TW3 — and the Piggy Chronicles

That Was The Week That Was … intriguing. Questions come to mind. For instance, who was the elephants dealer? What’s with Virginia Tech students that they represent a dangerous vote? Why did Jack get ANY mercy? And why don’t we have warnings on nutmeg labels?

Last but not least, where the hell are the sun spots … ohdearohdearohdear?!

The Review makes short work of the Palin business, but now that Sarah has activated the Pub-base sleeper-cell, we’ve certainly seen a lot of fireworks, the latest iteration including the Pubs misreading Obama’s lipstick comment and considering it a hit on their pig … mmm … candidate. [OK, I didn't mean it -- besides, I understand that pigs are really quite intelligent and not at all sarcastic. Snark, snark!! ]

Pigs or no pigs, there’s mud flying everywhere! Go over to Huffy to get the scoop.

I’ve included a few of the better Palin reads, out of the hundreds [nay, more] that are flooding the web — she’s more than a thorn in our side, and don’t let the pundits fool you; she’s the pole that the Fundys and conservatives are dancing around. More on that at the end of the week.

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY
September 9, 2008

The Treasury Department seized control of mortgage and
loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, firing the
companies’ chief executives and promising to provide as
much as $200 billion to prevent insolvency. The jobless
rate rose from 5.7 percent to a five-year high of 6.1
percent, with more than 84,000 jobs lost in August, and
Senator John McCain accepted the Republican Party’s
nomination for the presidency. “This campaign is not about
issues,” said McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis. “This
election is about a composite view of what people take
away from these candidates.” It emerged that McCain did
not properly vet Alaska governor Sarah Palin in selecting
her as his running mate, and that he interviewed her in
person only on the same day he offered her the
position. Despite McCain’s opposition to earmarks, Palin,
when mayor of the 6,700-resident town of Wasilla (known to
state troopers as Alaska’s “meth capital”), hired lobbyist
Steven Silver to help win federal earmarks totaling $27
million. It also emerged that Palin, 44, received her
first passport in 2006. Xiguang, an elephant undergoing
treatment on the Chinese island of Hainan, was off heroin
and headed home.

American commanders returned control of Anbar Province to
the Iraqi army and police, celebrating with a large parade
during which soldiers marched along a newly paved street
without their body armor, helmets, or guns. The United
States promised $1 billion in aid to Georgia, and Vice
President Dick Cheney visited Tbilisi to pledge continued
support. “It’s Cheney,” said Russian politician Konstantin
Kosachyov, “who was behind all the recent events on the
former Soviet turf.” American missiles struck a seminary
in Pakistan, killing twenty people, including two
children, but not Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani,
and “Paris Match” published a glossy eight-page spread of
Taliban fighters wearing the uniforms of the French
soldiers they had killed. Tropical storm Hanna struck
Haiti for four days, felling fruit trees and bridges,
flooding the city of Gonaives, forcing 54,000 people into
shelters, and killing 137 people. Detroit Mayor Kwame
Kilpatrick pleaded guilty to two felonies, including lying
under oath, and agreed to spend four months in jail, pay
$1 million, and resign from office. “I want to tell you,
Detroit,” he said, “that you have set me up for a
comeback.” Virginia Tech students were falsely told by the
local registrar of elections that if they voted at college
their parents would no longer be able to claim them as
dependents on their tax returns, and that they could lose
their scholarships and their health- and car-insurance
coverage. Cambridge University, seeking to attract a more
diverse student body and to shed its elitist image, asked
the producers of leading British soap operas to mention
the school in their storylines. A federal judge,
responding to Jack Abramoff’s pleas for mercy, gave the
former lobbyist only four years in prison instead of the
maximum 12.5 years. “My name,” said Abramoff, “is the butt
of a joke.” For the first time in a century, a month
passed without a visible spot on the sun. An ice age, said
scientists, may be forthcoming.

Satellite images revealed that global-warming-induced
melting had left the North Pole an island. Tens of
thousands of copies of a Swedish food magazine were
recalled after an error in a recipe for apple cake sent
four readers to hospitals with nutmeg poisoning, and a
British teenager’s head swelled to the size of a soccer
ball after she consumed a Baileys-chili-tequila-absinthe-
ouzo-vodka-cider-and-gin cocktail. A new biography of
writer Roald Dahl revealed that Dahl, in his work as a
British spy, seduced many American women. “I think,” said
Antoinette Haskell, whose father, Charles Marsh,
introduced Dahl to influential Americans, “he slept with
everybody on the east and west coasts that was worth more
than $50,000 a year.” The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
announced that it would not spend the $300,000 needed to
correct cards that mistakenly list the number of a
phone-sex company (1-800-TRAMP24) in place of the number
of the agency (1-800-STAMP24). “That’s a lot of money,”
said a spokesperson, “we can be using for wildlife
conservation.” The Victorian Aboriginal Education
Association warned Australian girls not to play the
didgeridoo because it was “men’s business” and could lead
to infertility; police in Florida checked for fingerprints
on a water-filled condom that had been used as a fake
breast by a cross-dressing thief who snatched the purse of
a 74-year-old woman; and a murder investigation in Japan
ended when pathologists discovered that the decomposing
corpse was actually a life-sized sex doll. The author of
the book “100 Things to Do Before You Die,” having
completed about 50 of the things on his list, fell, hit
his head, and died.
— Claire Gutierrez
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/WeeklyReview2008-09-09

bonus

She’s Clueless, He’s Worse
Robert Scheer, HuffPo
September 10, 2008

Ignorance is bliss, which perhaps explains Gov. Sarah Palin being so confidently wrong about the root cause of the federalization of most of the nation’s mortgage market. But what is Sen. John McCain’s excuse? Both act as if the financial meltdown of the U.S. economy has nothing to do with the policies of the political party they represent — but she at least may not know any better.

