Oh, poor Sarah Palin. She’s been the butt of so many jokes that cartoonists must be thinking they’ve hit the politics jackpot. Here’s one more to add to your list: log on to the site www.dresslikepalin.com and have fun comparing Palin’s one month couture budget to what the average American could have bought.

So, if you log on and play the game, you’ll see very quickly that Ms. Sarah has spent $2,500 on a Valentino jacket, $495 for Cole Haan boots, $22,800 for two weeks of makeup (yikes!), $865 on a Louis Vuitton bag etc. etc.

There’s not a ton of stuff on the site, but it does give you a good idea what middle class America would have done with the money. “Real working people live and dress far differently,” notes Executive Director of the California Nurses Association, Rose Ann DeMoro. “The $150,000 shopping spree amounts to, as one writer put it, more than the average American household spends on clothes in 80 years. The same $150,000 could buy 15,000 chef coats, 5,769 painter’s bibs, 5,000 police shirts, 4,687 auto mechanics’ coveralls, 3,750 pilot uniforms, or 3,571 housekeeper uniforms.”

And the list goes on….remember, politics and excessive fashion should mix only AFTER you’ve won the election (Jackie O had it down pat).

We’re trying to stop gagging over a press release we received from The Alchemist’s Apprentice, an online apothecary carrying a roster of natural and organic beauty brands. It seems the company’s house brand, Alchemy of Colour Mineral Cosmetics, has come up with a “Power Pink Lipstick” dedicated to Sarah Palin, and they’re going to donate $1 from each lipstick sale to her campaign. The joke is supposed to be that Palin is a self-professed pitbull with lipstick, provided courtesy of Alchemy of Colour. What’s funnier to us is that the press release couldn’t even keep its canines straight, referring to Palin as a “bulldog.”

But that gaffe pales in comparison to Palin’s endorsement from The Alchemist’s Apprentice. It’s hard for us to understand how a company that prides itself on its environmentally sensitive products could donate money to a “drill, baby, drill” governor who kills animals for fun. Are they really onboard with a candidate who wants to dictate to women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies? Can they throw their weight behind someone who wants to censor library books?

The beauty industry promotes causes ranging from breast cancer research to preservation of the Amazon rainforest. We applaud that. But we don’t know of any beauty company other than The Alchemist’s Apprentice that is taking a political stance in an election year. It seems to us that it crosses an ethical line when a company hawks a terminally flawed candidate to promote lipstick sales.

What’s next? We think a Sarah Palin blush would be very apropos. God knows she’s got enough to be embarrassed about.