The Joy of the Moosehunt - UK Film on Palin

HT Celtic Diva.

This one is for +Clumber

This is direct from Greta Van Susteran of Fox News, an impeccable source. This is Sarah Palin's assessment of tonight's debate between Presidential candidates Senator Obama and Senator McCain.

Greta tells us:

Just got this email from FNC embed producer Shush ….traveling with Governor Sarah Palin campaign

From: Walshe, Shushannah
To:
Sent: Tue Oct 07 23:14:22 2008
Subject: Palin reacts to debate

Palin reacts to McCain debate performance:

“Great. Great. It was a great night for America. He’s proposing real plans that will work for economic recovery and energy independence. I think Barack was even less candid than usual, which I was kinda surprised. But McCain has fought on and sounded very energized, and and it was a good night for him, for all of us, for all of America. It’s gonna be a great 28 days to go. Taking this message of reform on the road and just having it resonate more and more every day is what I believe’s happening. And it’s good. It’s very good. I look forward to the 28 days.”

From Gretawire.

I'd say it's time to dig the heels in and take the gloves off. Call me an elitist snob, but what's this about "kinda surprised" and "what I believe's happening"? And this is one of the more polished examples.

Another view from abroad, Maura Kelly, writing in the Guardian, said the other day:

It is not just painful, but frightening to watch someone who could become the vice-president of the United States stumbling around like this in an interview." Herbert was focused mainly on Palin's lack of readiness to lead the country, rather than her basic linguistic inadequacies. But the two go together. I would guess they stem from her lack of intellectual curiosity and her concomitant arrogance.

I could go on and on. I could mention the time when she mentioned "predator" lenders, rather than predatory lenders, to Couric. But you get the point.

I have to wonder whether Palin, who is being touted by Republican leaders as an anti-elitist, knows the definition of "elitism":

1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.

2. a. The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class.
b. Control, rule or domination by such a group or class.

Funny that a so-called anti-elitist is woman who rewards members of her inner circle and old high-school friends with plum appointments; who is a member of the party that has been ruling the White House for eight years; who seems so haughty about her right to run for the vice-presidency that she makes no effort to hide her exasperation with members of the media who are trying to assess whether she is prepared for the job.

From "Sarah Palin's Political Gibberish."

Gosh, she's even lost Brigette Bardot's vote. She said of Palin:

In a final salvo against Palin, the 74-year-old ex-star picked up on Palin's depiction of herself as a pitbull wearing lipstick and said she "implored" her not to compare herself to dogs.

"I know them well and I can assure you that no pitbull, no dog, nor any other animal for that matter is as dangerous as you are," Bardot wrote.

From "Brigette Bardot: Sarah Palin is a Disgrace for Women."

How the foreign press sees us

Flirting her way to victory: Sarah Palin's farcical debate performance lowered the standards for both female candidates and US political discourse
by Michelle Goldberg guardian.co.uk
Friday October 03 2008 18:30 BST

At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked. Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night.

By any normal standard, including the ones applied to male presidential candidates of either party, she did not. Early on, she made the astonishing announcement that she had no intentions of actually answering the queries put to her. "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also," she said.

And so she preceded, with an almost surreal disregard for the subjects she was supposed to be discussing, to unleash fusillades of scripted attack lines, platitudes, lies, gibberish and grating references to her own pseudo-folksy authenticity.

It was an appalling display. The only reason it was not widely described as such is that too many American pundits don't even try to judge the truth, wisdom or reasonableness of the political rhetoric they are paid to pronounce upon. Instead, they imagine themselves as interpreters of a mythical mass of "average Americans" who they both venerate and despise.

. . . .

Evidently, Palin's pre-debate handlers judged her incapable of speaking on a fairly wide range of subjects, and so instructed to her to simply disregard questions that did not invite memorised talking points or cutesy filibustering. They probably told her to play up her spunky average-ness, which she did to the point of shtick - and dishonesty. Asked what her achilles heel is - a question she either didn't understand or chose to ignore - she started in on how McCain chose her because of her "connection to the heartland of America. Being a mom, one very concerned about a son in the war, about a special needs child, about kids heading off to college, how are we going to pay those tuition bills?"

