The highlights: It appears that (1) a particularly vocal Republican critic of earmarks (Texas Rep. Pete Sessions) directed a $1.6 million earmark of his own last year to fund a blimp project through a firm that has experience in neither government contracting nor blimps. (2) Nearly half of the $1.6 million will go to administrative costs. (3) A former Sessions aide is a top lobbyist for the firm, raking in more than $446,000 from the company since 2006. And (4) Sessions says the project could create thousands of jobs in his Dallas district, though the firm is based near Chicago.

[W]hile Sessions used a Dallas address for the company when he submitted his earmark request to the House Appropriations Committee last year, one of the two men who control the company says that address is merely the home of one of his close friends.

In its defense, Sessions’ office told Politico that the Texas Republican has come out in favor of an earmark moratorium only since the start of this year — in other words, after he pushed for the blimp funding. A convenient distinction from the lawmaker who now heads the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Enter Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.). During an interview with MSNBC this morning, McCotter claimed that he voted against the $787 billion package because “it would not do enough for Michigan.”

We are a manufacturing state. We see a trillion dollars spent and, yet, we still see our auto industry hanging by a thread at the whim of a task force that’s going to determine its future.

He’s referring, of course, to the White House task force charged with deciding whether Chrysler and General Motors should receive billions more in emergency loans from the Wall Street bailout bill. (The struggling automakers have already accepted $17.4 $23.4 billion in federal cash through TARP.)

No matter. The bailout funds are to help the automakers stay solvent, while the stimulus legislation, in McCotter’s eyes, should have provided additional funds for retooling auto plants. He also rued the removal of an amendment — sponsored by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) — that would have provided a tax rebate to new-car buyers:

Well, first, we wanted to see something addressed to help sell cars. There was a hope when the Mikulski amendment was in the Senate and was adopted and, yet, that was taken out in the dead of night. That’s a big problem because we need sell cars in Michigan.

Secondly, what we also need to do is — we could have had more help for retilling of the plants and a plus-up in the infrastructure as opposed to the government bailout end of it.

Again, the critical part for Michigan right now is going to be the future of that auto industry and the job losses in our best care scenario, according to the viability plans, are 50,000 people — 50,000 working families are going lose their jobs even if the bridge loan is extended to the auto industry.

So you can see why temporary short-term solutions that will be worse in the long run are of little interest to my constituents who wrote in against this.

Actually, no. All we can see is that McCotter’s enthusiasm for socialism contrasts very starkly with other Republicans’ claims that the free market will work this out — not to mention the apparent Republican notion that a package made purely of tax cuts would provide the necessary panacea — all of which seems to support the growing suspicion that the GOP is a party in search of its soul. And if Democrats can’t capitalize on that chaos, well…

According to Alaska state records, during her tenure as governor, Palin accepted dozens of gifts worth a total of more than $25,000 from “industry executives, municipalities and a cultural center whose board includes officials from some of the largest mining interests in the state.”

Palin received the majority of these gifts in the early months of her administration, while she was pushing her much-ballyhooed ethics reform package through the state legislature — which banned state officials from accepting such gifts.

From The Post:

The 41 gifts Palin accepted during her 20 months as governor include honorific tributes, expensive artwork and free travel for a family member. They also include more than $2,500 in personal items from Calista, a large Alaska native corporation with a variety of pending state regulatory and budgetary issues, and a gold-nugget pin valued at $1,200 from the city of Nome, which lobbies on municipal, local and capital budget matters, documents show.

About a quarter of the entities bestowing gifts on the governor are represented by one of Alaska’s most influential mining lobbyists, who said in an interview that she was not involved in the tributes. The lobbyist, Wendy Chamberlain, has a relationship with the governor’s family through the friendship of their teenage daughters.

On forms disclosing the gifts, Palin, who is the Republican vice presidential nominee, routinely checked “no” when asked whether she was in a position to “take official action that may affect the person who gave me the gift,” and a spokeswoman for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign said the gifts had no undue influence on her.

In response to e-mailed questions, Meghan Stapleton, who is based in Alaska for the McCain-Palin campaign, wrote: “Throughout her career Gov. Palin has stood for the highest standards of ethics. She spearheaded new ethics reforms in Alaska and took on her own party and entrenched interests to return Alaska’s government to its people.”

Records show that 23 of the gifts were offered during Palin’s early months in office, when she was pushing the legislature to address a state corruption scandal by passing a package of ethics reforms. She accepted 18 gifts after the law passed in July 2007. Among other provisions, the law forbade executive branch officials from taking gifts from lobbyists or from interests with pending state business.

According to the article, Palin introduced her ethics reform legislation in January 2007, her first month in office.

That month, she accepted three gifts from Calista’s chief executive, Matthew Nicolai: a $2,200 ivory puffin mask, a woven grass fan worth $300 and a $150 ivory necklace. Nicolai, who did not return phone calls, runs the large corporation, which profits from a multibillion-dollar gold-mining operation on its land.

Palin, who holds significant sway over budgetary issues affecting cities, also accepted for “personal use” the gold-nugget pin from Nome. Mayor Denise Michels said the memento was meant to remind the governor that “Nome is a historic mining community.” Palin approved about $6 million in funding this year for a public safety building in the city. “Anything our state can do to help us in capital projects, we’re very grateful,” Michels said.

