The IBD Says "Drill, Baby, Drill!"

Investor's Business Daily has been a fan of Sarah Palin's energy policies for quite some time. They came out in defense of Palin's op-ed opposing Cap and Trade in an editorial yesterday. The article is here, along with an audio podcast version.

The whole editorial was great, so here it is in its entirety:


"John Kerry, replying to an op-ed Sarah Palin wrote on cap-and-trade, suggests the Alaska governor "check the view from her front porch." What she sees from there, senator, is energy wealth going to waste.

"The political death of Sarah Palin has been greatly exaggerated. In a devastating op-ed in the Washington Post, Alaska's governor exposes the cap-and-tax fraud that has nothing to do with earth's temperature and everything to do with government control of the economy.

"She also exposes the stealth socialism ambitions of the Democratic left and once again points out the availability of abundant "shovel-ready" resources under America's soil, off America's shores and even in America's rocks.

"Judging from the reaction from Sen. Kerry and the political arm of George Soros, one must ask: If Palin is spent as a political force, why is everyone on the left so worried and talking about her?

"Kerry took to the ultraliberal Web site Huffington Post to object to Palin's description of "the president's cap-and-trade energy tax" as "an enormous threat to our economy." In Alaska, she wrote, "we understand the inherent link between energy and prosperity, energy and opportunity, energy and security."

"Kerry, who opposed the Cape Wind project off breezy Cape Cod because a wind farm capturing energy from ocean breezes might spoil his view, went ballistic. In a thinly veiled reference to Tina Fey's "Saturday Night Live" skit, he repeated the warm-monger mantra that the "global climate change crisis threatens our economy and national security in profound ways" and that "Gov. Palin need look no further than the view from her front porch in Alaska to see how destructive this crisis can be."

"What Palin sees is a cap-and-tax plan that will result in a "dried-up energy sector" that even the sponsors of the Waxman-Markey bill anticipate, or they wouldn't have included a provision providing $4.2 billion over eight years for newly unemployed energy workers.

"It's not just the energy sector that will be devastated. Palin notes that "even more American jobs will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under the cap-and-tax plan." We have cited an analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation that found unemployment will increase by nearly 2 million in 2012, the first year of the program, and reach nearly 2.5 million in 2035. Total GDP loss by 2035 would be $9.4 trillion.

"Kerry responded that Palin failed to mention that "jobs in our emerging clean energy economy grew nearly 2 1/2 times faster than overall jobs since 1998." That's easy when you start from almost zero. Note that 1998 is also the year the earth started cooling, with not a warmer year since. There's even been snow in Malibu.

"From Palin's front porch, senator, she can see "the largest private-sector energy project in history" — her "3,000-mile natural gas pipeline (that) will transport hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of our clean natural gas to hungry markets across America."

"From Palin's front porch you can also see the 2,000-acre part of ANWR's frozen tundra that contains 10.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil (such estimates often underestimate actual yields) and that could supply all the oil needs of Kerry's Massachusetts for 75 years.

"And from her front porch, Palin can see the Chukchi Sea northwest of Alaska's landmass. Awaiting development there, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, are 1.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or 30% of the world's supply, and 83 billion barrels of oil, 4% of global conventional resources.

"MoveOn.org began e-mailing members Tuesday, asking them to fund a rapid response ad blasting Palin's op-ed. Soros' group said Palin was positioning herself as the face of conservative opposition to Obama's energy policy, telling supporters her op-ed was "a marvel of misinformation and outright lies."

"What really hurts is Palin's truth. Kerry and MoveOn.org say Sarah Palin must be stopped. We say, drill, baby, drill."

Quotes of the Day: July 10, 2009

"Couple of thoughts for the day...: "You have to sacrifice to win. That's my philosophy in 6 words." - George Allen. &..."Act in accordance to your conscience -risk- by pursuing larger vision in opposition to popular, powerful pressure." - unknown."

-Sarah Palin's thoughts on Twitter, July 8, 2009

Whining About Other Shoes

It looks like Palin probably buys the majority of my speculation about the "other shoe" actually being Axlerod's. Her interview with Time Magazine had these few snippets:

"Enemies stirred up by her sudden prominence — and orchestrated, she believes, by the Obama White House — would bury her in unfounded ethics complaints...."

"For Palin, however, these aren't isolated incidents. She believes they grow from the same root, which is too big and too formidable to ignore.

