The latest Gov. Palin “scandal”: She owns her own tanning bed!

This calls for a serious reconsideration of her candidacy:

On the campaign trail, Sarah Palin likes to brag about how she put the Alaska state jet on eBay and fired the governor’s personal chef. One item that doesn’t appear in her stump speech, however, is the personal tanning bed Palin had installed in the governor’s mansion.

This morning NarcoNews reported that that a tanning bed had been installed in the governor’s official residence in 2007, sourcing a Department of Transportation employee familiar with renovations at the mansion. This evening, Politico’s Ben Smith reported that Palin had paid for the tanning bed with her own money.

[…]

“She paid for it herself,” [gubernatorial spokesman Bill] McCallister told TPMmuckraker. “It was surplus from a local athletic club.”

The news of Palin’s luxurious purchase — beds can cost as much as $35,000 — presents a sharp contrast to the blue-collar persona she projects on the campaign trail.

Uh, not so fast, quips Jules Crittenden:

Yeah, but according to this site, most of them a lot less, between $1,000 and $4,000. Anyway, it’s her money.* Someone tell TPM it’s dark half the year up there. There’s that seasonal affective disorder thing, maybe the tanning bed cheers the governor up. Imagine how much book banning and teen-mom-program slashing she’d be doing if she was in bad mood.

The fact that TPM automatically assumed (via insinuation) that Gov. Palin spent $35K on her tanning bed tells us one thing (outside of the fact that they are clearly starving for anything that feels like a scandal re: Gov. Palin) and that is if TPM really believed a tanning bed cost that much, it’s probably because someone on staff got taken for a ride by paying that much for one themselves because they were too preoccupied with digging up non-scandals on Republicans they didn’t like to do a simple Internet search like Jules and Tim Graham did to find out that tanning beds aren’t as expensive as they used to be.  Maybe all that tanning has fried some brains.  I dunno.

Oh – and who else is hyping this story? Us magazine. Surprise surprise.

(Via Memeo)