Ideas are bursting into my public catch-pocket, since I've nowhere else to put them and their rattling din in my brain is incompatible with sleep.
First, I was very disturbed today. A cordoned off section of UAA's grassy commons hosted a sad group of pro-lifers rallying together. Obviously funded from somewhere, the group was standing awkwardly around a series of large poster-pictures mounted on elevated plywood signposts - dead babies, gore, hand-picked and shallow statistics. I'm a warm fuzzy pacifist, but these things disgusted me and to whatever extent it was their brain-child, so did the people.
Oddly enough, I saw them going to and leaving my Sociology class where the topic today was human sexuality. A statistic I learned there (not exact I'm sure): 68% of Americans these days believe abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances. 22% oppose it in all cases. Feel free to correct my numbers if I remembered wrong, but that was the gist.
So now I'd like to speak to them - the Anti-Right-ers. For clarity's sake I'm going to assume that the anti-abortion-rights folks I saw today were conservative, christian, republican, anti-gay or anti-gay-marriage, anti-socialism, anti-affirmative-action, anti-profanity/pornography, anti-cut-and-run (read that as anti-peace), ... and what I have to say (to you anti- type of person) is simple and falls into to categories: either (1) you have allowed your quiet subservience to turn into self-defeating stupidity, or (2) you are obviously more interested in self-righteous power games than saving fetal heartbeats. Let me explain.
1. Self-Defeating Stupidity: The GOP has taken on the mantle of Right-Wing Conservative values. Specifically this means that Rove and his predecessors realized they could get votes and stay in power by targeting a few topics. Ed Schultz says, "Gays, Guns, and God," but a more extensive list would include banning abortion and stem cell research, preventing the institutionalization of gay marriage, pushing back against Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and maybe something about guns now and then (guns aren't really a big issue these days if you ask me). Now, the GOP also courts rich people who want to protect their money from the government giving it to poor people (aka Reaganomics). One clear and easy sign that the GOP is in fact immoral is that their platform rests on this handful of ideologies. Any other legitimate political group would not only have an entire array of political priorities and viewpoints, but would have to constantly strive to unify its members due to their tenacious tendency of being composed of diversely opinionated human beings. Ergo, in my opinion, the GOP is a tool and nothing more. So the anti-women's-rights camp who are stupid enough fall right into a special trap the GOP set for them. The GOP knows the super-majority of Americans favor legal abortions (as does/did the Supreme Court), and yet they tout as one of their top five political battlefronts as banning abortion. The best part for the GOP is that a virtual non-issue such as banning abortion is an incredibly CHEAP way to buy a guaranteed (small) percentage of votes. For further understanding, I hope you'll take this imperfect analogy: say the Democrats wanted to strategically and cheaply pick up some small percentage of voters who are violently allergic to peanuts. So, they talk about peanut legislation, make peanut speeches, hold town hall meetings with peanut conversations, all blasting the damnable nut that kills so many every year. But, once they're in Congress, they sadly have to report that their effort to eradicate peanuts was a failure for now- though they'll say instead that the road to America-without-peanuts will be long and difficult. But, in truth the Democrats would snicker; they know that peanuts are too widespread and important to ever be banned in the U.S. Furthermore, they know that peanuts are heavily favored by beer drinkers, airline passengers, elephant trainers, and choosy moms. So, despite the fact that abortion will likely never be outlawed, your vote has been swept up for pennies on the dollar.
2. The Self-Righteous Power Game: You are a secretly hateful person who can't stand what you don't understand and without knowing it, you're doing harm to the world. While something eats away at your insides, you quietly lash out at the world by holding a racket against one or several activities you've decided to be vehemently opposed to. Abortion, something external and unrelated to you, is much more easily confronted than whatever soul-sickness you share with your fellow anti-lovers. Not to put you on the spot, but.... One of my favorite phenomenon of modern religion is the "born-again" christian. As an anecdote, this is most likely a weak willed or emotionally unstable human being who had a blank spot in their psyche and patched it with someone else's spiritual dogma. The best part about born-agains is that although they're usually pretty cool on the outside - humble, kind, etc. - you KNOW that their entire existence on the inside is predicated on their new-found moral superiority. Badda-bing - you're baptized, you're forgiven, and most importantly, you're not one of the "bad" people anymore. Sad but true: when you're starved of love, a bit of self-righteous hatred feels pretty good.
So why aren't you (1) or you (2) a special little flower for trying to save the unborn children? My evidence for accusing you of being ineffectual is fairly common knowledge among Progressives:
1. the GOP isn't interested in reducing abortions, but they ARE interested in increasing the power of government in the decisions of it's citizens (what better way to save the rich from the poor than to have legal jurisdiction over peoples' bodies).
2. the GOP supports abstinence only education, which is an oxymoron since standing in front of 30+ teenagers and begging them not to do what the media and their own bodies tell them to is a moron's idea of education.
3. research shows that leftist liberal condoms do way more to reduce abortions than the afore mentioned abstinence only thingy.
4. the GOP fears socialism, including paying for women's birth-control, medical insurance, or outreach clinics for the poor.
5. your self-righteousness, knowing no bounds, leads you to ASSUME that the best way to stop abortions is to ban it - like controvertible banned and burned books of old - when reality shows that the more you try to take away rights from someone, the harder and stronger they will fight back at you for it.
6. no one has ever convinced me that banning abortions won't lead to the good ol' dark ages of back alley abortions, where desperate women turn to their last option - maybe not in droves, but in enough numbers to make your recently approved ban seem like a bad idea.
7. your own lack of research into this subject has ejected you from the moral high ground and apparently pissed me off today.
If you still don't believe me, here's an excerpt from an op-ed article in the New York Times (http://select.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/opinion/05kristof.html?scp=4&sq=abortion%20and%20Bush&st=cse is the link to view the Nov. 2006 article by Nicholas D. Kristof)
"One reason [abortion's decline slowed in Bush's administration] is that in half the states, family planning spending hasn’t kept pace with inflation. Thus, at last count, 11 percent of sexually active women and girls were not using contraception even though they did not want babies, up from 7 percent in 1995. Half of unwanted pregnancies come from that group.
Then there’s the rise in the poverty rate under Mr. Bush and the increase in the number of uninsured Americans. The number of women who say they need help paying for prescription contraceptives rose by one million between 2000 and 2004."
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Thirty Second Chef
Well Thirty Second Chef is really the two minute chef this time. I'll keep working on that.
