The amazing thing -- when you watch Sarah Palin from a distance as an Alaskan -- are the words that come from the mouth of the state's one-time governor, if, of course, the "lamestream media'' can be believed.
Here, according to several sources in the lamestream media, is one of the things she said in Pella, Iowa, on Tuesday where a pro-Palin documentary, The Undefeated, was playing:
"I'm very grateful that someone would bother to go to these efforts to make a documentary about the record of my team in Alaska that worked so hard for energy security and ethics reform and privatizing businesses that should never be in government's hands.''
Palin, everyone in Alaska in general agrees, did help push through ethics reform as governor. But the references to "energy security'' and "privatizing businesses" are head-scratchers. Why? Because in Alaska, the government owns:
- The only railroad, the Alaska Railroad.
- The only spaceport, the Kodiak Launch Complex. (I bet most of America didn't even known Alaska had a spaceport.)
- One of the biggest investment banks, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority.
- The marketing organization for the state's huge seafood industry, the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.
- The only major university, the University of Alaska.
And more. The state would own the oil industry if it could.
But in America, unlike in Saudi Arabia, a government takeover of that business isn't possible. So, under Palin, the state simply taxed the oil industry to the limit. And why did the state tax the oil industry to the limit? So Alaskans wouldn't need to pay any state personal income or sales taxes, and so the government could actually give them money instead. Every Alaskan -- rich or poor, newborn infant or doddering old fool -- gets an annual check (usually more than $1,000 and up to $3,269 in 2008, which included an energy rebate that year) from the government. It is called a Permanent Fund dividend, and it is what Alaskans consider their "fair share'' of Alaska's oil, though most Alaskans did absolutely nothing to produce this oil.
Read the complete story only at Alaska Dispatch.