Joe McGinnis Nails It

Let me lead off with a link to Pipe Dreams.  The author, Joe McGinnis, relates in a several-page article, just how much of a GINO Sarah Palin really is.

For a teaser, here's his opening paragraph:

Forget “Drill, baby, drill.” Sarah Palin says she’s building a $40 billion gas pipeline, which even President Obama wants. The only problem: It isn’t there. And it’s her fault.

 It only gets better from there.  Here's another gem:

Sarah Palin had been a bare-knuckle backwoods populist who’d built a career out of puffing up dragons she could then slay. Her tactic was first to demonize, then to defeat.

Populist.  Yes, that is exactly right.  In fact, Syrin from Wasilla has a most excellent blog post detailing exactly why GINO is nothing if not a populist.  Actually, I think populist is a kind tag, one that doesn't necessarily carry the negative impressions we get elsewhere... such as:

There is a considerable gap between the image Sarah Palin tries to project and the reality that underlies it. In sometimes startling fashion, her deeds often belie her words. And as I learned on a recent visit to Alaska, nowhere is this more evident than in the story of the still-chimerical gas pipeline.

Apparently, the horse Sarah wanted to ride in on has yet to be born.  She's managed to piss off the companies who can actually feed gas into the AGIA pipeline.  Instead, she cut them out of any conversation, in an attempt to sign up a company to build the pipeline, even though that company is in Canada.  But even with the $500,000 she gave them, the Canada company isn't about to start construction until the companies that OWN the gas commit to shipping it via the pipeline.  Companies like Exxon, Conoco and BP.  Yes, she pissed them off.  They have rights to the natural gas she wants to see running through this pipeline. 

That's our Sarah!  Here's more:

“Facts to her are like Silly Putty,” said Larry Persily, former deputy commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Revenue, who later worked for Palin in the state’s office in Washington. “She shapes them into whatever people want to hear.”

And this:

“It’s just so puzzling,” he told me, “that the state has gone in the direction of dividing the players instead of trying to bring them together. It dumbfounds me. I’m not sure what point the governor is trying to prove, but everything she’s doing is the opposite of ‘Drill, baby, drill.’

Suffice it to say -- the Conde Nast Portfolio article is biting, incisive and revealing.  The article's author sums up GINO's achievements like this:

The bottom line is that for all her posturing, and as much as she might wish it were not so, Palin’s only accomplishment in two years of work on the pipeline project has been to give $500 million from Alaska’s budget to Canadians and to leave Alaska, once again, at the not-so-tender mercies of Big Oil.

A sad legacy, considering that her term is about over... Team Sarah, tell me again just what you admire about this waffle-headed would-have-been???

Things That Make Me Go "Hmmmmm"

April 2008 was a busy month for Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.  She had a budget bill to sign, polar bear protecting environmentalists to dissuade, a speech to deliver at an energy conference in Texas sponsored by oilmen, and a documentary shoot scheduled with Israeli filmmaker Elan Frank.  Her most avid supporter, blogger "Elephantman" (aka Adam Brinkley), joyfully announced the publication of her authorized biography, Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment Upside Down.

I'll come back to the Elan Frank film in a minute. But this information, from the first chapter of the Sarah biography, was just too interesting:

Born in Sandpoint, Idaho on February 11, 1964, Sarah Louise was the third of four children born in rapid succession to Chuck and Sally Heath.  The family moved to Alaska when Sarah was two months old... Her older brother, Chuck Jr., was two years old, Heather had just turned one, and Molly was soon to come.

Chuck Jr. was two, Heather just turned one, Sarah was two months and Molly was "soon to come."  [counts fingers, scratching head]

This means that Sarah was born just 10 months after Heather.  It also sounds like Sally was pregnant again just two months after Sarah was born.

Hmmmm.  I'm wondering if Bristol inherited this rapid-repeat-pregnancy tendency from Sally.

But back to Elan Frank.  He decided to do a documentary on 'women empowerment' and chose Sarah Palin as one of his subjects.  In early March, 2008 he was in Los Angeles preparing for his trip to Alaska when Sarah called him (from LA) and said she'd like to meet.  This get-together took place about a month before Frank traveled to Alaska to do his filming.

After Sarah was announced as a VP candidate, Frank remarked, "I was elated, it's like my best friend was picked for the job," and proceeded to sell his footage to Fox News.  In September, 2008 Fox aired a documentary that used substantial portions of that footage.

Elan Frank in Sarah's office, circa April 8, 2008

I can't find a video of that Fox program.  However, there is a video about Elan Frank recording Sarah Palin in which Frank describes his experiences shooting this documentary footage.

In a related Ynetnews story titled "Sarah Palin mesmerizes Israeli filmmaker", Frank says,

"I met her in my Hollywood office and we talked for over an hour… we instantaneously clicked and we had a blast. The funny thing is," he added, "that a few days later I got an email from a friend in Alaska telling me she was seven months pregnant. I didn’t notice a thing until later, when we were filming.

"I guess she's one of those women you can't really [tell] when they're pregnant, and she was probably dressing to hide it a little. You wouldn't know to look for it."

I can understand why Frank would be confused.  On one day he filmed Sarah slapping her squarish jelly-belly.  But a day or so before, she looked like this:

The 'fashion-assisting' scarf hangs straight down

The image above is a frame from the video about the documentary footage that Frank shot.  We see Sarah, Blackberry in hand, going out of her office, down some steps, and onto the sidewalk to greet daughter Piper who gets off the school bus. The only adjustments I made to this frame were to crop it and remove the letters that ran across the bottom.

For reference, here's the original frame, about the 00:02:03 mark:

By all accounts, Elan Frank shot this roughly 10 days before Trig Palin's official birthdate.  That would mean Sarah is supposed to be 33-34 weeks pregnant here.  I scrolled through more than a hundred pictures of women who are 34 weeks pregnant, and there's no reasonable comparison.

The author of a JewishJournal.com article about Frank's filming of Palin, titled Shooting Sarah Palin, tells us,

So yes, Frank seems to have fallen under her spell.  But Frank is no [sucker or fool] himself. This is a war hero who spent seven years in the Israeli army fighting a wily foe. He knows all about deception. He doesn't trust easily. He can tell real from fake and tough from soft.

"If Sarah Palin is anything," he says, "she's real and tough."

Hmmmmm.  Was Elan Frank mesmerized or not?  Was he under Sarah's spell?  Do seven years in the Israeli army enable you to tell the difference between a real pregnant belly and a fake one?