Northern Exposure of the Day

"Gulf: Learn from Alaska's lesson w/ foreign oil cos.: Don't naively trust - VERIFY. Livelihood affected by spill? Don't sign away remedy rights." -- Posted by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on her Twitter page in response to the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

How ironic it is that Palin speaks so negatively of internationally based oil and petroleum companies considering the fact that she has such close ties with those companies. As I mentioned in my previous posting, Palin's husband Todd was employed by British Petroleum (BP), which leased the damaged oil rig in the Gulf Coast and is headquartered in Great Britain, for approximately twenty years until his resignation in September 2009. And while President Obama previously received more than $77,000 in campaign contributions from BP, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Palin's running mate in the 2008 presidential election, has received nearly $45,000.

Palin has also targeted Venezuela and its President, Hugo Chavez, in the past, as well as the country's state owned oil companies. During an interview with Univision in October 2008, Palin stated: "We want through negotiation and sanctions if need be to put pressure on a dictator like Hugo Chavez, to let them see that they will not mess around with America the way that they want to. Hugo Chavez especially wanted to use energy sources as a weapon. Again, that brings us to how important it is for our country to get firmly on a path towards energy independence, where we create jobs here by tapping into domestic and alternative sources of energy to allow us to be less and less reliant on someone like Hugo Chavez." However, her anti-Venezuela sentiments apparently do not extend to her husband. Todd Palin's snowmobile racing team was sponsored this year by Mystik Lubricants, a division of Citgo. (Citgo is an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, the national oil company of Venezuela.) Aside from serving as the "proud sponsor" of Todd's racing team, Mystik Lubricants was also the "official lubricant sponsor of the 27th Annual Iron Dog event" for the second year in a row. By doing so, the company supplied 250 cases of snowmobile oil to the competitors and 500 safety vests to the volunteers. After the race was completed, the former governor appeared in a promotional video for the Iditarod Trail Race while standing in front of a snowmobile with the logo for Mystik Lubricants.