5/24/09- TWD's Agenda For The Day: Putting Herself Above Alaska......Again

Oh what did she do now, you ask? I'll let the tireless Mudflats tell you (via the Anchorage Daily News)

A) Over there on the left in the headlines section it says:

Palin Cuts $80 Million from Budget - Gov. Palin announced today that she is vetoeing $80 million from the state budget, including federal stimulus dollars meant to go for energy relief.

And that energy relief sure wasn't a necessity for this guy based on her astute governing. It couldn't be.

In the winter, Village Police Officer Clarence Snyder doesn’t use jail cells. They don’t have heat, and Selawik, an Inupiat village of around 800 people just above the Arctic Circle, gets pretty cold. So Snyder sits in a grimy green office chair watching prisoners until morning.

To say this didn't sit well with her colleagues is like saying LeBron's shot was just "ok."

State legislators and U.S. Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, immediately criticized Palin for turning down the $28.6 million. Legislators, who had voted overwhelmingly to take the money, said it will just go to other states to spend while Alaska could have funded weatherization work and renewable energy projects. They said no other state has rejected it.

Get that. Despite the chest pumping grandstanding by the likes of dumb alpha male governors like Texas' succession man Ricky Perry, South Carolina's jerk Mark Stanford, and Bobby "Tippy Toe" Jindal of Louisiana about not taking the loot, they in the end submitted under the smackdown they would face for not taking it (well, the energy money that is.)

But not the one and only "Lady Moosehunter." Oh no, not her at all.

Palin said accepting the energy stimulus money would have required the state to follow a federal demand and "entice" local communities to adopt building codes.

"There isn't a lot of support for the federal government to coerce Alaska communities to adopt building codes, but lawmakers can always exercise checks and balances by overriding my veto," the governor said in a written statement.

Even her own party members are calling her utter BS here.

Anchorage Republican Rep. Mike Hawker said Palin is wrong about the building codes, a statement that was quickly echoed by other state legislators from both parties.

"We've researched this thoroughly, and the governor's folks now have received a letter from the (U.S. Department of Energy) basically saying that you don't have to come up with all these building codes," said Hawker, a budget leader in the House.

Hawker said he believes Palin "had to do something to save face." The governor had initially balked at taking nearly a third of the available stimulus money -- calling it an "unsustainable, debt ridden package of funds" -- before agreeing to take all but 3 percent of it after the Legislature rejected her concerns.

Could this be the last straw finally for her. Maybe so.

Add another voice to the growing number of Alaskans who have just had it up to their eyeballs with the governor’s rejection of stimulus money designated for energy efficiency. Beyond the slap-in-the-face obvious fact that this is Alaska, and might just be a good idea to promote energy efficiency, you’d have to have your head in a bag to not “get” that this has nothing to do with Alaska, nothing to do with our economy, and everything to do with a certain governor’s dreams of grandeur, and higher political aspirations.

That quote came from this guy, who you will see below:

Who is Bob Poe? from Dennis Zaki on Vimeo.

He'll challenge the Palin one in next year governor's election. Hopefully, for Alaskans sake, he can do more than just challenge her.

TWD's Daily Agenda for this Sunday will include the usual suspects (Sports Threads, Music Threads, and a few other things) and a few other surprises. Until then, peace.