None of Palin's children, it should be noted, is heading off to college. Her son is on the way to Iraq, and her pregnant 17-year-old daughter is engaged to be married to a high-school dropout and self-described "fuckin' redneck". Palin is a woman who can't even tell the truth about the most quotidian and public details of her own life, never mind about matters of major public import. In her only vice-presidential debate, she was shallow, mendacious and phoney. What kind of maverick, after all, keeps harping on what a maverick she is? That her performance was considered anything but a farce doesn't show how high Palin has risen, but how low we all have sunk.

Read it all at The Guardian. HT to Celtic Diva.

Demeaning Democracy
by Rami G. Khouri
Released: 6 Oct 2008

BEIRUT -- Watching the US presidential election from the Arab region is a confusing vocation. At one level, American democracy is an impressive, vibrant, often stunning, phenomenon that permits any citizen -- certified idiots and genuine geniuses alike – to seek and assume public office, and control the destiny of society. It produces some of the most monumental errors and costly adventures in world history, in the military and economic fields, but it also contains the mechanisms for its own self-correction, reconfiguration, improvement and re-birth -- as we witness these days in the economic arena.

At another level, America also provides a powerful argument against a totally open, unregulated democratic system, because it allows the volatile and sometimes infantile emotional psyche of a bare majority of citizens to determine the exercise of immense power. . . .

Read it all at Agence Global.

Time to let the Constitution shine its light

archives.delaware.gov

"Federal Judge Orders Release of Chinese Muslims"
by William Glaberson, published October 7, 2008, New York Times.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bush administration to immediately release 17 Chinese Muslims who have been held for seven years at Guantánamo Bay, and to allow them to stay in the United States, because they are no longer considered enemy combatants.

The ruling, handed down by Federal District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, marked the first time that any United States court rejected government arguments and ordered the release of detainees from Guantánamo Bay, an American naval base in Cuba, since the detention center there opened in 2002.

Judge Urbina said that the detention of the 17 prisoners — members of the Uighur ethnic group, a restive Muslim minority in western China — was unlawful, noting that the Constitution prohibits indefinite imprisonment without charges.

"I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for the detention," he said.

The judge ordered the 17 detainees, all of whom are men, brought to his courtroom next Friday, but the government suggested that it would immediately appeal the ruling, and that perhaps immigration officials might detain the men on their arrival in the United States.

The judge reacted angrily, saying he did not want the detainees molested by anyone in the government, in what he called an urgent matter.

"There was a pressing need to have these people, who have been incarcerated for seven years — to have those conditions changed," Judge Urbina said.

Read the rest here.

World-stopping wonder and awe

I wrote the following in response to Fr. Terry's marevellous essay "Dancing With God." As usual, my comments were lengthy, stumbling, and not particularly well-written, but what made Haloscan spit it out was the fact it had too many links. So, what the heck, I'll post it here and link:

Yes, YosemiteGreg, those stories and that of the Empty Tomb. :)

Terry, I love this essay of yours and have read it several times now. But, as usual, it's also got me thinking. One of my favorite parts was this:

...the world-stopping wonder and awe that overcomes you when you begin to glimpse the movement of God in your midst.

How do you begin seeing this movement? By expecting it. By believing it is true, and then beginning to seek God out.

It took me a very long time to allow myself to expect it, believe it was true, and I still struggle with seeking God out in my everyday life -- but I do glimpse that glory, in and through bad times, as well as good.

