Palin pipeline or pipe dream?

Here are some more reasons why Sarah Palin's 1700-mile natural gas pipeline may never get built. Indigenous peoples and their lawyers:

Liz Logan, chief of a First Nations umbrella group in British Columbia, told NEWSWEEK that TransCanada, the company Palin's administration selected to pursue the project, has "very much downplayed the extent of the legal difficulties they face in Canada." One of Canada's top pipeline experts, Professor Andre Plourde of the University of Alberta, agrees that the seven-year timetable proposed by Palin's lawyers for sorting out First Nations claims is "optimistic indeed."

Well of course TransCanada downplayed the legal difficulties. It stands to make off with a whole hockey sock full of government greenbacks: $500 million of them. And who says legal difficulties are bad, anyway? Legal difficulties are good — for lawyers.

In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Patrick Galvin, Palin's revenue commissioner, conceded that "there are risks associated with this project … Nobody has said that this project is absolutely going to happen, guaranteed."

What, then, was this supposed to mean:

I fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history. And when that deal was struck, we began a nearly forty billion dollar natural gas pipeline.

If it might never get built, how could it have already begun?

Fortunately the GOP fixers have negotiated some special debate rules for Sarah Palin, so she might not have to answer that question.