Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue' book loose on energy facts

Sarah Palin is going to make a lot of money this week. She's hitting Oprah today to kick off tomorrow's launch of her book, Going Rogue: An American Life. Palin received a $1.25 million advance for the book and could ultimately pull in $10 million from sales.

 

Rush Limbaugh, inadvertently admitting that he's never read a policy book, recently praised Going Rogue, calling it "truly one of the most substantive policy books I've read." The AP also got its hands on an advance copy and assigned some journalists to fact-check the book, a fact that Palin derided on her Facebook page (seriously, that's how she talks to the world now) as "... making things up," suggesting that instead the news organization focus its work on digging up what's "going on with Sheik Mohammed's trial, Pelosi's health care takeover costs, Hasan's associations, etc."

 

Click over to read the AP's work digging up the truth of Palin's claims.

 

Media Matters did some debunking work of its own and has a well-documented and lengthy examination of Palin's book's claims. Its complete research can be read here.

 

In her book, Palin says she tried to talk about energy independence and hydropower in her interview with Vogue magazine, but that the interviewer wanted to talk about high fashion. Vogue contributing editor Rebecca Johnson said Palin "just kept talking about drilling for oil."

 

Palin also falsely claims that poor people will be hit hardest by cap-and-trade climate change legislation, despite the fact that the Congressional Budget Office found that households at the lowest income bracket would actually see a $125 annual benefit while the average household would see a cost of just $160 per year ($13/month).

 

She takes credit for vetoing $25 million in stimulus funding to pay for energy conservation because it would force Alaskans to adopt universal building codes that just don't work in Alaska. MediaMatters turned up the truth that the funds did not come tied to any such building codes and that Alaskans would have been free to set standards that fit their local situation. Palin has a general disdain for renewable energy in particular, continually claiming that clean energy legislation would kill jobs. She's much more comfortable with the status quo when it comes to energy policy. Let's not forget that she's the woman who popularized the phrase, "Drill baby, drill."

 

I'm pretty sure Sarah Palin is going to be found bumming around the news and political landscape for a long time to come. I don't see her running for office again; her base is passionate but electorally challenged -- you can't get elected president with 20 percent of the vote, no matter how much your voters love you -- but she can make a lot of money and wield a lot of political power by rousing up her rabble every election cycle and selling her books and her point of view via Facebook and Twitter. It's funny how she favors media that naturally lend themselves to facilitating ghost writing.

 

Read more about Sarah Palin on MNN:

 

• Beg your pardon? Revisit Sarah Palin's painfully awkward Thanksgiving interview made with a turkey being slaughtered in the background.

• Palin winks, waves goodbye to a melting Alaska.

• Drill, baby, drill: Palin spends last days in office Twittering about oil.