What Sarah Palin left behind in her wake

Because sometimes you just have to repost an article from 2007, when the world make more sense:

The earth beneath much of Alaska is not what it used to be. The permanently frozen subsoil, known as permafrost, upon which Newtok and so many other Native Alaskan villages rest, is melting, yielding to warming air temperatures and a warming ocean. Sea ice that would normally protect coastal villages is forming later in the year, allowing fall storms to pound away at the shoreline.

Erosion has made Newtok an island, caught between the ever widening Ninglick River and a slough to the north. The village is below sea level, and sinking. Boardwalks squish into the spring muck. Human waste, collected in "honey buckets" that many residents use for toilets, is often dumped within eyeshot in a village where no point is more than a five-minute walk from any other. The ragged wooden houses have to be adjusted regularly to level them on the shifting soil.

Studies say Newtok could be washed away within a decade. Along with the villages of Shishmaref and Kivalina farther to the north, it has been the hardest hit of about 180 Alaska villages that suffer some degree of erosion.

So Sarah Palin gave up on the indiginous peoples of Alaska twice, once when she walked away from her job as their governor and now she's trying to sell them up the river on climate change, literally. Beautiful. I remember the original story about Newtok from the New York Times -- today Pulitizer Prize-winner Eugene Robinson reminded me of it in an excellent column on the same Washington Post pages that published her tripe in the first place. I strongly recommend it.

(Photo by Charles Mason for the New York Times)