At the Bottom, and Digging Fast (UPDATE: The Post Is Fundamentally Wrong.)
The MSM charge to find something incriminating on Sarah Palin has driven the Washington Post to dig into her expense reports while she was governor of Alaska. The result is a misleading headline and a story about a governor who complied with the law and cost her people far less than hre predecessor. Here’s how the Post headlined its front page article.
Palin Billed State for Nights Spent at Home
Sounds bad, right?
The truth is that she claimed up to (but often less than) the legally-allowed per diem expense of $60 per day and stayed at home instead of staying at a more expensive hotel and billing the state for that expense. In addition, when she did claim the per diem, she noted her stay at home to clarify that she wasn’t staying at a hotel.
Not only that, but she didn’t claim expenses on meals, even though she was entitled to do so, didn’t claim travel allowances for her children when such claims were expressly legal, and used much less expensive means to travel around the state. Her travel expenses were almost a fifth of the expenses incurred by the governor before her just the year before.
In other words, despite a headline that insinuates wrongdoing, Sarah Palin not only complied with the law, but was responsible with the money with which she was entrusted and took less of it than she was entitled.
By comparison, since Barack Obama wants to claim his time running for President as executive experience, I’ll note that he’s again begging for money from his donors. Jaime Sneider reported earlier this summer that his campaign is burning through $42 million a month (with a paid campaign staff of 2000).
You’d think that perhaps the Washington Post might be interested in finding out where all that money goes, especiallys ince he’s explicitly made it a campaign issue in the past week?
Nahhh.
UPDATE: I’ve had the chance to look at the expense report excerpt that accompanied the Post article, and there’s a problem. The central point of the story is that the people of Alaska paid Sarah Palin for nights she stayed at her own home. The expense report proves that incorrect. Note that claimed up to the allowable $60 for meals and incidentals but nothing for lodging.
Here’s how laws like this work. I know since I’m a state employee myself, though not of Alaska. They tend to work out the same. When you’re a state employee, you have a duty station, which is what the state calls the place where you work. A police officer’s duty station might be the county where he works, or even a section of that county. My duty station is the office where I work. Sarah Palin’s duty station is Juneau. Any time you spend going from your residence to your duty station is on your own dime. But if the state requires you to work elsewhere for a short time, any distance you travel more than your normal travel distance from your residence to your duty station is on the taxpayers’ dime. That’s the travel allowance for things like plane trips the Governor took. For someone like me, it involves a flat rate reimbusement for the miles I put on my car to get to where I need to be.
If the travel is more than a certain distance from your duty station, so that you cuold not reasonably come back home each day, the taxpayers are also responsible for covering your housing and daily living expenses. This not only includes the hotel room, but also a certain amount – a per diem – for meals, tolls, and what have you. That daily expense rate is a flat rate that you get no matter what. If you spend more than the rate, too bad for you. If you spend less than the rate, the state often still pays you the flat rate. Government, go figure, huh?
Here’s an example. On occasion, I have to attend training classes and those classes are farther from my house than the office, but not far enough that I can’t get home in a reasonable amount of time. The first time I went, I dutifully saved my lunch receipts and turned in an exactingly-compelted form to my boss, who then gave it back to me and told me to do it. It happens that I had claimed too little for my meal allowance. I told him that I had receipts so I know exactly how much I spent. No matter. The state was obliged by personnel law to pay me that amount.
Sarah Palin’s trips look to be covered by very, very similar rules, from what of the report I can see. However, there’s something important to remember. When Palin was staying at her house, she was not, in fact, staying at what the state considered her residence. As far as the State of Alaska is concerned, Sarah Palin’s residence while she serves as Governor is not in Wasilla but Juneau where her duty station is.
That’s important. If the state considered her residence in Wasilla and her duty station on Juneau, it would be obliged to pay her a per diem allowance for every single day she worked. By making her residence and her duty station in Juneau, the state avoids that obligation. Palin actually saved the state money by not claiming a housing allowance for staying in her own house even though, so far as I can see, she was easily allowed to do so. It was no big deal for her to do that, so I’m not congratulating her very much. I am noting that she was entitled to that money and turned it down, so she’s been putting the taxpayers’ money where her mouth is, so to speak.
Other Posts of Interest:
Category: Oh, THAT liberal media., Sarah Palin, The Obamessiah
Of course, at the same time the supercilious dismissive elitists in the MSM ponder how Sarah can fulfill her onerous ["pitcher of warm spit"] duties while a mother of five, they also screech & howl that she took per diem on the days off from Juneau to visit her family hundreds of miles away in Anchorage.
Do they ever reflect on how the American people judge them to be hypocritical imbeciles?
And nobody has vetted Obama or Biden, giving Obama ginormous access-passes on Rezko, Ayers, & Rev [God Damn America] Wright—while overlooking Obama's "scheduling conflicts" that prevented him from visiting his mom's deathbed in '96!
daveinboca…
I’ve heard about the deathbed thing – and that Obama didn’t pay her hospital expenses during the period prior to her death, and that part of his universal health care thing is based on the fact that his mother was indigent and didn’t have health care benefits. I’ve done some searching, but have been unsuccessful – do you have any links? On any of the above?