earmarks

I had the opportunity to speak this morning with former Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), who was The Grand Canyon State’s senior senator when Sen. John McCain first joined the Senate in 1986. Sen. DeConcini spent 18 years in the Senate, and bore witness to Sen. John McCain’s formative years in the institution. Both men were [...]

I’ve been trying to get somebody at the McCain campaign press office to comment on the 1991 Arizona Republic articles that appear to contradict Sen. John McCain’s frequent assertion that he has “never requested a single earmark or pork-barrel” item for his home state in his entire career.
According to the articles, McCain wrote a letter [...]

This weekend, the news was all Palin, all the time. Following Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s lackluster interviews with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, “Saturday Night Live” kicked off its new season with the return of Palin look-alike Tina Fey in a dead-on send-up of the GOP vice presidential nominee — which my colleague Ari Melber covers here.
On [...]

ABC News has released an excerpt of Charlie Gibson’s third and final interview with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in which Gibson asks Palin about her shifting position on the “Bridge to Nowhere.”
Palin stops short of specifically saying she initially supported the project, but criticizes the abuse of earmark process as an “embarrassment.”

On the campaign trail, Sen. John McCain frequently rails against wasteful earmarks. There are two examples of pork he points to as particularly egregious.
First, is the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska. Second, is a $3-million study of grizzly bear DNA in Montana. When he mentions the latter, he often jokes, “I don’t know if [...]

There are a lot of different numbers being thrown around concerning Sen. Barack Obama’s earmark requests and those of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. So I thought it would be fun to try to sort this out.
At a rally in Ohio, Palin today repeated Sen. John McCain’s frequent claim that Obama has requested nearly $1 [...]

The Obama campaign is circulating a video featuring Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and indicted Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) at a joint press conference in July — and that’s not even the damaging part.
In the video, Palin says that she reached her position on federal earmark reform as a response to “the writing on the wall,” [...]

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has lied and dissembled about her past support for the “Bridge to Nowhere “earmark, as many journalists have reported.
Now, the Obama campaign is circulating a photograph of Palin literally bragging about her support for the bridge, with a note titled “I supported the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ and All I Got Was [...]

Mayor Palin hired Steven Silver, who secured millions in federal earmarks for Wasilla — and that ‘bridge to nowhere.’

There’s been a good deal of response to my post yesterday about Mayor Sarah Palin’s enthusiasm in receiving federal money for Wasilla — some of it from from small-government veterans, who pointed out that it’s the task of small-government leaders to secure federal dollars for their communities.
But that was never in doubt, and it’s not [...]