The Joe McGinnis article about Sarah Palin and her "Magical thinking" is a must read for anybody fascinated with Sarah Palin or worried about AGIA.

This article in Portfolio will answer several questions about Sarah Palin, her shaky grasp of reality, and how that affects her ability to bring her gas pipeline fantasies to fruition.

That was when Sarah Palin reared her head. (I love that mental image.)

She saw the launching of a natural-gas-pipeline project as a God-given opportunity to prove herself bigger than Big Oil. Thus was born, in the spring of 2007, the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, or AGIA, under the terms of which the state would pay up to $500 million in startup money to the company it selected to build the pipeline. The chosen company would have to comply with AGIA’s stringent, inflexible terms. Certain provisions, such as the state’s refusal to set tax rates in advance or even specify the formula by which they would be calculated, seemed designed specifically to discourage Exxon Mobil, BP, and Conoco Phillips from participating.

In fact, the terms discouraged almost everybody. In the end, the only bidder to meet AGIA’s requirements was the Calgary-based pipeline-construction company TransCanada. Nonetheless, Palin was thrilled. She felt that with AGIA, she’d stuck her thumb in the eye of Big Oil as no governor before her ever had. She was good, and they were bad, and she’d defeated them. She was Joan of Arc at Orleans.

There was only one problem: Trans Canada didn’t have any gas. Exxon Mobil, BP, and ConocoPhillips had the gas. In her populist fervor, what Palin had done—aided and abetted by the state legislature—was contrive to pay as much as $500 million to a foreign company to look into the possibility of someday building a line.

Here are a few delicious quotes just to wet your appetite:

As Mike Hawker, the Republican co-chairman of Alaska’s House Finance Committee, told me one night in Juneau not long ago, “The only thing standing in the way of an Alaska gas pipeline is the Sarah Palin administration.”

“Facts to her are like Silly Putty,” said Larry Persily, former deputy commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Revenue, who later worked for Palin in the state’s office in Washington. “She shapes them into whatever people want to hear.”

“She just doesn’t think it’s important to know things,” said Andrew Halcro, the conservative who ran against her for governor in 2006. “Issues register on her brain only in terms of populist appeal. She never thinks through the policy implications.”

From the other end of the political spectrum, state representative Les Gara of Anchorage, a liberal, said, “She doesn’t spend time studying problems. She’d much rather deliver a sound bite than do the hard work of governing.”

She may not be “a fucking psychopath,” as one very prominent Alaskan told me she was, but Palin does seem prone to what psychologists call magical thinking.

Please take some time to read the whole article as it is VERY well written and informative. (Besides it is not from ADN so we know they appreciate the traffic.)

And before I forget I must give a hat tip to my pal AKM over at Mudflats where I found this and who also did a great write up as well. Wow you have SO much reading to do today. LOL!