Reading this made me recall the many years when I fought it. I come from family and friends and an educational background that surrounded me with the "spiritual but not religious" perspective on religion and faith (even as I attended Sunday School and church weekly with my family while growing up and was confirmed in 8th grade, with much anguish, with, in effect, my fingers crossed). My studies in anthropology, history, and literature; Sunday School teachers who told us our Jewish friends were going to hell; and the images of Buddhists in Vietnam burning in protest of the war, while my own pastor prayed (in those seemingly interminable pastoral prayers the Methodists do), prayed for U.S. military victory and thus (as I understood it) death to the enemy -- all contributed to a deep skepticism and mistrust of any kind of institutional religion. I also never *got* it as a child -- always felt like an outsider in my home church, thought of Jesus as mysterious and offputting (didn't look or talk like any "friend" I knew or could imagine), and was horrified at what struck me as celebration of a tortured death.

Yet, the day finally came when I did start to get it, indeed came to expect, believe in, and seek God's movement in my life, when Jesus Christ became my means for doing so. But today I see so much in our contemporary culture that adds to those barriers, the scales that were once in front of my eyes. Two things, especially, come to mind.

First is the continued force of the so-called Religious Right in culture and politics, which I believe is what fuels the fear and loathing of agnostics and atheists (most recently evidenced by Bill Maher's new movie, Religulous, which I have not seen but have read about, and the websites associated with the movie). On one of Maher's recent shows, he talked about how scary it was that Sarah Palin "literally believed in the Bible." Now if he meant an anti-science view based on Creationism or foreign policy based on Dominionist theology, for example, I, too, admit to fear, or at least deep concern (though personally I'm more concerned about the woman's inability to tell the truth -- but that's another matter). But when I listen to Maher and others rant about Palin's religion, what I hear is also deep aversion and sometimes contempt for anyone who believes in God as someone or something that is revealed in everyday life, to whom one does pray, for many reasons, but including intercessionary prayer, for anyone who actively seeks God's will in trying to wrestle with difficult decisions. This is not a new problem in Western culture in general and U.S. politics in particular (recall Stephen Carter's The Culture of Disbelief back in the 1990's), but it is growing with leaps and bounds on the internet and news right now.

Second, strangely enough (to me, at least), people within the church, all across the spectrum of theological/political views, seem to view those who hold the "spiritual but not religious" view with both pity and contempt. This growing segment of the U.S. population (as high as 40% of the total population, according to one article), is viewed by some as "moderate voices" in favor of religion (see same article), but more often, as lazy, self-centered or New Age flakes among those "inside" church culture, right and left (not what she meant, I know, but how Kit Carlson's recent article would have struck me back when I was an outsider). A better view may be what Robert Fuller said (at the end of the article at Beliefnet that prompted Kit's essay):

But it is difficult to move to a more qualitative understanding. We don't fully understand how unchurched Americans assemble various bits and pieces of spiritual philosophy into a meaningful whole. We are even further from understanding how to compare the overall spirituality of unchurched persons with that of those who belong to spiritual institutions.

Spirituality exists wherever we struggle with the issue of how our lives fit into the greater cosmic scheme of things. This is true even when our questions never give way to specific answers or give rise to specific practices such as prayer or meditation. We encounter spiritual issues every time we wonder where the universe comes from, why we are here, or what happens when we die. We also become spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love, or creativity that seem to reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world. An idea or practice is "spiritual" when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the deepest meanings or powers governing life."

People who are scared to death because of what they see and hear (or think they see and hear) from religionists and religious people can be reached by ways in which they allow themselves to glimpse the glory of God -- the sublime, for example, in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" or even the "self-willed" order of non-human nature in Jack Turner's The Abstract Wild. Personally, I don't believe that the way to reach them is to avoid religious language or revise religious practices (at least that never worked for me), but rather to find ways to get religious people to speak as Terry has, openly, clearly, and joyfully about how and what they see, feel, and know about God in their lives, without apology and without censure, but with some kind of better understanding of what motivates the "spiritual but not religious" -- their deep, and not entirely unrealistic, fear of promoting ignorance and intolerance by in any way supporting or participating in institutional religion. Looking at the deep conflict and bitterness in the Episcopal Church, it is hard to argue that, well, it's just the "nutters" (as Mad Priest might say) -- the denominations and sects of extreme fundamentalism -- not "us." And, for the sake of some degree of peace and forbearance in the midst of our strife, it becomes increasingly difficult to appeal to individuals' "experience" of the divine, especially among those who do not readily express it in orthodox terms, without fear of an attack from the neo-orthodox or conservatives within the church. So it seems "we" progressives seem to get caught in middle between those we would seek to evangelize and those who would brand us heretics.

