Round-up: SarahPAC disclosures

According to the Washington Post's politics blog "The Fix," SarahPAC, the former governor's Virginia-based political action committee, raised more than $2.1 million over the course of last year, and $1.4 million of that in the last six months.After contributing $64,600 to various candidates and party committees, and paying for "an expansion of the organization's staff," SarahPAC had about $900,000 on hand at the end of 2009. Read more, here, including statements from Palin's team, most notably Palin's "senior adviser," Meg Stapleton. Also, ABC News is reporting that SarahPAC spent more than $60,000 on copies of Palin's memoir, Going Rogue. For a quick hit on the total numbers, here is the Federal Election Commission's summary of SarahPAC's year-end filings. For hours and hours upon hours of fun reading, here's that PAC's main "reports image index," at the bottom of which is a link to the full year-end report, which is the one generating all this news.

In our brief keyword search of the report, we found some interesting things. There were zero mentions of "BSMP LLC" (Bristol Palin's consulting company). But, there were more payments to Meg Stapleton's "IzzyLene Consulting." (It might just be a coincidence, but that company name seems to be a phonetic allusion to a line from an Irish call-and-response folk jest about eating human carrion during times of famine on the top of Kildare.) Humorously, one individual donor from Fairbanks listed his or her occupation as "Retired/Dumpster Diver." But most interesting is that two of PalinPAC's biggest individual donors (at $5,000 apiece) are J. Howard Coale and his wife, Lauren. According to this unofficial Florida Department of Corporations record of the inactive Coale Family LLC, J. Howard Coale seems to be related to John P. Coale, reportedly one of Palin's close advisers and the husband of Palin's Fox News Channel colleague, Greta van Susteren. John Coale is also reportedly a part of The Church of Scientology, and we wondered what Scientology would want with Palin until we read this memo obtained by Gawker and ostensibly written by Coale.