Well, Charmagne Oil will certainly be happy about this! If they've been holding back on contributing to McCain and the "Repo party" (nice!) selecting Palin sends the message to the oil industry "Yes! You order, we obey! Give us your money!" Here's Palin on CNN in June:
I think those politicians who don't understand that we need more domestic supply of energy flowing into our hungry markets, you know, they're living in La-La Land. And we're in a world of hurt if their agenda continues to be to lock up these safe, secure domestic supplies of energy.
Remember too Larry (Kudlow), we're talking about a sliver of the coastal plain of Alaska being explored and drilled for oil. It's about a footprint of a 2000-acre plot of land. That's smaller than the footprint of LAX, for instance. So it's not so grandiose an acreage that it is out of the realm of possibility for others to start understanding why it is that we can do this safely.
Oh! Just like LAX airport! Stand alone, isolated little patch of drilling! Hmmm... Airports don't need access roads or pipelines, um, or pipeline maintenance roads, er, or a nearby port to ship all this stuff in, right? Just a little, isolated 2000 acre plot...
(Man, I miss McCain99 - back when he was smart enough to understand that offshore and ANWR drilling wasn't worth it. Too bad we're stuck with McCain08.
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Beauty pageant contestant, eh? (She won in her local town pageant and came in second for Miss Alaska.) She is sounding more and more like Dan Quale! (At least Quale had a JD from U of IN, compared with Palin's very impressive Bachelors of Journalism from U of Idaho's, uh, renowned?, er, world famous?, um, Pulitzer-laidened? School of Journalism. (With a minor in Politics!))
But, hey, she has lots of experience! She's been the mayor of a 9,000 person town! She was also her high school's head of the "Fellowship of Christian Athletes"! Awesome. I mean, there's no chance that McCain will every be incapacitated in the next 4 to 8 years...
In 2006, she was also the only major candidate for AK gov to support teaching creationism in public schools, despite endless cases finding that it is unconstitutional to use the schools to promote this religious idea.
And, of course, she - just like McCain08 - want to bring the "success" of the Prohibition on Alcohol and our current, brilliant, Prohibition on Drugs to a new Prohibition on Abortions. This will be a surprise to a lot of people - despite being some sort of "moderate" on abortion prohibition in the past, currently McCain is now full-tilt "pro-life" - including wanting more Supreme Court justices of the "quality" of Thomas and Scalia. Just to be clear - that is a full-tilt prohibition - the health (let alone the life or death) of the woman will not be taken into account.
Actually, McCain is playing the religious right the same way the core of the Republican party has for years. They will rev up the "religious base" with the same goofball social "issues" and get them out in droves in November. Of course, they won't tell them that the nasty, old Constitution ties their hands from outlawing homos or forcing prayer and/or creationism in schools or putting up big statues of Jesus in courtrooms, or whatever it is they want.
All in all, Palin is a damn good choice:
1) Every time "the media" mentions that Obama would be America's first "black" president, they will have to also mention that Palin would be our first woman veep. McCain plays the press to his advantage again!
2) Insanely enough, Palin will pull a good number of "disaffected" Hillary supporters.
3) Palin will be his envoy to get the religious nuts out to the polls.
4) Ka-ching! Mo oil money! Mo oil money! Mo oil money! (Because McCain is doing public funding, the oil $$$ will go to the Republican Party and 537s, but it will be spent to his advantage, and he will owe them big time.)