Sitka - Early arrival, Early breakfast, Ludvig's Bistro, quiet night with bar noise, Mellow Days Cafe, Twisty Turny Ferry back to Juneau, Back to work.
Bananas Foster, Josh the Recruit, Crew Chow Problems, "the wall", Bubblenet watching in Dibs, Rope swing, keeping food hot?
back at home.
Orville Delano Bunker (rejected)
John Brown Bunker
Caden
Parker
Pagan
Phinneas
Dylan
Thomas Glen
James Glen
Greyson
Earth oven
Office Chef
Debate boosters
diagonal thinking
kitchen reorganize
surety of the home
All stuff I was going to write about. Well, I wrote about it, kind of.
Now I'm thinking that "The Trees" would be a great name for a restaurant in downtown Eugene.
Politically, word from inside the Belt loop says Palin is making the Alaskans for Obama camp have to work harder. I'm sure a lot of Alaskans like the idea of voting for Palin, and furthermore, up here I'd say people are pretty familiar with the idea of having powerful people in Washington. I for one am going to get as many people I know to vote as possible. Stevens, Young, and others are older than Emperor Palpatine and keep Alaska rolling in braggarts and bacon. Personally I think Sugar and Bacon are better bedfellows, or at the very least, Milk and Honey Bacon.
Mmmmmyummmm
RECIPE TIME:
written by fingertip exclusively for the Thirty Second Chef:
Brown Basmati Chili Rice:
1 yellow onion,
Assorted fresh chiles, sliced or chopped, 1 cup (hotter or milder as you like - seeds out for mildest)
Toss with a few Tablespoons of Olive, Sesame, Peanut, or Vegetable oil over high heat
Cook a couple minutes - toss in a little wine if you have some leftover.
Add about a cup of whole baby carrots, bring up to heat and sautee briefly.
Add four or five smashed or minced cloves of garlic.
Add bbq or citrus marinated extra firm tofu, cut into cubes.
Add Three cups of brown basmati rice.
Add 9 Cups of water or chicken stock (I usually go 1/2 and 1/2 or 1/4 chix stock, 3/4 water).
Add a couple Tablespoons of Lemon Juice, fresh or not, up to you.
Cook at medium low heat with lid on for a while. When liquid goes away and rice is fluffy and soft, it is ready (47 1/2 minutes.) Towards the end of cooking, you can add any extra vegetables to the pot to steam - anything you're fond of, Zucchini, Cauliflower, Broccoli, Mustard Greens, green beans - whatever.
______
Top and Core Peppers, and stuff with:
Toss the following two ingredients with 1/4 cup basalmic vinegar.
1 1/2 - 2 cups wedged tomatoes with seeds removed
1/2 - 3/4 cup crumbled feta cheese (the more the merrier)
make:
1/2 cup caramelized onions with 2 Tablespoons of garlic (saute a few minutes before onions are all done)
6-8 cups raw leaf spinach (or 4 oz. frozen chopped spinach) sauteed with onions and garlic
add:
-2 teaspoons dried Italian Seasoning
-more wine if you have some
-enough of the cooked brown rice from above to have enough filling to stuff all your peppers
-you can also add some meat here, like ham, salami, pepperoni, sausage, chicken, beef, or more tofu. mmmmmtofu.
Stuff topped and seeded peppers, surround with rice (add tomato sauce to the rice for 2nd baking, 1 8oz. can and 1/2 can of water or chix stock). Sprinkle Feta and chopped almonds over the rice and put tops back on the peppers.
Cover, bake on 400 for 1/2 hour, turn down to 350 for another 1/2 hour to 1 hour depending on how firm to mushy you want your bell peppers to be.
______________
Ginger Soy Dressing:
Mince one small chunk of ginger (about the size of a die) and chop a couple cloves of garlic.
Dice 1/4 of an onion.
Mix all these together with 1/2 cup soy sauce, 1/4 cup sesame oil, and 1/4 cup rice vinegar. Puree all these items together (I use a hand held stick blender).
Rest of the Salad:
Soak 1/2 cup raisins in your favorite rum,
Using the waffle cut tool on a slight diagonal to the baby carrots, making three or four cuts the same distance apart from each other along the length of the baby carrot, or barring that, just cut baby carrots into quarters lengthwise.
Using a regular knife, cut the apple into quarters and trim the core out of each quarter. Then proceed to chop the apple slices with your tool, or into similarly sized pieces as the carrots. In other words, small and edible.
Toss most, but not all, of the dressing into the salad.
Chop 1 cup whole almonds and toss them into a hot pan. Add 2 Tbsp. honey and stir until honey gets really hot (hot sticky, be careful!) and almost begins to smoke a little. Quickly toss in about 1 Tablespoon of butter, 1 teaspoon of Kosher salt, and all the leftover rum from the rum raisins turn heat to low. Stir until liquid is almost gone, remove, let cool and try to separate it into chunks while it cools (you may have to chop it with a knife once it cools, it's basically just candy at this point).
Toss raisins and Almond Rum Candy crumbles into the salad and then eat. (hopefully the peppers are about done by now.
Serves 4 - 8 people depending on how big they are.
Total Cooking time: 500 hours and 30 seconds.
Sitka - Early arrival, Early breakfast, Ludvig's Bistro, quiet night with bar noise, Mellow Days Cafe, Twisty Turny Ferry back to Juneau, Back to work.
Bananas Foster, Josh the Recruit, Crew Chow Problems, "the wall", Bubblenet watching in Dibs, Rope swing, keeping food hot?
back at home.
Orville Delano Bunker (rejected)
John Brown Bunker
Caden
Parker
Pagan
Phinneas
Dylan
Thomas Glen
James Glen
Greyson
Earth oven
Office Chef
Debate boosters
diagonal thinking
kitchen reorganize
surety of the home
All stuff I was going to write about. Well, I wrote about it, kind of.
Now I'm thinking that "The Trees" would be a great name for a restaurant in downtown Eugene.
Politically, word from inside the Belt loop says Palin is making the Alaskans for Obama camp have to work harder. I'm sure a lot of Alaskans like the idea of voting for Palin, and furthermore, up here I'd say people are pretty familiar with the idea of having powerful people in Washington. I for one am going to get as many people I know to vote as possible. Stevens, Young, and others are older than Emperor Palpatine and keep Alaska rolling in braggarts and bacon. Personally I think Sugar and Bacon are better bedfellows, or at the very least, Milk and Honey Bacon.