"A lot of this comes from Washington, D.C. The trail is pretty direct and pretty obvious to us," says Meg Stapleton, a close Palin adviser in Alaska. Awaiting a flight back to Anchorage from distant Dillingham, Stapleton adds that the anti-Palin offensive seems lifted straight from The Thumpin', which describes the political strategies of Rahm Emanuel, who is now the White House chief of staff.

"It's the Sarah Palin playbook. It's how they operate," Stapleton says."

I think the Obama White House, whether directly or indirectly (because there are some there who don't need coercion, they are just simply in love with Obama, not to mention they're jealous of all the attention she's been getting), has also compromised the Alaska legislature, but I won't go into all that again.

And I know that others have speculated about this stuff too, I'm not the only one. I do want to go on record though and say that if I copied anyone else's ideas, it was completely unintentional. All I had to go on was a snippet in the comments of C4P that someone in Alaska said that the Dems nationally had told some legislators to stall all of Palin's priorities.

Everything else was brainstorming and following things to their logical conclusion. I later watched alot of interviews where people said essentially the same thing, but I didn't steal the idea from them.

Now, about the whining thing....

Frank Luntz was on Hannity last night whining about Sarah Palin's "whining," saying that the "American people" didn't want to hear her talk about the ethics complaints.

There were a few things I wanted to scream at the television (and, I may in fact have actually screamed them).

1. "She wasn't talking to you!"

2. "She wasn't talking to you!"

And finally....

3. "She wasn't talking to you!"

To recap....

"She wasn't talking to you!" (If you swear, you may insert an expletive between "wasn't" and "talking.")

These people in the media (and I know Luntz is usually a friend of the Gov, and she can take constructive criticism, so I'm not really mad at him) are complete idiots sometimes.

They think that they are so enlightened...... Drives me out of my mind.

Newsflash: She wasn't talking to the people of America, the Republican party, or to Mr. Frank Luntz's control groups.

She was talking to Alaska. You know, those people who are actually her constituents who might have wanted some explanation as to why she was resigning. You know those people?

Why can nobody see past the end of their national 2012 nose?

And, for the record, there is a very legitimate problem in Alaska with these ethics complaints. Maybe national pundits are completely fine with allowing state resources to go down the drain, as long as your political career remains intact, but Sarah Palin isn't.

If it's between the state government being able to actually get its work done for the people of Alaska and her sitting in the Governor's office, she'll just leave office. And that's exactly what she did.

She puts the state and the people whom she's serving above herself, and that is why she is one of the only politicians in America today who actually deserves to be one.

She really cares about Alaska, and Alaska has a problem that needs to be fixed. If that doesn't jive with what the rest of America "wants to hear"......oh, well. Tough cookies; she's going to say it anyway.

And while I don't think that it's an effective strategy going forward for Palin to constantly talk about the ethics complaints, I think the complaints are honestly a big reason why she resigned, and this isn't a woman who quite frankly cares about what Frank Luntz's focus groups think.

She's just going to tell the truth. Whatever happens beyond that, happens.

Quote of the Day: June 9, 2009

"Good Conservatives always pay their bills. And on time. Not like the Socialists [anklebiters] who run up other peoples bills."

- Margaret Thatcher

"Freeeedom!"

That's the word that I imagine is running through Sarah Palin's mind these days. "Only a few more weeks of this craziness and I am outta here! All you anklebiters just try and mess with me now!"

I don't know about my previous speculation about the other shoe (it is after all, speculation), but I do know that the more time that passes since the resignation, the better I feel about it. I feel like I can breathe again.

Whether there was a coordinated effort to break Sarah Palin by using the constraints of her office or not, the result was the same as hog-tying her and then telling her to climb a mountain. Not gonna happen.

So, I'm getting happier and happier with the idea of Sarah Palin, Private Citizen. And it looks like she is too:

Resigning was what was best for her state (Alaska already looks like it's breathing a sigh of relief), what was best for her and her family, and (I think) what was best for the whole country.

And if it didn't follow the political playbook of what a politician is supposed to do, so what? Who wrote that stupid playbook anyway? Maybe it needs to be torn up.

And for her critics out there who just don't understand why she would "step down" from a position of power to go back and mingle with the "lowly masses," I have this to say: In the United States of America, the People have the real power. Elected officials are merely our servants.

In that case, I say she took a step up.