So SarahPAC only has $154,347 left?

I refuse to accept that my fifteen minutes of fame has finally come to an end.

Today the October quarterly report came out, and let's just say that Palin's days of living off the mentally challenged in this country are all but over.

When the quarter began the fund had $171,686.

It brought in a measly $166,090 over a three month period.

And it spent $183,429. (Including $20,000 to political campaigns.)

Leaving it with only $154,347 at the time of this report.

Remember that in the last quarterly report we learned that the PAC started with $267,574, brought in $149,246, and spent $245,136.

We thought THAT was pathetic, and it was, but this report essentially proves that it is all over but the crying.

I did a quick rundown of some of the numbers and found the expenditures to be much the same as they have been all along, Though there are significantly less of them.

Consultants pocketed a cool $57,000. (And yes it is still Northstar Strategies and Tim Crawford who are receiving that money. Crawford and Northstar were also reimbursed for travel and lodging expenses.)

Postage and direct mail still approximately cost SarahPAC a whopping $51,000. (Can you say "money laundering?")

They spent about $1,670 on fundraising. (What a waste.)

The fund is also still paying Marilyn Lane and Carol Ryan for "clerical" work.

And attorney fees cost them $6.738, with the largest portion going to the law offices of Baker and Hostetler which apparently is the firm representing SarahPAC.

At some point soon the operating costs for this slush fund will far exceed the amount that Palin can still squeeze out of the pockets of these poor ignorant slobs and then completely drain the few dollars left behind each month.

I imagine when that finally happens we will see this sad little grifting operation finally come to an end.

 Then Track Palin will have to start paying his own attorney fees. Bummer!

So the SarahPAC quarterly report came out, and it certainly appears that Palin's days as a grifter are coming to an end.

The highlights first.

The PAC started with the embarrassingly low amount of $267,574.69 as "cash on hand."

By the end of the quarter that had been reduced to $171,686.19

Total donations amounted to a piddly $149,246.57 and they spent a whopping $245,136.03.

Fiscally conservative my ass!

Consultants ran her about $113,000.

Postage/Mail was in $66,900 range.

Marilyn Lane and Carol Ryan each continued receiving $2,000 per month for "clerical."

Palin is also paying a Becky Tessier to be her "travel agent" at $500 a pop, yet the PAC's lawyer Tiemessen only received $340.00 this go around.

And only two candidates, Darryl Glenn and Paul Nehlen, received the usual $5,000 donation apiece to provide cover for the slush fund.

There were some other minor expenses for car rentals and airfare, but the vast majority of the money continues to go for consultants, which at this point is clearly a euphemism for something else, and postage which we have always known was a euphemism.

It is a money laundering operation pure and simple, and Palin will continue to use it to finance her lifestyle until it is bone dry.

And that day of dryness is clearly coming up fast.

Palin has been spending more than she is taking in for well over a year now, and seems to have only minimally reduced those expenditures.

At this rate she is probably only good for another two quarter or so and then there will be nothing but dust wafting through the halls of SarahPAC.

Here is the link to the FEC report so you guys can do a little more research if you want.

Let's take a deeper look into this most recent SarahPAC disclosure shall we?

The big numbers as I mentioned yesterday is that SarahPAC started the reporting period with $565,830.22 cash on hand.

During the six months they brought in an additional $457,469.52.

Spent $642,326.57.

And ended up with $380,963.17.

Which of course means that Palin spent $180,859.05 MORE than they brought in.

And that means that the PAC is, for all intents and purposes, on its last legs.

Now let's take a deeper dive and see what we might see.

Republicans are all in a lather over an anti-Hillary book written by a former Sarah Palin consultant. Oh this should go well.

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

The book does not hit shelves until May 5, but already the Republican Rand Paul has called its findings “big news” that will “shock people” and make voters “question” the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton. 

“Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” by Peter Schweizer — a 186-page investigation of donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities — is proving the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy. 

The book, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, asserts that foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return. 

“We will see a pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable U.S. policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds,” Mr. Schweizer writes.

As some of you may have heard Rand Paul is giggling like a school girl over the idea that some hidden secret is about to be revealed in this book that will destroy Hillary's candidacy.