Mmmmmyummmm
RECIPE TIME:
written by fingertip exclusively for the Thirty Second Chef:
Brown Basmati Chili Rice:
1 yellow onion,
Assorted fresh chiles, sliced or chopped, 1 cup (hotter or milder as you like - seeds out for mildest)
Toss with a few Tablespoons of Olive, Sesame, Peanut, or Vegetable oil over high heat
Cook a couple minutes - toss in a little wine if you have some leftover.
Add about a cup of whole baby carrots, bring up to heat and sautee briefly.
Add four or five smashed or minced cloves of garlic.
Add bbq or citrus marinated extra firm tofu, cut into cubes.
Add Three cups of brown basmati rice.
Add 9 Cups of water or chicken stock (I usually go 1/2 and 1/2 or 1/4 chix stock, 3/4 water).
Add a couple Tablespoons of Lemon Juice, fresh or not, up to you.
Cook at medium low heat with lid on for a while. When liquid goes away and rice is fluffy and soft, it is ready (47 1/2 minutes.) Towards the end of cooking, you can add any extra vegetables to the pot to steam - anything you're fond of, Zucchini, Cauliflower, Broccoli, Mustard Greens, green beans - whatever.
______
Top and Core Peppers, and stuff with:
Toss the following two ingredients with 1/4 cup basalmic vinegar.
1 1/2 - 2 cups wedged tomatoes with seeds removed
1/2 - 3/4 cup crumbled feta cheese (the more the merrier)
make:
1/2 cup caramelized onions with 2 Tablespoons of garlic (saute a few minutes before onions are all done)
6-8 cups raw leaf spinach (or 4 oz. frozen chopped spinach) sauteed with onions and garlic
add:
-2 teaspoons dried Italian Seasoning
-more wine if you have some
-enough of the cooked brown rice from above to have enough filling to stuff all your peppers
-you can also add some meat here, like ham, salami, pepperoni, sausage, chicken, beef, or more tofu. mmmmmtofu.
Stuff topped and seeded peppers, surround with rice (add tomato sauce to the rice for 2nd baking, 1 8oz. can and 1/2 can of water or chix stock). Sprinkle Feta and chopped almonds over the rice and put tops back on the peppers.
Cover, bake on 400 for 1/2 hour, turn down to 350 for another 1/2 hour to 1 hour depending on how firm to mushy you want your bell peppers to be.
______________
Ginger Soy Dressing:
Mince one small chunk of ginger (about the size of a die) and chop a couple cloves of garlic.
Dice 1/4 of an onion.
Mix all these together with 1/2 cup soy sauce, 1/4 cup sesame oil, and 1/4 cup rice vinegar. Puree all these items together (I use a hand held stick blender).
Rest of the Salad:
Soak 1/2 cup raisins in your favorite rum,
Using the waffle cut tool on a slight diagonal to the baby carrots, making three or four cuts the same distance apart from each other along the length of the baby carrot, or barring that, just cut baby carrots into quarters lengthwise.
Using a regular knife, cut the apple into quarters and trim the core out of each quarter. Then proceed to chop the apple slices with your tool, or into similarly sized pieces as the carrots. In other words, small and edible.
Toss most, but not all, of the dressing into the salad.
Chop 1 cup whole almonds and toss them into a hot pan. Add 2 Tbsp. honey and stir until honey gets really hot (hot sticky, be careful!) and almost begins to smoke a little. Quickly toss in about 1 Tablespoon of butter, 1 teaspoon of Kosher salt, and all the leftover rum from the rum raisins turn heat to low. Stir until liquid is almost gone, remove, let cool and try to separate it into chunks while it cools (you may have to chop it with a knife once it cools, it's basically just candy at this point).
Toss raisins and Almond Rum Candy crumbles into the salad and then eat. (hopefully the peppers are about done by now.
Serves 4 - 8 people depending on how big they are.
Total Cooking time: 500 hours and 30 seconds.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Keanu Charles Reeves
PK to the world
[last post at pkpoetry.blogspot.com is poetry I greatly admire that Gil Scott Heron wrote and delivered, an mp3 file I ran across.]
Last Thursday we rushed out of Anchorage to catch the night flight on time, bringing us safely without sleep to an airport. JFK arrivals led to the Air-train to a Manhattan subway line. Grand Central came next and little time was spent remembering the intervening hours of all the afore mentioned. Our friend Jessica, originally Carey's college roommate Jessica grew up near Beacon in upstate New York. Follow the Hudson like the train we caught Friday morning, and you'll wind up as us, in Fishkill. This town, "kill" meaning Creek in Dutch, isn't violent. The I-84 diner in front of the hotel we drove the rental car to had the feel well funded, well founded, mom and pop run homestyle restaurant or Denny's hybrid; open 24 hours a day, sometimes 25; stacks of pies and pastries; stacks of menu items and pages and pages as thick as a homemade pancake. Napped, woke, ate, slept, tossed, turned, woke. Road-toured; self-guided.
Mostly looking at houses and prices and trying a soak in maneuver as a passenger or a driver. Grumpy but playing, having fun looking all over. History waits at every T-junction. Every town has the name and the story of someplace old where the recognizable names come from. Seventeen-O-something built house with the wood plank floors and the same utensils and cookware.
Everywhere we go we're from Alaska. Palin means what? Just some lady that got promoted for all the wrong reasons. Reasonable to say she was fair and decent in many ways while here, though all politicians are really a bit difficult to trust now aren't they.
Sunday wedding day - couldn't get the jet-lag out of my eyes the night before. Get to Cat Rock where a large apparently wealthy family built a house/castle on the beautifully sculpted crest of hill, looking down on West Point military place school, but more importantly is the atmosphere of thousands of trees and rolling hills, and a beautiful, sunny, humid, swimming pool air, end of summer Sunday. Jessica's sister and her groom are Wiccan, so this double sister ceremony was Wiccan (cups, chalices, and blessings to elements). The after party was in wedding fashion with the addition of a pack of Lindy-Hop dancers; Jessica's favorite past-time for many years now, ever since dance classes at OSU, is Lindy-Hop. It looks like a combination of swing dancing and running in place. Or maybe some kind of bouncy step-aerobics. Last but not least, was the bride-sisters performance of the "Time Warp" from Rocky Horror Picture Show, lip-syncing to a semi-participating audience.
