Palin's Pipeline - The only problem: It isn’t there. And it’s her fault

[RamboLiberal]

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You see, before she became the woman who John McCain said “knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States”—and long before she became the new darling of the newly disenfranchised far right—Sarah Palin had been a bare-knuckle backwoods populist who’d built a career out of puffing up dragons she could then slay. Her tactic was first to demonize, then to defeat. She’d ridden her luck for 10 years, from the Wasilla city council to the governorship. And when she became governor, in 2006, she found herself eyeball-to-eyeball with Alaska’s most demonizable dragon of all—Big Oil.

How better to defang the industry that had ruled Alaska like a colonial master for 40 years than to make sure its major players would be no more than spectators at the state’s next grand pageant, the building of a new pipeline that would carry natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope to what Palin called the “hungry markets” of the Lower 48?

In her zeal, however, Palin overlooked one salient fact: It was Alaska’s three largest oil producers—Exxon Mobil Corp., BP, and ConocoPhillips Co.—that controlled the natural gas the new pipeline would need if it were ever to pump anything more than hot air.

By writing the rules in a way that excluded the oil companies from the process, Palin—although she gained the short-term approval-rating points that made her seem attractive to McCain last summer—all but assured that the “largest private-sector infrastructure project in North America” would never be anything more than her personal field of dreams.

http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2009/03/17/Governor-Palins-Big-Energy-Battles?page=1#page=1

From article in Portfolio by Joe McGinnis

[maddezmom]

1. long but well worth reading every bit of it

K&R

[Pastiche423]

6. Dayum!

Did he skewer her or what? Actually, it was the facts (something that sarah knows very little about) that he presented that skewered her so wonderfully.

The last paragraph wraps it up quite nicely...


"And with Palin’s attention shifting several thousand miles to the southeast, Alaskans are starting to catch on. In its January 27 edition, Bradners’ Alaska Legislative Digest, a publication that had long been supportive of Palin, had this to say: “The problem we see is that we continue to see Governor Palin as not really interested in governing, not interested in chasing an issue to the bottom. Further, our assessment is our governor just doesn’t understand the difference between campaigning and governing. We increasingly suspect that Governor Sarah Palin now has a focus that is Washington D.C. beltway politics, and Alaska may pay a price for pandering to interests quite far to the right of center.”

Looks like the great white whale wins again."

All in all, a marvelous read.

[dynasaw]

2. Ha ha ha ha

:rofl:

[PA Democrat]

3. I'll bet Sarah sucks at chess.

She's really not a deep thinker, is she?

[localroger]

5. Chess? She probably sucks at Tic-Tac-Toe. /nt

[Supersedeas]

8. checkerzzzzz

[tammywammy]

4. recommended

[malaise]

7. Great article

Even in november, I thought it apparent that Palin had returned to Alaska feeling she’d outgrown it. Three days after Election Day, she bounced—black-booted and BlackBerried—back into her governor’s office in Anchorage. After having been absent for more than two months, she paused to greet the assembled press.

The press? Half a dozen camera operators in boots, jeans, down vests, and flannel shirts; a couple of local television correspondents; a reporter from the city’s not-so-slowly-dying daily paper: This was the press? After what she’d seen, heard, and been besieged by for the past two months?
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To say she's out of her depth is an understatement. :rofl: