After finishing as a runner up for Miss Alaska 1984, Sarah Palin went on to be crowned the state's Queen of Earmarks and its Empress of Fiscal Irresponsibility.

Wonk Room: Sarah Palin: Earmark Queen Of The Earmark State

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. ...(read on)

As mayor, Sarah Palin managed to secure a thousand dollars a year per person in her city in earmarks, yet...

When Palin left office in 2002, Wasilla had “racked up nearly $20 million in long-term debt,” or roughly $3,000 of debt per resident. ...(more)

Asked in 1996, her first year in office, about her ability to "effectively run" the city, Palin claimed:

"It's not rocket science," Palin said, "It's $6 million and 53 employees."

Only "$6 million and 53 employees" and yet she managed to bury it $20 mil. in the red in just two-terms. How very Bush-like. And she wants us to trust her to be a heartbeat away from the national budget?

Video Update: Sit Room's Abbi Tatton just reported on the story: Download | play Download | play

The internets were abuzz immediately when this strange shot of McCain during his RNC acceptance speech gave more ammo during closeups for another Colbert Report 'McCain Green Screen Challenge' to videophiles with a knack for chroma key effects, but what caught Josh Marshall's eye was the building being used as the backdrop with the green green lawn that was providing the fodder. Initial speculation that it was one of McCain's innumerable mansions quickly faded when his readers confirmed that it was actually Walter Reed Middle School in North Holllywood, CA (pictured on right, above), but why?

A local Bay Area reporter for NBC picked up on it and called the school to find out. The receptionist said, "We were all wondering that, What was that about? We don't know," but TPM is reporting that they do plan to release a statement. [see update below]

An odd fact, uncovered by TPM's Greg Sargent, is that the school actually served as the backdrop for Matt Santos' announcement of his presidential candidacy on The West Wing. Not really sure what to make of that, but it is quite an odd coincidence in any case.

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So much for the well-publicized promises to "set aside partisan politics and festivities planned for the convention opening" and adopt "a more a subdued business-only tone in deference to Gulf Coast residents" due to the hurricane.

ABC's Blotter: As NOLA Residents Flee, Republican Party Officials Don Pink Boas and Swig Vodka Shots

As residents of New Orleans were fleeing Hurricane Gustav, top Republican party officials donned pink boas and swigged vodka shots at a wild whirl of corporate and lobbyist-paid parties this weekend in Minneapolis-St. Paul. [...]

[T]he National Rifle Association, Lockheed Martin and the American Trucking Association put on a raucus six-hour party at a downtown bar featuring music by the band "Hookers and Blow." There was no evidence of any actual prostitutes or cocaine.

h/t Wonkette

John McCain has claimed that he believes "there is a special place in hell" for Tucker Eskew and the others who were behind the push-poll that implanted the idea in S.C. voters' minds in 2000 that he had fathered an illegitimate black child, but that sure didn't stop him from hiring Eskew to help prepare Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Jake Tapper: McCain Hires GOP Operative Who Helped Smear Him in South Carolina in 2000

Former officials of Sen. John McCain's 2000 campaign expressed shock and disbelief Monday to learn than the GOP presidential nominee had hired South Carolina political consultant Tucker Eskew.

Eskew, along with Warren Tompkins and Neal Rhodes, were key members of then-Gov. George W. Bush's South Carolina team during the 2000 primaries. McCain and his team long held Bush, Tompkins, Rhodes and Eskew responsible for the various smears against McCain and his family in the Palmetto state during that contentious contest. [...]

Asked if the McCain campaign would have a comment about hiring one of the South Carolina strategists the senator and his 2000 campaign team once held responsible for smears against him, McCain 2008 spokesman Brian Rogers emailed, "No."

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise after McCain hired Rove's protegé two months ago and began running the negative campaign he pledged not to. There's apparently no depth of depravity that McCain won't stoop to and no issue he won't flip-flop on in an attempt to win this election.

Best McCain Analogy Evah...