Monday we walked the Vanderbuilt estate, I fell asleep on Jess's mom's couch after feasting on leftover wedding food. Never did eat the wedding cupcake. Did bring home some New York maple syrup as reception gifts. Took back the rental car Monday at dinner time and took the 6:30 ish train back to the Big Red Delicious of Times Square. We needed to wait 'til 5:00 am get back on the subway to return to JFK and home. Instead of waiting in sleep, we waited awake, wandering the blocks. We saw the Lehman Brothers building, ate at Havana (where Plantains taste like Bananas) the Chimmichurri sauce has some magical blend of peanut or coconut oil or something that was definitely mmmmyummmy. We passed half a dozen Starbucks, stopped at the last one, had a chat about Liberal views on Palin and how we like Alaska with a nice guy acting cashier at Starbucks. Apparently they closed at midnight and we saw him later as we were momentarily encamped on a porch trying to raise the internet. Starbucks guy stopped and asked why we weren't at the bar he'd suggested. We said we were going there next. But then we moved along, not liking the Sports-ish bar and going on, and still walking, moving the computer from bag to bag to get comfortable, taking pictures of menus and trying not to feel guilty about "borrowing" ideas and prices (research you see). Say it needless anyway that New York is an unnecessarily big place filled with wonder - kind of like "The Matrix" of Keanu Reeves fame. Then again we didn't get on the tour bus or "see much daylight" and granted we took the subway and a bus to JFK at three o'clock in the morning, but hey, this is f'ing New York we're talking about. We weren't mugged and no buildings fell on - wait, that's in bad taste. I recognize that.
Coming up next time...a multimedia extravaganza! A coniferous epoch of epicurean analysis, the piece de la whatever - the first in a series of Thirty Second Digressions:
The Thirty Second Chef! (actual times may vary)
[last post at pkpoetry.blogspot.com is poetry I greatly admire that Gil Scott Heron wrote and delivered, an mp3 file I ran across.]
Last Thursday we rushed out of Anchorage to catch the night flight on time, bringing us safely without sleep to an airport. JFK arrivals led to the Air-train to a Manhattan subway line. Grand Central came next and little time was spent remembering the intervening hours of all the afore mentioned. Our friend Jessica, originally Carey's college roommate Jessica grew up near Beacon in upstate New York. Follow the Hudson like the train we caught Friday morning, and you'll wind up as us, in Fishkill. This town, "kill" meaning Creek in Dutch, isn't violent. The I-84 diner in front of the hotel we drove the rental car to had the feel well funded, well founded, mom and pop run homestyle restaurant or Denny's hybrid; open 24 hours a day, sometimes 25; stacks of pies and pastries; stacks of menu items and pages and pages as thick as a homemade pancake. Napped, woke, ate, slept, tossed, turned, woke. Road-toured; self-guided.
Mostly looking at houses and prices and trying a soak in maneuver as a passenger or a driver. Grumpy but playing, having fun looking all over. History waits at every T-junction. Every town has the name and the story of someplace old where the recognizable names come from. Seventeen-O-something built house with the wood plank floors and the same utensils and cookware.
Everywhere we go we're from Alaska. Palin means what? Just some lady that got promoted for all the wrong reasons. Reasonable to say she was fair and decent in many ways while here, though all politicians are really a bit difficult to trust now aren't they.
Sunday wedding day - couldn't get the jet-lag out of my eyes the night before. Get to Cat Rock where a large apparently wealthy family built a house/castle on the beautifully sculpted crest of hill, looking down on West Point military place school, but more importantly is the atmosphere of thousands of trees and rolling hills, and a beautiful, sunny, humid, swimming pool air, end of summer Sunday. Jessica's sister and her groom are Wiccan, so this double sister ceremony was Wiccan (cups, chalices, and blessings to elements). The after party was in wedding fashion with the addition of a pack of Lindy-Hop dancers; Jessica's favorite past-time for many years now, ever since dance classes at OSU, is Lindy-Hop. It looks like a combination of swing dancing and running in place. Or maybe some kind of bouncy step-aerobics. Last but not least, was the bride-sisters performance of the "Time Warp" from Rocky Horror Picture Show, lip-syncing to a semi-participating audience.
Monday we walked the Vanderbuilt estate, I fell asleep on Jess's mom's couch after feasting on leftover wedding food. Never did eat the wedding cupcake. Did bring home some New York maple syrup as reception gifts. Took back the rental car Monday at dinner time and took the 6:30 ish train back to the Big Red Delicious of Times Square. We needed to wait 'til 5:00 am get back on the subway to return to JFK and home. Instead of waiting in sleep, we waited awake, wandering the blocks. We saw the Lehman Brothers building, ate at Havana (where Plantains taste like Bananas) the Chimmichurri sauce has some magical blend of peanut or coconut oil or something that was definitely mmmmyummmy. We passed half a dozen Starbucks, stopped at the last one, had a chat about Liberal views on Palin and how we like Alaska with a nice guy acting cashier at Starbucks. Apparently they closed at midnight and we saw him later as we were momentarily encamped on a porch trying to raise the internet. Starbucks guy stopped and asked why we weren't at the bar he'd suggested. We said we were going there next. But then we moved along, not liking the Sports-ish bar and going on, and still walking, moving the computer from bag to bag to get comfortable, taking pictures of menus and trying not to feel guilty about "borrowing" ideas and prices (research you see). Say it needless anyway that New York is an unnecessarily big place filled with wonder - kind of like "The Matrix" of Keanu Reeves fame. Then again we didn't get on the tour bus or "see much daylight" and granted we took the subway and a bus to JFK at three o'clock in the morning, but hey, this is f'ing New York we're talking about. We weren't mugged and no buildings fell on - wait, that's in bad taste. I recognize that.
Coming up next time...a multimedia extravaganza! A coniferous epoch of epicurean analysis, the piece de la whatever - the first in a series of Thirty Second Digressions:
The Thirty Second Chef! (actual times may vary)
Thursday, September 11, 2008
This Election Is About Change and Compromise
Another re-post of NYTimes.com material.
81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on Wrong Track
By DAVID LEONHARDT and MARJORIE CONNELLY
Published: April 4, 2008
Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.
In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.
Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.
A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.
The dissatisfaction is especially striking because public opinion usually hits its low point only in the months and years after an economic downturn, not at the beginning of one. Today, however, Americans report being deeply worried about the country even though many say their own personal finances are still in fairly good shape.
Only 21 percent of respondents said the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992, when the recession that began in the summer of 1990 had already been over for more than a year. In the latest poll, two in three people said they believed the economy was in recession today.