And a whole lot of Right Wing news outlets, and a few considered legitimate, are all lining up to interview Schwiezer and get access to copies of the book before it hits the shelves.

However as Media Matters points out, in quite some detail, Schweizer is far from a reliable source known for accurate reporting.

And that is something that Rachel Maddow detailed on her show last night.

In my opinion all that has to be known about Schweizer to ignore anything he has written, is that for a couple of years he served as one of Sarah Palin's consultants.

And since we all know how well informed SHE was, it kind of stands to reason that Schweizer plays fast and loose with the facts.

The question we have to ask ourselves is knowing that the Clintons are savvy political animals, and knowing that Hillary has had her sights set on the presidency for probably decades now, do we REALLY think that there is any hard evidence that she auctioned off her influence to the highest bidder to donate to the Clinton Foundation?

No, I seriously doubt that there is.

And even if there were, do we think this stumble bum would be the one to uncover it?

Nah, in my opinion this is just one of a number of hit pieces that will come flying at Hillary. In the end we will file it away with Email-gate, Benghazi-gate, and whatever the conservatives pull out of their ass next-gate.

Sarah Palin never lets a criticism slide, but sometimes it takes awhile for her ghostwriter to make sense out of her screeching, this one is a week overdue.

"I don't know WHAT this blonde chick is talking about, I am too busy trying to figure out how to get that Daily Beast guy."

This courtesy the Wasilla Wendigo's ghostwritten Facebook page:

(She starts off by hitting CNN with a low blow.)

CNN: it’s no wonder your ratings still aren't matching competitors. American viewers are smarter than you assume, and we simply want truth in reporting. 

(Ouch right in the jewels!)

Please see the article linked below. (The article linked below actually takes you Breitbart's page, but I have not included it because, well it links to Breitbart's page.) Wolf Blitzer’s recent coverage of this story (Here is the link to the actual story, written in late March that Palin has finally gotten around to being pissed off about. You may remember it as the Daily Beast article that pointed out that SarahPAC's ad featuring snippets of her CPAC speech mocking consultants, was ironic since so much of SarahPAC's money went to Palin's consultants. I posted about it here.) really was blisteringly dishonest. First, because he didn’t reach out to me or the SarahPAC staff for rebuttal. (Yes because those people are so easy to get on the record, right?) Second, because he failed to disclose the anti-tea party associations of the “architect” (Karl Rove dig?) of this story whose organization is a competitor of my efforts to advance the candidacies of genuine grassroots conservatives – not those handpicked by the permanent political class. (I read the article at Breitbart so that you don't have to and the crux of it was an attack on the Daily Beast journalist for being an anti-tea party guy, a strange rationalization that since Palin's consultants are paid a salary they are not actually "consultants," and then an ad hominem attack on Obama for stopping the White House tours due to the sequester.) As the article explains, in my recent CPAC speech I gulped and denounced the consultants who engage in campaign hopping and have made a racket out of multi-million dollar failures each election cycle for themselves and their cronies. What a shame CNN continues to plug away in a floundering direction with reports like this. The shame is that they employ some top-notch reporters who no doubt believe in truth in journalism, but examples like this diminish the good reporters’ good efforts. (I love it when Palin gives journalism advice to news outlets. You know because she has that Bachelor's degree in communication and all.)

Now you may think that the example above is a good representation of how Palin NEVER gets over a criticism, but you have not seen anything yet. As our President would say, proceed oh ignorant one.

As a side note, I find it interesting that CNN recently disclosed that their old “Crossfire” show might hit their airwaves again. Wasn’t CNN among those who issued blistering criticism about the use of a “crossfire” icon in 2010 to represent political districts we wished to see represented by commonsense conservatives? CNN, among others, implied that using a “crossfire” icon (which was a tactic first employed by Democrats to illustrate political maps of districts they “targeted” to win) was inciting violence. 

 - Sarah Palin


Wow! So clearly Palin is STILL steaming over the criticism she received for putting those crosshair symbols on that map, and to her response after Gabby Giffords was shot.

Here is the old Crossfire logo that Palin is referring to:

Oh yeah, totally the same, don't you think?

