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Perks of Office

This guy makes John Rowland look like a piker:

As storms once again battered the state of Alabama over Christmas, Republican Gov. Robert Bentley moved to divert funding from the 2010 BP oil spill recovery effort to finance the renovation of a second Governor’s mansion on the Gulf Coast.

Yet that beachside mansion, which Alabama governors beginning with famed segregationist George Wallace have enjoyed, was not damaged by the BP oil spill. It was damaged more than two decades earlier by Hurricane Danny, and has sat empty ever since.

While Alabama’s oyster industry and coastal communities continue to suffer from the effects of the massive Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout, the repairs to the governors’ mansion are estimated to cost between $1.5 million and $1.8 million. Though Bentley says he will stay there only “on occasion,” the administration said the property would be “primarily” used to wine and dine corporate executives considering the state for investment.

Yet Bentley argues that the mansion repairs are a priority for economic development, and says the move has no connection to the fact that he recently lost two beachfront properties in a messy divorce.

via Think Progress

And it’s perfectly legal, so far as I can see, as well as being perfectly sleazy.I like to think that had Rowland not ended up in jail, the voters in Connecticut would have denied him a fourth term, but there’s little chance that Bentley has anything to fear. The Southland has been a one-party state since the end of Reconstruction; the parties flipped in the 60s, when the Democratic Party, to its everlasting credit, put principles over politics and championed the civil rights acts that the Supreme Court, along with governors like Bentley, is now busy undermining. In any one party system, but particularly systems dominated by parties of the right, people like Bentley tend to float to the top.

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