Elections '08 Presidential Race

Sarah Palin Night at the Republican Convention – UPDATED X 2

palin-at-convention.gif

UPDATE: Keep in mind as you think about the warm and fuzzy parts of the Palin speech that the good governor slashed funding for transitional housing for teenage mothers and, according to Mudflats, cut budgets for special needs children by 62 percent. More about this in the next few days.

UPDATE # 2: A couple of commentator have mentioned it, but in case you haven’t seen it, the Fallows piece in Atlantic online is worth reading. It’s, if anything, almost overly even-handed (meaning it give Palin more of the benefit of the doubt that I think is appropriate), but one of today’s better sane and savvy takes.

*************************************************************************************************************


But first, the warm-up players

6:10: HUCKABEE…

Huckabee’s a class act. (As opposed to Mitt Romney who frothed at the mouth with right wing fervor and actually called the Roberts Court too liberal.)

Don’t agree with him (obviously), but it’s a good speech.

6:13: Where I grew up people had three sacred heroes Jesus, Elvis and FDR—and not necessarily in that order.

6:20: She got more votes running for mayor of Wasila, Alaska, than Joe Biden got running for the president of the United States.

I have no cable here so I have only those sane people at PBS. No CNN and MSBC people to ridicule. Bummer.


6:42: LINDA LINGLE is on.

“Sarah Palin will not try to reinvent herself during this campaign.” (Oh, really? Then why has she continued to rewrite her personal/political history on: the Bridge to Nowhere, earmarks and a list of other issues. Just curious.)

6:46: By the way, am I the only person who doesn’t think that giving a keynote and then flying home six-hours from Texas after your water breaks is not “tough,” but reckless—especially when you have a high risk pregnancy and your baby has come early? Maybe she had an examination in Texas and the doctor told her it was all okay. I hope so. But so far that’s not what we’ve heard.

I worked up until the afternoon I delivered my kid, and went back to work. A lot of women do. But I would not have gotten on a plane after my water broke unless a doctor told me the loss of amniotic fluid would not harm my baby.

6:52: What’s up with the hats at this convention? And what’s up with the chanting? (USA! US!. Zero! Zero!)

6:53: Note to Hawaii Governor chick, Linda Lingle: How much executive experience does John McCain have? Zero! Zero! Zero!

6:56: His decision to choose Sarah Palin tells us a lot about John McCain. (You got that right, babe.)

6:57: “Washington is broken!” (Uh, yeah. So all this gets fixed because long-time Washington senator chooses Sarah Palin?)

“This choice is bold historic and courageous.” (Read: reckless. Actually, “reckless” is a word that comes repeatedly to mind tonight.)

7:01: RUDY…. Unlike the Dem’s keynote, at least Giuliani seems to know that the keynote is not supposed to be about him—so far that is.

7:02: The left wing media and Hollywood celebrities don’t get to decide who will be elected president.

(Whew! Glad we cleared that up.)

7:04: Is there ANYTHING else to say about John McCain that does not talk about the fact that he was a POW?

7:06: Oh, yeah, he was “a proud foot soldier in the Reagan revolution.” (Except that Nancy Reagan hates him.)

7:09: He’s the least experience candidate for president in at least the last hundred years. (Will somebody who isn’t on dial-up please refute that?)

7:11: This is no time for on the job training. (Uh, yeah. Sa-rah! Sa-rah! Sa-rah!)

7 :12 : There is “good change and bad change.” (“Drill, baby, drill,” they chant. Okay, that’s just scary. The madness of crowds.)

7:15 Rudy Giuliani just said that the democrats will increase terrorists. Aside from the bad grammar, what the hell is that man talking about?

7:17: “I believe when they gave up on Iraq, they had given up on America.” (Oh, the mendacity! This is giving me a headache.)

7:18: Obama was against wire tapping before he was for it. (Like McCain was against torture before he was for it?)

7:20: The craven bid for the Jewish vote is dishonest and loathsome.

7:22: blah, blah, blah Palin….more executive experience than the entire Democratic ticket combined.

7:23: I’m sorry that Barack Obama does not feel that here hometown is cosmopolitan enough. (Main repub talking point tonight: Obama! Eltist, Elitist, Elitst. Facts not invited!)

7:32: SARAH’S ON!