Only difference is that the CNN logo is not identifying actual human beings, and targeting them for elimination. Oh AND it did not correspond to an actual assassination attempt on somebody targeted by the symbol.

But you know other than those two minor differences, totally the same.

I think in Palin's case the old adage, you can take the girl out of middle school, but you can't take the middle school out of the girl, has never been more accurate.

P.T. Barnum said "There is a sucker born every minute." That was the best news Sarah Palin every heard.

Sarah Palin has been using her political action committee to buy up thousands of copies of her book, "Going Rogue," in order to mail copies of the memoir to her donors, newly filed campaign records show.

The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate had her political organization spend more than $63,000 on what her reports describe as "books for fundraising donor fulfillment." The payments went to Harper Collins, her publisher, and in some instances to HSP Direct, a Virginia-based direct mail fundraising firm that serves a number of well-known conservative politicians and pundits.

Sarah PAC spent another $8,000 on colorful bookmarks designed by a Nashville-based event branding firm. And her committee paid her publisher $20,000 for what appears to have been the cost of sending her personal photographer and another aide along on her book tour. Those expenses are listed by the PAC as travel repayment to Harper Collins.

So essentially Sarah Palin took the hard earned money donated to her Political Action Committee to purchase her own book. She then donated the books to her fundraisers to thank them for getting her the money to buy the books in the first place. Then Harper Collins paid her a royalty for each of the books she bought with the donated money.

Jesus, that is just horrible.

But hey maybe not. Perhaps she did what her prayer partner Joe Lieberman did back in 2004.

When former Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman sought in 2004 to give away copies of his memoir, "In Praise of Public Life," he declined to take royalties off the books purchased by his campaign committee. It is not known whether Palin entered into a similar arrangement.

So what do we think? Did she decline the royalties or not? Yeah, that is kind of what I think too.

But as scandalous as that is, it may not be the most egregious use of her PAC money.

Palin also used the funds to pay IzzyLene Consulting to provide media and political consulting for a whopping $54,000. As many of you undoubtedly know that firm belongs to Meg Stapleton who serves as the spokesperson for SarahPAC. Stapleton was originally Palin's spokesperson while she was the governor. She now performs much the same function, but somehow that now makes her a "consultant".

And apparently Palin has a pretty bad consulting addiction.

She also paid the following "consultants":

Pamela Pryor, media and political consulting, $36,000.00.

Timothy Crawford, consulting/fundraising, $36,000.00

Northstar Strategies, political/logistical/advance consulting, $50,000.00

Aries Petra Consulting LLC,Consulting/ Media/Communications, $12,000 (This is kind of an embarrassing amount since this is in fact Rebecca Mansour, who is Palin's favorite Facebook writer.)

Andrew Davis, Media and Political Consulting, $22,500.00.

Kim Daniels, Media and Political Consulting, $21,000

Some business referred to as The McIntosh Cos., provided fundraising consulting for $3000.00,

Callisto Consulting LLC, Internet consulting, $8000.00. (This guy is actually Joseph Russo, the founder of the "sea o'pee" who may now be the guy who surfs the net to let Palin know when somebody is saying bad things about her. Hi Joseph!)

Orion Strategies, Political Issue Consulting, $30,000.00

Eric Schnure, Consulting, Communication, Speech, $14000.00

Kathryn Cascella, Fundraising Event Consulting, $2100.00

Even Palin hanger on, Ivy Frye jumps on the "consulting" bandwagon. Frye apparently earned a respectable $7,500.00 for something called "Administrative Clerical Consulting", which may just be a fancy way of saying she answered the phones and read Palin's mail.

All in all Palin paid an unbelievable $296,100.00 in "consulting" fees. That is about an eighth of her entire take for 2009. You know it would be significantly cheaper if she were just addicted to heroin.

I have no idea if in Palinworld "consulting" means something completely different than it does in our world, but I have to wonder, if she was getting so much consultation how come she made so many incredibly stupid mistakes? Did she not listen? Are they not very good? Or are they not really what we would call, consultants?

If I was a cynic I would have to wonder if all of this is not some elaborate method for laundering money or funneling it to her supporters by calling them "consultants". But nobody is cynical enough to believe THAT, are they?