From the comments on the Just Because McCain Says He’s a “Maverick” Doesn’t Make It So post:

fiver Says :

A high school friend of mine had an old Maverick. It had lots of miles and was pretty run down. It didn't always start in the winter, and it overheated pretty easily if you drove it to far. On the highway it generally pulled to the right, but it could change direction in an instant - almost so fast you couldn't remember the original direction.

Of course it used a ton of gas, burnt oil and created clouds of smoke. But every time my buddy got pulled over, he'd tell the cops the car had been towed and spent a long time in the pound. For some reason, that excuse seemed to work all the time…

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

"... not a maverick."

Download | play Download | play h/t Heather! (Watch the entire segment on YouTube)

Via Digby:

Works for me:

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... Howard Wolfson, Senator Clinton's former communications director, said that this pick might just work to draw women to the Republican ticket. Are you worried about that?

KERRY: Well, with all due respect to Howard, you know, I have much more respect for the Clinton supporters than that sort of quick- blush take with -- I mean, how stupid do they think the Clinton supporters are, for Heaven sakes?

Do they think Clinton supporters supported Hillary only because she was a woman. For Heaven sakes, they supported Hillary because of all the things she's fought for, because she fights for health care, which John McCain doesn't support; she fights for children and children's health care, which John McCain voted against; she fights for a windfall profits tax on the oil company, which John McCain opposes.

I mean, for Heaven sakes, the people who supported Hillary Clinton are not going to be seduced just because John McCain has picked a woman. They're going to look at what she supports.

The fact that she doesn't even support the notion that climate change is manmade -- she's back there with the Flat Earth Caucus. And I don't see how those women are going to be fooled into believing -- I think it's almost insulting to the Hillary supporters that they believe they would support somebody who is against almost everything that they believe in.

STEPHANOPOULOS: OK.

KERRY: What John McCain has proven with this choice -- this is very important, George. John McCain wanted to choose Tom Ridge. He wanted to choose Joe Lieberman. He wanted to choose another candidate, but you know what? Rush Limbaugh and the right wing vetoed it.

And John McCain was forced to come back and pick a sort of Cheney-esque social conservative who's going to satisfy the base. What John McCain has proven with this choice is that John McCain is the prisoner of the right wing, not a maverick.

I like it. ...

I do too. Kerry keeps swinging for the fences like that and someone's going to want to test him for steroids.

Digby also shares some good advice, as always, on what our response to Palin might ought to be. While I tend to agree, that might be a tall order, as this well just keeps getting deeper. Your thoughts?

On Fox News Sunday when asked to "assess the Bush presidency" by Chris Wallace, John McCain asserted that "history will judge the president" and ran through a litany of talking points attempting to differentiate himself from the current administration. One area he was most insistent about was that he is a "maverick" who continues to oppose the Bush administration's use of torture.

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McCain: I obviously don’t want to torture any prisoners. There’s a long list of areas that we were in disagreement on, but I also think ...

Wallace: You’re not suggesting he did want to torture prisoners?

McCain: Well, waterboarding to me is torture, OK? And waterboarding was advocated by the administration and according to published reports was used, but the point is, we’ve had our disagreements, and I've been called a quote "maverick," and I'm not the most popular person in my party.

Though McCain himself was a victim of torture and has been outspoken about his opposition to it, his voting record has not matched his rhetoric.

ThinkProgress:

McCain seems to forget that he voted against a bill that would have banned the CIA from using waterboarding. In fact, when the bill passed, McCain urged Bush to veto it, which he did. Thus, McCain’s claim that he “obviously doesn’t want to torture prisoners” rings hollow. Indeed, because of Bush’s veto, the CIA retains the option of waterboarding prisoners. ..(more)

And it wasn't just torture that John McCain was being disingenuous about. His oft-repeated claim that he is a "maverick" is a myth. His own home state paper, The Arizona Republic, concluded otherwise, finding through an analysis of his Senate votes over the past decade "that McCain almost never thwarted his party's objectives." Just like he did on torture, he oft pretends to be against something but only until his vote is actually needed to count, and whenever that happens he falls reliably in line.

Likewise, his attempts to differentiate himself from Bush would be laughable if so much weren't at stake. John McCain has voted with George W. Bush 95 percent of the time in 2007, and has voted with him 100 percent so far this year.

