Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-AK
Is there something in the water up there? The air? This is Senator
Lisa Murkowski, from Alaska,
speaking on the floor of the Senate on the the
22nd of January. Any comparisons to another Alaskan, I'll leave to you.
I know that the quote after squiggle is long, but it's the only way to show the full magnitude of it.
Enjoy:
Today I will add one more example to show the comparison. At this time in the football season, we are all focused on what is going on with Super Bowl XLIX, which is coming up in 10 days now. We will see Super Bowl XLIX pit the reigning NFL champions, the Seattle Seahawks--in Alaska we don't have our own professional football team, so we kind of adopted the Seahawks. I will let my colleagues know that I will be standing with the ranking member in rooting for the eahawks on the big day next week. A lot of folks are excited about it, and we will be
watching it. The game will be played next Sunday.
For the moment, let's look back to September 19, 2008, when the first cross-border permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline was first submitted to the State Department. Let's specifically focus on the Seahawks because
they provide a pretty good example of how much has changed over the past 6 years. Back in September of 2008, the Seahawks were about to start a season in which they would have a record of just 4 and 12--winning 4 games and losing 12. At that point they were still a good team and we were still rooting for them, but they were a pretty
different team. For starters, the Seahawks had a head coach. Their current coach, Pete Carroll, was still at the University of Southern California coaching the Trojans. Their star running back, Marshawn Lynch, was about to start his second year in the NFL as a member of the Buffalo Bills. It would be another 2 years before Lynch joined the
Seahawks and just over 3 years before the Nation discovered his love of Skittles during the game against the Philadelphia Eagles.
The most famous members of the Seahawks secondary--the Legion of Boom--are Richard Sherman and Earl Thomas. Back in September of 2008, both were still in college, respectively playing for Stanford and the University of Texas.
Of course, we cannot forget Russell Wilson. A lot of Alaskans are rooting for him to get a second consecutive Super Bowl as the starting quarterback for the Seahawks. Back in September of 2008--he played just a handful of college games at that time. He was a redshirt freshman at North Carolina State.
My point here is not necessarily about football--although that is what a lot of us are talking about--it is to demonstrate that a lot can happen over the course of 2,300 days, and it does, whether we are talking about what goes on in politics, in world events, or the world of sports. My point is that it should probably take the Federal
Government less time to approve an important infrastructure project--what the President himself has called just a single oil pipeline--than it takes to build an NFL championship team.