Home

Share

From this page you can share Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes to a social bookmarking site or email a link to the page.
Social WebE-mail
Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes
(Your Name) has forwarded an article to you from CommonDreams.org: Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes

(Your Name) forwarded this article to you from CommonDreams.org.

Sign up here if you would like to receive daily news from CommonDreams.org.

Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes

The Wasilla City Council, with Sarah Palin, the future governor and vice-presidential nominee, at the center, in a 1998 photograph. Throughout her career, Ms. Palin has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and blurred the line between government and personal grievance. (Heath Family, via Associated Press)

WASILLA, Alaska - Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.