. Let's get our national conversation grounded, at least a little, in reality.
When I wrote the title for this piece I may have understated it -- the Palin story is not just changing corporate media, it may be revolutionizing it.
Why has the press all of a sudden declared its independence? I don't know. I'd love to find out. I have a couple of theories.
1. McCain broke an unspoken rule, he didn't use the press to vet this candidate, and that was enough for them. They're saying, in unison, "We know how to do this" -- finally they have a real role in the electoral process, not just to be bullshitted by everyone, so get out of our way while we do our jobs. I'd like to think this is the primary drive. But there's also this...
2. They are American citizens too, and they're horrified by the way McCain made this decision, and want to send a message to him and all other politicians in the future -- if you screw up like this, we're going to push you until you admit it. If that's true, then I would bet that no matter how good a speech Palin gives tonight, she has no future on the national ticket.
3. They learned from the National Enquirer beating all of them on the Edwards scandal, and made a decision not to accept non-answer answers to serious questions, like How well did you vet this candidate?
I think McCain screwed up, he should have gone with the boring predictable choice of Romney. They might have lost the election, but it would have been close. Now, with Palin, I don't think it will be close. It could be they make it through this process (but I doubt it) but everyone's had a look at how McCain uses all his much-touted experience. Get this -- He's turning Obama into the safe, conservative choice. Key point. Obama was going to have a hard time making that case, but McCain just made it for him. All Obama has to do is smile and give a few speeches and show up at the debates. He'll do well at all of that.