They are also sending out a photograph of Palin with a T-shirt that reads "NOWHERE ALASKA 99901”:Then there's this article from Charles Homans Watch Out, Russia: Sarah Palin is Coming! saying she's not the first to claim foreign policy experience (and money) because Alaska is next to Russia.
"In fact, Steve Doocy, Michael Barone, and now John McCain himself--who have all been using Alaska's proximity to Russia as a testament to Palin's foreign policy chops--are stealing a page from the playbook of Sen. Ted Stevens, the icon of the paleo-Republican establishment in Alaska whose corruption Palin has made a (recent) career of condemning. Stevens, like a generation of Alaskan politicians before him, has regularly used Alaska's marginal strategic importance as a cover for political nest-feathering--which explains part of why a quarter of the $7.6 billion Alaska received from the federal government in 2002 alone went to defense spending. In 1986, the hawkish senator called in a favor from then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and had an Army division originally intended for fighting guerrillas in the tropics moved to Alaska instead. 'Once they decided to satisfy Stevens, they invented a rationale and said that the Russians are coming to threaten the Aleutians,' a Defense Department official groused to a reporter at the time.
And finally in Earmarks? Seriously? Steve Benen wonders why earmarks of all things are being touted as a big issue:
"Now, there are plenty of substantive ways to approach this. One could note, for example, that the McCain campaign is lying, and that Obama sought $311 million in earmarks last year, not $1 billion, and didn't seek any earmarks for Illinois at all this year. One could note that Sarah Palin hired D.C. lobbyists to secure millions of dollars in earmarks for Wasilla while she was its mayor, and during Palin's gubernatorial term, she's requested nearly $750 million in earmarks, easily the largest request in the nation, per-capita. One might even be tempted to note that McCain has been misstating his own record on earmarks for quite a while. But stepping back, I have an entirely different question: who on earth cares about earmarks?"
But I did find this article from March saying "Senator Barack Obama on Thursday released a list of $740 million in earmarked spending requests that he had made over the last three years, and his campaign challenged Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to do the same." So $1 billion is probably rounding up, but it's similar to Palin's and Illinois has about 19 times more people than Alaska.
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