We know Sarah Palin isn't the biggest fan of Vogue, but we think she'd do really well guest-editing her own issue. So we've worked up a sample cover in the style of our Cover Lies feature (in which we expose how little relationship ladymags, like Sarah Palin, have to reality). While the real Vogue bows to the recession with its $300 "Steal" of the Month, Palin could show us how to get a $150,000 wardrobe for free — and how to pick a $700/night hotel, complete with robe and slippers. In lieu of book reviews, she could offer up a bunch of snide remarks about Katie Couric — "the perky one" probably can't read anyway. And for balance, Palin could add some media elite contributors, like Trig-birther Andrew Sullivan and Rebecca Johnson. (Johnson works for the fake America but the real Vogue, and says all Palin wanted to talk about in her much-maligned interview was "drilling for oil" — but what else is there, anyway?) In fact, right after a Jeffrey Steingarten piece on moose-meat, Going Vogue should include a free sample of premium Alaska crude. We hear it gets rid of both wrinkles and endangered wildlife.

Fact Check: Palin's Book Goes Rogue On Some Facts [AP, via Yahoo News]
Palin's Katie Couric Myths [Daily Beast]
Palin's Ego Trip [Daily Beast]

Pickens made a lot of money with oil, and then decided that wind farms were an even better way to make money. Because he is a capitalist Republican conservative, he thought his best bet for making a profit on wind power was to get a shitload of money from the government. And so, despite his years of partisan donations and funding of smear campaigns he suddenly played Mr. Concerned Citizen Environmentalist during the 2008 presidential campaign, earning him important meetings with Bloomberg, Obama, McCain, and Harry Reid.

But! Wind power turned out to not even be worth the effort of pretending to care about it as a front for taking lots of government money to build natural gas pipelines, so he is giving up on his "world's largest wind farm" plan. Because, hey, natural gas prices fell, and the money being handed out to people pretending to free us from foriegn oil dried up, and the gub'mint won't pay for his transmission lines until 2013.

Turns out that "per diem" she got for staying at her own damn house in Wasilla counts as "income"!

The governor's office wouldn't say this week how much she owes in back taxes for meal money, or whether she intends to continue to receive the per diem allowance. As of December, she was still charging the state for meals and incidentals.

"The amount of taxes owed is a private matter," Sharon Leighow, Palin's spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. "If the governor collects future per diem, those documents would be a matter of public record."

Yes, it's a "private matter" because she's not gonna serve in Obama's cabinet.

Frankly a couple thousand bucks in back taxes is the least of Sarah Palin's problems. Her unwed teenage-mom daughter explained that abstinence is a fairy tale on national TV, the presidential campaign left her a nervous wreck with only a shred of her former entirely unjustified self-confidence, and people keep telling her to run for president in 2012.

But the biggest problem? Now she might have to "govern" her tiny little socialist oil state for real, 'cuz the price of oil is falling! So Alaska will run out of oil and money in about two years, just in time for Sarah to begin her awesome presidential campaign for real.

"Oil futures spiked Monday morning just as news broke that Somali pirates had nabbed a Saudi Aramco-owned super tanker named Sirius Star off the coast of Kenya. The huge ship can carry up to 2 million barrels of oil.

Just before 9 a.m., oil futures stood at $56 a barrel. By 10 a.m., they rose $3 to nearly $59."

The article goes on to say blah blah many other factors blah blah, but really what we're talking about here is a merry band of African buccaneers who can move world oil prices with one single heist. A $3 increase per barrel means that they would have raised the value of the very ship they jacked by $6 million just by stealing it. If that is not the best job ever then you don't know what you're talking about. Are we "glamorizing" a dangerous lifestyle? Shut up. [NYT]

Huckabee's got a "friend" who tells him this whole mess is the result of "financial terrorism": "Just today, a friend of mine in the financial markets indicated that he's been doing a careful analysis of the last 12 days, and there seems to be a manipulation of the marketplace - at the last half-hour of each day, there is an extraordinary rush of computerized trading going on. He believes that there may, in fact, be evidence of economic terrorism that is fueling a lot of what's going on. Now it's a fascinating idea, that if somebody could break down the world economy, it would have a greater impact that any bomb ever set off. It seems to be there is plausible argument for it."