(FASHION NOTE) The hair’s part up and part down. I think the color of her blazer could be more dynamic.

She’s charismatic. I’ll say that for her.

7:34: Our nominee is a true profile in courage……who refused to break faith with our troops in Eye-rack. (Why has no one told this woman how to pronounce the name of the country?)

7:37: To the families of special needs children….I promise you that if I’m elected, you’ll have an advocate in the White House. (That was nice.)

7:38: Todd’s an Eskimo (or part anyway). Cool.

7:40: Talking about working people, whom the Republicans generally abandon. But, hey, it’s all good.

7:41: Average hockey mom. The difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick. (Good line.)

7:42: Somebody has given her excellent advice with this speech. She’s defending her mayoral past. “It’s kind of like being a community organizer except that you have actual responsibilities”

7:43 Bitterly clinging to religion and guns…yadda, yadda. San Francisco. (Did she mention lattes? Or was that just an implication.)

7:44: Well, I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment….. (No, John McCain is.)

….so some of the media consider me unqualified. (No. Actually, it’s mostly because you’re unqualified.)

NEW REPUB TALKING POINT: nonstop media bashing. Why? Because they can’t make the case, and they can’t combat the ongoing drip-drip-drip coming out about Palin. So they’re going to try to murder the messenger.

7:47: When I stood up too……Sudden and relentless reform never sits well with the power brokers. (Republicans know this from experience as power brokers?)

7:78: Did she really sell a governor’s jet on eBay? Okay, that’s a good one. Ditto, getting rid of the private chef.

7:49: I told the Congress thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere. (Which is a total lie!)

7:50: Gas pipeline good. Polar bears bad.

7:52: (Ah, hah. I see how they’re going to combat her lack of knowledge about world issues. Good speech writers and then using oil and gas as a way in—as she sounds very knowledgeable on that subject. Smart strategy.)

7:57: Al Qaeda terrorists are still plotting our destruction and he wants to read them their rights. (Groan. How is this disingenuous, mendacious and stupid? Let us count the ways….)

Palin’s speech is smart—-and feels no responsibility to accuracy. But it’s skilled in terms of writing, and skillfully and compellingly delivered.

Palin is a smart woman, and a smart and likeable politician. One should, under no circumstances, underestimate her.

53 Comments

  • Putting Words in Palin’s Mouth

    There was a flutter of attention when McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told a group of Post reporters and editors yesterday that his team was having to rework the vice presidential acceptance speech because the original draft, prepared before Gov. Sarah Palin was chosen, was too “masculine.” While we all wondered to ourselves what might make a speech masculine or feminine, no one batted an eye at the underlying revelation: that the campaign was writing the nominee’s speech before knowing who the nominee would be.

    [snip]

    So when you watch Sarah Palin tonight, expect to learn something about how well she handles a Teleprompter. Expect to learn something about the McCain campaign’s assessment of its political standing with women, or working families, or social conservatives. Whether you’re learning what Sarah Palin really thinks or feels is anybody’s guess.

    -Fred Hiatt

  • Pretty mediocre. Unless one was predisposed to embrace her, she sounded mostly canned and even stilted. Like a very, very good valedictorian. Dreadful voice. And she laid down at least two bald-faced lies that could haunt her in campaign commercials.

    I also have to say that convention is not even remotely “America” in 2008.

  • First of all, her speech was written by Matthew Scully, George W. Bush’s speechwriter. Yeah.

    Second, is it smart to bash community organizers over and over again? I’m sure people who are out in the community doing hard work to help people feel really good about Mrs. Palin tonight.

    Finally, I posted this on my blog so I’ll just share it here:

    The crowd loved her.

    The right wingers loved her.

    But will America love her?

    In the first major, national appearance in front of millions of television viewers, beamed out to a vast majority of people who have no idea who she is, Sarah Palin is here to introduce herself as…a snide hockey mom with some bitchy one-liners (that she didn’t write)?

    First impressions count. And instead of showing class and honoring what a significant achievement this was for her party, her gender, her COUNTRY, she spent thirty minutes smacking her lips like she was at a Comedy Central Roast of Barack Obama.

    Ladies and gentleman, introducing Sarah Palin.

  • This speech was a killer, and she may very be the catalyst which wins the White House for the Republicans.

