Here's some great research from The Mudflats.
Maybe it’s the fact that he’s Kansas born and bred, or maybe it was just the sweet smell of the great outdoors, barley, and a little extra folding money - whatever it was, senate candidate Joe Miller apparently decided after he came to Alaska, he’d try his hand at farming.
Farmer Joe bought himself a thousand acres in Alaska’s Fairbanks North Star Borough. And what did he have a yen to grow on his arable land in the sleepy hollow of Delta Junction?
Barley, it would appear. But life as a farmer/ivy league attorney is tough. Sometimes a feller could use a helping hand. Maybe something like a nice check from . . . the Federal government! Joe’s misguided intellectual and philosophical purity about how we shouldn’t rely on the federal government for anything did not keep him from making a little extra cash on the side thanks to you the taxpayer. That’s right, Mr. ’Who Needs the Feds?’ collected more than $14,000 in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2003, including barley and conservation subsidies.
Farming's a tough way to make a living, and farming in Alaska has to be particularly challenging. But like all Western states Republicans who bitch about government spending and entitlements on one hand, and benefit from them on the other (Alan Simpson and subsidized grazing, for example), Miller's just another hypocrite.
Issue number one on his campaign Web site is "government spending," where he says the "only answer is to return our federal government to the limits prescribed by our Constitution." I'm pretty sure getting paid by the feds not to grow crops wasn't something the founding fathers had in mind.
So when's Joe going to pay back that $14,000?