Distracted momentarily from her campaign revelries of maverick opposition to the “bridge to nowhere,” which she had supported until it became a public relations debacle, and congressional earmarks for which she, as a small-town mayor, had hustled piggishly at the federal trough, Palin made the mistake of dealing with an unscripted subject.

Referring to the government’s bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Palin opined that the two had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers,” displaying abysmal ignorance of the fact that only now will those privately owned banks become a huge taxpayer obligation, as the federal government takes them over. Nor can the meltdown of home values be traced to those two beleaguered institutions, because they did not make the original subprime mortgage commitments.

The housing bubble was the result of the Ponzi-scheme antics of those other financial entities: commercial banks, stockbrokers and hedge funds, which were allowed in a GOP-deregulated market to get into the “swap” business. Through the rampant reselling of loans, the obligation to collect on a loan was divorced from the act of selling it in the first place, so who cared if the recipient of the loan was not at all qualified or the appraisal of the property value was inflated, as long as the paper was traded away, or insured, before the moment of foreclosure?

As with any Ponzi scheme, the perps, who included the legislators as well as the bankers who exploited the loopholes they provided, expected to bail long before the bubble burst. The role of the legislators, Republican-led but with far too many Democratic running dogs, was critical to the success of the scam.

The mortgage swaps distancing the originator of the loan from the ultimate collector were made legal only as a result of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, pushed through Congress just hours before the 2000 Christmas recess. Gramm, until recently co-chair of the McCain campaign, also had co-authored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which became law in 1999 with President Bill Clinton’s signature. That gem, which Gramm had pushed for years with massive financial industry lobbying, destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies. Those two acts effectively ended significant regulation of the financial community, and no wonder we have witnessed an even more rapid and severe meltdown in housing values than during the Great Depression.

Not surprisingly, Gramm was rewarded for his service upon retirement as a senator and as head of the Senate Banking Committee with a top position at the Swiss-based UBS bank, which is close to drowning in the subprime mortgage nightmare he helped create. These folks have no shame, as was evidenced when the senator’s wife, Wendy, was named a director of Enron, whose roiling of the energy market had been made possible only through yet another provision of Gramm’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act.

While neophyte Palin can claim ignorance of such matters, that would be particularly difficult for McCain, who as a senator consistently lined up with Gramm in his deregulation crusade. Clearly McCain had not learned much from his previous involvement with the savings-and-loan debacle about the risks to consumers in unregulated banking.

McCain served as chair of Gramm’s abortive 1996 presidential campaign, and Gramm returned the favor, providing critical support for McCain with the hard-line Republican base, including the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. It was assumed in the business press that Gramm was the front-runner to be Treasury secretary in a McCain administration. Gramm left his role as the top economic person near McCain only after he made an embarrassing statement blaming the current economic downturn on “whiners,” an awkward reference to the victims of his disastrous legislation.

Amazingly, the turmoil in the housing market, which has led to the socializing of the nation’s revered homeownership market in a massive expansion of the role of big government, has apparently not troubled McCain’s conservative supporters. As I said, ignorance is bliss, and evidently not just for the newbie Palin. ++

McCain’s Integrity
Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic
10 Sep 2008

For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It’s about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?

So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.

And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil.

He capitulated and enshrined torture as the policy of the United States, by allowing the CIA to use techniques as bad as and worse than the torture inflicted on him in Vietnam. He gave the war criminals in the White House retroactive immunity against the prosecution they so richly deserve. The enormity of this moral betrayal, this betrayal of his country’s honor, has yet to sink in. But for my part, it now makes much more sense. He is not the man I thought he was.

And when he had the chance to engage in a real and substantive debate against the most talented politician of the next generation in a fall campaign where vital issues are at stake, what did McCain do? He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama’s virtues and implied disgusting things about his
opponent’s patriotism.

And then, because he could see he was going to lose, ten days ago, he threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That’s all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base. This is pure Rove.

Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country’s safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country’s national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.

McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it. ++

What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick
A theocrat is a theocrat, whether Muslim or Christian.
Juan Cole, Salon
Sept. 9, 2008

John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the “transcendent challenge” of the 21st century, “radical Islamic extremism,” contrasting it with “stability, tolerance and democracy.” But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God’s will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.