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Even after all of the criticism that John McCain has received recently for repeatedly citing his experience as a POW as an illogical excuse for everything from his extramarital affairs to his rule-breaking to having so many more homes than most people have pairs of shoes that he can't keep track of them (as if his having been a POW 35 years ago has somehow inoculated McCain from any criticism whatsoever for any thing he does) his campaign sure wasn't kidding when they responded by letting it be known that it had only just begun to exploit his POWness.

Greg Sargent:

In an interview with KDKA radio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, John McCain POW-POW-POWed when asked about charges that he's an elitist who's out of touch with the American worker on kitchen-table issues.

McCain: [I]n all due respect my friends, I know what it's like to not have a house, I know what it's like not to have a kitchen table. I know what it's like not to have a table or a chair. For five and a half years, I sat in a cell with nothing but concrete floor and three boards to sleep on.

The argument goes something like this: John McCain, as a former POW, can't be out of touch with the average working stiff. He totally understands ordinary folks' financial hardships (obviously) because he was a POW. Is any of this making sense to you? No, me neither. And it's not just the McCain campaign itself that wants to beat you over the head with the fact that McCain must be impervious to any criticism simply because he was a POW. The South Carolina GOP has also hopped on the POW-talk express with perhaps the most POWerful ad ever:

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Okay, this has gone way past ridiculous already, and it seems it's not going to stop until November. Everyone knows John McCain was a POW, and everyone with a brain knows that having been a POW is not a valid excuse for cheating on your wife or for saying something stupid, nor is it a blanket policy qualifier for the office of the Presidency.

There ought to be some simple way to put an end to this kind of nonsense, and DKos' Georgia10 is on it:

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Richard Dreyfuss, appearing on MSNBC to discuss the new documentary he narrates, America Betrayed, on Hurricane Katrina, the worst man-made disaster in American history, seized the opportunity in front of a cheering crowd of onlookers to blast George W. Bush and the Republican party for all the damage they have inflicted upon this country over the last 8 years.

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Dreyfuss: I don't think the Europeans have any confidence in our government. I think that the last eight years has destroyed two hundred years of respect and dedication. And I think we have been the point of meaning and admiration in the world for very specific reasons, and George Bush trashed it.

O’Donnell: So, you don't think that John McCain would be able to manage this government well, would have a different response than George Bush to a Hurricane Katrina?

Dreyfuss: I think the Republican party is corrupt through and through. And even the republicans like Buckley before he died said 'we should lose this election, go into the wilderness, and get cleansed', and I believe that's true. I think that they have been in office too long. I think that they are too adept at thievery, at moving the Constitution into places it never meant to go. I think that they have an extraordinary ability to divide rather than unite. And I think that I'm tired of being called a traitor, because I like my flag and I support the troops.

In what I must say seems to echo a theme similar to that of Naomi Kline's must-read book, Shock Doctrine, America Betrayed promises to go beyond Katrina and delve into the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 attacks, the war in Iraq, and offer "a long, hard look at how this country handles disaster, which ones they indirectly cause and how corporate America and their friends in the White House profit from those disasters in the long run."

Can't wait to see this one.

Since it's no longer taboo to point out John McCain's ridiculous and offensive attempts to use of his experience as a POW as if it's somehow an excuse for everything from his extramarital affairs to his rule-breaking to his having more pieces of real estate than he can keep track of, and so on, we would be remiss if we didn't point this one out too.

When CNN's Walter Isaacson confronted John McCain about his professed love of the band of ABBA, which of course was a lame attempt to cater to "disaffected Hillary supporters" as his blogger Michael Goldfarb made clear, McCain (you guessed it) whipped out the trusty ol' POW card to explain:

“What were you thinking?,” Isaacson asked him, looking incredulous.

“If there is anything I am lacking in, I’ve got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life,” McCain joked. “I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again.”

But, as Spencer Ackerman was quick to point out:

What? McCain was shot down in 1967. ABBA began making music in 1972. Don't try this sh** on me, McCain! Your POW experience has nothing to do with your Partridgey musical taste.

Cue the mockery... Nicole thinks maybe we should just put out a distress signal for McSame instead