But, Norris sagely points out, don't forget the Chinese! "Oh yeah, I think - oh definitely, Mike. The thing is, China has one and a half trillion dollars* of our debt. Now, what did we give China for collateral for that one and a half trillion dollars? So the thing is, you know, with our government - what did - what secret deal did they get, give China, said, 'Well, you know, ah, we won't tell the people but you can drill 50 miles off the Florida shore, and do a slant drilling into our oil in Florida,' you know - so a lot of things are going on underhandedly that we the people don't know, and that's why it's so important, Mike, that we the people get the power back. We need a voter revolution in our country." (audience applause)

Also? When Congress took off for the Jewish Holidays, they were really Christmas shopping, and Barack Obama is big on infanticide. Read it here.

[Via Idolator]

[Daily Mail]

Last spring Palin sued the Department for trying to protect polar bears in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge! Because, you know, fuck the polar bears, they totally get in the way of the oil. And speaking of drilling! The whole time Sarah Palin was making out the Interior Department to be some Ecoterrorist front organization polluting soft minds with her fuzzy science on climate change, numerous employees of the Interior Department and the oil companies Sarah so loves were getting very cozy. And snorting cocaine! A federal investigation concluded today revealed:

• 13 Interior Department officials in Denver and Washington charged with managing billions of dollars took bribes and part-time consulting gigs from oil companies in exchange for letting them drill for cheap on their federal communist lands.
• And also, fucking them!
• Investigators described a "fraternity house environment" and "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" among the bureau officials and their oil company friends.
• Substance = cocaine!!!
• "Two oil marketers who received gifts and gratuities on at least 135 occasions displayed no remorse when confronted with their activities."
• Also, golf and ski trips that will invariably be described as "lavish." (Ski! Blow! Polar Bears!)
• Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is apparently known as the "Kennedy" of the Republican Party — "and not for his stance on civil rights." And he's not even implicated in this particular federal case!

Related: Interior Dept. Opens 2.6 Million Alaskan Acres for Oil Exploration [NYT]

It's no secret that the B-Hills has some oil rigs. There's that flower-covered monstrosity on Olympic—the one that's giving all the students cancer at Beverly Hills High—but the one you may not know about is right smack dab in the middle of the mall where you look at puppies and buy Louis Vuitton handbags—The Beverly Center!

According to the folks at Bloomberg, "The Beverly Center's kidney-bean shape was designed to accommodate drilling.... Pumping operations are hidden behind a wall between Macy's and Bloomingdale's."

And the mall's general manager, Jeff Brown says, "There are oil wells all over the place. Drive down the street, you see hotel, beautiful house, oil well. Here, I don't know if shoppers know there's one or not. They probably don't.''

But we do now, Jeff. So next time you're at the Beverly Center and you see a poor mountaineer a-shootin' at some food, don't call mall security, just wait for that Texas tea to come up from the ground a-bubblin' crude. Or just get a cookie at Mrs. Fields. It's really up to you.

• Oil in Beverly Hills `Humming' Where Britney Shops [Bloomberg]

New York Times - October 1988:

"As the price for crude oil slid below $10 a barrel in the spot market last week and OPEC officials warned that it could sink to $5, an uneasy sense of deja vu pervaded the world. The sharp decline stirred memories of the price plunge that occurred in 1986, sending economic shock waves through oil-producing regions, including the American Southwest."

New York Times - February 1990:

New doubts about the world's ability to pump enough oil to keep pace with growing demand have convinced many analysts that oil prices will rise much more rapidly than previously expected, by about 50 percent within five years.

The Economist - March, 1999:

"Now the long oil-price odyssey seems at an end. Since its peak in 1980, the price has fallen erratically. It has plunged by half in the past two years alone. In real terms, oil now costs roughly what it did before 1973. Crude is gushing from the ground at the rate of 66m barrels a day, half as copiously again as in OPEC's prime. The world is awash with the stuff, and it is likely to remain so."

The Telegraph - May 2008:

“There are simply no buyers because the market has more than enough oil,” says its Opec representative, Hussein Kazempour Ardebili. The oil cartel’s estimates are almost the opposite of Wall Street’s: 88.75 million barrels a day of supply and 86.8 million barrels a day of demand.

The Hindu Times (Vipin Chandran) - May 2008:

"An evaluation of the oil and gas futures and options markets seems to be indicating that supply is sufficient to meet current demand and the oil price increase seems to be overdone with speculative interests in abundance. I believe we are nearing a steep correction in oil prices."