CSU cuts 40,000 students ... Spends up to $100,000 plus expenses for Palin speech

Here's the scoop:

• Students claim they found a five page contract in a trash bin that details the costs and speaker demands for Palin's forthcoming speech at a university gala in June
• A university president claims that the contract was stolen from the office of the school foundation
• While local police are investigating the alleged theft of the contract,
• the California attorney general's office is investigating the Stanislaus Foundation's secret handling of a public document

The students who found the contract claim they were tipped off by someone inside "somewhere" (presumably a building) that campus administrators were shredding documents on a day when staff members were supposed to be on furlough. It just so happened, that the contract was found intact in a garbage can amidst piles and piles of papers.

University officials deny any attempt to shred documents. 

Feel free to chuckle if you want. It's hard not to imagine a group of liberal activist students dressed in ninja pajamas slinking across campus, breaking into the building, then rummaging through garbage cans in search of the contract. Having spent time working in a university library, it's also not hard to imagine a couple of grossly overweight university employees sitting amidst piles and piles of papers exhausted from five minutes worth of shredding. I digress.

Palin's speaking fees command rates as high as $100,000 per appearance. The university is selling gala tickets for $500 each for patron's to have the privilege of listening to Palin's blistering vacuities. 

This whole scenario is ripe for comedy, but it's the details of the contract that put this scandal over the edge. According to the AP article, the former Alaska governor's requirements include:

• first-class flights from Anchorage to California, if she flies commercial
• If she flies private, per the contract, "the private aircraft MUST BE a Lear 60 or larger ..."
• Palin must be provided with a suite and two single rooms in a deluxe hotel near the campus in Turlock in the Central Valley (no staying on campus for the Queen of the Tea Baggers)
• during her speech, her lectern must be stocked with two water bottles and two bendable straws

"This is not about Sarah Palin," Attorney General Jerry Brown said in a prepared statement Tuesday. "The issues are public disclosure and financial accountability in organizations embedded in state-run universities." [AP]

Actually, the issue is why the school feels it can justify spending up to $100,000 for a Palin keynote appearance, plus pay for all of her luxury expenses, when so many students are being denied an education due to extreme budget cuts. Not to mention, inviting a woman to speak who does not, in any conceivable way, represent the best of American higher education.

Palin recently mocked the press at a $200 per plate fundraiser in Canada thanking the organizers of the event for providing a straw for her water bottle, stating "the bent kind, which I just read in the media that I supposedly insist upon".

Except that it's in her contract.