Learn From the BP Disaster. Then Drill Again.

Nansen Saleri, president and CEO of Quantum Reservoir Impact in Houston, was formerly head of reservoir management for Saudi Aramco. He seems to think, no, he does think, and contend, that after learning our lesson, we should drill again. The Palin crowd might well agree, and surely will, but that hardly constitutes responsibility, wisdom, and prudence.

But Hardship Endures in Alaskan Zone Hit by Valdez Spill.Not as easy as wishing something were true.

Palin Speaks to Investors in Hong Kong

Jonathon Stone, the chairman and CEO of CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, with Sarah Palin at a meeting in Hong Kong on Wednesday.





Just yesterday I was wondering what'd happened to her, and to day I wonder what she could have said of interest to this audience.


''I'm going to call it like I see it and I will share with you candidly a view right from Main Street, Main Street U.S.A.,'' Palin told a room full of asset managers and other finance professionals, according to a video of part of the speech obtained by The Associated Press. ''And how perhaps my view of Main Street ... how that affects you and your business.''

Main Street? Gimme a break.

It marked Palin's first major appearance since she resigned as governor in July, and the speech's location and international scope could help boost her credentials ahead of a possible bid for president in 2012. While she's thought to be considering that, her Hong Kong trip bore no political overtones, said Fred Malek, a friend and Palin adviser.

Going to Hong Kong is foreign policy experience?

In her speech -- closed to reporters -- Palin argued that many average Americans are uncomfortable with health care reforms that infringe on private enterprise, Chris Palmer, an American fund manager for Gartmore Investment Ltd., told reporters.

They need her to know that? Why not just watch or read some news?

In an apparent reference to tensions between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese that have led to riots, Palin mentioned China's ethnic problems, arguing they are ''a sign that China lacks mechanisms to deal with regional issues,'' Palmer said.

They'll love that in Peking (oops, my age shows: Beijing).

She also criticized the U.S. Federal Reserve's intervention in the economy over the last year and praised the conservative economic policies of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, according to another attendee who declined to be named because he didn't want to be seen as speaking on behalf of his company.

It is so easy to praise Ronald Reagan for his economic policies while ignoring their true impact and actual effects: he conducted deficit spending (Keynisian), cut taxes for the wealthy and threw the US into recession.

Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said Tuesday the group knew little about Palin's speech.

''We're curious as to what she's willing to say in private but not in public,'' Sevugan said. ''Are there other countries that she can see from her window that she doesn't want us to know about?''

Touche.

Palin chases the dollar signs

Look for Palin to take frequent journeys to the bank before going on the road to the White House.

Absolutely.

The public's attention span is short, so it is in Palin's self-interest to seek the gains that come with fame.

Also true.

The governor's Fairbanks farewell speech last Sunday, with its warnings about big government and attacks on the media -- even a celebration of hunting -- was tailored to tastes of America's political right.

Her base.


What the far right wants is red meat, served up bloody red.

We have, this week, Fox News' race-baiter Glen Beck calling President Obama "a racist" and accusing Obama of having a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."

What is white culture? One thing it is is not black.

On CNN, Lou Dobbs has fanned the Birthers, challenging Obama to "provide the long-form birth certificate," and hinting -- without evidence -- that the certificate produced in last year's campaign is not "the real document."

Dobbs is a certified dirtbag, a hysterical demagogue.

As this column is written, CNN's "Larry King Live" is readying a lowbrow face-off: Judge Sonia Sotomayor's qualifications for the U.S. Supreme Court will be discussed by left-wing publicity hound the Rev. Al Sharpton and right-wing attention seeker Ann Coulter.

Who cares what those two think? Judge Sotomayor is about to become a Justice, and whatever objections Coulter has are irrelevant.

Sarah Palin would fit cable TV "commentary" like a glove, witness her 2008 speeches about Obama "palling around with terrorists." If caught wordless, she could always wink at the camera.

