There is much befuddlement and some amusement over Governor Sarah Palin’s response to the bipartisan report that she had violated state ethics laws in her (and Todd’s) harassment of William Monagan and others to pressure them into firing Palin’s brother-in-law.

Here’s what the report says:

Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: To get Trooper Michael Wooten fired.

That’s a violation of the Alaska State law Sec. 39.52.110:

(a) The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust. (more)… and …

Sec. 39.52.120. Misuse of official position. (b) A public officer may not (3) use state time, property, equipment, or other facilities to benefit personal or financial interests; (4) take or withhold official action in order to affect a matter in which the public officer has a personal or financial interest; (5) attempt to benefit a personal or financial interest through coercion of a subordinate or require another public officer to perform services for the private benefit of the public officer at any time…

Here’s what the report concluded:

For the reasons explained in section IV of this report, I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 2952.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.

Pretty straightforward, though some have tried to muddy the waters by equating a “personal” interest with a financial one, and saying thereby that absent financial interest, no law was broken.

Here’s what Governor Palin said in response:

“I’m very very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing…any hint of any kind of unethical activity there.”

I’m grateful to the Aussie’s, who in the 1990’s coined the expression “dog-whistle politics”. That’s what Palin is doing – yes, objective observers can see that she is plainly contradicting the findings of the report, but she is speaking to a special group of people – those who support her without question or reservation, who think that Katie Couric sandbagged her by asking her if she read things. They will never read the report, and their only information on that report will be what Governor Palin says.

They heard her. That’s all that’s going on. Sarah’s talking to the Christians.

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Sarah Palin was roundly booed last night as she dropped the ceremonial puck at a hockey game in Philadelphia. It was a strategic blunder on the part of the McCain campaign to put her in an open forum. She’s widely reviled now.

First they withdrew her from the media. She doesn’t’ do interviews or press conferences because she can’t think on her feet, has no depth, and is kind of an airhead. Then they put her on the stump and filled her pretty little head with hate speech. They even ban people now from talking to her supporters now at her rallies, because they are so obviously unbalanced.

What good is she to Bush? (McCain (Freudian)). She has but one value: She has solidified his support among racists and bigots and Christian fundamentalists. But she polls less than McCain now, meaning she’s a drag on the ticket. The stroke of genius doesn’t look so geniusy anymore.

Here’s another clip on the hockey game.

The American Psychological Society has has approved a measure banning members from taking part in interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan and all of the secret CIA black sites.

APA president Alan Kazdin recently wrote President Bush to inform him of the decision:

The effect of this new policy is to prohibit psychologists from any involvement in interrogations or any other operational procedures at detention sites that are in violation of the U.S. Constitution or international law…In such unlawful detention settings, persons are deprived of basic human rights and legal protections, including the right to independent judicial review of their detention…There have been many reports, from credible sources, of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of detainees during your term in office. Therefore, the American Psychological Association strongly calls on you and your administration to safeguard the physical and psychological welfare and human rights of individuals incarcerated by the U.S. government in such detention centers and to investigate their treatment to ensure that the highest ethical standards are being upheld.”

The measure was the result of grassroots organizing within the association, and 60% voted in favor of it. The fact that 40% voted against it is disturbing.

Most people only dabble in politics every two years or so, and don’t really understand it well. There is but one objective in the game, and that is to win. Winning means getting more votes than the other guy. It’s that simple. The means by which this is done vary – often times it is a mere matter of persuasion, but this is a crude and primitive technique. Even using wedge issues like abortion and gays and guns doesn’t guarantee results.

There are other ways to bring about political victory – for instance, controlling vote counting machinery. I’ve written a lot about that – if ever there were a case of the Emperor’s New Clothing, it is the doe-eyed acceptance of electronic voting machines where the actual count is done behind a green curtain. Americans presume to know that our way of doing things is superior to all others, so the idea that votes are being stolen right under our noses, out in plain sight, is unthinkable. Think again.

Another way to bring about victory is to keep the other party from voting in the first place. The game is pretty obvious now – Democrats want to register as many voters as possible, Republicans want to keep them away from the polls. So the right wing noise machine has been busy for two years now – it started out quietly, as one official or another would complain about “voter” fraud, as if election fraud was not our greatest problem. (John Fund of the Wall Street Journal wrote a book about voter fraud, which is itself a fraud.) Then it got louder. And louder. Pretty soon all of the ‘pubbies were talking about it, and the blogs got into it (here, here, here) – here we go again – RWCJ (right wing circle jerk).

