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The first time I heard about Palin’s proposed $40 billion Alaska natural gas pipeline was not when she asked the Wasilla Assembly of God to pray for it, but it was during the October 2, 2008 vice presidential debate:

We’re building a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline, which is North America’s largest and most expensive infrastructure project ever, to flow those sources of energy into hungry markets.

Today, Palin mentioned the natural gas pipeline again in her energy policy speech given in Toledo, Ohio touting the project as proof she is an energy reformer:

We introduced the big oil companies and their lobbyists to a concept some of them had forgotten — free-market competition. They had a monopoly on power and resources, and we broke it. The result is, finally, progress on the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history — a nearly forty-billion dollar natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence.

When the last section is laid and its valves are opened, that pipeline will lead America one step farther away from reliance on foreign energy.  That pipeline will be a lifeline — freeing us from debt, dependence and the influence of foreign powers that do not have our interests at heart.

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When my mother picked me up at the Detroit airport, and we drove to Toledo, she warned my cousins were hard core Republicans.  I promised not to talk politics, at least at the funeral home, as we drove by the Jeep factory which was temporarily shutdown to trim inventories of slow-selling SUVs.  At least, Chrysler plans to make an electric Jeep Wrangler at the Toledo Jeep Assembly Complex to keep the factory alive. I knew Toledo was a blue-collar town with close ties to the auto industry, and I expected the town to be for Obama.

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