is sarah palin a real person or is that just a persona she puts on?

[Blue_In_AK]

14. Well, in the first place,

she didn't give everyone that much money. The Permanent Fund has been around since 1980, and we've been getting money ever since, no matter who is governor. She did hand out an extra $1,200 one year as an energy rebate since Alaska's energy costs had been extraordinarily and unusually high, but that's not why she was popular.

People tend to forget that she followed the most unpopular governor in the country, Frank Murkowski, and she came to power as a populist whistleblower, calling out the good ol' boys (my autocorrect said "good oil boys," which is actually pretty accurate). At the time, a fair number of our legislators were under investigation by the FBI for accepting oil company bribes, and in fact several of them ended up doing time (see Corrupt Bastards Club). After Sarah was elected, she worked with the democrats to enact ACES, a new oil tax regime that benefited the state (and by extension "us" since we're an owner state) more than Big Oil. She also enacted a fairly sweeping legislative ethics reform bill, again with the help of the Democrats. As governor, she was bipartisan and did not push any religious agenda. (Her successor, Sean Parnell, former ConocoPhillips lobbyist, has since gotten ACES repealed, guaranteeing Big Oil a $2 billion a year windfall. We will have a referendum on the ballot next August to reinstate ACES, which had been working just fine. Sean Parnell is an infinitely more dangerous governor than Sarah ever thought of being.)

There's more, but the Sarah we see now is unrecognizable. It's pretty shocking, really.