The unhappiness presents clear risks for Republicans in this year’s elections, given the continued unpopularity of President Bush. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they approved of the job he was doing, a number that has barely changed since last summer. But Democrats, who have controlled the House and Senate since last year, also face the risk that unhappy voters will punish Congressional incumbents.
Mr. Bush and leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill have moved in recent weeks to react to the economic slowdown, first by passing a stimulus bill that will send checks of up to $1,200 to many couples this spring. They are now negotiating over proposals to overhaul financial regulations, blunt the effects of a likely wave of home foreclosures and otherwise respond to the real estate slump and related crisis on Wall Street.
The poll found that Americans blame government officials for the crisis more than banks or home buyers and other borrowers. Forty percent of respondents said regulators were mostly to blame, while 28 percent named lenders and 14 percent named borrowers.
In assessing possible responses to the mortgage crisis, Americans displayed a populist streak, favoring help for individuals but not for financial institutions. A clear majority said they did not want the government to lend a hand to banks, even if the measures would help limit the depth of a recession.
“What I learned from economics is that the market is not always going to be a happy place,” Sandi Heller, who works at the University of Colorado and is also studying for a master’s degree in business there, said in a follow-up interview. If the government steps in to help out, said Ms. Heller, 43, it could encourage banks to take more foolish risks.
“There are a million and one better ways for the government to spend that money,” she said.
Respondents were considerably more open to government help for home owners at risk of foreclosure. Fifty-three percent said they believed the government should help those whose interest rates were rising, while 41 percent said they opposed such a move.
The nationwide telephone survey of 1,368 adults was conducted from March 28 to April 2. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
When the presidential campaign began last year, the war in Iraq and terrorism easily topped Americans’ list of concerns. Almost 30 percent of people in a December poll said that one of those issues was the country’s most pressing problem. About half as many named the economy or jobs.
But the issues have switched places in just a few months’ time. In the latest poll, 17 percent named terrorism or the war, while 37 percent named the economy or the job market. When looking at the current state of their own finances, Americans remain relatively sanguine. More than 70 percent said their financial situation was fairly good or very good, a number that has dropped only modestly since 2006.
Yet many say they are merely managing to stay in place, rather than get ahead. This view is consistent with the income statistics of the past five years, which suggest that median household income has still not returned to the inflation-adjusted peak it hit in 1999. Since the Census Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s, there has never been an extended economic expansion that ended without setting a new record for household income.
Economists cite a variety of factors for the sluggish income growth, including technology and globalization, and it clearly seems to have made Americans anxious about the future. Fewer than half of parents — 46 percent — said they expected their children to enjoy a better standard of living than they themselves do, down from 56 percent in 2005.
Respondents were more pessimistic when asked in general terms about the next generation, with only a third saying it would live better than people do today. (Polls usually find people more upbeat about their personal situation than about the state of society, but the gap is now larger than usual.)
Charles Parrish, a 56-year-old retired fireman in Evans, Ga., who now works a maintenance job for the local school system, said he was worried the country was not preparing children for the high-technology economy of the future. Instead, the government passed a stimulus package that simply sends checks to taxpayers and worsens the deficit in the process.
“Who’s going to pay back the money?” Mr. Parrish, an independent, said. “We are. They are giving me money, except I’m going to have to pay interest on it.”
Democrats have asserted recently that the lack of wage growth has made people more open to government intervention in the economy than in the past, and the poll found mixed results on this score.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they would support raising taxes on households making more than $250,000 to pay for tax cuts or government programs for people making less than that amount. Only 38 percent called it a bad idea. Both Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidates, have made proposals along these lines.
More broadly, 43 percent of those surveyed said they would prefer a larger government that provided more services, which is tied for the highest such number since The Times and CBS News began asking the question in 1991. But an identical 43 percent said they wanted a smaller government that provided fewer services.
And although both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have blamed trade with other countries for some of the economy’s problems, Americans say they continue to favor trade — if not quite as strongly as in the past. Fifty-eight percent called it good for the economy; 32 percent called it bad, up from 17 percent in 1996.
At the same time, 68 percent said they favored trade restrictions to protect domestic industries, instead of allowing unrestrained trade. In early 1996, 55 percent favored such restrictions.
Dalia Sussman and Marina Stefan contributed reporting.
81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on Wrong Track
By DAVID LEONHARDT and MARJORIE CONNELLY
Published: April 4, 2008
Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.
In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.
Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.
A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.
The dissatisfaction is especially striking because public opinion usually hits its low point only in the months and years after an economic downturn, not at the beginning of one. Today, however, Americans report being deeply worried about the country even though many say their own personal finances are still in fairly good shape.
Only 21 percent of respondents said the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992, when the recession that began in the summer of 1990 had already been over for more than a year. In the latest poll, two in three people said they believed the economy was in recession today.
The unhappiness presents clear risks for Republicans in this year’s elections, given the continued unpopularity of President Bush. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they approved of the job he was doing, a number that has barely changed since last summer. But Democrats, who have controlled the House and Senate since last year, also face the risk that unhappy voters will punish Congressional incumbents.
Mr. Bush and leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill have moved in recent weeks to react to the economic slowdown, first by passing a stimulus bill that will send checks of up to $1,200 to many couples this spring. They are now negotiating over proposals to overhaul financial regulations, blunt the effects of a likely wave of home foreclosures and otherwise respond to the real estate slump and related crisis on Wall Street.
The poll found that Americans blame government officials for the crisis more than banks or home buyers and other borrowers. Forty percent of respondents said regulators were mostly to blame, while 28 percent named lenders and 14 percent named borrowers.
In assessing possible responses to the mortgage crisis, Americans displayed a populist streak, favoring help for individuals but not for financial institutions. A clear majority said they did not want the government to lend a hand to banks, even if the measures would help limit the depth of a recession.
“What I learned from economics is that the market is not always going to be a happy place,” Sandi Heller, who works at the University of Colorado and is also studying for a master’s degree in business there, said in a follow-up interview. If the government steps in to help out, said Ms. Heller, 43, it could encourage banks to take more foolish risks.
“There are a million and one better ways for the government to spend that money,” she said.
Respondents were considerably more open to government help for home owners at risk of foreclosure. Fifty-three percent said they believed the government should help those whose interest rates were rising, while 41 percent said they opposed such a move.
The nationwide telephone survey of 1,368 adults was conducted from March 28 to April 2. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
When the presidential campaign began last year, the war in Iraq and terrorism easily topped Americans’ list of concerns. Almost 30 percent of people in a December poll said that one of those issues was the country’s most pressing problem. About half as many named the economy or jobs.
