You guys are amazing. I post actual video of her pulling a gill net (not recreational fishing), a story from her dad about her piloting their commercial fishing boat, and you just dismiss that as evidence.
At this point, if you want to believe she doesn’t do any of the commercial fishing itself, we’re going to have to revoke your membership in the ‘reality based community’.
Man, you guys are really reaching. The season for the type of fishing the Palin’s have a license for lasts exactly four weeks. She can do that on summer vacation. There is clearly no law against it, as Palin’s commercial fishing activities are well known and publicized in Alaska. It’s one of the things that make her popular, because she’s seen as a ‘true Alaskan’.
That’s also why the family itself has to pitch in and do the fishing. When you have a small operation like that, and you’ve got exactly four weeks to catch as much fish as you can, everybody jumps in and helps. It’s very lucrative, but you have to work fast and hired help in the four week season is absurdly expensive and probably not feasible for a small family fishing operation.
Oh, okay, thanks for the info. Then I was wrong in inferring that she might just have gone fishing with her dad that day for fun.
But if so, then I think it was a little misleading for you to say:
Um, no, if she’s just putting in some part of her summer vacation, over a period that’s at most four weeks long, helping out her husband with the family business, then she’s not in fact spending “a lot of time” on this commercial fishing job.
According to her tax returns in the past two years the Palins have averaged aroun $11K a year from their fishing endeavors. It’s not chump change, but I wouldn’t call it “very lucrative.” Of course, it has exactly nothing to do with the subject of the thread–the Palins’ wardrobes, for those of you trying to follow along at home–and precious little to do with the “are the Palins wealthy” hijack. If you just want to bricker and argue about fishing then that’s fine, but a thread about clothes hardly seems the appropriate place for it.
11K for one month’s work is ‘very lucrative’ in my book. It certainly is for someone who only earned $61K a year as a mayor.
In any event, the amount obviously fluctuates with the season. In this Time Magazine analysis of their income, it says the Palins made $46,000 last year from fishing.
And their actual tax returns say they made between 7 and 15 thousand dollars. The Time article went to press before the tax forms were released. It doesn’t actually matter, though, because it has nothing to do with her clothes. The parent hijack to the fishing hijack is the “are the Palins wealthy” hijack. Insofar as the fishing business has anything to with that hijack, you are either arguing that the Palins are not wealthy–ignoring the fact that their income is somewhere around $160K per year, plus the “very lucrative” fishing business–or that they are wealthy but it doesn’t matter because they worked hard for it. There is of course the possibility of a third argument, but I’m not going to waste too much time thinking of one because… none of this actually matters.
OK, as long as you volunteer to pass out the ammo, let’s go: the job of Mayor is so un-demanding of executive skills that she can take a month off in the summer, in addition to any other time off she took during the year? List a few comparable politicial positions that have that amount of time away from the office. NOT vacation times, mind you, where an executive might need some R and R, but comparable positions where an executive earns big bucks working very hard at a demanding positions completely removed from her political position.
If you can, do so without admitting that the experience of serving asf Mayor of Wasilla is in no way rigorous or complex enough to count as training for President of the US. Good luck with that.
Ok, I will concede that at some point in the past it is likely that Sarah Palin actually worked in her husband’s commercial fishing operation.
Note that it is his, not theirs: he is listed as the sole proprietor.
That doesn’t change the fact that the family is wealthy beyond the vast majority of Americans, nor does it change the fact that they need to give the clothes back or acknowledge it as income on their next tax filing.
Sam Stone This Snowboarder Bo fella is clearly uninterested in facts. Why it’s important to disbelieve something that is common knowledge, I cannot fathom, but hey.
I like the sexism here. “Her Husband’s Commercial Fishing Operation.”, it’s not her husband’s operation, it’s the FAMILY operation.
Jeez, smear Palin for things that are actually true.
So it’s a “very lucrative” business, but it’s just too “absurdly expensive” to hire professional help, so people, naturally, have to get their family members to pitch in, even those family members who already hold a full-time governmental position?
Have I got that right?
I think I’m starting to see where some of that “waste and corruption” Palin was going on about in Alaska might be…
And did we ever clear up exactly when she’s giving back the clothes? I mean, this is fun and all, discussing how she rips off the taxpayers she’s so eager to protect, but it is kind of a diversion. The RNC claimed with extreme self-righteousness that those clothes were going to be donated to charity when the campaign was over.
Is the campaign over yet? Please notify me when it reaches some kind of termination, by Republican standards. Tick, tick, tick…
I am quite familiar with commercial fishing and while I am certainly no fan of Sarah Palin, anything but, I think this whole argument is off base. Sam Stone is right. It is a small operation. Quite small, actually.
The Palins may not be poor, but their net worth doesn’t make them rich. Comfortable? I think I’ll go with comfortable. And if the money earned from fishing has helped them get comfortable, they worked bloody hard to get there. Anyone who’s ever been out on a small commercial fishing vessel knows what it means. And I guess the corollary is no one else has a clue.
The hell? Sam has dodged the revenue issue – sure, they’re commercial fishermen, just like Al Gore’s father was a farmer. But $11K per year is something other than making your living in field.
Kimstu has provided objective evidence: the Palins are a high net worth family. I don’t begrudge them this, hardly. But methinks somebody in that income range can afford their own clothing.
But don’t believe me. Campaign insiders wanted Palin to buy 3 outfits for the convention and 3 outfits for the stumps, with a maximum RNC outlay in the $25,000 - $35,000 range. Currently, the estimates are pushing $200,000. There was nothing about outfitting the entire family.
But should there be an internal audit and investigation? Oh yes. And the Republican National Committee agrees with me, or claims to.
Obey the law, Ms. Palin.
Let me repeat my stance on Palin. I think she has a terrific skillset. I suspect that she’s also a little dumb in an academic sense, but I might be wrong. I am confident that she’s currently wholly unqualified for the Presidency. But I would bet that she could make a mint on the rubber chicken circuit, all the power to her. Hey, Guilliani did that for years. I even believe that Hollywood should be interested.
Whoa, you mean she gets the entire four weeks off from her job as mayor or governor every summer, so she can put in the whole time fishing? Plus the usual holidays and personal days at other times? Pretty sweet deal! Well yeah, if that’s true, then she does “spend a lot of time” on the fishing gig, but I can’t say I feel too sorry for her!
I swear, these unionized blue-collar rig workers with their high wages and these government employees with their generous vacation packages are the folks who’ve got it made. Here I’ve been a good little industrious cog in the famed engine of capitalism, working for private firms and institutions with no union, and I’ve never earned as much as Todd Palin or got as much paid vacation as Sarah Palin! (Well, I did get that much vacation when I was working in the Netherlands, but that’s because Dutch law mandates it.) Time to mobilize the masses for some better labor laws, I guess!
I never heard of this “Hockey Moms Association of America”. Outside of the linked page, there’s nothng on it in Google either. Who wants to bet me paychecks that this isn’t some sham charity that Sarah Palin made up on the spur of the moment? And that she’s the president of said Wassila chapter, and as such will donate all the clothes to a needy family, like, say… a local family with five kids, the youngest in diapers and their first grandbaby on the way? I bet those clothes never leave the Palin famly closets except on the backs of the Palins. And Todd’s reported $40,000 worth of recreational items? Some might become Christmas gifts, but I bet they’ll keep the majority of them too.
This is just more of the same, crooked republican politicians getting around the law, because the law is for governing those who can’t figure out how to get around it and the law serves those in power.