Palin’s husband, Todd, also accepted two fact-finding trips sponsored by mining companies as gifts, according to The Post. A list of all the gifts is available here.

The article does not appear to allege illegal activity. But much like the “Bridge to Nowhere” and the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of earmarks Palin requested for her state, it clearly pokes another hole in the alternate reality that the McCain campaign has tried to create around Palin’s record in Alaska.

As MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann noted Thursday on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” because Palin was a relative unknown on the national stage when McCain chose her as his running mate, the campaign saw in her a blank slate on which to project the image of their choosing — in this case, that of the maverick reformer, which neatly coincided with the image McCain has sought to project for himself.

However, the more information has come out about her past, the more difficult it is to square that image with the facts.

In 1991, McCain was embroiled in the The Keating Five Scandal, in which he and four other senators were implicated in a corruption investigation connected to the Savings & Loan crisis. Though McCain was cleared of wrongdoing in August, he was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee for exercising poor judgment for meeting with federal regulators on behalf of one of his major fund-raisers, Charles Keating Jr., the chairman of Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. Keating would spend four and a half years in prison for fraud and racketeering following the bank’s failure.

Facing re-election the following year, McCain sought to salvage his damaged reputation by re-branding himself as a champion of government reform and a foe of wasteful spending. According to the article from The Arizona Republic dated June 14, 1991, McCain joined with two other senators and nine House members June 13 to introduce legislation to rescind more than $1 billion in funding for 325 federal pork-barrel projects in the 1991 budget that had not yet been spent.

“Listen, my friends, the system is broke, and this is the way to start fixing it,” McCain announced at a news conference. “There may be legitimate projects on this list, but I assure you, they are the exception and not the rule.”

According to the article, within hours of the news conference, McCain’s press secretary, Scott Celley, announced three Arizona projects on the list “could be ‘justified’ and ‘would pass muster’ if they went through the traditional process of hearings.”

In an interview, McCain said, “I’m not criticizing the projects, I’m criticizing the process. You can make a big-deal story about John McCain opposing three Arizona projects. I’m sure it will make good copy.”

There was just one problem. McCain had circumvented the “traditional process of hearings” to secure the funding for one of the Arizona pork projects he was now criticizing, and supported the other two.

Among the projects that made McCain’s “pork list” were the construction of a forestry-science center at Northern Arizona University, the expansion of a border-crossing station at Mariposa, 10 miles west of Nogales, and the paving of a road in the Black Mesa area of the Hopi Indian Reservation, which for generations has been at the center of a land dispute between the Hopis and Navajos.

The projects were called pork because they were not subject to hearings, were awarded without competitive bidding, or were of purely local interest and not of national importance, among other reasons.

“The funds for the dubious local projects were ‘snuck through’ the normal budget process,” a McCain news release said.

However, McCain, along with Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, wrote a letter in July 1990 to Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., chairman of an Appropriations subcommittee that oversees transportation funds, specifically asking for $5.5 million for the Black Mesa road…

The project was given $4.7 million, apparently through actions by Lautenberg outside the normal legislative process.

“It seems pretty weird ,” said Bob Maynes, press secretary for Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., who is increasingly at odds with McCain. “I just don’t understand it. He (McCain) appears to have done exactly what he is criticizing.”

The article also notes that Celley, McCain’s press secretary, said McCain had supported the NAU forestry center, but pointed to $4.5 million appropriated for its construction from the Federal Buildings Fund, as pork. Celley said McCain also supported the $10.6 million expansion of the Mariposa border-crossing station.

McCain said he didn’t know what the Arizona projects were and said he would not comment on their merits.

“I have no comment, because I do not know if they are good or bad or indifferent,” McCain said. “They might be the most good and valuable project that all civilization rests on, I don’t know, but if they did not go through the correct process, then I think they are wrong.”

According to the article, this was apparently not the first time McCain had gone around the normal legislative process to fund pet projects.

Celley admitted that McCain has worked in the past to push appropriations through in whatever manner was necessary.

“We have worked for them (appropriations),” he said. “Letters were written about these projects, and the senator may have talked with people to work their way through.”

A June 15, 1991 editorial from The Republic recounted the episode, lambasting McCain’s hypocrisy.

While Mr. McCain spoke [at the news conference], a news release from his office thundered that “the funds for the dubious local projects were ‘snuck through’ the normal budget process.” In other words, these boondoggles had bypassed public hearings, the preferred practice for all 535 members when it comes to funding home-district projects that cannot stand on their own merits.

Much to his discomfort, Mr. McCain subsequently learned from a reporter that three Arizona projects were to be found on the diabolical list. In fact, Mr. McCain himself had sought funding for one of them, $4.7 million for the Turquoise Trail road, which would link Navajo and Hopi Indian communities.

“Oh, my God, is there three?” a chagrined Mr. McCain sputtered. “Oh…really? Is there really three in there?…I’m just shocked.”

Later on, the senator averred that what was really at issue was the “process,” not the projects themselves, although in the earlier news release he described the projects as “dubious.” Finally, Mr. McCain even back-pedaled on whether they actually had “snuck through” the process.

Had Mr. McCain attacked the process and even singled out those three Arizona projects as examples of extravagant spending, he could have made an important point. Instead, he was left defending his pet projects while criticizing everyone else’s pork-barreling. And that is precisely why Congress cannot get spending under control.

Even on McCain’s signature issue — his supposed career-long opposition to pork — he is not telling the truth.