    Sarah is defiantly a breath of fresh air for Republicans, completely overshadowing the likes of Hillary or Michele. She has a voice that makes angles sing, a manner which inspires men to be gentlemen and ferocity which electrifies the crowd.

  • “She has a voice that makes angles sing”

    The Pork Queen of Wasilla certainly sang all of the angles. Actually her voice is one of her worst qualities. And her manner was such that she gave critics license to come out swinging. What a mean-spirited, small cheapshot artist she turns out to be. Or – to use the “quotes” – “she” has been turned into. The speech rang false more of the time than not – it was a teleprompter performance by a lightweight. And there were enough outright lies for at least a couple of counter-ads that use her at the RNC podium spouting total bullshit.

    The worst thing about the Palin nomination is watching the final transformation of John McCain into a coward and a phony. His campaign is now hiding behind Palin’s family/skirts to deflect criticism of McCain and rather than appoint someone he respected, he caved to the crazies in his party and chose a full-fledged wingnut who happens to wear a dress.

    More Palin Please ! She’ll be an asset to the Democrats as this thing keeps rolling.

  • So Pokey – you’re an in-the-tank guy if memory serves. Do you support the windfall tax on oil profits that Pork Queen pushed for and which allowed her to achieve her popularity and successes as a governor ? I kept waiting for that in her speech – maybe even a little love for Obama as her soulmate on that central achievement of her administration, which has allowed Pork Queen to dodge the kind of tax vs. spend bullets that make most governors’ lives miserable. Never heard it. I’ve said elsewhere, if Pork Queen pushes that oil tax agenda on McCain and the GOP, I’ll be so impressed with her spunk, I’ll vote for her.

  • Oh and Pokey, how much money was returned to federal taxpayers when Pork Queen FINALLY decided she was against the “Bridge to Nowhere” as referenced in her speech tonight ? None ? Pork Queen kept it ? Oh.

  • “(The Pork Queen of Wasilla) is defiantly a breath of fresh air for Republicans”

    Definitely or “defiantly”? And, uh, “fresh air” or a breath mint ?

  • Palin clearly doesn’t possess a “radio voice.” But, that aside, if I were a speech writer I’d have been a little concerned about someone spinning the hockey mom, pitbull lipstick line into a line about lipstick and pigs. As for mayors, community organizers, and responsibilities – they both have ’em, but co’s rarely get credit for carrying theirs; it’s in their job description that they not. Were I a Republican, I’d have taken a much different tack wrt community organizing, but I wouldn’t expect a speech writer for The Village to be sufficiently in touch with the people to know that tack.

  • As compared to Hillary, who men were reminded of a bitter X-wife, and whose high screechy voice made the angels cry, Governor Sarah Palin is a delight for the eyes as well as the ears, and whose gentle soul personifies motherhood and faithfulness.

    One believes that Sarah Palin could bake pies, pitch soft ball, nurture her family and deliver a masterful satirical attack against Obama which would drive Ann Coulter to envy, all in the same day.

  • Can we not waste time (and dignity) comparing Hillary and Palin?

    I thought it was a pretty good speech, especially when she stuck to her ordinary roots and folksiness and laid off the attacks. I suppose the plan was to make Wed for the base and Thurs for the moderates but I’m not sure giving her so many nasty lines was the way to go – the organizer shot struck me as particularly tone deaf.

    As to the cognitive dissonance of a campaign where the #1 campaigns on his Washington bona fides while his #2 runs against insiderdom and experience, well, it makes my head hurt.

  • Yes, let us not mention Hillary again and relegate her to the ghosts of elections past, and pray that in our future, she will never materialize as a malevolent apparition.

  • “One believes that Sarah Palin could bake pies, pitch soft ball, nurture her family and deliver a masterful satirical attack against Obama which would drive Ann Coulter to envy, all in the same day” because one desperately wants to believe lots and lots of patently ridiculous stuff. One might even be a little light in the “analytical intelligence” department.

    I’ll leave it at that in assessing the myriad resaons One might be prone to pulling stuff out of One’s butt in assessing VPILF.

