To hear Sarah Palin tell it, she and her mama grizzlies are people-powered, grassroots examples of how Americans can get involved in politics. But a close look at SarahPAC's campaign finance report shows she spends her donations on the same old, standard consultants as every other politician. And like many others, she still finds ways to keep her inner circle in the money.

She pulled in just shy of $866,000 in donations from people hailing from Kissimmee, Florida to Rancho Palos Verdes, California. But Marylander Laurie Beitman's $35 and the bulk of Palin's small-dollar donations is going to more than Republican candidates the former Alaska governor wants to see win this fall. By our count, Palin spent nearly $400,000 on consultants, lobbying firms and the standard direct mail and fundraising firms politicians frequently use. (The AP had a stricter consulting tally, $210,000.) Just about the only maverick-style item she purchased was $4,000 worth of sausage.

Palin spent $30,000 on "consulting, national and international issues" with Randy Scheunemann's Orion Strategies, a lobbying firm representing foreign governments.

Then there's Rebecca Mansour's Aries Petra Consulting, which Palin paid $22,000 for "internet messaging" to write those infamous Palin Facebook messages. Politico describes Mansour as a "Los Angeles screenwriter and political neophyte whose creation of the popular cheerleading blog Conservatives4Palin endeared her to Palin's inner circle."

She paid NorthStar Strategies, the firm owned by her campaign body man and former Bush administration alum Jason Recher $36,000 for "logistics political consulting."

Former press aide Meg Stapleton's IzzyLene Consulting received $2,500 for media consulting.

Palin paid $35,000 to Grey Strategies, a Columbus firm that helped her with media, logistics and political consulting. It appears to now be a newly merged firm called Grey Shockley, run by lobbyists Doug McMarlin and Leslie Beyer. According to Hotline on Call, McMarlin also travels with Palin.

True North L'Attitudes, a consulting firm created in February by an Anchorage woman named Robyn Engibous, got more than $10,000 for scheduling. Engibous, a former staffer for Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), also got almost $1,400 in reimbursements for office supplies and mileage.

Palin has made much of her personal wealth in speaking fees, which reportedly run up to $100,000 per speech. For speechwriting services this past quarter, her PAC paid $3,700 to Lindsay Hayes. Hayes wrote speeches for Palin during the presidential campaign; she also was a speechwriter for Sen. Stevens for several years.

SarahPAC gave another $5,000 for "clerical" work to Ivy Frye, a close confidant of Palin's who has been with her since her campaign for governor and who Palin hired as an aide in the governor's office. In addition to the $5,000, SarahPAC gave Frye almost $1,500 to reimburse her for postage and copies. In the first quarter of 2010, she paid Frye $15,000 for clerical work and more than $3,000 in reimbursement for printing and shipping costs.

The PAC also pays a $10,000 monthly legal retainer, totaling $30,000 for the quarter, to the Palin family lawyer, Thomas Van Flein. Van Flein was Palin's personal lawyer while she was governor, defending her against ethics complaints. He also represented Palin's daughter, Bristol Palin, when she tried to get child support from Levi Johnston earlier this year.

Check out our past coverage of Palin's "brain trust" of advisers here.

Why is Mint.com Citing a Racist Website in an Immigration Blog Post?

Mint.com, the free personal finance site, put up a weirdly strident anti-immigration post on its Mintlife blog on Wednesday. Turns out, it's not just tacky, it's poorly-sourced—down to a citation for the openly racist anti-immigration site VDare.com.

Timothy Lee, writing on Megan McArdle's blog at the Atlantic website, flagged the bizarre Mintlife post, which is credited to Ross Crooks. Why bizarre? Well, as Lee points out, it's odd that a service site like Mint would take such a stridently anti-immigration stance. But worse, the chart is flat-out wrong—and peculiarly sourced:

The most jarring name on this list is the openly racist vdare.com. The rest of the list is a mix of official government sources, non-profits, and blogs. The sources skew heavily in an anti-immigrant direction, although at least one is a pro-immigrant source (fiscalpolicy.org). While none of the other anti-immigrant sources is as offensive as vdare, few (if any) of them could be considered credible sources for statistics about immigration.

Lee goes on to run down the problems with the infographic's statistics—which are many. You can check out the post here.

Mint was bought by software makers Intuit—the company behind the Quicken finance software—last fall. It seems pretty unlikely that a big company like Intuit is looking to piss off costumers who (having paid attention in economics class) believe that immigration improves, rather than harms, a country's economy. So what happened here? Is Crooks an anti-immigrant true believer who got carried away, or just a guy who didn't know much about the issue and doesn't have a great eye for credible sources? Or is "immigration is bad" official Mint.com policy now? Any way you slice it, Mint doesn't look good.

Update: MintLife Editor Lee Sherman responded to us with an apology:

At MintLife, our mission is to give users and visitors the financial information they need to save and do more with their money. Topics range from personal finance advice, to analysis of macroeconomic trends and the fiscal impacts of news of the day. We publish content from a variety of contributors and sources, and the opinions expressed don't necessarily reflect those ofMint.com or of Intuit.

It's true that the tone is often provocative, seeking to engage readers in dialogue around important topics, but the recent blog post "The Economic Impact of Immigration" went too far, cited polarized sources and did not receive the editorial judgment and oversight it deserved.

We regret it. It is completely unacceptable and won't happen again. Our intention was not to further the agenda of any of the sources from which data was pulled, and the post has been removed.

- Lee Sherman, Editor of MintLife

[Mint.com; The Atlantic]

Send an email to Max Read, the author of this post, at max@gawker.com.

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Dave Ramsey has had a great amount of success with his radio show that teaches good old fashioned common sense financial advice. He is certainly not without his detractors though. There are a lot of people who describe his advice as out of the main stream and mathematically incorrect. Both of these statements are true, but that is precisely why he has gotten so popular. Ramsey has made an observation that very few people have. Personal finance is much more about personal behavior than it is knowledge about money itself.

Ramsey is often criticized for teaching people to do things which technically defy mathematics. Recently one blog called Territory Michigan attacked Ramsey for suggesting that people pay off all their debt. The blogger gives an example in which a person with a low interest rate student loan can make more money in a money market and pocket the difference then pay the loan off payment by payment over the next decade.

This is where this blogger and many other of Ramsey's critics get it wrong. Ramsey often makes the statement on his show that, "If we were doing mathematics, you wouldn't have borrowed money in the first place!" Often people will ask him if they should pay off their debt largest interest rate to smallest, but he teaches that you should pay off your debts smallest principal balance to largest. The reason he teaches this is because personal finance is much more about behavior than any knowledge you know about finance. Paying off a few small debts first will give you some easy wins, making you feel that, hey, this plan really works, and will encourage you to continue!

People who criticize him often aren't thinking straight, because they do not factor in risk which is a needed part to any financial calculation. You could go to Vegas and put all of your money on 28 black, but you know you wouldn't do this because there's so much risk of not winning, even though the rate of return would be enormous! Whenever you borrow money, there's risk involved that somehow you will get behind because of a financial problem, or that the company will mess with you financially (it does happen!).

These critics often also use very unrealistic examples. The blogger at Territory Michigan uses an example of a 3% student loan, which almost no one has! Dave Ramsey's mathematics may be incorrect, but they actually work! He has over 3 million listeners and is a multi-millionaire. His teachings have gotten hundreds of thousands of people out of debt, they work! Who are you going to listen to, a critic with a Weblog, or a guy with a lot of money and thousands of success stories?

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Why is Mint.com Citing a Racist Website in an Immigration Blog Post?

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