It has been a rather hectic Thanksgiving weekend around the CTBlue household, which accounts for the paucity of recent posts. I am therefore doubly thankful to a regular reader who pointed me to this article from the wintry wastes of Alaska, which I herewith pass on to my other reader(s).
It seems that Alaska, the home of a certain governor who allegedly knows “more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America“, a state that is awash in oil, is also the home of $10.00 per gallon heating oil, and the recipient of charity from boogyman Hugo Chavez:
With heating oil prices approaching $10 a gallon in rural Alaska and reports of neighbors stealing fuel from neighbors to warm their homes, a Venezuela-owned oil company plans to supply free fuel to villages again this winter.
That’s what a Citgo executive who oversees the company’s free heating oil program told the Alaska Inter-Tribal Council earlier this month, said council director Steve Osborne.
Citgo has provided roughly 15,000 Alaska village households 100 gallons of heating oil each for the past two winters. If the company donates the same amount this year, some families will save as much as $1,000 on their fuel bills. It’s part of a program providing assistance to low-income communities in 23 states.
Some towns in Alaska are turning the assistance down. I would venture to guess that the folks making the decisions are not the ones needing the help.
One can’t help but wonder how the woman who is omniscient when it comes to energy policy can allow people to freeze in a state she claims produces 20% of domestically produced oil. Perhaps the problem is that in the real world, Alaska only produces 3.5% of that total. Maybe Sarah’s been sending the villagers the fantasy 16.5%, which, much to their misfortune, produces nary a joule of energy.
It is worth noting that Obama has made plans to meet with tribal representatives, to get their ideas for actually addressing their problems.
I should add here that I hope, or at least think I hope, that I am beating a dead horse here. Part of me thinks that over the course of the next few months Sarah will recede back into irrelevancy. Part of me thinks that she will remain the Great Female White Hope for the Republican right, which may very well lead to a fractured Republican party in 2012. But yet another part of me fears her as a potentially successful 2012 demagogue. We don’t know where we’ll be at that point, and there’s always the chance that the country will respond to her appeal to ignorance and resentment. So, until we are absolutely sure that the horse is dead, we should definitely keep beating it.
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