Putting Plane On Ebay Not Even Sarah Palin's Idea?

[babylonsister]

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/putting_plane_on_ebay_not_even.php

Putting Plane On Ebay Not Even Sarah Palin's Idea?
By Greg Sargent - September 11, 2008, 10:15AM


This story in The Huffington Post got only a bit of attention yesterday, but it deserves a lot more. It appears that Sarah Palin's now-infamous decision to put the state-owned jet plane on eBay might not even have been her idea:

What is left unmentioned is that Palin didn't come up with the idea to sell the plane using eBay in the first place. Moreover, because of the unique purchasing terms of the aircraft -- which required the state to make payments amounting to $20,000 per month even if the jet wasn't in use -- the decision not to hire a broker to help sell the property appears in hindsight to have been a costly mistake.

Before the Alaska Republican took office, it was something of a standard operating procedure for the state to try to sell such big-ticket items using the online auction site. Officials had been doing it since at least 2003, three years before Palin became governor.

"It was the practice of the state to dispose of items such as this via eBay prior to listing the jet," Vern Jones, Alaska's Chief Procurement Officer, acknowledged on Tuesday.

This seems pretty damn important. The eBay tale is a standard line in Palin's stump speech -- it's a pithy formulation that is key to the McCain-Palin ticket's claim to being a pair of reformist warriors.

Given that Palin's eBay idea doesn't even appear to have been an original one, you'd think she should take the same sort of media heat for it that she's taken on the Bridge to Nowhere fib.

[niyad]

1. well, that and the fact that the plane didn't even sell on ebay.

[grasswire]

2. equally important is that her crony bought it at a loss

THAT is corrupt. Selling off state property to a crony at a loss should prompt an ethics investigation.

[babylonsister]

3. I hadn't heard that; sure does call her ethics into question. nt

[grasswire]

5. yep....the buyer is a donor to Palin.

very ugly stuff.

[hughee99]

4. Is it realistic to expect that you can sell a plane two years later

at a profit? Like a car or boat, it's probably worth less once it rolls off the lot, isn't it?