The Beaverhausen Chronicles: Earmarks

More lies from the Muttley/Beaverhausen/Shrub campaign. As reported in today's Wall Street Journal:

What Muttley/Beaverhausen Say
• Sen. John McCain said his running mate hadn't sought earmarks or special-interest spending from Congress, presenting her as a fiscal conservative. McCain said Gov. Palin shared his views and hasn't sought congressional earmarks. "Not as governor she hasn't," he said.
• The McCain campaign said that Palin's overall record is one of fiscal discipline. "Her record is cutting the number of earmark requests from the previous administration sizably," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, and she has vetoed wasteful state spending.
• Gov. Palin herself suggested she no longer seeks earmarks for her state. "The abuse of earmarks, it's un-American, it's undemocratic, and it's not going to be accepted in a McCain-Palin administration. Earmark abuse will stop."
• The McCain campaign has also come under fire for saying on the stump and in TV ads that Gov. Palin killed the controversial "Bridge to Nowhere," a $223 million earmark linking the mainland to a sparsely populated island.

The Facts
• State records show Palin has asked U.S. taxpayers to fund $453 million in specific Alaska projects over the past two years. These projects include more than $130M in federal funds that would benefit Alaska's fishing industry, $9M to help Alaska oil companies, and $4.5M to upgrade an airport on a Bering Sea island that has a year-round population of less than 100.
• In the current fiscal year, she is seeking $197 million for 31 projects. In the prior year, she sought $256 million for dozens more projects ranging from research on rockfish and harbor-seal genetics to rural sanitation and obesity prevention.
• By comparison, her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, sought more than $350 million in his last year in office.
• Alaska's state government is among the wealthiest in the U.S. Flush with oil and gas royalties, it doesn't impose income or sales taxes. In fact, money flows the other way: Every man, woman and child this year got a check for $3,200.
• She supported the Bridge To Nowhere project initially and killed it after it was widely criticized and Congress allowed the state to use the funds for other projects.

So What About Senator Obama?
• Sen. Barack Obama requested a total of $860 million in earmarks in his Senate years. That doesn't include $78M for projects that were national in scope and had been requested by many lawmakers.
• Sen. Obama halted all earmark requests in fiscal 2009.

Using the same calculation that the McCain campaign uses, the total amount of earmarked dollars divided by the number of working days while each held office, Gov. Palin sought $980,000 per workday, compared with roughly $893,000 for Sen. Obama.

I guess this is where McCain's lack of computer knowledge comes into play. Everything, I mean everything, is available on the Internet. Plausible deniability is no longer a campaign strategy.

Read the complete article here.