McCain pledged to work for peace based on “the transformative ideals on which we were founded.” Tolerance and democracy require freedom of speech and the press, but while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin inquired of the local librarian how to go about banning books that some of her constituents thought contained inappropriate language. She tried to fire the librarian for defying her. Book banning is common to fundamentalisms around the world, and the mind-set Palin displayed did not differ from that of the Hamas minister of education in the Palestinian government who banned a book of Palestinian folk tales for its sexually explicit language. In contrast, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”

Palin argued when running for governor that creationism should be taught in public schools, at taxpayers’ expense, alongside real science. Antipathy to Darwin for providing an alternative to the creation stories of the Bible and the Quran has also become a feature of Muslim Fundamentalism. Saudi Arabia prohibits the study, even in universities, of evolution, Freud and Marx. Malaysia has banned a translation of “The Origin of the Species.” Likewise, fundamentalists in Turkey have pressured the government to teach creationism in the public schools. McCain has praised Turkey as an anchor of democracy in the region, but Turkey’s secular traditions are under severe pressure from fundamentalists in that country. McCain does them no favors by choosing a running mate who wishes to destroy the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which forbids the state to give official support to any particular theology. Turkish religious activists would thereby be enabled to cite an American precedent for their own quest to put religion back at the center of Ankara’s public and foreign policies.

The GOP vice-presidential pick holds that abortion should be illegal, even in cases of rape, incest or severe birth defects, making an exception only if the life of the mother is in danger. She calls abortion an “atrocity” and pledges to reshape the judiciary to fight it. Ironically, Palin’s views on the matter are to the right of those in the Muslim country of Tunisia, which allows abortion in the first trimester for a wide range of reasons. Classical Muslim jurisprudents differed among one another on the issue of abortion, but many permitted it before the “quickening” of the fetus, i.e. until the end of the fourth month. Contemporary Muslim fundamentalists, however, generally oppose abortion.

Palin’s stance is even stricter than that of the Parliament of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2005, the legislature in Tehran attempted to amend the country’s antiabortion statute to permit an abortion up to four months in case of a birth defect. The conservative clerical Guardianship Council, which functions as a sort of theocratic senate, however, rejected the change. Iran’s law on abortion is therefore virtually identical to the one that Palin would like to see imposed on American women, and the rationale in both cases is the same, a literalist religious impulse that resists any compromise with the realities of biology and of women’s lives. Saudi Arabia’s restrictive law on abortion likewise disallows it in the case or rape or incest, or of fetal impairment, which is also Gov. Palin’s position.

Theocrats confuse God’s will with their own mortal policies. Just as Muslim fundamentalists believe that God has given them the vast oil and gas resources in their regions, so Palin asks church workers in Alaska to pray for a $30 billion pipeline in the state because “God’s will has to get done.” Likewise, Palin maintained that her task as governor would be impeded “if the people of Alaska’s heart isn’t right with God.” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei of Iran expresses much the same sentiment when he says “the only way to attain prosperity and progress is to rely on Islam.”

Not only does Palin not believe global warming is “man-made,” she favors massive new drilling to spew more carbon into the atmosphere. Both as a fatalist who has surrendered to God’s inscrutable will and as a politician from an oil-rich region, she thereby echoes Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has been found to have exercised inappropriate influence in watering down a report in 2007 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Neither Christians nor Muslims necessarily share the beliefs detailed above. Many believers in both traditions uphold freedom of speech and the press. Indeed, in a recent poll, over 90 percent of Egyptians and Iranians said that they would build freedom of expression into any constitution they designed. Many believers find ways of reconciling the scientific theory of evolution with faith in God, not finding it necessary to believe that the world was created suddenly only 6,000 ago. Some medieval Muslim thinkers asserted that the world had existed from eternity, and others spoke of cycles of hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Mystical Muslim poets spoke of humankind traversing the stages of mineral, plant and animal. Modern Islamic fundamentalists have attempted to narrow this great, diverse tradition.

The classical Islamic legal tradition generally permitted, while frowning on, contraception and abortion, and complete opposition to them is mostly a feature of modern fundamentalist thinking. Many believers in both Islam and Christianity would see it as hubris to tie God to specific government policies or to a particular political party. As for global warming, green theology, in which Christians and Muslims appeal to Scripture in fighting global warming, is an increasing tendency in both traditions.

Palin has a right to her religious beliefs, as do fundamentalist Muslims who agree with her on so many issues of social policy. None of them has a right, however, to impose their beliefs on others by capturing and deploying the executive power of the state. The most noxious belief that Palin shares with Muslim fundamentalists is her conviction that faith is not a private affair of individuals but rather a moral imperative that believers should import into statecraft wherever they have the opportunity to do so. That is the point of her pledge to shape the judiciary. Such a theocratic impulse is incompatible with the Founding Fathers’ commitment to tolerance and democracy, which is why they forbade the government to “establish” or officially support any particular religion or denomination.

McCain once excoriated the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his ilk as “agents of intolerance.” That he took such a position gave his opposition to similar intolerance in Islam credibility. In light of his more recent disgraceful kowtowing to the Christian right, McCain’s animus against fundamentalist Muslims no longer looks consistent. It looks bigoted and invidious. You can’t say you are waging a war on religious extremism if you are trying to put a religious extremist a heartbeat away from the presidency. ++

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