Failed vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin is spending a lot of time on Facebook posting family photos and attacking President Obama’s clean energy investments.
Her latest social media rant targeted struggling electric car company Fisker Automotive, which received a U.S. Department of Energy loan, and announced last Friday that they were laying off 75 percent of their staff. She then went on to attack the “Obama-subsidized” plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt and Tesla Motors, which she writes “turns into a ‘brick’ when the battery completely discharges and then costs $40,000 to repair.”
“This is really just the latest manifestation of the administration’s crony capitalism as their green energy buddies benefit from this atrocious waste of taxpayer money. Americans really need to get outraged by these wasteful ventures. As we’ve seen time and time again, We the People are always stuck subsidizing the left’s ‘losers.'”
Except Tesla is a winner. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk’s zero emissions electric car company recently announced its first quarterly profit after three years of losses and that it will repay the $465 million in Department of Energy loans a full five years earlier than expected. Tesla’s stock is up 18 percent over the past year. The Tesla Model S was also voted Motor Trend‘s 2013 Car of the Year, with the magazine writing that “for the first time since anyone can remember, this year’s winner was a unanimous choice. Not a single judge had any doubts about the 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year.”
While Palin uses her Facebook account to blast the president for “picking winners and losers in the free market,” that’s exactly what she did as governor of Alaska. In January 2009, Palin announced a plan to produce half of Alaska’s electricity from renewable sources by 2025. Palin’s administration picked 77 geothermal, wind, tidal, and wave energy projects with $100 million in funds that she urged the legislature not to cut.
Perhaps Palin’s definition of renewable energy has changed since then. In an April Fool’s Day Facebook post that received nearly 60,000 likes and more than 8,000 shares, she uploaded an image of a cross with the words “sustainable power source.”
Photo: Tesla Motors
