And it is a total hit piece. The heart of this article is not the fluff you quoted from the very end, the crap the author threw in to give himself a false gloss of intellectual credibility, it is the fraudulent accusations made at the very beginning.
Slander, lie, mislead distort, say something nice about the target at the end to "prove your objectivity" is the standard template for these sort of Media political hit pieces.
From the Article
The first two general-fund budgets for which she was responsible showed spending hikes of 16.4 percent (from fiscal year 2007 to '08) and a mind-boggling 21.8 percent the next year. Total government expenditures (a slightly different measure) grew 38.6 percent in those two years combined.
However when you bother to do some research rather then merely accept the intellectual honesty of the author because he is telling you what you want to hear, you learn something interesting.
The "source" for those numbers is a Huff Po Leftist who admits in his original article he simply made a guess since the state of Alaska has a number of different budgets.
So once again the Palin haters simply made up the data to validate their feelings.
*crickets*
Good post Johnnie!
Noted. Do you have different figures?