PALIN-TOLOGY

For the people who do not read Slate magazine on-line as I do... some Sarah Palin tid-bits

1. Her diet is "heavy in wild Alaskan seafood, moose, caribou and fresh fruit."
2. Palin's first-born son, Track, was born on April 20, 1989, almost eight months to the day after she eloped and married her husband, Todd, on August 29, 1988.
3. She does believe in climate change, but she has expressed doubts that human activity is to blame.
4. Palin has said she is "as pro-life as any candidate can be and called abortion "an atrocity." She has supported mandatory parental consent, and while she is pro-contraception, has also indicated her preference for abstinence education over "explicit sex-ed programs." She would permit abortion in cases where the mother's life was endangered, but not in the case of rape or incest.
5. Palin said in a 2006 debate that she supports teaching creationism alongside evolution in public schools on the grounds that "healthy debate is so important."
6. Palin on Iraq: "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq. I heard on the news about the new deployments, and while I support our president, Condoleezza Rice and the administration, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place."
7. Palin asked the Wasilla library "how she could go about banning books" with offensive language. It's not clear whether any book was ever banned.
8. When she was running for governor in 2006, Palin said she supported a $223 million federal earmark for the Gravina Island Bridge. Congress eventually killed the earmark after it became a symbol of pork-barrel spending, but Alaska was given the same amount of money to spend on other projects. She lied about it last night in her speech.
9. The Alaska governor has no command role with National Guard troops engaged in combat operations or with the 49th Missile Defense Battalion, which is stationed in Alaska. She does command the National Guard when it comes to natural disasters and homeland security. These issues are handled by a member of her cabinet, Maj. Gen. Craig.
10. Cindy McCain and others have asserted that Alaska's proximity to Russia has contributed to Palin's foreign-policy knowledge. This is a bold faced lie, she has never been to Russia.
11. Sarah Palin fired former Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, who said the governor pressured him to fire an Alaska state trooper who happened to be getting divorced from Palin's sister. Palin has denied these allegations. Alaska's state legislature voted in July to get an independent investigator to look into the firing.
12. The environmental Web site Grist.org has reported that she objected to listing polar bears or beluga whales as endangered in Alaska, fearing it might affect Alaskan drilling projects. She also voted against a proposition to limit mining where runoff would threaten salmon populations.
13. Alaska has long been the recipient of astounding amounts of federal funding. While Palin slashed pork requests in half during her tenure, the state still requested $550 million in Palin's first year in office. This year she has requested about $198 million—$295 per person—which is still the highest amount per-capita in the country, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. And when she was the mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired an Anchorage-based firm to secure $27 million in federal earmarks for the town.