Sarah Palin's Alaska just lost $1 BILLION in the stock market -- and now she's kissing Obama's ass, looking for a handout -- PUCKER UP, BABY, PUCKER UP !!!!!!!!!

Republican economics in action: Take a bunch of money from the
government in tax breaks and subsidies. Whine about government
spending on "those people". Dump all the ill-gotten gains into the
stock market. Destroy the financial system. Ask for more taxpayer
money while decrying "socialism". Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

And where else but in Sarah Palin's Alaska to see this phenomenon in
all its shining glory?

It turns out, you see, that the same state that takes in $1.87 in
federal dollars for every dollar it gives back (just behind New Mexico
as the 2nd biggest welfare state) and sent Sarah Palin to preach about
the evils of "government spending" to her rabid base, also just lost
$1 billion by changing their investment strategy to buy stocks right
before the crash. And, just like the greedy bankers on Wall St.,
Sarah Palin is now asking for a bailout for her state.

The Anchorage Daily News has the story:
http://www.adn.com/news/government/story/671129.html

A change last year in how a key state savings account is invested has
yielded nothing but pain so far -- a loss of about $1 billion.

The reason is the stock market meltdown that began last fall.

Because Department of Revenue officials plowed a big chunk of the
Constitutional Budget Reserve into stocks shortly before the meltdown
started, the state suffered the same kind of stinging losses many
Americans have experienced in their personal retirement portfolios.

Revenue officials, as well as state legislators who encouraged the
stock investments in hopes of generating bigger profits, acknowledge
their timing was dreadful.

But they're hoping the market rebounds in coming years and the bet
pays off over the long haul.

Yeah....uhhhh, good luck with that whole stock market "bounce back"
thing. Perhaps we should be asking Governor Palin if she agrees with
Rush Limbaugh in hoping that Obama fails in his plans to stimulate the
economy through government largess. Perhaps Alaska should should just
pull itself up by its bootstraps, eh? Who knows: those Blue donor
state Atlases just might "shrug" and leave the welfare-loving Red
states to fend for themselves at a certain point.

But it gets better:

Over its history, the budget reserve has been plowed predominantly
into relatively safe and stable investments such as bonds and Treasury
bills. Such investments typically don't generate the same kind of big
returns that stocks can, but they're not as risky and can be quickly
sold to provide ready cash if needed.

During last year's legislative session, lawmakers had a huge stack of
surplus dollars on hand because of a run of record-high oil prices, so
they put more than $4 billion into the Constitutional Budget Reserve
as savings.

Instead of parking the money in the reserve's conservative investment
account, it was shifted to a subaccount that's invested more
aggressively in stocks.

That subaccount had a market value of about $4.5 billion in the
summer. But with the stock market crash, its value has plunged to $3.5
billion -- meaning a $1 billion loss, said Jerry Burnett, the state's
deputy revenue commissioner.

So essentially, speculation-driven high gas prices, coupled with
ridiculous welfare payments from the federal government due to
corruption from the likes of "Tubes" Stevens, led Alaska to start
living high off the hog. So the Gordon Gekkos in Alaska decided that
they should be making even more money, and gambled the People's money
on high-risk investments on Wall Street, in true Republican style.
When gas prices fell due to a crackdown on oil speculation, and when
the stock market collapsed, sending shocks through the financial world
due to the overweening greed of the wizards of high finance, all that
money just vanished.

And now, in a show of remarkable Agamemnonesque hubris, Pirate Palin
is now seeking to retake her ill-gotten loot after loosing a financial
plague on Alaska through incompetent greed by stealing it from the
same blue states that earned it through the sweat of their citizens in
the first place.

Homer put an unforgettable and terribly apropos phrase in the mouth of
Achilles that will ring in eternity:

O thou, cloaked in shamelessness, mindful of nothing but profit!

But not only is there shameless greed here, there is remarkable
cluelessness. Republicans never learn:

Burnett said officials had no reason last spring to expect the state
would need to dip into the reserve anytime soon, and so investing in
stocks made sense as they can deliver superior returns over a long
period even though they can experience extreme swings up or down in
any given year.

Despite last year's market collapse, state officials have no plans to
change how the reserve is invested, Burnett said.

"Some years you're going to have a loss," he said. "You can even have
a severe loss. But over time, you're going to do better than if you
bought all Treasury bills and just held them forever."

State Sen. Kevin Meyer, an Anchorage Republican who last year co-
chaired the House Finance Committee and helped write the state budget,
agreed that he and other legislators advised Galvin to invest the
reserve's new deposits more aggressively.

In years past, Meyer said, state officials have heard criticism for
investing too conservatively as stocks soared.

He believes last year's investment shift can yet turn out rosy.

"I'm still not sure it was a bad decision," he said. "We've got some
time, so hopefully the stock market will come back."

The learning curve for these people is nil. Not even total Armageddon
would be enough to deter Republicans from their ideology of market
worship. They will simply do the same things over and over again,
expecting a different result and taking the country down Senator
Stevens' tubes in the process.

Compromise with such people is not possible, any more than it was
possible for Achilles to compromise with Agamemnon. All we can do is
crush them in the court of public opinion and marginalize them as much
as possible, while demanding justice for those who have been
wronged.

Demanding equity for the blue states that provide tax dollars to the
federal government to support incompetence like this would be a good
place to start.
.

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