  • Pork Queen’s attractiveness as a VP whether or not the ILF is attached, as it obviously is in Pokey’s case, boils down to this question IMHO:

    Would Pork Queen of Wasilla had as successful and popular tenure as Governor and, before, as mayor had she not aggressively pursued two key approaches to governance, both of which involve that fundamental conondrum of taxing and spending: (A) as Gov, pushing for a windfall tax on oil company profits. (B)as mayor, very successfully using a Washington lobbyist, and presumably the strategic positioning of a certain Alaska Senator who must not be named, to get an unusually high rate of earmarks from federal coffers to boost the local treasury. This is a serious question, has nothing to do with moose hunting or beauty contests or how angelic someone’s voice sounds.

    There’s also the little matter of Pork Queen asserting in her speech that when Alaska’s cup ranneth (?) over with money from oil profits, she “sent it back where it came from.” According to the deeply held convictions of most of the folks she was addressing in that room, if she’d “sent it back where it came from” that would be the oil companies she taxed. In fact, she sent it back to John and Jane Q Statetaxpayer, according to the kind of redistributive scheme that characterizes…uh…Obama’s tax policy.

    I’d like to hear a sensible conservative address those contentions honestly. I fear there are so few of those folks left all I’ll get in response is more blather.

  • Some have obviously forgotten that purpose of Sarah’s speech last night was to introduce herself and her family to the American people and the world. Without a doubt, nearly all media have lavished praise on her speech, her natural charisma and her success at accomplishing her goal and purpose.

    NYT – “electrified the party”

    LAT – “Defiant Sarah Palin comes out swinging”

    WPO – “well-delivered, with an appealing combination of charm and bite”

    There are those who would deride an analysis of the speech, the person, the leadership charisma and instead debase themselves with references to “VPILF” (Vice Presidents I Like to F%$k) and school yard names.

  • Sure she can read from a teleprompter – I believe she was once a TV News Anchor. Sure the hall loved it! Can you say red meat? And sure the talking heads were complememntary – when was the last time you heard them slam a speech anywhere?

    Problem is McCain has declared war on his “BASE” – the media. And they don’t like it. The stories keep coming out. And until Sarah faces the press in a Q and A it will continue.

    You want to know the real feelings? See that YOU TUBE bit of candidid remarks from Murphy and Noonan. And forget that Bush-Quayle won. They were facing Dukakis. Anyone here think Obama is Dukakis?

  • It’s “I’d like to fuck” not “I like to fuck.” Totally different things. Though I’d be surprised if anybody out there has more than one name on either of those lists. Take that John Breckinridge.

  • “Sure she can read from a teleprompter..”

    Obama, is ahead in the polls, and can also read from the teleprompter, but Palin’s adlib of “You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick”, portends well for her ability to engage in Reganisk one liners on the talk show circuit and debates.

    “I can feel it! The dice are rollin’!”

  • Lipstick”, portends well for her ability to engage in Reganisk one liners on the talk show circuit and debates.

    As the voters cry out helplessly for some frigging substance.

  • In addition to VPILF, she’s on the short list of GMVPILF (for grandma) — even GMILF without the V P being a short list. Wonder if just her looks spur rumors that she’s got a “boy toy” Enquirer stuff — though I can’t stand most of her positions, good for her, showing you can be attractive, smart and tough at the same time. Besides, she and her husband and maybe future son-in-law can lead a posse of Alaskans and personally hunt down Bin Laden themselves.