William Kristol surely would love that.

Doubtless, the former governor will undergo analysis by the elite media's two ranking psychobabblers, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and Gail Sheehy of Vanity Fair. They've sucked every possible milligram of blood out of Hillary Clinton. But such attacks will only strengthen Palin's credentials with the right-thinking faithful.

Elite psychobabblers; love that. Yes, the more the liberals in the media attack her, the more Palin's supporters will love her.

The right does the nominating in the Republican Party, and two early deciding states -- Iowa, with its caucuses, and South Carolina with its primary -- are strongholds of the Christian right.

As well, Palin -- for the moment -- is an honest-to-goodness national celebrity.

Time will tell, but if she writes a book (well, if someone writes a book that she can say she wrote) the publicity will keep the spotlight on her. And she is surely going to travel and campaign for certain candidates, all of which themedia she loves to bash will cover.

Alaska lawmakers attending last week's National Council of State Legislators' meeting were spotted wearing buttons saying, "I'm from Alaska. Please don't ask me about her." A Washington, D.C., airport newsstand, displaying the Time magazine with Palin on the cover, put out a sign reading "Only two copies per customer." "Starting this afternoon, she's someone else's story," the Anchorage Daily News' irreverent "Alaskan Ear" column opined last Sunday.

They'll miss her. Until this month, I never thought any Alaska governor could match Wally Hickel's famous declaration: "We can't just let nature run wild."

But that was before Sarah Palin intoned: "Only dead fish go with the flow."

She's from Wasilla

The pattern is inescapable: she takes disagreements personally, and swiftly deals vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. Illustration by Risko.
After the debacle that was the Reublican presidential campaign (not that it pains me), John McCain went back to being a Senator, and an inconsistent (what is often called a maverick) Republican.

On the other hand, Sara Palin went back to being Alaskan Governor, an unpredictable Republican (not called a maverick), and, unlike her benefactor, the Senator from Arizona, did not lower her profile for long.

Like Richard M. Nixon, who chose the coalfield town of Hyden, Kentucky, for his first post-resignation public appearance, Palin has come to a place where she is guaranteed a hero’s reception. She is not only a staunch foe of abortion but also the mother of a boy, Trig, who was born with Down syndrome just a few months before John McCain chose Palin as his running mate. The souvenir program for this evening’s dinner is full of displays for local politicians and businesses, attesting to their pro-life bona fides. An ad for Hahn Realty Corporation reads, “If you need commercial real estate, call Joe Kiefer! Joe is pro-life and a proud supporter of the Vanderburgh County Right to Life.”

Commercial real estate and opposition to abortion: quite a mix.

Her appeal to people in the party (and in the country) who share her convictions and resentments is profound. The fascination is viral, and global.

And resentment is a key, integral ingredient of the Governor and her admirers.

What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life?

Nothing much good. Parallels can be drawn, inferred, postulated, none flattering.

Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life—neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection.

Tabloid fame is part of modern-day society.

Another aspect of the Palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs. This pheromonal reality has been a blessing and a curse. It has captivated people who would never have given someone with Palin’s record a second glance if Palin had looked like Susan Boyle. And it has made others reluctant to give her a second chance because she looks like a beauty queen.

Sexism? She plays the sexy card: the winks, the beauty queen look. The first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs is quite a phrase.

The caricature of Sarah Palin that emerged in the presidential campaign, for good and ill, is now ineradicable. The swift journey from her knockout convention speech to Tina Fey’s dead-eyed incarnation of her as Dan Quayle with an updo played out in real time, no less for the bewildered McCain campaign than for the public at large. It is an ironclad axiom of politics that if a campaign looks troubled from the outside the inside reality is far worse, and the McCain-Palin fiasco was no exception.

For the hard-core believers, it is not a caricature; they love her, admire what they see her representing, and believe.