But the issues have switched places in just a few months’ time. In the latest poll, 17 percent named terrorism or the war, while 37 percent named the economy or the job market. When looking at the current state of their own finances, Americans remain relatively sanguine. More than 70 percent said their financial situation was fairly good or very good, a number that has dropped only modestly since 2006.
Yet many say they are merely managing to stay in place, rather than get ahead. This view is consistent with the income statistics of the past five years, which suggest that median household income has still not returned to the inflation-adjusted peak it hit in 1999. Since the Census Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s, there has never been an extended economic expansion that ended without setting a new record for household income.
Economists cite a variety of factors for the sluggish income growth, including technology and globalization, and it clearly seems to have made Americans anxious about the future. Fewer than half of parents — 46 percent — said they expected their children to enjoy a better standard of living than they themselves do, down from 56 percent in 2005.
Respondents were more pessimistic when asked in general terms about the next generation, with only a third saying it would live better than people do today. (Polls usually find people more upbeat about their personal situation than about the state of society, but the gap is now larger than usual.)
Charles Parrish, a 56-year-old retired fireman in Evans, Ga., who now works a maintenance job for the local school system, said he was worried the country was not preparing children for the high-technology economy of the future. Instead, the government passed a stimulus package that simply sends checks to taxpayers and worsens the deficit in the process.
“Who’s going to pay back the money?” Mr. Parrish, an independent, said. “We are. They are giving me money, except I’m going to have to pay interest on it.”
Democrats have asserted recently that the lack of wage growth has made people more open to government intervention in the economy than in the past, and the poll found mixed results on this score.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they would support raising taxes on households making more than $250,000 to pay for tax cuts or government programs for people making less than that amount. Only 38 percent called it a bad idea. Both Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidates, have made proposals along these lines.
More broadly, 43 percent of those surveyed said they would prefer a larger government that provided more services, which is tied for the highest such number since The Times and CBS News began asking the question in 1991. But an identical 43 percent said they wanted a smaller government that provided fewer services.
And although both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have blamed trade with other countries for some of the economy’s problems, Americans say they continue to favor trade — if not quite as strongly as in the past. Fifty-eight percent called it good for the economy; 32 percent called it bad, up from 17 percent in 1996.
At the same time, 68 percent said they favored trade restrictions to protect domestic industries, instead of allowing unrestrained trade. In early 1996, 55 percent favored such restrictions.
Dalia Sussman and Marina Stefan contributed reporting.
Some Thoughts on Wal-Mart Mom
Letter To The Editor, www.nytimes.com, Sept. 9 2008:
Re “A Heartbeat Away” (column, Sept. 8): So now William Kristol, referring to Sarah Palin, is trying to convince us that voters will find the idea of “a Wasilla Wal-Mart Mom a heartbeat away” from the presidency to be “no problem.”
Eight years ago a candidate sold himself as the kind of regular guy you’d like to sit down and have a beer with. George W. Bush went on to become president and brought our nation to a breaking point with two continuing wars and a ballooning national deficit, and ruined the United States’ reputation and standing around the world.
Given the similarity between Mr. Bush’s ideology and Ms. Palin’s (deeply religious, anti-choice, wants to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, cut taxes and so on), I do not think our nation can continue on the same path for an additional four years.
Just the very thought should induce the public to steer as far away as possible from this conservative and toxic Republican ideology.
Michael Hadjiargyrou
Stony Brook, N.Y., Sept. 8, 2008
Re “A Heartbeat Away” (column, Sept. 8): So now William Kristol, referring to Sarah Palin, is trying to convince us that voters will find the idea of “a Wasilla Wal-Mart Mom a heartbeat away” from the presidency to be “no problem.”
Eight years ago a candidate sold himself as the kind of regular guy you’d like to sit down and have a beer with. George W. Bush went on to become president and brought our nation to a breaking point with two continuing wars and a ballooning national deficit, and ruined the United States’ reputation and standing around the world.
Given the similarity between Mr. Bush’s ideology and Ms. Palin’s (deeply religious, anti-choice, wants to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, cut taxes and so on), I do not think our nation can continue on the same path for an additional four years.
Just the very thought should induce the public to steer as far away as possible from this conservative and toxic Republican ideology.
Michael Hadjiargyrou
Stony Brook, N.Y., Sept. 8, 2008
Alaska Gas Pipeline - NYTimes Article
Palin’s Pipeline Is Years From Being a Reality
Published: September 10, 2008,www.nytimes.com
ANCHORAGE — When Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska took center stage at the Republican convention last week, she sought to burnish her executive credentials by telling how she had engineered the deal that jump-started a long-delayed gas pipeline project.
Stretching more than 1,700 miles, it would deliver natural gas from the North Slope of Alaska to the lower 48 states and be the largest private-sector infrastructure project on the continent.
“And when that deal was struck, we began a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence,” said Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. “That pipeline, when the last section is laid and its valves are opened, will lead America one step farther away from dependence on dangerous foreign powers that do not have our interests at heart.”
The reality, however, is far more ambiguous than the impression Ms. Palin has left at the convention and on the campaign trail.
Certainly she proved effective in attracting developers to a project that has eluded Alaska governors for three decades. But an examination of the pipeline project also found that Ms. Palin has overstated both the progress that has been made and the certainty of success.
The pipeline exists only on paper. The first section has yet to be laid, federal approvals are years away and the pipeline will not be completed for at least a decade. In fact, although it is the centerpiece of Ms. Palin’s relatively brief record as governor, the pipeline might never be built, and under a worst-case scenario, the state could lose up to $500 million it committed to defray regulatory and other costs.
Contributing to the project’s uncertainty is Ms. Palin’s antagonistic relationship with the major oil companies that control Alaska’s untapped gas reserves.
Ms. Palin won the governor’s office in part by capitalizing on populist distaste for the political establishment’s coziness with Big Oil, and her pipeline strategy was intended to blunt its power over the process. Her willingness to take on the oil companies has allowed the McCain campaign to portray her as a scourge of special interests.
Now, though, she will need the industry’s cooperation if her plan is to succeed, and just this week, her office said she intended to reach out to the North Slope oil companies.
As Ms. Palin takes to the road to campaign with Mr. McCain, invoking the pipeline as a major victory, some Alaska lawmakers who initially endorsed her plan now believe it was a mistake. State Senator Bert Stedman, a Republican who is co-chairman of the finance committee, said that in its contract with the chosen developer, TransCanada, the state bargained away too much leverage with little guarantee of success.