  • Maybe it’s just a figment of my imagination, and maybe my instinct is wrong, and maybe I’m prejudging Sarah Palin (although a myriad of Sarah Sins exist to reinforce my hunch’s), but any sympathy I had for the Ice Queen Sarah quickly vanished while watching her “speech” last night at the GOP “Up With People” revival meeting.
    All the old familiar Republican double speak and big lie tactics came to the forefront.
    Palin was a chip off the old block and her railing at the Washington establishment, and the liberal media and the old Hockey Mom and Working Mom and Traditional Family values paean, and the tossing around of her (?) new baby (actually the first time I’ve seen her holding the kid it’s usually the daughter), and the pregnant daughters boyfriend who was chewing his gum and looking like little Tommy from down the street, and the whole dog and pony show for the religious right supporters.
    But what Palin trys to project (just a regular working mom), isn’t backed up by her record which includes lying about her opposition to disgraced Sen Ted Stevens and the “bridge to nowhere”, her actually being a lobbyist for Stevens,her unsympathetic line item veto of aid and education to young unwed mothers and thier babys, her proposals to teach “creationism”, but not sex education only abstinence, her membership and support for the secessionist AIP while waving the flag around, Palins back stabbing ways with not only Sen Stevens when she was through with him but also her betrayal of onetime family friend the ex Mayor of Wasilla, her mau mauing of city employees in Wasilla if they didn’t Kow Tow to her whims and ridiculous religious beliefs, such as the poor Librarian who had a choice of banning books or losing her job, the fired public official who didn’t fire her ex brother in law, and just the overall nasty divisive way she has operated as a politician not to mention the overall shrillness and accusatory manner with which she delivered her speech.
    It all reminds me of the phony, mean spirited, backstabbing, overly ambitious, take no prisoners Eve Harrington (played brilliantly by Anne Baxter) in the 1950 movie “All About Eve”.
    There’s something palpably unsettling and malignant about the “Ice Queen” Sarah Palin IMHO, and I think it’s going to become more and more evident to everyone as the campaign continues.

  • Pokey, I’m sorry but there was plenty of substance in comment #14 for you to bite on – it was a direct challenge on a very concrete question. But you weren’t up for that were you ?

  • My gawd! Who but dong key booty can use “mau mau and Kow Tow” in the same sentence? And why did he capitalize kow tow and not mau mau? Because he’s a freaking racist like we here at the Reconciliation Commission have been telling you from the very beginning of his rude invasion of this blog.Most other successful sites have written him off. Don’t do it here, because he’ll migrate to another blog and it sadly, might be your very own.

  • Woody, your comment at 29 is pretty sexist and antiquated, and that woman whose photo is pictured (with long, bad hair) is not one to give advice. I’d say the up-do looks desperate but the idea that everyone over 40 should have that horrible, short Laura Bush/Hillary hair is fightin’ words. (You mean like 56-year-old Jaclyn Smith on Shear Genius, a show about hair, and virtually every attractive actress over 40? Though they have it styled — a blow dryer and some electric curlers are two things Sarah from the Tundra could acquire and master.) Why didn’t you quote the other guy who concludes your linked article, advising her to just “let her hair down” (with a good cut).

  • Regarding #18

    As oil prices rose, two prominent politicians proposed strikingly similar initiatives to raise taxes on the oil industry and send money to struggling consumers. Now, both are running for national office — on opposite tickets.
    As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin pushed a proposal through the state legislature that mirrors what Barack Obama is proposing on a national scale.

    How the Alaska Tax Works

    But the tax functions exactly like a windfall profits tax, said Jerry Burnett, acting deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Revenue. As the price of oil goes up, oil company profits rise. And as profits rise, so does the tax rate on oil production.

    When prices are $80 a barrel, the tax rate is roughly 37 percent, and the state’s budget runs a slight surplus. When oil hits $120 a barrel, the tax rate reaches about 50 percent of profits, and the state collects about twice what it spends, Burnett said. For fiscal year 2008, the state projects that the tax increase Palin pushed will generate an extra $2 billion for the state.

    … One feature that makes it different from a pure windfall profits tax. It allows companies to reduce their tax burden by reinvesting profits in additional production and exploration in Alaska. It takes a lot of money from the oil companies at high prices, but it also gives them a great incentive to invest”.

    http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=news-000002943975

    Looks like excellent TAX plan to me and a good compromise that the Republicans should endorse.

    NYT (international) 1/26/2007 —- In her first year as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has plunged ahead with the fearlessness of a polar explorer.

    The populist Republican has raised taxes on the powerful oil industry. She has pushed through ethics legislation amid a burgeoning corruption investigation of Alaska lawmakers. She has bucked her party’s old guard. And she has ordered her administration to seek fewer congressional earmarks after Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” became a national symbol of piggish pork-barrel spending.
    The 43-year-old governor has also emerged as a national figure and a media darling, posing recently for Vogue magazine.

    Alaska’s first female governor, a former Miss Wasilla with swept-up light-brown hair, says it is her responsibility to be available even to fashion magazines if it can help change the state’s reputation for graft and gluttony at the public trough.

    “We’ve got to make sure the rest of the United States doesn’t believe the only thing going on in Alaska is FBI probes and corruption trials,” Palin said.