Like everything coming out of the Republican Party, they are organized from the top down. The ground level people bark on command, it seems. So when the Montana Republican Party challenged the voting credentials of 6,000 people in Democratic-leaning counties, it followed the national lead. The hypocrisy made the skin crawl – these folks who work their top-down economics on us, who despise any organizing attempts by the lower classes, such as labor unions and ACORN, are suddenly concerned that voting rights be preserved. Righto.

A judge stepped in and put a stop to the shameless Montana purge, calling it “political chicanery”. But the New York Times and CBS News have covered more chilling aspects of the vote purge movement, where swing states like Nevada and Colorado have been targeted. In Colorado alone, 19.4% of voters have been removed from the rolls since the 2004 election. There are sure to be confrontations as people go to vote on election day and find out they are not listed. Sure, in some places they can file provisional ballots, but that’s a fake vote – that is, those ballots are not counted. They are just used to get pesky voters out of their hair.

What to do? Democrats, as usual, are on this like sweat on Rocky Balboa – no, wait, that’s not true. Democrats, as usual, are not on this at all, and have done little or nothing about it. Greg Palast has offered up a comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, that offers advice on what to do when challenged by Republican thugs on election day, or when learning that you have been purged from the voting rolls. (Insist on voting on a real ballot, don’t yield to pressure, stand your ground, call the police.)

Election fraud, voter intimidation, voter purges. We’re in line for another stolen election. Vice President Sarah Palin. It’s high comedy. There is a TV show that’s going to run on BBC America – channel 264 on Direct TV, 879 on Dish, at 4 and 8 PM (MST) tonight. Here’s the promo:

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Make some popcorn. We’re behind the eight ball again. Learn what the Republicans have been up to these last four years, and how the Democrats did nothing about it.

The following is the text of a “sermon” I plan to give this coming Sunday at our Unitarian gathering. Since it will only drift off into the ether afterwards, I’m putting it up here too so that my reader can be as bored as the fifty or sixty poor souls on Sunday. I was asked to give a five minute talk on how I became a Unitarian.

Comets and Curiosity .

Bill Maher, the comedian and also the guy that made the movie Religulous (which we’ll probably never get to see here in Bozeman), had a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. He talked of his first confession. He went in and kneeled in the confessional and said:

I don’t know why we’re here. I don’t care – that’s above my pay grade. I’m only the Treasurer. Let’s just have some fun. There’s so much we don’t know, so much to wonder about, so much to research and investigate. We’ll never run out of questions. And we are not bound by anyone’s belief system. We are free to investigate and wonder and let it take us where it takes us. Even to our inevitable doom, wiped out by a comet.

Yeah – I watched the debate last night. Wife and I talked about it afterward – I asked her not to dwell on words so much as demeanor and attitude. She’s much more observant of people than I am.

She says that Obama comes across as cool and confident, approachable, knowledgeable and assured. McCain knows it all, has an edge on him, and is a fighter. He seems willing to do or say anything to take Obama out. (Obviously she’s been influenced by the recent ads and attacks by McCain/Palin.)

End of story.

Except this – I think of a tyrannosaurus Rex when I see McCain strutting around on stage flailing his short arms. It’s a bit comical.

Now, on to substance.

End of story.

Except this – both candidates went out of their way to affirm that the United States is a force for good in the world. We rescue people. Debates are hardly the place to let reality interfere, but this notion or rescuing people is our official mythology, and neither candidate is going to affirm any other. But when I see both candidates prostrate themselves at the alter of American exceptionalism, each goes down another notch. I wonder if either really know what’s up, if they have both internalized the lies. I think one is a little smarter than the other, but there is no avenue – none! – for expression of truth in presidential politics, so if Obama has an inkling of how the U.S. really behaves on the world stage, he’d better repress it.

And I think he has.

We are a violent culture, a violent people – we have killed millions in Iraq alone, our latest bloodbath. (I go back to 1990 to put that “s” on the end of “million”.) The mythology of benevolent intervention is necessary to shield us from ourselves, to hide the mirror. We are about resources – Obama did say at one point that we have 3% of the world’s oil, yet consume 25% of world oil production. That statistic ought to say it all – we can only survive with other people’s resources. We are too insecure merely to buy from others, so we take by force.

Usually we murder other people while carrying the cross of Jesus, though we’re not so vocal about spreading Christianity with our bullets and bombs anymore. There has been progress, I guess.

For the second debate, which has a town-hall forum, the audience members submit questions to the moderator, who then approves which audience members get to participate. If audience members stray from their questions, the moderator is to cut them off.