“There is no requirement to lift one shovel of dirt or lay down one inch of steel,” he said.
A spokesman for Ms. Palin, Bill McAllister, denied that her recent statements about the pipeline were misleading. He said they should be viewed within the context of the project’s long and frustrating history, dating back to the Carter administration.
“When the governor signed the legislation giving her administration the authority to grant the gas line license to TransCanada, Alaska came closer than it has ever been to seeing the project actually happen,” Mr. McAllister said. “There is no denying that a major milestone in the project has been reached.”
Ms. Palin’s pipeline plan has its roots in longstanding efforts to access the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas under the North Slope, where some of the world’s major oil companies, including BP, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, have exploration and development rights. Congress has prodded all parties involved to develop a plan to tap the gas since at least the 1970s, but the private sector has been unwilling to assume the huge cost of building a pipeline without considerable government tax breaks and other concessions.
Ms. Palin’s push for a pipeline is central to her view that Alaska, with its North Slope gas resources, is a key to helping the United States develop an energy policy that embraces increased domestic production of gas and oil and the development of renewable and alternative energy sources.
Her predecessor, Frank H. Murkowski, had negotiated an exclusive pipeline deal with the major oil producers that proved unpopular with lawmakers and was never acted on. In the 2006 Republican primary, Ms. Palin wielded Mr. Murkowski’s pipeline proposal against him, calling it a sweetheart deal for Big Oil, which treated Alaska like a colony and faced little resistance from past governors.
Once elected, Ms. Palin set about fashioning an alternative that was essentially a 180-degree turn, intended to open up the bidding process to other companies. It also did away with incentives that a consultant for the Legislature estimated would have saved the oil companies an estimated $10 billion over 30 to 40 years. Ms. Palin also rehired key state oil and gas officials, including Marty K. Rutherford, who had quit, and Tom Irwin, who had been fired, after opposing Mr. Murkowski’s approach.
Mr. Irwin said Ms. Palin wanted to create an environment for a larger number of companies in the energy industry to openly compete to build the pipeline, rather than just handing a favorable deal to the North Slope oil producers. Ms. Palin’s objectives were enshrined in the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, introduced just months into her governorship.
“We were going nowhere; the producers were holding us hostage,” said Ms. Rutherford, who heads Ms. Palin’s gas pipeline team. “They were demanding great value from the state with no guarantee to do anything for us.”
While Ms. Palin’s legislation did away with the concessions to the oil companies that she considered to be excessive, it committed the state to paying the winning bidder up to $500 million in matching money to offset costs of obtaining regulatory approvals and other expenses. Ms. Rutherford, whose team recommended the subsidy, said the governor was reluctant but eventually agreed that the state had to share in the risk to that degree; the $500 million amounts to about 10 percent of the projected state budget surplus this year.
The bill sailed through the Legislature in May 2007. Only a single lawmaker, the House majority leader, Ralph Samuels, a Republican, voted against it. When the state solicited proposals from interested companies, it soon became apparent that the big oil companies would not participate. One of them, ConocoPhillips, submitted a proposal outside the process, but it was swiftly rejected by the Palin administration.
Of the five companies that eventually bid, Ms. Palin’s administration chose TransCanada Pipelines, which operates 36,500 miles of pipeline across North America. TransCanada had previously tried to negotiate a pipeline deal with the Murkowski administration, but was sidelined by the governor in favor of the big oil companies, some officials who were involved in the talks said. That contributed to the rift that led to the departures of Mr. Irwin, Ms. Rutherford and five others from the state Department of Natural Resources.
The proposal that TransCanada negotiated with the Murkowski administration was structured differently from the current one and had no provision for a $500 million state subsidy, said two people who reviewed it and who spoke on condition of anonymity because the proposal remains confidential.
Of the Palin aides familiar with TransCanada from those earlier negotiations, Ms. Rutherford had an unusually close connection. For 10 months in 2003, she was a partner in a consulting and lobbying firm whose clients included Foothills Pipe Lines Ltd., a subsidiary of TransCanada.
Ms. Rutherford said in an interview that . . .
Published: September 10, 2008,www.nytimes.com
ANCHORAGE — When Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska took center stage at the Republican convention last week, she sought to burnish her executive credentials by telling how she had engineered the deal that jump-started a long-delayed gas pipeline project.
Stretching more than 1,700 miles, it would deliver natural gas from the North Slope of Alaska to the lower 48 states and be the largest private-sector infrastructure project on the continent.
“And when that deal was struck, we began a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence,” said Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. “That pipeline, when the last section is laid and its valves are opened, will lead America one step farther away from dependence on dangerous foreign powers that do not have our interests at heart.”
The reality, however, is far more ambiguous than the impression Ms. Palin has left at the convention and on the campaign trail.
Certainly she proved effective in attracting developers to a project that has eluded Alaska governors for three decades. But an examination of the pipeline project also found that Ms. Palin has overstated both the progress that has been made and the certainty of success.
The pipeline exists only on paper. The first section has yet to be laid, federal approvals are years away and the pipeline will not be completed for at least a decade. In fact, although it is the centerpiece of Ms. Palin’s relatively brief record as governor, the pipeline might never be built, and under a worst-case scenario, the state could lose up to $500 million it committed to defray regulatory and other costs.
Contributing to the project’s uncertainty is Ms. Palin’s antagonistic relationship with the major oil companies that control Alaska’s untapped gas reserves.
Ms. Palin won the governor’s office in part by capitalizing on populist distaste for the political establishment’s coziness with Big Oil, and her pipeline strategy was intended to blunt its power over the process. Her willingness to take on the oil companies has allowed the McCain campaign to portray her as a scourge of special interests.
Now, though, she will need the industry’s cooperation if her plan is to succeed, and just this week, her office said she intended to reach out to the North Slope oil companies.
As Ms. Palin takes to the road to campaign with Mr. McCain, invoking the pipeline as a major victory, some Alaska lawmakers who initially endorsed her plan now believe it was a mistake. State Senator Bert Stedman, a Republican who is co-chairman of the finance committee, said that in its contract with the chosen developer, TransCanada, the state bargained away too much leverage with little guarantee of success.
“There is no requirement to lift one shovel of dirt or lay down one inch of steel,” he said.