I don't know the answer to this problem, but for me, at least,what you write, Terry, strikes me as a step in the right direction (as well as your overall efforts in both your blogs). And I share with you not only the hope but the firm belief that God will see us through these troubled times, from glory to glory.

Tax Law Professors Get in the Truth Game

Alright, maybe I'm overloading on Palin news, but bear with me, please. This should all be over soon.

I read not long ago that the Palins had finally released their tax returns and, as I suspected, there were some issues regarding their treatment of travel expenses and the per diem charges. Ordinarily this kind of information makes me want to snooze (sorry Chuck Irish, my tax law professor), but fortunately now I've found some experts to do the hard work of figuring out what it all means.

Go to TaxProf Blog and read "Tax Profs Agree: Gov. Palin's Tax Returns Are Wrong." The article does a good job of bullet-pointing the highlights, but the devil is in the details when one follows the links. My favorite was the article on the Roger M. Olsen opinion letter. Olsen is a Washington D.C. tax attorney who wrote an opinion letter justifying the Palins' treatment of various expenses in their tax returns (funny how those Beltway folks can come in handy sometimes). As an attorney who remembers a little something from Tax I and Tax II more than twenty years ago, I am amazed at the following:

Undoubtedly the most amazing (brazen?) aspect of Mr. Olsen's opinion letter is that he cites absolutely no law in the four pages to support his conclusions -- no code or regulation sections, cases, or rulings.

Another discrepancy is the $196,531.50 income as Governor reported on her financial disclosure form (with the notation "[a]s reported to filer by State of Alaska"), compared to the $107,987 wages, tips, other compensation and $122,401.43 Medicare wages and tips reported by the state of Alaska on the W-2 attached to her tax return.

(Mr. Olsen has a tax LL.M. from George Washington and is a former Assistant Attorney General of the Department of Justice's Tax Division under President Reagan.)

Brazen, indeed.

Palin's Terrorist Pals and Tales of the Maverick

Also of interest, "Make Believe Maverick: A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty." An excerpt:

Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has reassembled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove's base. And he has engaged in a "practice of politics" so deceptive that even Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain's campaign ads go "too far" and fail the "truth test."

The missing piece of this puzzle, says a former McCain confidant who has fallen out with the senator over his neoconservatism, is a third, never realized, campaign that McCain intended to run against Bush in 2004. "McCain wanted a rematch, based on ethics, campaign finance and Enron — the corrupt relationship between Bush's team and the corporate sector," says the former friend, a prominent conservative thinker with whom McCain shared his plans over the course of several dinners in 2001. "But when 9/11 happened, McCain saw his chance to challenge Bush again was robbed. He saw 9/11 gave Bush and his failed presidency a second life. He saw Bush and Cheney's ability to draw stark contrasts between black and white, villains and good guys. And that's why McCain changed.

Read the rest at The Rolling Stone.

Why is Palin such a good liar?

Frank Schaeffer asks the question "Why is Palin Such a Good Liar for God?" in an article published today at The Huffington Post. He writes,

The Evangelicals live in a resentment-fueled, inward-looking subculture. They are convinced that the world is out to get them and put them at a perpetual disadvantage. They equate knowledge, facts and education with an elite that they feel belittled by.

The Evangelical "base" have unwittingly become the enemy of democracy. They are democracy's enemy because a grossly misinformed Evangelical public that celebrates its ignorance is the antithesis of an informed people who can manage their own affairs....

