In the interest of not clogging up the rest of the site, I’m just going to periodically update this one post every time a new issue surrounding Sarah Palin pops up. I figure that way a) it’ll be organized, b) I won’t repeat myself, and c) I can devote the main page to more important stuff, like some stupid thing McCain said or how Barack Obama’s going to lead us to the Sherbet Kingdom on a winged marshmallow.

Sarah Palin was announced within 12 hours of Barack Obama’s speech, the official announcement made on Friday at roughly 12:30pm. Since then, we’ve learned the following:

1. Despite all her talks of fighting the establishment, both Alaska the state and Wasilla the city received more in earmarks under her watch, per capita, than anywhere else in the nation. In particular, little Wasilla got $11.9mil for its 5,300 population self.
2. She slashed funding for a home that opened its doors to young single mothers who needed a place to live, via a line-item veto. So they can’t claim she shot it down for being loaded down with pork.
3. She thought the founding fathers not only wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, but put the phrase “under God” in it, managing to be wrong twice. The page itself has been removed, but thanks to internets, we have the cached version.
4. Speaking of internets, mysterious Wikipedia user “Young Trigg” made a whole boatload of edits to Palin’s Wikipedia entry, all of which were positive and most of which happened right before she was announced. According to the TimesOnline, much of the “information” came from Palin’s biography.
5. She is currently embroiled in a scandal concerning the firing of a Safety Commissioner, presumably because the man wouldn’t fire her ex-brother-in-law (who probably was, admittedly, a huge jackass).
6. Related to the above, Palin has just recently hired lawyers for her upcoming defense in said scandal.
7. Palin, as Governor, first tried to get books banned from the local library and, when she couldn’t do that, tried to fire the librarian for “not supporting” her.
8. In the 90s, Palin was the member of a fringe Alaska party which based itself on the idea that Alaska should be able to secede from the union.
9. Following that, her husband was a card-carrying member of the party until 2002, which was coincidentally the first year Palin tried to run for statewide office.
10. Palin was baptized at, and remains the member of, a church whose pastor says that Kerry voters are going to hell and the Iraq War was ordained by God.
11. Palin suggested that Creationism should be taught alongside evolution in classrooms. Not only that, but she refused to acknowledge that global warming is man-made.
12. The entirety of Palin’s foreign travels consists of a single trip to Germany and Kuwait, which included a stopover in Ireland.
13. As recently as 2007, Palin admitted to not following the war in Iraq.
14. Just a month prior to her selection as the Vice Presidential nominee, she expressed a significant amount of distaste for the job, even joking that she had no idea what it consisted of.
15. Palin failed to disclose the fact that she was part-owner in a car wash (which itself collapsed), in violation of a law requiring gubernatorial candidates to disclose non-publicly-traded interests.
16. As governor, Palin used taxpayer dollars to fund some downright scary dominionist Christian groups and programs, including somewhere in the area of $25,000 for one particular youth group.
17. Echoing the impressive stonewalling that Bush did during the Abramoff scandal, Palin’s office is refusing to release hundreds of emails, claiming they cover “confidential policy issues”, despite the subject headings saying otherwise.
18. Palin has pulled McCain into the obstruction of her Troopergate investigation, doing everything in their power to halt the probe entirely, including getting seven key witnesses to reneg on their pledge to cooperate, leading to the need for subpoenas.
19. Despite tagging roughly $27,000,000 in earmarks for Wasilla, city police still charged rape victims for all tests, necessitating a statewide law to ban such charges.
20. Exploiting a system intended to reimburse politicians for travel expenses, Palin charged the state nearly $17,000 for nights she spent at home.
21. She’s got a history of firing people for overly personal reasons, including canning an aide because the guy was having an affair with her friend’s wife and “a campaign adviser whose mother-in-law fought Palin’s legislative agenda.”
22. Palin had a penchant for hiring childhood friends with, literally, no qualifications to take high-level posts in the Alaska state government.

If we shift focus slightly to what the McCain campaign did concerning the selection process…

1. The McCain campaign did not bother to check back issues of Palin’s hometown paper during the vetting process.
2. As a matter of fact, the “vetting process” consisted mostly of doing a cursory Google search and assuming that since nothing big showed up, there’s nothing to worry about. Additionally, they’re “keeping their fingers crossed” in the hopes that nothing else happens.
3. Although campaign manager Rick Davis claims otherwise, there was no federal background check done on Palin.
4. Up until as close as 48 hours before making the announcement, McCain was “holding out hope” that he could choose Lieberman or Ridge.
5. Prior to selecting her as his Veep, McCain had met Palin a total of one time.

Now, I’m not going to mention pregnancies, DUI’s, or media coverage. This post is going to be continually updated only with policy or otherwise pertinent stories.

The reason I compiled this was to point out basically one thing: John McCain made a rash decision at the last minute and did absolutely no research prior to doing so. He never met the woman, didn’t read up on her, and with two days to go before announcing his pick was hoping to get someone else. The expanding list of what we know about Palin indirectly shows how irresponsible the decision was, the 2nd have directly shows it. I’m not doing this to attack Palin, I’m doing it to show how piss-poor of an executive John McCain is and would be as president.

If I’m forgetting anything, please let me know and I’ll add it here. I’d like this to be my version of The Carpetbagger Report’s ever-expanding list of McCain flipflops.