"The great reformers of any generation would not stand by and let the kind of poverty, death, suicide rates, and lack of infrastructure that exist today in rural Alaska continue. There has been reform needed in two major areas in Alaska for some time now.

When Palin came to office she chose the easy route and took on the fat cats in Juneau. The much more difficult job of sitting down and having a long running conversation with rural Alaska and its leaders is something she decided to stay away from and has yet to show a real dedicated interest in doing.

There are still many rural villages today without roads, electricity, indoor plumbing, and some even have their sewage leaking into the water supply."

www.palinsalaska.com

Discover Palin's Alaska and meet the people who live on the banks of "Honeybucket Lake." Mike Leavitt, the current head of the Department of Health and Human Services was told by a local leader, "Maybe you can relay the message to President Bush that we live in a Third World country."

The Alaska Center for Public Policy has a wealth of information about the current state of Alaskan families. Another good place to jump in begins with a story from the Alaska Public Radio Network about the annual Kids Count Alaska report.

Arcticstat has a vast index of poverty statistics for Alaska. Ecanned even breaks down the numbers for the individual communities in the state. To augment that data, We the People: American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States was published by the Census Bureau in 2000.

To conclude the tour, here is an article in the Washington Post that lays out the $27 million in earmarks that Mayor Sarah Palin secured for tiny Wasilla.

The intense "truthiness" of the Palin run for Veep borders on parody. To find out what she actually thought and when she actually thought it, the 2006 Alaska Gubernatorial debates are available from C-Span.

Who, pray tell, is this Westbrook Pegler fellow that was carefully scripted into Palin's only major speech?

"It tells us something about Sarah Palin's homage to small-town America, delivered to an enthusiastic GOP convention last week, that she chose to fire it up with an unsourced quotation from the all-time champion of fake populism, the belligerent right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler.

"We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity," the vice-presidential candidate said, quoting an anonymous "writer," which is to say, Pegler, who must have penned that mellifluous line when not writing his more controversial stuff. As the New York Times pointed out in its obituary of him in 1969, Pegler once lamented that a would-be assassin "hit the wrong man" when gunning for Franklin Roosevelt."

Wall Street Journal

"Pegler's career took off in 1933 when he became a nationally syndicated columnist with Scripps-Howard, roared along under the Hearst family, and ended 30 years later under the auspices of a twitchy sect of neo-Nazis and professional racists from the White Citizens Council and the Rev. Billy James Hargis' truly reptilian Christian Crusade.

At his peak in the 1930s and 1940s, Pegler was a leading popularizer of one of the most concerted antidemocratic crusades in this country's history: the vicious backlash against the New Deal and the labor movement to which it gave legal protection. This anti-Roosevelt front included the country's major industrialists, anti-Semitic, red-baiting pamphleteers, Congressman Martin Dies' Committee on Un-American Activities, and an assortment of Depression-era demagogues (and men on horseback who conspired with Hitler's agents in this country)...

I doubt readers would be charmed by Pegler's assertion in November 1963 (at the height of the civil rights movement) that it is "clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry"; his embrace of the label racist, "a common but false synonym for Nazi, used by the bigots of New York"; or his habit of calling Jews "geese," because they hiss when they talk, gulp down everything before them, and foul everything in their wake."

Slate

"[Pegler] was also known for what Philip Roth described as his "casual distaste for Jews," which had become so evident by the end that he was bounced from the journal of the John Birch Society in 1964 for alleged anti-semitism. According to his [NYT] obituary, he'd advanced the theory that American Jews of Eastern European descent were "instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared."

Politico

Oh, that Westbrook Pegler.