It is this pride in ignorance that continues to puzzle me. You would think they would know by know that Republican politicians and consultants like Rove are just using them. Nevertheless, it's even scarier now that someone like Palin is part of the bait. Schaeffer writes:

The Republican leadership and John McCain are counting on Palin's grass roots sincerity that most Republican leaders no longer have. Palin is a true believer. And true believers put the mission they sincerely believe in -- that God has "laid on their hearts" -- above mere details such as truth or honesty, let alone honor. They also speak with conviction.

Palin doesn't actually believe the rehearsed smears she's telling about Obama, but she does believe that she is morally right in lying.

If lies will help her win, Palin believes God's will is being done. McCain just wants to win an election. Palin has bigger fish to fry. Her "call" is to restore America to its "Christian heritage." In that sense Palin is the product of my late father Francis Schaeffer, who helped politicize the Evangelicals into the Religious Right through his incendiary books such as A Christian Manifesto (1980) wherein he called for the takeover of America in the name of Christ if, need be, by force if all else failed....

Please read the rest at Why is Palin Such a Good Liar for God?" at The Huffington Post.

Richard Trumka on Racism and Obama

Alone in a great forest

Taking a break from politics, I've finally gotten around to reading Jack Turner's The Abstract Wild. It's extraordinary. I cannot begin to explain the connections I find between this kind of writing and my off-beat notions of religious experience and the place we humans should find ourselves in the universe, if we only we would get out of our concrete jungles and become "alert, careful, literally 'full of care.'" So for now, I'll just share a few excerpts from this powerful book.

In light of the current financial crisis, it may be good to step back and consider the following from Turner's Introduction:

I believe a saner relation to the natural world must end our servitude to modernity by creating new practices that later out daily routines. I also believe that no resolution to the crises facing the wild earth will achieve more than a modicum of success without an integration of spiritual practice into our lives. Any spiritual tradition worthy of the name teaches the diminishment of desire and it is desire in all its forms -- simple greed, avarice, hoarding, the will to power, the will to truth, the rush of population growth, the craving for control -- that fuels the destruction of our once-fair planet. I believe that virtually all problems are problems of scale, and I know, to the degree I know anything, that desire usually drives us to adopt scales that are inappropriate to their subjects. This is true for emotion and forestry as it is for hunting and global economics.

from Introduction, p. xvi, The Abstract Wild (Tucson: Ariz. U. Press 1996).

And this can only speak for itself:

If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature -- gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. In this, wilderness is no different from music, painting, poetry, or love; you concede the abundance and try to respond with grace.

The problem is that we no longer know what these gifts are. In our effort to go beyond anthropocentric defenses of nature, to emphasize its intrinsic value and right to exist independently of us, we forget the reciprocity between the wild in nature and the wild in us, between knowledge of the wild and knowledge of the self that was central to all primitive cultures. Once the meaning of the wild is forgotten, because the relevant experience is lost, we abuse the world, literally mis-use it. The savagery and brutality of gang rape is now called "wilding," and in New Age retreats me search for a "wild man within" by sitting in the mud beating drums.

Why do we associate the savage, the brutal, with the wild? The savagery of nature fades to nothing compared to the savagery of human agency. The most civilized nations on the planet killed sixty to seventy million of each other's citizens in the thirty-year span from the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II. Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Dōgen, Mill, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Manet, Basho, Van Gogh, and Hokusai didn't make any difference. The rule of law, human rights, democracy, the sovereignty of nations, liberal education, scientific method, and the presence of an Emperor God didn't make any difference. Protestantism, Catholicism, Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, Buddhism, Shintoism, and Islam didn't make any difference. How can we, at this time in history, think of a grizzly or a wolf as . . . savage? Why laugh at the idea of the noble savage when we have discovered no savage more savage than civilized man?

The easiest way to experience a bit of what the wild was like is to go into a great forest at night alone. Sit quietly for awhile. Something very old will return. It is well described by Ortega y Gasset in Meditations on Hunting: "The hunter . . . needs to prepare an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed by consists precisely in not assuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a 'universal' attention, which does not incscribe itself on any point and tires to be on all points."

Ibid., "The Abstract Wild: A Rant" at p. 27.