Baked Alaska: Palin Installed a Tanning Bed in the Governor's Mansion

It seems Sarah Palin achieved her healthy, orange glow not by wrestling moose in the great Alaskan outdoors, but under the buzzing blue lights of a tanning bed.

Narco News, tipped off by a reader, found that shortly after moving into the Governor's Mansion, Palin had a personal tanning bed put in. As Al Giordano and Bill Conroy write:

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The Republican nominee for vice president, Governor Sarah Palin, it turns out, is a pioneer of the Great Indoors:

"The governor did have a tanning bed put in the Governor's Mansion," Roger Wetherell, chief communications officer of Alaska's Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, confirmed to this newspaper. "It was done shortly after she took office [in early 2007] and moved into the mansion."

The home tanning bed in the Governor's Mansion in Juneau adds a trivial fact among the many, big and small, coming to light about the right-wing's latest celebrity, McCain's gamble to try and wrestle the election away from Democrat Barack Obama, but one that -- tug the thread -- leads to other questions about elitism, ethics, public health and the insufferable phoniness that plagues politics and politicians.

It's true. For one thing, unless the tanning bed was powered by Huskies on electronic treadmills, it probably used up tons of energy. And having our political candidates crisped is probably not the best use of energy right now (or ever).

Then there's the fact that Palin's running mate suffers from skin cancer -- a disease usually caused by sun exposure, tanning beds, and more generally our cultural obsession with tanning.

On the bright(!) side, this story should help burnish(!) Palin's reputation as a blue-collar 'everywoman'. I hear that all throughout America's heartland, people have so many tanning beds they use some of them for firewood.