Palin had been on the national Republican radar for barely a year, after a cruise ship of conservative columnists, including The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, had stopped in Juneau in 2007 and had succumbed to her charms when she invited them to the governor’s house for a luncheon of halibut cheeks.
Wonder if Willie K swooned; seems so.
At least one savvy politician—Barack Obama—believed Palin would never have time to get up to speed. He told his aides that it had taken him four months to learn how to be a national candidate, and added, “I don’t care how talented she is, this is really a leap.”

He was right about that, too.
The paramount strategic goal in picking Palin was that the choice of a running mate had to ensure a successful convention and a competitive race right after; in that limited sense, the choice worked. But no serious vetting had been done before the selection (by either the McCain or the Obama team), and there was trouble in nailing down basic facts about Palin’s life.

Time heals, and people forget over time, but she seems content being who she is, and that helped her lose the election.

There is virtually nothing about Palin’s performance in the fall campaign that should have come as a surprise to John McCain. Had he really attempted to learn something about her before the fateful day of August 29, 2008, when he announced that she was his choice for running mate, he would easily have discerned all the traits that he belatedly came to know.
Choosing her was a move of desperation, what is called a "Hail Mary pass" (toss the football as far as you can, and pray), and he didn't seem to bother finding out who she really was.

In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived.
A man showing such traits might be labeled Machiavellian; she was nicknamed Barracuda.

The first thing McCain could have learned about Palin is what it means that she is from Alaska. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse.Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.
Provincial.
It is in this Alaska—where it is possible to be both a conservative Republican and a pothead, or a foursquare Democrat and a gun nut—that Sarah Palin learned everything she knows about politics, and about life. It was in this environment that her ambition first found an outlet in public office, and where she first tasted the 151-proof Everclear that is power.

Power is an aphrodisiac for men and women.

The second thing McCain could have discovered about Palin is that no political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition.

Is that rare in a politician?

When she ran for Governor of Alaska in 2006, her style was already apparent.

Palin’s lack of knowledge turned out not to hurt her. Andrew Halcro later remembered that he and Palin once compared notes about their many encounters, and she said, “Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, Does any of this really matter?”

Sadly, in many cases, no, it does not matter. Yet she did win the race, and rode the wave of rising oil prices to increased royalty payments to Alaskans (wait, is that socialism?).

Palin was able to increase the annual distribution from the state’s Permanent Fund to about $3,000 per resident, almost double the amount received the previous year. She could be a fiscal conservative and a big spender all at the same time.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's not.

Palin’s anti-politician stance had worked so well in her campaign that she carried it over into her dealings with actual politicians in Juneau, who didn’t take kindly to the practice.

Politicians will be politicians.

When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”

Say, what?

Then came the announcement of Bristol's pregnancy, Troopergate, and, after the campaign ended, the video of Governor Palin, who had pardoned a turkey and pronounced for local television cameras that the campaign hadn't changed her, standing in front of a worker pushing turkeys through a kind of grinder, what seemed an all too apt metaphor for how Palin’s political fortunes had changed in the wake of her great national adventure, even if her personality had not.

Perhaps nothing has caused a bigger stir than Palin’s nomination of Wayne Anthony Ross to be Alaska’s attorney general. Ross is a two-time gubernatorial candidate and a board member of the National Rifle Association. He had sown controversy over the years by referring to gays and lesbians as “degenerates” (he later sought to downplay the remark, saying his aversion to homosexuals was no different from his aversion to lima beans) and for staunchly opposing subsistence-hunting preferences for native Alaskans. A flamboyant divorce lawyer who drives a big red Hummer with the vanity license plate war, Ross is a good old boy of pithy expression and considerable charm. (“In Alaska,” Ross told me, “a liberal is someone who carries a .357 or smaller.”)

What a guy: equating people with lima beans.


