When you have to lie to support your case, you don't deserve to win.
Big industry backers of the Keystone XL pipeline appear to be doing just that. Brant Olson of The Understory discovered a slew of Twitter accounts that were all sending out the same messages and links relating to the Alberta tar sands (Twitter users, look for the #tarsands hashtag). The links were all to pro-oil front groups.
The pro-tar-sands Tweeters, Olson found, were clearly astroturf. Olson also manages to connect Keith Bockmann, perhaps the only real person among this passle of industry mouthpieces, with two of the pro-tar-sands websites and with former Nebraska State Senator Chris Abboud, a front-man for the pro-oil astroturf Nebraska Energy Forum.
Let me be clear: no one pays me to say the things I say in opposition to the unnecessary, unsafe, un-American Keystone XL pipeline. I don't need to stitch together a sock puppet choir to amplify my voice. My only amplifier is the truth.
TransCanada, American Petroleum Institute, Keith Bockmann, if the truth isn't enough to get your message across, then keep that message and your backhoes and your leaky pipeline off our prairie.
Update 08:55 CDT: Keith Bockmann's Twitter account has been suspended. Aw, shucks. Looks like you'll have to direct inquiries about his passion for toxic tar sands oil to his MySpace account.
Update 08:57 CDT: In other Keystone XL news, Shell Oil is so eager to slurp up Keystone XL's tar sands oil that it is doubling capacity at one of its refineries in Port Arthur, Texas. That refinery is half-owned by Saudi Arabia's state oil company. The dots connect themselves.
Update 09:16 CDT: Prefer real Americans? Check out Bold Nebraska. Also visit Stand with Randy and join lots of real people standing against TransCanada's predations against our environment and our land rights.
And they're astroturfing my State Fair in Missouri. They will have plants in the crowd at a rally to support Big Oil Roy Blunt's charge against the EPA. A plant? Really?