On earmarks

An email from doubleplusundead led me to Cuffy Miegs‘ artful dissection of a Wall Street Journal article on Governor Sarah Palin’s supposed “airport to no where”;

The Wall Street Journal’s credibility takes a hit today as it reports on Gov. Palin’s federal funding requests for Alaska. The problem? The WSJ sloppily declines to identify which of these requests were hypocritical earmarks and which requests were normal legislative appropriations:

Somehow, the Wall Street Journal thinks that taking earmarks from Congress is the same as giving earmarks from Congress and uses a governor’s requests as evidence of her (and McCain’s) insincerity about ending earmarks.

A governor’s responsibility is first to her own taxpayers and with a Congress more than willing to shell out money for pet projects of it’s members to buy job security, it was also her responsibility to get as much free money to make life easier for as many residents as possible. Does the Wall Street Journal think that if Palin hadn’t spent that money that Congress would have written the rest of us a check to return that money to the taxpayers?

I’ve said on this blog in the past that the closer government is to the people, the more liberal it should be – a governor knows better how to spend money in her state than a bureaucrat in Washington. If government sees it’s job as redistribution of wealth to benefit the least of us (I don’t agree, by the way, but government does see itself as that these days), and we know damn well that government is going to spend every dollar they get (and more), who can fault a governor for getting as much of that money as they can for their own people to improve their own states?

The problem is in Washington, not in Alaska. Fault the Democrats AND Republicans who refuse to break free of the culture of buying votes with tax dollars.

Category: John McCain/Sarah Palin, Media