This is one of the main reasons she gave for her premature retirement as Alaska's governor:
Pretty damning stuff, huh? But wait, as always, there's more to her story:"Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I've been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations....
"The state has wasted thousands of hours of your time and shelled out some two million of your dollars to respond to 'opposition research' -- that's money not going to fund teachers or troopers or safer roads.... Todd and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills in order to set the record straight. And what about the people who offer up these silly accusations? It doesn't cost them a dime so they're not going to stop draining public resources -- spending other peoples' money in their game.
"It's pretty insane -- my staff and I spend most of our day dealing with this instead of progressing our state now."
But there's new evidence to suggest the argument is just factually wrong. Greg Sargent reported that the governor's own office conceded yesterday that money used to respond to the ethics charges are part of fixed costs that would have gone to the same lawyers, whether the charges were filed or not. The funds wouldn't have gone to schools, police, or transportation, as Palin claimed. The $1.9 million "was arrived at by adding up attorney hours spent on fending off complaints -- based on the fixed salaries of lawyers in the governor's office and the Department of Law. The money would have gone to the lawyers no matter what they were doing."As I've said, no savvy politician leaves office just to save the taxpayers a few bucks, and Palin is a savvy politician. Just add one more lie to the list, and wait for the other scandal shoe to eventually drop. You just know that it's coming.
[Update: Olbermann breaks it down and also asks whether we should be surprised at this point:
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2 comments:
According to Levi, she's leaving in order to cash in while the cashing is good, which was my best guess. My hope was for a nice juicy scandal.
Obviously, Levi has an ax to grind, but it's fun to have him out there throwing spitballs.
I can't imagine what was going through that kid's head while he was standing there at the convention next to Bristol, looking uncomfortable as hell in that suit ex DLB but "How the fuck did I get here?" is my best guess.
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