None of McCain’s still-loyal soldiers will say negative things about Palin on the record. Even thinking such thoughts privately is painful for them, because there is ultimately no way to read McCain’s selection of Palin as reflecting anything other than an appalling egotism, heedlessness, and lack of judgment in a man whose courage, tenacity, and character they have extravagantly admired—and as reflecting, too, an unsettling willingness on their own part to aid and abet him. They all know that if their candidate—a 72-year-old cancer survivor—had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job.

Not presidential timber.

To ask why none of them dared to just walk away is to ask why Colin Powell did not resign in protest over the Bush administration’s foreign policy, or why none of Bill Clinton’s disillusioned aides resigned after he lied to them about Monica Lewinsky. The question cannot comprehend the intense bonds that the blood sport of modern politics produces. To leave a campaign—especially a struggling, losing campaign—is akin to desertion in wartime, and even as they began to understand her limitations, plenty of McCain aides still saw Palin as the campaign’s best hope. Some still believe that, simply in terms of the electoral math, she helped at least as much as she hurt, and maybe helped more.

Colin Powell staying on is understandable, for a life-long soldier does not abandon his assignment, but as a person he showed an enormous lack of judgment and no political courage. If Palin helped as much as she hurt the campaign, what was the value of her choice?

McCain will not talk about the campaign, or about his VP choice, period. McCain’s daughter Meghan, who has continued the blog she began on the campaign last year, has said that Palin is the one topic on which she will have no public comment. And she discusses everything else.

In Evansville, though, Palin concentrated on the task at hand: an emphatic defense of the anti-abortion cause.

And that is what the cause is: opposed to abortion, not pro-life.

Sarah Palin is a star in Evansville and all the many Evansvilles of America, but there is a big part of the Republican Party—the Wall Street wing, the national-security wing—in which she cuts no ice. She could do well in the Iowa caucuses or South Carolina primary, but it is much harder to imagine her making headway in New Hampshire, where independent voters were turned off by her last fall. It is also difficult to see just how she would expand her appeal beyond the base that already loves her.

Well, politics has a way of moving in unpredictable directions, so handicapping the 2012 election in July 2009 seems absurd.

Statehouse Journal

Gov. Sarah Palin has rejected suggestions by detractors at the Capitol that she has been distracted from state business.


“The source of the greatest tension this year between the Legislature and the executive has been certainly the appearance that the executive is prioritizing her national image, her national brand, over the day-to-day operations of state government and the interests of the State of Alaska,” said Mike Hawker, the Republican co-chairman of the House Finance Committee.

Who wants to govern a mere, and far-away, state, when the national spotlight beckons?

Recently, she has sparred publicly with Levi Johnston, the 19-year-old father of her grandson, who broke up with Ms. Palin’s daughter Bristol. On Thursday, while lawmakers hone the state budget, the governor is to speak at an anti-abortion group’s fund-raising dinner in Indiana. The next morning, she addresses a breakfast for a nonprofit for families like her own who have a child with Down syndrome.

Ms. Palin and her aides insist she is as engaged with state businesses as ever. “We have a very good working relationship, as far as we know, with lawmakers,” Ms. Palin said last week in her office, where she met with reporters. “Our door is always open.”

A royal we?

“There are critics out there who say she’s not engaged in the national ambitions that they have for her,” Ms. Stapleton said. “The fact that she has people criticizing that she’s not doing it the way D.C. insiders would do it is a compliment to her.”

She could turn out to be a shooting star that burns out quickly.

At one point, someone complimented her hand-painted clogs. “Cute shoes,” the person said. Ms. Palin responded, alluding to a recent dust-up over being seen wearing the logo of her husband’s snow machine sponsor: “I may not be able to tell you who paints them or I may be charged with an ethics violation or something.”

Or something. Still, she is not be counted out. Such feigned simplicity plays well with some.

New Soccer Team Stokes Seattle’s Passion

Fans Jordan McDonald, with the horn, and Phil Andrus, with the spiked hair, go all out for the Sounders soccer team at Qwest Field in Seattle.
Now, that's liking the game. I wonder if peoples in other lands paint themselves?


