Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Living life on the edge.


Newest contestant on "Canada's Got Dumbth!" Maria "Dodo Can't Think" S. gets positively Hunter-level gushy over (who else?) Sarah Palin.

That would be this Sarah Palin.

That would be this Sarah Palin.

This has been another savage, vicious, cruel, unforgivable attack on Dodo, her family, her principles, her chastity, her job, her way of life and every single thing she holds dear. Apparently, that's how hyperlinks work.

AFTERSNARK: Unsurprisingly, "Dodo" is utterly unaware that Palin is flat-out lying here:

We can safely drill for U.S. oil offshore and in a tiny, 2,000-acre corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if ever given the go-ahead by Washington bureaucrats.

Ah, yes, the "2,000 acre" myth, that economist Paul Krugman so thoroughly disemboweled here:

Last week Interior Secretary Gale Norton repeated the standard response to concerns about extensive oil development in one of America's last wild places: ''The impact will be limited to just 2,000 out of 1.9 million acres of the refuge.'' That number comes from the House version of the Bush-Cheney energy plan, which promises that ''surface acreage covered by production and support facilities'' will not exceed 2,000 acres. It's a reassuring picture: a tiny enclave of development, practically lost in the Arctic vastness.

But that picture is a fraud. Development won't be limited to a small enclave: according to the U.S. Geological Survey, oil in ANWR is scattered in many separate pools, so drilling rigs would be spread all across the coastal plain. The roads linking those rigs aren't part of the 2,000 acres: they're not ''production and support facilities.'' And ''surface acreage covered'' is very narrowly defined: if a pipeline snakes across the terrain on a series of posts, only the ground on which those posts rest counts; bare ground under the pipeline isn't considered ''covered.''

Now you see how I work in such a small space. By those definitions, my ''impact'' is limited to floor areas that literally have stuff resting on them: the bottoms of the legs on my desk and chair, and the soles of my shoes. The rest of my office floor is pristine wilderness.

Amusingly, Palin can't even lie properly by claiming that only 2,000 acres will be used. Rather, she makes the clearly bogus claim that all of that drilling will fit in a "tiny, 2,000-acre corner" of ANWR, which is not the same claim at all and is clearly nonsense.

"Dodo": Even dumber than "Hunter." Hard to believe, but true.

No comments: