Travel expenses for kids

Everybody knows that you can bring kids or spouses on government trips. It is an accepted thing. BUT if you do that, they share your room, you pay for their airfare and meals and anything else. The only benefit they get is from sharing the hotel room and sharing taxi rides or something where they don't add to the state cost.

What is astounding to this Cow is not only that Sarah Palin billed the state for separate rooms and airfares for her kids, but that only Alaska newspapers are reporting it.

Nobody else seems to be covering it.

Were a normal state employee to do this they would be billed for the kids costs and then fired for filing a false travel expense report. Cow thinks this is a really big story, and illustrates that somebody thinks the rules don't apply to them.

Which tells you something of their character.

Moo!