Freddie Ljungberg, a European soccer star and world-class player, is a member of the Sounders.
When the new Swede arrived in the new Seattle, he needed no ax or fishing net, the tools of so many other Scandinavian immigrants who had come before. Instead he wore shorts, and when his name was called on his first day at work — “Freddie Ljungberg!” — 28,000 people erupted.

“They sold it to me that the fans are special here,” Mr. Ljungberg said Saturday night in the locker room at Qwest Field here, just after playing his first minutes at midfield for an American professional soccer team, the new Seattle Sounders FC. “And I must say, they are.”

Even in a city that has supported professional football, baseball and basketball teams for decades, many people say that something else is at work in the instant passion for the Sounders. They say it reflects the region’s well-established affection for soccer but also its conviction that it is not quite like the rest of America. When Seattle cheers the Sounders, it cheers its civic image.

“Soccer is kind of the alternative sport for the United States,” said J. B. Wogan, 24, a reporter for a suburban weekly newspaper. “And Seattle is kind of an alternative city.”

Maybe, finally, futbol is catching on in the US. Kids play it all over, but the game has no real presence on a professional level.

Sounders soccer games at Qwest Field have been selling out.



The early version of the Sounders sometimes drew more than 20,000 fans, but by the mid-1980s, the Sounders and the league were gone. When Major League Soccer began play in 1996, Seattle was left out. The area only had a minor league team until now.

It all comes at a time when Seattle has plenty to be glum about. It lost its professional basketball team, the Sonics, to Oklahoma City last year. Across from Qwest Field, the cranes at the Port of Seattle are not as busy as they once were. Unemployment is rising quickly.

“We seem to have struck a chord and been a pretty good story in a relatively dim landscape,” said Adrian Hanauer, the team’s general manager and one of its owners. “That’s fine for now, but we know that this is a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kind of business. We have to deliver on the pitch and connect to our fans.”

Palin ready for what?

Watching the two videos of Governor Palin's interview with Katie Couric was troubling: there is no doubt this boob isn't ready for the Vice-Presidency (I wonder if she's even ready to be Governor), but what is irksome and exasperating, let alone scary, is that people are buying her schtick. All she can do is recite talking points.

Couric asked her for examples of McCain leadership, and all Palin could muster was "I'll try to find you some and I'll bring 'em a to ya." Yup, she said "ya" in a folksy sorta way. Hell, when she tried to characterize how she'd been dealt with after saying that being able to see Russia from Alaska amounted credible foreign policy experience, she couldn't think of the word "mocked" -- which Couric offered as an escape. Granted that Governor Palin was nervous; but, how that do in negotiations with, say, Putin, whom she characterized as "rearing his head and coming into the air-space of the United States of America."

Say what?

Oh, spy planes are sent to Russia from Alaska, too. That also qualifies to be VP.

I must say I have a new-found respect for Ms. Couric; she proved her worth as a journalist.

Palin's Hockey Rink

Over the next 8 weeks there will be much discussion about, one of many topics, Governor Palin's qualifications, background and temperament. Already there has been quite a bit in the last week.

Ms. Palin, now Alaska's governor and Republican Sen. John McCain's running mate, has pointed to her two terms as Wasilla's mayor, from 1996 to 2002, as evidence that she has enough executive experience to take on the presidency, should the need arise -- more than Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, who touts his own background as a community organizer in Chicago.

"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities," Ms. Palin said Wednesday in her acceptance speech at the Republican convention.

In this article, a few items jump out at me. First, these numbers: Ms. Palin marched ahead, making the public case for a sales-tax increase and $14.7 million bond issue to pay for the sports center, which was to feature a running track, basketball courts and a hockey rink. At the time, the city's annual budget was about $20 million. In a March 2002 referendum, residents approved the mayor's plan by a 20-vote margin, 306 to 286. The city cleared roads, installed utilities and made preparations to build.

592 votes in total.