Thus read the rules for the third of four farces the be perpetrated upon us, aka “debates”. Much attention is paid to the illusion of discourse, and in the town hall forum, the illusion is even grander – they want us to believe that the questions originate below, from the audience. But notice the brute force – if someone asks a question that is not pre-approved, that is, if someone says something confrontational, their mike will be cut. O’Reilly would be proud.

Our two party system is a very fragile illusion fostered by those whom it protects – those already wealthy, already powerful. Debates used to be run by the League of Women Voters, and they did a credible job with the material they were given – after all, a debate between Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan could only yield a few surprises – well, none, actually. Candidates carefully rehearse their performances, and questioners are selected from the corps of ‘respected’ journalists, to make sure that real give-and-take is avoided. Each candidate wants assurance that he will not really be have to think on his feet, and each wants but one thing from the the debate – a carefully rehearsed spontaneous and memorable one-liner.

Oh, there I go again.

In 1987, the League pulled out of the debates, complaining of the two parties’ micromanagement of every aspect of the show. The parties took over. In 1992, with Ross Perot allowed in, there was a populist revolt of sorts. After a series of three debates, he climbed in the polls and threatened to unseat the two parties. They have since that time written their rules in such a way that third parties, no matter how popular, are excluded. That is the whole point – to maintain the illusion that when we have two parties that are really one, that we actually debate anything.

The old Soviets had it easy. They could enforce their system of privilege with a jackboot and billy club. Here in the USA we have to go to great trouble and expense to foster illusions. We have to promote freedom of speech, yet not allow it. We have to debate within the narrow confines of ‘acceptable’ opinion. Thus we saw in the first debate between Obama and McCain that the candidates were tripping over one another to claim that each was tougher than the other, each believed in making war against weak countries, each thought that we were threatened by these people we call “terrorists”, neither questioned our bloated and out-of-control military budget … it wasn’t a debate. It was a groveling contest.

And the American people, dumbed down by television news and weak from substandard education anyway, have enough innate smarts to ignore all of that and go right to the core issue: Which candidate is more likable? Obama won. McCain is kind of an asshole, and it comes through.

I’ll be surprised if Obama doesn’t “win” again tonight – McCain just can’t hide that mean streak. And just as I grimaced at Sarah Palin’s inability to answered the simplest of questions with Katie Couric, so too will I tighten up as I see the ‘questioners’ read their scripted lines.

I hope one of them does something unpardonable – asks a real question. I want to see a microphone cut off. I want to know that some of us are still thinking.

Elliot Spitzer was going after the Bush Administration for trying to cut regulators off at the knees. Spitzer was a bad boy, for sure, paying for exotic sex, but some bad boys get caught, and most walk free. I suspect he went after the wrong people, and got stung. (“Crimebusters” are to satisfy themselves going after low-level drug offenders, and leave the big boys alone.)

This is from the Washington Post, February, 2008:

Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime
How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers
By Elliot Spitzer

Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers’ ability to repay, making loans with deceptive “teaser” rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.

Mr. Spitzer is Governor of New York

I’m used to living in the United States, and I love it that we don’t have double standards here. We instead have triple standards, quadruple standards. We can stand for anything that is convenient at the moment. We can be against invasions while we invade, against torture while piling Iraqi bodies on top of one another for photo-ops … there’s a portion of the public that will buy anything. I just don’t know what percentage of us they are. I fear the answer to that question.

So I jus’ love Levi Johnston words from My Space – you know him – he’s the babydad of Bristol Palin’s love child. This is what he said before the McCain people got hold of him:

I’m a f*****’ redneck who likes to snowboard and ride dirt bikes. But I live to play hockey. I like to go camping and hang out with the boys, do some fishing, shoot some s*** and just f*****’ chillin’, I guess.
“In a relationship. I don’t want kids.”

He wants to use MySpace

“for networking or for dating …Love kids, but not for me.”

In other words, he’s white trash. He’s not the guy we want standing at the front of the church as our precious one walks up the aisle.

It’s amazing that the Republicans can pull this stuff off, turning on a dime, embracing the things they are against while at the same time continuing to be against those things. I admire their ability to manipulate their base that way. No doubt politicians everywhere would love to find a voting bloc as gullible as the right wing Christians.

That’s the double standard. I’m used to that. Here’s the triple standard: Imagine that Barack Obama, a black guy, had a knocked-up daughter, and that the babydaddy was a thug. Just imagine.

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