    Party labels seem to mean very little to Palin. Her revenue commissioner is a Democrat. Her husband, Todd, a blue-collar worker on Alaska’s oil-rich North Slope, is an independent.

    The mother of four is often seen bounding down the Capitol stairwell, holding a pink backpack and rushing to get her 6-year-old daughter, Piper, off to school on time — something that Pitney said could make Palin more appealing to a national audience.

    She immediately took on the state’s most lucrative industry, questioning whether Alaska — which gets about 85 percent of its revenue from big oil — is getting its fair share of the oil companies’ billions of dollars in quarterly profits.

    She got what she wanted from the GOP-controlled Legislature. Relying heavily on Democratic votes, she won approval last month (November 2007) to boost taxes on oil company profits from 22.5 percent to 25 percent. That could bring in an additional $1.6 billion annually for the state, depending on oil prices.

    http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/26/america/Alaska-Governor.php

  • Anchorage Daily News in response to PorkQueen’s assertions in Wednesday performance before RNC:

    “As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million.

    “n her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation, although she has cut, by more than half, the amount the state sought from Washington this year.”

  • reg: “n her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation….

    Do you mean that a governor should be turning down money that the state sent to Washington and has an opportunity to get it back? Why, this is her credit as a leader of a state. It sounds to me that she was reponsive to the citizens of the state where she was elected governor, just as she will be to the citizens of all the states when in Washington.

    Keep quoting liberal journalists and we can keep knocking them down.

  • Sure Obama can read a teleprompter. He can also extemp. See the remarks Tuesday in Ohio showing relief that Gustav missed being another Katrina but speaking of the quiet storm that is destroying american familieis – examples of health care, joblessness etc. Very moving and off the cuff.

    And anyone who watched Joe Biden in the Democratic debates knows that he’s no slouch either. I hope the bloviators in the media like Brokaw build Palin up and speak of Joe’s “Challenge” in debating her. When he demolises her it will be just so much sweeter.

  • I’ve got to say this. Reading the blogs (Sommerby, Digby, MYDD) I note some panic that Palin may be working out. Get real people – you want Obama and Biden to swat this fly with a howitzer?

    Look, if people are really so dumb as to vote for McCain because of the Moosehunter then we deserve what we get and everyone should make plansm for the debacle to follow. But I still have hope that folks aren’t that dumb.

  • don quixote Says:
    September 4th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
    Maybe it’s just a figment of my imagination

    ________________________________________________________________

    There’s the understatement of the year.

  • Pokey – thanks. On the first, you reaffirmed my point exactly and I have stated that I will, on the basis of sheer maverickyness, vote for McCain-Palin if Palin has the stones to make her Alaska strategy re: oil companies the GOP/McCain national strategy.

    On the second, Palin may have cut back – having been for the bridge to nowhere before she was against it – but Alaska under her tenure has gotten the highest per capita rate of pork of any state and, as the article states, cut it back only after it became a political embarrassment. Lest we forget, it had to get to the point where Ted Stevens – who she used in her campaign ads just two years ago – was actually indicted. So is she a smart pol ? No doubt. Has she shown integrity on pork over her tenure as mayor and as governor. But my biggest question is this: How does leading a small state and a small town that had the advantage of either-or-both a huge revenue base from oil, a revenue base that allows Alaska’s governor to send a couple grand to each resident (to the tune of something like $27,000 going to a Palin-sized family) coupled with the highest level of pork spending coming from the fed of any state in the union (and same for Wasilla, which recieved unusually high pork bucks after Palin hired a professional lobbyist and started traveling regularly to DC to dip into the trough) – how does that actual record make Palin someone who has the kind of executive experience to govern even a more complex state that has real tax-spend issues, much less the USofA.

    This woman has been a PorkQueen, has governed an entity that has a tax base more like Brunei’s than, say, Illinois’ or the country as a whole, and only backed off some of the worst excesses when scandal erupted.

    The whole argument for her candidacy is a joke – unless you happen to be the kind of disingenuous ideolgue who hold much of the GOP hostage.