A spokesman for Ms. Palin, Bill McAllister, denied that her recent statements about the pipeline were misleading. He said they should be viewed within the context of the project’s long and frustrating history, dating back to the Carter administration.
“When the governor signed the legislation giving her administration the authority to grant the gas line license to TransCanada, Alaska came closer than it has ever been to seeing the project actually happen,” Mr. McAllister said. “There is no denying that a major milestone in the project has been reached.”
Ms. Palin’s pipeline plan has its roots in longstanding efforts to access the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas under the North Slope, where some of the world’s major oil companies, including BP, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, have exploration and development rights. Congress has prodded all parties involved to develop a plan to tap the gas since at least the 1970s, but the private sector has been unwilling to assume the huge cost of building a pipeline without considerable government tax breaks and other concessions.
Ms. Palin’s push for a pipeline is central to her view that Alaska, with its North Slope gas resources, is a key to helping the United States develop an energy policy that embraces increased domestic production of gas and oil and the development of renewable and alternative energy sources.
Her predecessor, Frank H. Murkowski, had negotiated an exclusive pipeline deal with the major oil producers that proved unpopular with lawmakers and was never acted on. In the 2006 Republican primary, Ms. Palin wielded Mr. Murkowski’s pipeline proposal against him, calling it a sweetheart deal for Big Oil, which treated Alaska like a colony and faced little resistance from past governors.
Once elected, Ms. Palin set about fashioning an alternative that was essentially a 180-degree turn, intended to open up the bidding process to other companies. It also did away with incentives that a consultant for the Legislature estimated would have saved the oil companies an estimated $10 billion over 30 to 40 years. Ms. Palin also rehired key state oil and gas officials, including Marty K. Rutherford, who had quit, and Tom Irwin, who had been fired, after opposing Mr. Murkowski’s approach.
Mr. Irwin said Ms. Palin wanted to create an environment for a larger number of companies in the energy industry to openly compete to build the pipeline, rather than just handing a favorable deal to the North Slope oil producers. Ms. Palin’s objectives were enshrined in the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, introduced just months into her governorship.
“We were going nowhere; the producers were holding us hostage,” said Ms. Rutherford, who heads Ms. Palin’s gas pipeline team. “They were demanding great value from the state with no guarantee to do anything for us.”
While Ms. Palin’s legislation did away with the concessions to the oil companies that she considered to be excessive, it committed the state to paying the winning bidder up to $500 million in matching money to offset costs of obtaining regulatory approvals and other expenses. Ms. Rutherford, whose team recommended the subsidy, said the governor was reluctant but eventually agreed that the state had to share in the risk to that degree; the $500 million amounts to about 10 percent of the projected state budget surplus this year.
The bill sailed through the Legislature in May 2007. Only a single lawmaker, the House majority leader, Ralph Samuels, a Republican, voted against it. When the state solicited proposals from interested companies, it soon became apparent that the big oil companies would not participate. One of them, ConocoPhillips, submitted a proposal outside the process, but it was swiftly rejected by the Palin administration.
Of the five companies that eventually bid, Ms. Palin’s administration chose TransCanada Pipelines, which operates 36,500 miles of pipeline across North America. TransCanada had previously tried to negotiate a pipeline deal with the Murkowski administration, but was sidelined by the governor in favor of the big oil companies, some officials who were involved in the talks said. That contributed to the rift that led to the departures of Mr. Irwin, Ms. Rutherford and five others from the state Department of Natural Resources.
The proposal that TransCanada negotiated with the Murkowski administration was structured differently from the current one and had no provision for a $500 million state subsidy, said two people who reviewed it and who spoke on condition of anonymity because the proposal remains confidential.
Of the Palin aides familiar with TransCanada from those earlier negotiations, Ms. Rutherford had an unusually close connection. For 10 months in 2003, she was a partner in a consulting and lobbying firm whose clients included Foothills Pipe Lines Ltd., a subsidiary of TransCanada.
Ms. Rutherford said in an interview that . . .
Monday, September 8, 2008
Sunday Night Home
Made some updates to this Blog site, including the first of two Link lists - this one is for TEDspeaks. Great 15-30 minute videos if you have a bit of time.
Enjoying my fly i-pod and favoring calming relaxing, yet deftly piquant music.
Sporadic classes Mon-Thurs - Anthro- and Soc- ologies, Statistics, and Managerial Accounting. On a lighter note - this semester is seasoned with Weight Training Salt, Piano Lesson Pepper, and Swimming Conditioning (marinade/tenderizer? - well, sanitizer anyway).
And for the record, Sarah Palin is generally regarded here as about as good of a Republican as you could hope for - except for those "touchy" areas that have to do with God or the GOP. She's down to Earth, though ready to drill it. She's intelligent, though lock-in-step-ish too. She's not a fundamentalist (Christian), though she's muuuch closer to fundamentalist than atheist. Her image and family seem to imply she isn't fake or a compulsive liar, but image and demographics are on the shallower side of analysis.
I'll wait and listen to her words, but I suspect the Republicans can't pull this one off - even if I'm an Air Traffic Controller for two years, I'm not ready to be Co-Pilot by a long shot.
Go Obama! And whatever you do - don't lie to us.
!!! COMING SOON !!!- PK's Poetry - recently transcribed from fresh brains!
!!! COMING SOONER !!! - the swiftly approaching dawn! Good Night!
Enjoying my fly i-pod and favoring calming relaxing, yet deftly piquant music.
Sporadic classes Mon-Thurs - Anthro- and Soc- ologies, Statistics, and Managerial Accounting. On a lighter note - this semester is seasoned with Weight Training Salt, Piano Lesson Pepper, and Swimming Conditioning (marinade/tenderizer? - well, sanitizer anyway).
And for the record, Sarah Palin is generally regarded here as about as good of a Republican as you could hope for - except for those "touchy" areas that have to do with God or the GOP. She's down to Earth, though ready to drill it. She's intelligent, though lock-in-step-ish too. She's not a fundamentalist (Christian), though she's muuuch closer to fundamentalist than atheist. Her image and family seem to imply she isn't fake or a compulsive liar, but image and demographics are on the shallower side of analysis.
I'll wait and listen to her words, but I suspect the Republicans can't pull this one off - even if I'm an Air Traffic Controller for two years, I'm not ready to be Co-Pilot by a long shot.
Go Obama! And whatever you do - don't lie to us.
!!! COMING SOON !!!- PK's Poetry - recently transcribed from fresh brains!
!!! COMING SOONER !!! - the swiftly approaching dawn! Good Night!
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