  • Also how do you square Palin’s assertion that when Alaska had excess oil profits, she sent them back to “where they came from” with the fact that she sent bigger oil kickbacks to John Q Taxpayer. By GOP economics, that’s a total lie. The money came from the oil companies, not from average taxpayers. Not to mention that Alaskans don’t even pay state taxes, but get a payout each year from the state’s oil fund – money that the state invests from the profits on oil leases.

    The PorkQueen was talking out of her ass – lying really – and poor schmucks in funny hats were lapping up the bullshit. PorkQueen is one of the biggest frauds ever sold to the electorate in American history. The Jerry Springer shit is actually a distraction from what a fluff and a phony she is.

  • How do you square Palin’s assertion that when Alaska had excess oil profits, she sent them back to “where they came from”

    This is a simple one – The people of Alaska and the USA are the owners of 92% of the LAND and the OIL which is underneath the land (State and Federal Land).

    Of course as a land owner, one should be paid equitable for the extraction and transportation of OIL from/across your own land.

  • Not so fast, Pokey. The oil companies paid the windfall profits tax. That wasn’t the leasing money that goes into the Alaska fund that makes average Alaskan’s benficiaries of some combination of oil emirate/socialist economics. You can’t win this argument by using the logic of Democrats’ – gotta stick with Republican economic nostrums. That’s my whole point. I’m not arguing with what PorkQueen did, I’m arguing with her rhetoric and agenda, which now includes NO WINDFALL PROFITS TAXES ON OIL COMPANIES. I’ve already said that if the PorkQueen convince McPOWPOW and the GOPers to push for the kind of redistributive tax scheme that she imposed on the oil companies in Alaska, I’d vote for them.

  • There is, by the way, no group of Americans outside of a ghetto housing project so dependent on getting free money from the government as Alaskans – every last one of them, not to mention the extra pork flowing at record rates to municipalities like Wasilla and the Juneau bureaucrats.

  • Reg,
    There is a profound difference between getting a share of profits derived from state owned land and privately owned land.

    99% of the oil profits in Alaska is derived from state owned land, and it would only be responsible management for the state to obtain the maximum profit for the state owned resources. The state is acting as any private company would, getting the highest return for their shareholders, who happen to be the Alaska residents. THIS TAX ONLY APPLIES TO STATE-OWNED-LAND.

    The tax is set at its highest rate in Prudhoe Bay, where the state takes 25 percent of the net profit of a barrel when its price is at or below $52.

    The percentage then escalates as oil prices rise over that benchmark. Alaska gets about $49 of a $120 barrel, not counting other fees.

    BP Alaska, which runs Prudhoe Bay, said earlier this year that it had delayed the development in the western region of the North Slope as a result of the tax. ConocoPhillips cited the same reason for scrapping a $300 million refinery project.

    Investment dollars are flowing instead to places that have a better return, like the massive deep-water projects offshore in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, where ConocoPhillips said the government take equals less than 50 percent of the barrel.

    In July, BP announced it would begin developing the Liberty oil field, a $1.5 billion project expected to yield 100 million barrels of oil, located on federal lands in Alaska. If the project had been located in state lands on the North Slope, “I don’t think we’d have been able to make that investment,” Suttles said.

    Alaska state officials say they still do plenty to court the oil industry, such as giving small, independent producers breaks on royalty payments. And the state tax bill includes a generous provision for deducting investments in new fields or other capital costs.

    Although Alaska’s huge resources and relative political stability make it affordable for oil firms to pay huge taxes there, “you don’t want take so much that you discourage activity,” said Kenneth Medlock, a petroleum economist at Rice University in Houston. “You want to strike that fine balance.”

    The federal government could easily apply this to federal leases, but this type of legislation has been often blocked by a few Republican Senators.

  • POKEY’s RADICAL ENERGY POLICY

    Mandate that every new car sold in the USA must be Flex fuel compliant by 2010 and provide standards for FLEX retrofitting kits.
    Mandate Reverse Metering nationwide — enabling small clean generators of power to PROFIT when their generation exceeds their use.
    Enact large windfall taxes on OIL and GAS companies who are using FEDERAL and STATE lands.
    Remove the Government impediments to Clean Energy projects
    Provide cheap government backed loans for all clean energy projects (small and large) – wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, etc.
    Provide LARGE tax rebates for all electric cars.
    Provide LARGE tax rebates for clean batteries (non-toxic).

Leave a Comment